Xo

she called over her shoulder, “We’ll look after you, promise!” Then shouting: “Detective! Stop!”

 
     

Chapter 12
    P. K. MADIGAN’S hand was nearly to the doorknob.
    His eyes slid Dance’s way and she saw his face cloud with the irritation he mustered so well.
    But he also seemed to understand instantly that she had a point about not wanting him to go inside.
    Or, she deduced from his hand dipping toward his pistol, maybe some risk awaited.
    He stepped back. So did Dennis Harutyun.
    Dance hurried across the street and joined them.
    “Anybody inside?” the chief detective asked sharply.
    Dance steadied her breathing. “Don’t think so. But I don’t know. The thing is the perp—or somebody—was here this morning. Eleven, eleven-thirty. You don’t want to contaminate anything.”
    “In here ?”
    “I think we should assume it was the killer.”
    “She know that for sure? The time?” A glance toward Tabatha’s trailer.
    “Probably. The TV was on and it would’ve been all morning. Her husband’s away a lot and she’d keep it on for comfort. She’d know the time according to the show she was watching.”
    “Who’d she see? Can she ID ’em?”
    “No. And I believe her. She didn’t see a face or vehicle.”
    A deep sigh. He muttered to Harutyun, “Get CSU over here. And tape off the property. As much as you can. All of the trailer.”
    The careful deputy made a call.
    Madigan and Dance both stepped away from the trailer and stood on the crumbling walk.
    “What’d Edwin, or whoever, be doing here? Afterward?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Could’ve been a friend, one of the crew.”
    “A friend maybe. I talked to the crew. They would’ve said something about being here or acted deceptive. And none of them did.”
    Silence for a moment as he stared at the door, wanting to go in. He rocked on his feet. He asked her suddenly, “You like to fish?”
    “No.”
    “Hm.” He studied the crisp, jaundiced grass. “You don’t fish? Or you don’t like to?”
    “Neither. But I’ve got a friend who’d live on his boat in Monterey Bay if he could.”
    Michael O’Neil was always out in the choppy water. Often with Dance’s son, Wes, and his own children. Sometimes Dance’s father, a retired marine biologist, went along.
    “Monterey Bay. Hm. Salmon.” Madigan looked around. “I like to fish.”
    “You catch and release?”
    “No. Seems crueler to me. I catch and eat.”
    “Michael does that too.”
    “Michael?”
    “My friend.”
    More silence, dense as the growing heat, as they watched Harutyun and Stanning string the yellow tape.
    “I told her, Tabatha, that we’d have somebody keep an eye on her.”
    “We can do that.”
    “It’s important.”
    “We can do that,” he repeated, with a bit of edge. To Harutyun: “Get a car over here. Some rookie. Keep an eye on the place. That trailer across the street too.”
    “Thanks,” Dance said.
    He didn’t respond.
    She sensed Old Spice or something clove-oriented rising from his large body. He actually wore a gun belt with single spare cartridges stuck into loops, pointing downward, like a cowboy’s. No speed loaders, those accessories that contained a disk of six or eight rounds to be dropped quickly into an open cylinder of a revolver. Detectives in Fresno probably didn’t have much cause to shoot people, much less reload quickly.
    Madigan stepped closer to the door, examined the lock. “Could’ve been jimmied.”
    They waited in more silence for the Crime Scene Unit to arrive and when they did, Dance was again impressed at the efficiency of the operation. The team dressed fast, in full jumpsuits, masks and booties, and—she was surprised—two of them with weapons drawn cleared the interior of the trailer, making sure there were no threats. Most police outfits have SWAT or regular officers—unswathed in evidence-protective clothing—handle this job, resulting in contamination of the scene.
    CSU proceeded to process the trailer, dusting and using alternative light source wands for prints, taking trace evidence samples, electrostatic footprints on the front stoop and inside, looking for tire treads and anything else the perp might have discarded or shed.
    Dance’s friend, Lincoln Rhyme, was perhaps the country’s leading expert in forensic evidence and crime scene work. She herself was a bit skeptical of the extreme reliance on the art; one case she knew of had nearly resulted in the execution of an innocent man