Drying soil, a breeze too light to be dangerous, dead roots, food, small cadavers, mating, eggs, the pulsing of change within cocoons, humming, whirring of wings, the bustling inside an anthill, the earth giving way, a new tunnel, food, food, food, eating, flying, building the net, mating….
The images zipping through his mind at the speed the car was going, never lasting, just flashes of something, no context, not important, or important, but not to him, not at the moment, he was talking about the wives, would they kill, or had they gotten used to the way things were as they said?
“Yeah, the kind bad soap operas are made of.” George snorted, pointedly ignoring the gap in their conversation, or perhaps it hadn’t been such a great gap and Andi just hadn’t realized it.
“The screen writers have to get their ideas from somewhere.”
“It just sounds so far-fetched.” George set the blinker to get them on the highway. “And I’m not convinced they had anything to do with it. There’s too many things not adding up. Just like with Gartner. Why would they have waited until now? I bet they had tons of chances to make it look like an accident. Why did it have to be now, and why in the way it happened? There was nothing easy about the kills.”
“Perhaps we have been too focused on the possible killers. It makes sense with all the things we’ve found so far. And eliminating the closest family members as suspects is always a good idea, which is why we definitely have to talk to the sons again. But perhaps it’s time to take a very close look at the way the victims were killed?”
“You mean like going through the evidence Evangeline and CSI have so far again and trying to come up with a plausible timeline in which we then try to fit our mysterious female killers?”
“It’s a start. And real police work.” Andi had to admit he sounded self-deprecating.
“What you do is real as well.” George glanced at him with visible worry. “It’s just not officially accepted.”
“A very fine distinction.”
“And a very good one as well.” George’s hands tightened around the steering wheel, telling Andi to stop putting himself down.
“It is. It just doesn’t help us with Chief Norris breathing down our necks because the mayor is riding her ass.”
“And we’re back to your poetic use of words.” George laughed. “I don’t want that either, but some things just can’t be helped. Besides, if we do real police work, as you call it, you don’t have to ruin your mental health, which is more important to me than any hounding the chief could do.”
“Thank you. That means a lot.” Andi glanced at George, infusing his words with enough sincerity to show his partner he wasn’t joking. George put his right hand on Andi’s thigh for a moment, a reassuring gesture that shouldn’t have felt so good.
The first thing George did when they were back in the precinct was to get a second whiteboard. They were the only ones using them, so nobody complained when George arranged the second one in a ninety-degree angle to the first one, creating another wall between their desks and the rest of the office, shielding Andi’s workspace completely. It almost felt like having their own office. Andi booted his PC and opened the files CSI and Evangeline had sent them. George was already waiting with his black marker at the ready. At the top of the board, he had written TIMELINE. Knowing his partner needed for things to have a certain structure, Andi refrained from making fun of him. And even though he would never admit it, the tidiness of George’s fact gathering helped Andi to think. He glanced at the other whiteboard, which was a mess of colored lines and huge circles with names on it. Perhaps tidiness was too big a word for it.
“Okay, let’s start with the date. Time of death was last Friday between two and four a.m. Cause of death was drowning in the body of water the victims were found in. Tox screen says they were drugged with ketamine and their blood alcohol was at approximately one per mill for each of them, which hints at them having roughly the same speed when drinking.”
George wrote it all down, the time and cause of death more to the right of the board, while the alcohol and ketamine got spaces closer to the middle. George cocked his head.
“We know from their wives they went to the cabin early on Thursday and spent the day hunting.”
“CSI confirms that the deer we found in the cool house was from that day.” Andi scrolled down the document while George put “departure from home” at the very left of the board, followed by “arrival at cabin” and “hunting.”
“They had a successful day, killed some innocent creatures, decided to start with the beer the Pérezes have stored there on Wednesday.”
George inserted “beer + ketamine” in the space between “hunting” and “ketamine.”
“Now you’ve got ketamine twice,” Andi pointed out.
“Alcohol as well.” George glanced at Andi. “Do we have confirmation the ketamine was in the beer?”
Andi scrolled some more, finding the line he was looking for. “Yep. Several bottles of the beer had been tampered with. They have a special cap designed specifically for this brewery. The cap is thinner than the usual crown caps and has a loop for easy opening. There were six caps with tiny injection sites found in the trash and on the table and under the sofa. CSI also found six more bottles with injection sites, which makes two crates at the very top of ten crates in total, stacked at five.”
“Whoever did this wanted to make sure they got the doctored beer on the first evening. Sensitive schedule?” George furrowed his brows.
“Probably. The sooner they died, the more time they would spend in the water destroying any and all evidence before they were even reported missing.”
“Which brings me back to the professional killer. This is something a pro would definitely consider.”
Andi leaned back in his chair. “You’re right. Or somebody who had gone to the trouble of finding out everything about ketamine, how it works, and how quickly it leaves the human system. You said it before: this whole setup reeks of meticulous planning. Of somebody who had the time to ponder all eventualities.”
“Which would shoot our theory that the point in time is somehow important. It could have just been that the killer or killers were finally done with the preparations.” George put the black marker down, getting the red. He wrote “TIME?” above “departure from home.”
Andi opened his drawer, found a ballpoint pen in there, and started dissecting it. While his fingers were busy, the analytical part of his brain pondered the possible scenarios. “We have either a pro at work or somebody with a grudge and the patience to enjoy their vengeance served frozen.”
