“You have any time to come by? If not, I’ll go to yours.”
I’d just finished a morning consult. Acidic custody case. It’s rare for me to have aggressively warring parents in the office together but these two had claimed they’d “raised their consciousness” and really wanted to work things out. That hadn’t ended up well.
I said, “I can be there in thirty.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
—
Milo’s workspace is a windowless closet one floor above the big detective room.
That and his ability to work cases as a lieutenant had been negotiated with a corrupt police chief about whom Milo had damaging information. The chief, nearing retirement, assumed the pathetic allotment would drive a pariah to quit. Soon after, the chief was dead of a heart attack on the fifth hole of a Rancho Mirage golf course.
Milo continues to enjoy the solitude as he closes murders.
When I got there the door was open. He scowled, grunted, and hoisted his bulk from his desk chair, waited until I’d settled before sinking back down and making the chair cry.
I’d squeezed into my usual spot. The only spot, really, and not much of that: a hard chair in a corner behind the desk. If Milo wheeled back carelessly, I’d be the one to get dented.
He tapped a blue binder but kept it closed. Rotating slowly, he facedme.
“Okay, first off, the prelim autopsy, Basia’s not sure when the final will come through. Probable cause of death: strangulation, no ligature marks so maybe manual, but with the freezing, no way to be sure. Basia said it wouldn’ta taken much force, Martha’s hyoid and what was left of her thyroid cartilage basically crumbled. Overall condition of the body was malnourished and fragile. Basia also doesn’t see any signs of thawing and refreezing so our working guess on TOD is reasonable. Apart from the dog barking and the mail at the door, it fits with last time Martha was seen away from her house.”
I said, “A week ago.”
“Six, seven days,” he said. “Four days before she was found, that discount grocery place. No video there but they remembered her as a nice old lady who kept to herself and bought mostly frozen food. I’m still waiting for her financials and her phone-dump to come through. Phone as in landline, no mobile account.”
He turned back to the desk, opened the blue murder book, flipped a page but paid it scant attention.
“The crime scene,” he said, “is likely the bathroom. There’s only one in the house. It had been cleaned up but there were minute blood specks on the wall above the tub and around the drain. Luminol picked up splotches in the tub itself and a whole lot more was found down the drain. Basia’s tool guy can’t be sure what was used to remove the arms but something like a jigsaw would fit. No tools in the house but if we ever find something, we can do a wound match.”
I said, “Using a pig carcass.”
“How do you know that?”
“You told me years ago.”
“I did? What case?”
“No case. You were getting philosophical—pigs and humans, Orwell—”
He’d colored around his jowls. “I do that a lot, huh?”
“I find it educational,” I said. “Seeing as Martha paid cash, did you come across any money in the house?”
“Funny you should ask, that was my next revelation. Yeah, Alicia found a big manila envelope with a little over five thousand in hundreds and fifties stashed between some old newspapers in the bedroom. Martha’s pension was just short of four a month and she got another twelve hundred from Social Security so looks like she kept around a month’s worth on hand.”
“Makes sense if you pay in cash. Nothing else?”
“Place is such a mess it’ll take a while to go through. There was a cigar box with some jewelry in a box under her bed. Looked like costume junk to me but Darlene will check at the lab. Her TV was an old thirty-incher still attached to a roof aerial. Not even basic cable, just local stations, and there doesn’t seem to have been a computer, anywhere. It’s like she was living in the past, Alex.”
I said, “Maybe she’d freeze-framed.”
“To what?”
“A happier time.”
He thought about that. “When I knew her she always looked okay. Not super talkative but quietly pleasant. But who knows, she mighta been living weird even back then and keeping it to herself.”
