Just Watch Me by Jeff Lindsay

Author:Jeff Lindsay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

17

The police arrived fairly quickly. In Katrina’s neighborhood, they usually did. Cops are ultimate realists, and they know how the world works. Slow response and sloppy service tend to piss off rich guys. Piss off a rich guy, you’re looking for a job. And Katrina and Michael Hobson were very, very rich. So even though most cops would not really go out of their way to give rich people a better kind of law enforcement, it was a good idea to let the rich folks think they did. Katrina’s 9-1-1 call got a very quick response.

First on the scene was a patrol unit, two uniformed officers with over thirty years on the job between them. They arrived, took one quick look at Michael’s body to verify that he was dead, and then went to work. There is a well-established routine for a homicide, and both officers knew it well. Hoffner, the senior of the two, led Katrina gently away to the kitchen. There he politely asked her for a cup of coffee. Over the years he’d found that giving somebody a definite task settled them down, and coffee created a chummy atmosphere that made a witness more likely to talk freely. He had also found that the smell of coffee usually covered any unpleasant odors from a homicide. And there are odors, almost every time. So if you wanted your witness to calm down a bit and answer questions rationally, it helps if they’re not thinking, Oh my God—that stink is Herbert’s intestines!

So Hoffner asked for coffee, and Katrina bustled about making a pot. He asked a couple of simple questions as Katrina worked, noting down her answers as well as his own observations: Witness’s hair was tousled, clothing a bit mussed—probably just out of bed. Witness appeared greatly agitated but not hysterical, and so on.

Hoffner’s partner, Officer Beard, was junior by seven years, and so he got the dirty end of the stick, doing the grunt work. He immediately secured the area around the crime scene—Michael’s office—and then began a careful perimeter search. By the time he finished that and returned to the house, the detectives had arrived.

Officer Beard led the two detectives to Michael’s office, informed them that the victim’s wife had discovered the body approximately twenty minutes ago, and that no one had been in the office since their arrival on the scene. Then he took up station beside the office door and the two detectives, pulling on latex gloves, went into the room.

They paused just inside and surveyed the room. “Nice office,” the younger one, Detective Melnick, observed. His gray-haired partner, Sanders, just nodded and went to one knee just inside the door, looking at the scuff marks on the floor. Melnick took two steps in toward the body, and so he saw it first and jerked to a halt. For a long moment, he was absolutely speechless. Then, when he tried to think of something to say, nothing came. Melnick wanted to be a captain someday, and he was enrolled at the community college to better himself with that in mind.

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