Fatal: A Novel by John Lescroart

Author:John Lescroart [John Lescroart]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781501115677
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2017-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

With Beth feeling very much like an extra wheel, staying out of the team’s way as it moved from room to room, Len Faro and his Crime Scene Unit spent the better part of three hours at Peter Ash’s apartment. In the end, they left with his bedsheets and the drinking glass that Carol had used. They also took Peter’s laptop and an iPad, but they encountered no sign of a telephone. They tested for gunshot residue and blood spatter evidence, but there was none of either. They collected fingerprints. Peter had ten business suits hanging in his closet, along with sixteen dress shirts, a coat hanger full of ties. Underwear, socks, t-shirts, sweaters, and casual pants in the dresser. In the refrigerator, they found a bottle of Hafner chardonnay, half of which was gone, and they bagged it to bring to the lab. If Peter and his guest had been drinking that on Monday, this was another possible source of either fingerprints or DNA. There were also two unwashed wineglasses on the counter, the dregs dried up in the bottom of each of them.

Faro’s team was thorough, but it didn’t find much. Maybe one or both of the computers would reveal something about Peter’s personal life, but that was a big maybe. Also, if they couldn’t get a DNA match with Carol Lukins—that is, if she had not been Peter’s sexual partner on Monday night—then Beth thought it unlikely that the search exercise would have produced anything of substance.

Taken together, the condition of the room and Ned’s testimony indicated that Peter had come home from work, bought beer for his young neighbors, then had a woman stop by, with whom he apparently drank some wine and then had sex. Afterwards, he changed into more casual clothing and, assuming he hadn’t been shot in this room, he must have gone out. Which left a couple of unanswered questions: Did his sexual partner leave right afterwards on her own, or did they leave together? And if he left alone, did someone then pick him up? Or did he drive himself?

Where was his car?

Leaving Faro to his colleagues and duties, Beth excused herself, left Peter’s apartment, and crossed the landing to number 3, where she knocked, hoping to get the cooperative Holly, but no one answered. Her legs killing her, Beth trudged up the next flight to Ned’s apartment where, much to her surprise, she seemed to have succeeded in waking him up again.

“Man,” he said as he opened the door, squinting through a haze of marijuana smoke. “Really?” He had removed his shorts and stood on one foot in the doorway in his tighty-whities and his Marley t-shirt while the man himself was singing “No Woman, No Cry” in the apartment.

“Really, Ned,” Beth said. “Tough day at school?”

He shrugged, grinned stupidly. “I fixed my schedule so I don’t do Fridays. Is that great, or what?”

She shook her head, not particularly sharing his thrall. “Do you know Peter Ash’s car?”

“Sure,” he said.

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