Murder Crossed Her Mind by Stephen Spotswood

Author:Stephen Spotswood [Spotswood, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

With Hiram gone, I went right to my desk and added his fee to our expense report under “professional consultation.” The eggs and toast I threw in for free. While I was doing that, Ms. P took her seat behind her own desk.

“That was illuminating,” she said.

“If you consider illuminating a synonym for confusing,” I replied, dotting the last i. “Why kill Bodine and then, however many days later, come back and shove her in the hope chest? I say come back, though I guess it’s possible they camped out. In either case, killers usually don’t like to spend so much time around their victims. At least not the sane ones. Please don’t tell me we’ve got a kook. I don’t know if I have the constitution for another nut.”

Usually Ms. P will chastise me for using words like kook and nut, but this time she let me have it.

“No,” she said. “There are rational reasons for our killer to spend an extended amount of time in Miss Bodine’s apartment.”

Ms. P knew I preferred to get to an answer on my own, so she gave me time while I pointed my brain at the question. You kill someone and stick around, or keep coming back, for days—weeks, even. Why? Someone might linger for five or ten minutes, maybe as long as an hour, if they were—

“He was looking for something!” I blurted. “Because Bodine’s apartment is what it is, the hunt took him days. So long that, eventually he—or maybe she, because Bodine was light prey—had to move the body because it started to get rank.”

Ms. P nodded. “That is the most logical conclusion. At least with the evidence at hand. The question now becomes—”

“What was the killer looking for and did they find it?” I finished.

“If Mr. Wocjik was right, someone was in her apartment as late as Sunday. It suggests the search, if that’s what it was, was ongoing.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “But they didn’t come back Monday, because if they did, they would have run into Whitsun. So did they find something Sunday, or did they get to the door, hear Whitsun moving around, and scram? Also—does this move her neighbors up the list of suspects? Because we asked them if they’d seen any strangers about and got noes across the board.”

All good questions and worth pursuing. But the big one now was what did a retired secretary, a shut-in hoarder, a woman who lived in a cage of her own making, have that was worth killing for?

“Perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at your souvenir,” Ms. P said.

“Souvenir” was our personal code for evidence that fell into my pockets at crime scenes. In this case, the clipping that had been soaked in our victim’s internals.

It was so wet it was on the cusp of disintegration. I’d placed it in a safe spot near, but not too near, the furnace in the basement. There it had been slowly drying for several days.

“You think that’s what the killer was after?” I asked.

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