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CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

EDMONDS, WASHINGTON

MONDAY, MARCH 27, 2023

8:00 A.M.

When Raymond dragged his ass into the office on Monday morning, he was much the worse for wear. The health app on his phone said he’d had only three hours of sleep, and it showed.

He’d lain awake most of the night, tossing and turning and wondering how he could have gotten things so completely wrong on what was likely to be one of the most prominent cases of his career. His homicide victim had seventeen stab wounds. If that wasn’t a clear indication of overkill, what was? It also usually meant the killer was someone close to the victim and who had a clear motive—a greedy or unfaithful spouse, an angry offspring, or a rejected lover.

Clarice had checked several of those boxes, and Ray had never bought the idea that she could have been sleeping in the same bed next to her husband while he was being stabbed to death and not have heard a thing. Now, though, having talked to the party’s bartender and learned that someone had been feeding her drinks all night? That changed everything. Did that someone also have reason to want Chuck Brewster dead? As for what else might have been in Clarice Brewster’s drinks? Unfortunately, there was no way to tell. The tox screen for Chuck Brewster, the actual victim, had yet to come in, but in the aftermath of the murder, Clarice, who was still among the living, had never been subjected to one.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Mona had thrown off her covers, sat up on her side of the bed, and demanded, “What the hell is the matter with you? You may not be sleeping, but neither am I.”

At that point, she had grabbed her iPad and flounced off to spend the remainder of the night in the guest room. That was one of the hazards of being married to a cop. When investigations went south and an officer wasn’t sleeping, most likely his or her spouse wasn’t, either.

Ray was at his desk nursing a cup of coffee that he had dredged out of the bottom of the break-room pot when Detective Burns showed up. She looked fresh as a daisy, which made Ray feel that much worse.

“Anything happening?” she asked. It took a few minutes for him to bring up the DNA match on the cork along with his new theory of the case—that perhaps the guy who had been feeding booze to Clarice all night might have been giving her something else as well.

“Maybe it’s time we took a much closer look at Joel Franklin,” she said. With that, she headed for her computer. Once there, she studied her screen with frowning concentration while her fingers flew over the keyboard at a speed Ray knew he could never duplicate.

It was only a matter of minutes before she said aloud, “Hey, I think I’ve got something.”

“What’s that?”

“Didn’t Adam Brewster tell us that Joel was the guy who encouraged him to reconcile with Chuck Brewster because his own father was dead and they’d never managed to overcome their estrangement?”

“I seem to remember him mentioning something like that,” Ray said. “Why?”

“Because Joel Franklin’s father, Marvin D. Franklin, and his wife, Lucille, are both alive and living in Hammond, Indiana.”

“Hang on,” Ray said. “I’ll check the video for sure.”

Sure enough, close to the end of Adam Brewster’s interview, he had said just that—that Joel had wanted him to reconcile with Chuck because he himself had missed doing so with his own father before the older man had passed away.

Ray was stunned. Monica Burns may not have been leading the interview, but she sure as hell had been paying attention to every detail.

Six months earlier, Smitty Howard, Ray’s longtime partner, had pulled the plug and disappeared into the sunset. Ray hadn’t exactly been thrilled when Monica Burns turned up as Smitty’s replacement. In the intervening months, Ray had yet to give Detective Burns her head, and that fact hadn’t gone unnoticed.

A few weeks earlier, Chief Nelson had pulled Ray aside. “Look,” he said, “I know you’re showing Detective Burns the ropes, but you need to let her take the lead on occasion. That’s the only way she’s going to learn how to do the job.”

Ray had planned on doing just that—to start having Monica take the number-one position on a case, but his good intentions hadn’t been enough to overcome his reluctance to let her do so in regard to this one. Now, however, he wondered if maybe the chief was right, and it really was time for Ray to change his tune.

“Good catch,” he said aloud to Monica. “And if Joel lied to Adam about his family life, what else has he lied about and how come?”

Monica was still glued to her computer when Don Wilson from the Tech Unit turned up at their shared cubicle.

“Found it,” he said, scattering a sheaf of computer printouts across Ray’s desk. “Take a look at these.”

“What am I looking at?” he asked.

“Our initial cell tower examination covered Saturday and Sunday, the day before and the day of the homicide. The phones present on Saturday were primarily ones with area codes from this general area. On Sunday, however, starting about midafternoon and over the same general time period of the party, we noted the presence of three different phone numbers bearing area codes from Southern California. One of those is registered to Adam Brewster.”

“The homicide victim’s son,” Ray supplied.

“The second leads back to a Joel Franklin.”

“He’s Adam Brewster’s spouse,” Ray said. “What about phone number three?”

“No idea,” Don answered. “It’s a burner, so there’s no way to tell whose it is.”

That’s easy , Ray thought. It belongs to whoever’s got something to hide.

“All three phones both started and stopped pinging on the towers closest to the Brewster residence at the same time,” Don continued. “That suggests that all three devices were traveling together. We picked them up again a few minutes later, at the next set of towers to the south of the first one, so it’s likely that when they left the party on Sunday evening, they were headed southbound. By the way, none of those devices reappeared in the general area during the time frame when the ME estimates the homicide occurred.”

“So, either they weren’t at the scene, or the killer or killers were smart enough not to bring their devices along with them.”

“We can continue monitoring towers,” Don continued, “but as you get closer to Seattle, there are more and more towers, and I don’t have enough manpower here to launch that kind of digital grid search.”

“That’s okay,” Ray said. “You’ve made a good start.”

“Actually, there’s more,” Wilson said. “What I’ve given you so far covers the day of the party. You asked me to take a look at the same towers a day or so earlier, and I did.”

By now he had both detectives’ undivided attention. Unfortunately, Don Wilson was hopelessly long-winded.

“Did you find anything?” Monica urged.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Don announced with a grin. “Late on Friday night, March 10, yet another Southern California phone, registered on the tower nearest your crime scene. The first ping came in at eleven fifteen p.m. on Friday. The last one was at twelve forty-five Saturday morning.”

“That’s an hour and a half,” Ray said, thinking aloud, “pretty late at night for a casual visitor to show up. Did you track down the owner?”

“Sure did,” Wilson replied. “Name’s Marc Atherton. Lives at 459 Sixteenth Street in Huntington Beach, California.”

“Who’s Marc Atherton, and what the hell was he doing in the area of our crime scene the morning before the homicide?”

“You’ll need warrants to find that out,” Don Wilson said cheerfully. “I’m glad that’s your job instead of mine. TU’s already done its part.”

“That phone has to be connected to the case,” Monica asserted. “When we canvassed the area for video footage, we made the same mistake TU did the first time around. We looked for and downloaded footage on the night of the homicide instead of two nights before. Maybe our killer was doing recon in advance of the hit.”

“Time to fix that, and you’re driving,” Ray said, picking up the car keys and tossing them in Monica’s direction. “An hour and a half is a lot shorter time frame than we were looking at before, and we already know where we’re likely to find usable video.”