A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(65)

The house was still fully furnished, so Chelsea hadn’t moved out yet. Jane went around to the front of the house and stepped up on the porch to examine the windows. It didn’t take long to find the one the bullet had passed through into Nick Bauermeister. The outer frame of it had been spackled to fill nail holes where a piece of plywood must have been nailed to cover the window until it had been replaced. She looked closer and saw the glazing compound around the edges of the big pane was fresh and white. She could see that the wall of the living room across from her looked different, probably a new coat of paint that didn’t quite match the color of the rest, so that must have been the place where the bullet and blood spatter had ended up.

Jane left the porch and went around the house looking for the best way in. At the side was an old-fashioned cellar entrance, a concrete frame covered by a pair of wooden doors at a thirty-degree angle from the house to the ground. There were a hasp and padlock to keep it closed, but Jane took out her pocketknife and removed the screws holding the hasp. She went down the steps, avoiding a rattrap on the fourth step, then closed the doors and waited for her eyes to adjust to seeing in the moonlight that the small cobwebbed cellar windows admitted. Then Jane carefully headed for the wooden steps leading upstairs into the kitchen, watching her feet to keep from stepping on anything in the near darkness.

The kitchen was small and neat, without much space for clutter or adornment. She opened the refrigerator door to verify that the girlfriend was still living here, and saw women’s food—yogurt, carrot sticks, celery sticks, a lot of vegetables in one drawer, boxes of vegetarian burgers and breakfast sausages in another, and premade diet meals in the freezer.

Jane moved through the house, not looking for anything, but looking at everything. The newspapers had said the girl was twenty-three, but none had carried a picture of her. In the bedroom Jane found framed photographs on the low woman’s dresser. One was a blond, blue-eyed girl about the right age with a woman about forty-five to fifty who resembled her. Jane studied the photograph, then moved to the next one.

This time the girl was with a young man. He was more than a foot taller than she was, and broad shouldered with a small head. The word that came into Jane’s mind was “lout.” He was beefy, but the arm muscles showing were not defined. He had a quarter inch of blond hair, small, pale close-set eyes, and a smile that was crooked, as though the smile was about to become a smirk. The eyes had an opaque quality that Jane had seen in people who weren’t very bright but prided themselves on their cunning.

Nicholas Bauermeister had not been a very attractive man, but Jane was aware that there were certain young women who found his type very male, and therefore, appealing. Jane had never been one of them, but so far there was no indication that Bauermeister had ever done anything that would have made his murder deserved or even likely.

Jane looked in the closet at Chelsea’s clothes. She was a size four. She didn’t have bad taste, but the clothes were inexpensive, mostly from discount chains. She had a collection of sneakers and flip-flops, all well-worn, and three pairs of high heels that she hadn’t worn much, and some bad-weather boots. There was another bedroom that had an old, swaybacked bed with a clean cover, and a closet full of male clothes. Nick’s clothes were big—size thirteen boots and sneakers, double-X shirts, and jeans with a thirty-five-inch inseam. He had a few pairs of cargo shorts, but no sport coats or dress shoes.

Jane worked as efficiently as she could, touching little, moving nothing, and searching a whole room before going on to the next. She found that Chelsea kept a shoebox filled with the upper parts of bills she had paid and other business mail. One piece was a set of bank statements dated two weeks ago. Since banks predated everything, these had probably just arrived. Chelsea had just under two thousand dollars in her checking account, and a bit under five thousand in a savings account. Nick had about nine thousand in checking, and no savings.

In a drawer near the kitchen door Jane found a flashlight. She turned it on and went down the steps to the basement. It took only a few minutes of searching to find the first surprise, a large battered toolbox under a workbench. She opened it and found a black cloth bag with handles like a satchel. Inside were an eighteen-inch crowbar, a center hole punch, a pair of wire cutters, long-handled bolt cutters, a headband with a light on it, a small bright LED flashlight, a couple of hacksaw blades with tape wrapped around one end to form a handle, and a piece of sheet metal cut with a hook on the end to make a slim-jim for opening a car door lock. The last object in the box was a small white cloth bag. Jane touched it and recognized the feel. She opened it and found a pair of thin leather gloves, a pullover ski mask, and a Glock 19 pistol. Jane ejected the magazine, found it was loaded, and pushed it back in.

Nicholas Bauermeister had been a thief.

Jane returned the objects to the cloth bag, and then the toolbox, and put the box back under the bench. How had the police missed Bauermeister’s burglary kit? They had come to the house in response to Chelsea’s call that he had been murdered, and that made the whole house a crime scene, not just the living room and the field in front of the house. It was true that they hadn’t come to investigate the victim, but when police had control of a victim’s house they usually tried to figure out who he had been and what could have brought him the kind of enemies who shot people to death. Jane supposed that the local police in this peaceful rural area had very little experience with homicides.