Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(37)

“What do you think?”

Another sigh. “Crap, it’s January eighteenth. Just three days to go. Well hell…” Griffin stopped murmuring, seemed to collect his thoughts. “Okay, so I can only speak to the Providence scene, and there wasn’t much to it. First responders arrived to a quiet house. Front door was closed but unlocked. In the family room, they found the body of a woman. She was lying there so peacefully, one of the guys dropped to start CPR. Wasn’t until he was leaning over her that he saw the bruises around her neck and realized she was dead.”

“Fully clothed?”

“Dressed in some kind of upscale, dark green track suit—pants, long-sleeved white shirt, matching top. Fluffy white socks, L.L. Bean slippers. Comfy clothes, as one of the detectives put it. Like she’d gotten all settled for the night, then someone rang the doorbell.”

D.D. considered that. Women didn’t usually wear track suits and fluffy socks when expecting male guests, so she went with their theory—Randi had turned in for the night.

“TV?” she asked. “Was it or any lights on when the officers arrived?”

“TV was off, all lights had been turned off—”

“Print the switch plates?” D.D. interrupted.

“Duh,” Griffin informed her drolly. “Nada. Perp was definitely wearing gloves and, less quantifiable, but I’d say knew the house. Felt comfortable there. It’s like he showed up, did the deed, then tidied up. Turned off lights, mopped the floor, wiped down the kitchen for all we know. But the scene was tidy. Except for the dead body, of course.”

“So maybe there had been a struggle,” D.D. challenged. “Maybe Randi put up a helluva fight, and that’s why the perp cleaned up afterward.”

“Maybe. No signs of trauma on the body, though. No defensive wounds, no bruising. All in all, it’s like someone walked in, put his hands around her neck, and that was that.”

“You’ve said he a couple of times. So you’re thinking a male attacker?”

“ME’s best guess. It’s not easy to manually strangle someone. Takes a bit of muscle but also finger strength. Randi was an average-sized female, five five, hundred and twenty, did Pilates four times a week. In theory, it would take someone bigger and stronger to overpower her so quickly.”

D.D. pursed her lips. “And Jon Menke?”

“Weasel,” Griffin muttered. “Six feet, one ninety, physically fit, spent four to five mornings a week at the gym. Apparently, he felt a doctor should look the part. We learned his female colleagues appreciated that.”

“A ladies’ man?”

“Definitely not monogamous.”

“Did Randi know?”

“Apparently part of the cause for the divorce. The other part being that he liked to beat the shit out of her.”

“Document it?” D.D. asked sharply.

“Oh yeah. To give Randi some credit, she did her homework before leaving the bastard. Called a hotline, got some advice. She’d filled an entire safety deposit box with photos and walk-in clinic reports before dialing up the lawyer and making a break for it. And trust me, Menke was pissed off about that. His wife not only left, but got him branded as a wife beater while nailing him for alimony. Yeah, Menke had every reason to want her dead and was fully capable of getting the job done.”

“Except…” D.D. drawled out.

“Alibi,” Griffin supplied. “A cocktail waitress, mind you, some pretty young thing who probably saw his pecs, his paycheck, and his Porsche and promptly forgot things like his history of domestic abuse, but they were in a bar and several regulars backed their claim. In the end, we couldn’t break it.”

D.D. thought about it. “You said he had a history of smacking his wife around?”

“Yep. Fat lips, black eyes, a wrecked knee where apparently he’d kicked her.”

“Sounds like a guy who had trouble managing his temper.”

“Yep.”

“But, the homicide scene…”

“Looks like the work of someone fully in control,” Griffin agreed. “Which was the second problem with pursuing Menke. On the one hand, it just felt right to nail him for something. On the other hand, this something didn’t feel like his kind of something. He would’ve trashed the place. Not to mention, according to our criminologist, wife beaters who become wife killers almost always disfigure their spouses. Shoot them in the face, stab them five dozen times. It’s a personal, frenzied, dehumanizing attack. This…this was cold-blooded. More akin to murder-for-hire, which became our next theory.”

“Oooh,” D.D.’s eyes widened. “Menke paid someone to take down his too-good-for-her-own-good ex-wife.”

“Yeah. My theory. Real winner at the time, and maybe still the best theory, but we could never find a money trail. Now, the feds were investigating Menke for health care fraud at the time, and the money trail there was long and convoluted. Lot of suspicion that he was dealing prescription drugs on the side, which would’ve given him access to both cash and a certain ‘clientele’ we could never prove. So murder-for-hire remains the most likely scenario, in my mind.”

“Did you ever get him for fraud?”

“Feds got him. Small potatoes though. Could only prove the tip, not the iceberg. But it was enough to have his medical license revoked, plus he’s serving three-to-five in a Club Fed somewhere. You can contact a Boston FBI agent, David Riggs, if you have more questions. He ran the health care fraud investigation.”