Long Shadows (Amos Decker, #7)(39)

“Working on it. Did you ever see Cummins and Draymont together?”

“Draymont is the dead guy?”

“Yes.”

“Sure, I mean, he was over some nights the last few weeks.”

“Some nights? So, not every night.”

“Well, his car wasn’t there those nights, so I just assumed he wasn’t, either.”

Decker sat down at the table and eyed her. “I know she was your friend, but I need to ask you something.”

She sat down across from him and sipped on her drink while she gave him a knowing look. “You want to know if they were having sex?”

“Yes, but what made you think that?”

“He was young and handsome and she was still young and lovely and single and alone. I would’ve jumped into bed with that guy in a heartbeat. The men around here are mostly bald and fat. And all they want to do is play golf. Makes you lose faith in the American male.”

“Anything more specific?”

She looked at him with a coy expression. “Just things that maybe a woman picks up on that men never do.”

Decker sat back. “Let me tell you what I picked up on. He wasn’t wearing a tie. Everyone in a suit at Gamma Protection does apparently. At that hour, he was in the house, not outside. There were two wineglasses in the dishwasher and an empty bottle of merlot in the recycling bin. The judge had makeup, lipstick, and perfume on when she was killed. I don’t think she was asleep at all. The fingernail and toenail polish she was wearing was the same color as the bottle on her bathroom counter. She’d put it on that night, presumably, which you wouldn’t really do unless you were expecting someone. It was a particularly hot shade of cherry red. It was also on one of the wineglasses.”

Kline smiled. “Go on, Agent Decker. You’re just hitting your stride, I can tell.”

“There were clothes on the floor of her closet, all items of lingerie, as though she was thinking about what to wear that night. Some tissues were in the wastebasket with lipstick marks on them. Same color the judge was wearing. That was probably either the judge wiping off excess, or Draymont getting rid of kiss marks on his face. The bed covers were really messed up and the mattress was several inches off-kilter from the box springs. We thought that represented a struggle with her killer. But now I think it was two people being energetically intimate.”

“At least she had fun before she left this world,” said Kline thoughtfully, her lips trembling. She composed herself with a long drink from her glass. “And I must say, you’re very observant. For my part, I had just seen a couple of times the way they looked at each other. And when I asked Julia about him she went overboard explaining how it was all professional. Which led me to think, ‘She doth protest too much.’”

“You didn’t tell us that yesterday.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“Our questions were pretty general.”

She lifted her glass. “Well, now you know.”

“The security gate log showed Draymont arriving around eight that night. Was that his usual time?”

“Around that. Actually, I don’t think he was here last week at all. And he’d been at her home two days before he was killed. At least I saw his car.”

“Do you know when your other neighbors the Perlmans are getting back today?”

“Their flight gets in around eleven. They’ll probably be here around twelve thirty or so.”

“Have you told them about Judge Cummins?”

She shook her head. “I…I didn’t have the heart to. Maya and Julia were very close. It’s not something you want to do over the phone.” She finished her drink. “So, what will you do with that information?”

“Keep digging like I always do. The truth is worth it.”

And as he left her, Decker reflected that it actually felt good to say that.





Chapter 28



Y?OU WERE RIGHT, AGENT DECKER,” said Helen Jacobs.

They were huddled over the body of Julia Cummins at the morgue. Decker’s electric blue tsunami had come and gone, but left him a bit pale and shaken. He hated that reaction as much as he hated anything. It made him feel weak and not up to the task. And he knew others seeing it might think the same.

Screw synesthesia.

“She’d had sex before she died?” he said.

“Yes. I checked for that, as I said when I saw you at the crime scene. But I was really looking for an assault, considering that she was murdered. I went over her entire body. I checked for the usual finger pad bruising on her arms, legs, and neck, suction bites, especially on her breasts, petechiae in the eyes and palate, bruising to the inner lips and behind the ears, all places typically impacted by a sexual assault. I used swabs and a Foley balloon catheter to check her vagina. The physical structure of that part of the anatomy makes detection of an attack difficult, so I also used a colposcope and an ultraviolet light to do my exam. All the results came back pretty much negative for a sexual assault.”

“And since you found no firm evidence of sexual assault, you proceeded no further on that line?”

“That’s right. No assault meant no sex at all, at least in my mind.” Jacobs looked embarrassed. “I should not have made that assumption. But I suppose I was influenced by her violent death. You never see consensual sex end that way. At least I haven’t.”