Redemption (Amos Decker #5)(58)

“Hey, it was your first time. You think the first time I ran the ball at Texas I was as good as the last time I ran it? You learn from your mistakes, Decker, you know that.”

“Well, I made enough of them on this case to last a lifetime.”

He led Mars to the side door. This presumably was where David Katz had gone into the house. Decker had a key that had been given him by Natty. He unlocked the door and stepped into a utility room. Up a short set of steps was the kitchen.

“So we’re here to sort of walk through the crime scene?” said Mars.

Decker didn’t answer right away. He gazed around at the small room. The HVAC equipment was in here, as well as hookups for a washer and dryer.

“Why would Katz have pulled around here to come into the house?” He was really saying this to himself more than Mars.

“Well, maybe this was the way he always came in.”

“There’s no record that he was ever here before.”

Mars looked around the room. “Well, then I guess that is strange. Why come in here instead of through the front door?”

They walked up the stairs and into the kitchen.

“You think maybe Richards told him to come in that way?”

“I have no way of knowing that,” replied Decker. “I don’t know who arranged the meeting or why. Or even if it was a meeting or just a shoot-the-breeze sort of thing.”

They arrived at the spot where David Katz had been shot.

“He fell here and the beer he was drinking hit the floor but didn’t break.”

“Okay. And then Don Richards was shot—”

Decker put up a hand. He had just downloaded something from his “cloud” that was not making sense.

“What?” said Mars, who had seen this expression before.

“Two things. The beer bottle was nearly empty when it hit the floor.”

“How do you know that?”

“The spill pattern and volume of beer on the floor.”

“Wouldn’t some of it have dried?”

“We took that into account.”

“Okay, so he drank the rest.”

Decker shook his head. “He had almost no beer in his stomach when they did the autopsy.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. And the second point?”

Decker closed his eyes and brought two images up in his head.

“Katz was right-handed. The print of his we found on the beer bottle was from his left hand.”

“Well, that’s weird. You didn’t see that before?”

“No, actually I did. But I didn’t place any great importance on it because sometimes you hold a drink in your other hand. We’ve all done it.”

“But now?”

“But now I’m looking at everything that doesn’t seem to fit.”

“And what does that tell you, looking at it that way?”

“That someone could have pressed his hand on the beer after he was dead, but used the wrong hand.”

“To make it look like he was drinking beer? Why would that matter?”

“I don’t know.”

Mars looked at Decker nervously. “And if there was almost no beer in his stomach, that wasn’t a red flag?”

“Should have been,” admitted Decker. He looked down at the floor. “But if Katz didn’t drink the beer, who did?” He eyed the kitchen sink. “Maybe it went down there.”

“To make it look like he’d drunk most of what was in the bottle?”

“If that was their plan, they didn’t know how postmortems work. Not that it made a difference since I completely missed that because I didn’t fully read the PM report.” He slammed his fist against the wall and then rubbed the cut the blow had produced. “The fact is, everything changed when we found the fingerprint, Melvin. I was really eager to get the person who’d done this. And that print led directly to Meryl Hawkins. Nothing else mattered at that point.”

“I get that, Decker. And I know you want to beat yourself up over this, and maybe you’re right to do it. But you got another chance to get it right, so clear your head, get rid of the guilt, and focus. I know you can do this, bro.”

Decker took a couple of deep, calming breaths. “Okay, the problem has always been, how did the killer or killers get here? They had to come down that one road and pass the other houses. No one saw them. There was no trace of another car, and there would have been.”

“Maybe they came on foot.”

“They had to have come to the house after the rain started. Yet there was not a single trace of that in the house. They might have been meticulous in cleaning up, but to not leave a single mark?” Decker shook his head in disbelief. “Not going to happen.”

“Well, what if the killers were in the house before the rain started. Then they ambushed Katz when he came in. And killed everybody else.”

Decker thought about this. “That means they would have come to the house in broad daylight with no rain to give them cover. Someone would have seen them coming down the road.”

“Maybe they came from behind the house and not down the road.”

“And waited hours to kill everyone? Why?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Mars. “Maybe they were trying to get some information from them before they murdered them.”