Marc (Bowen Boys, #4)(7)
He looked at his brother hard and decided that he was right. “She didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked her if she had registered with you. She didn’t know. And she wasn’t lying either. She simply doesn’t know.”
“You want me to go and talk to her?” Reed nodded and frowned when Khan shook his head. “Nah, we’ll leave it to Marc to deal with. He owes me for siding with Monica about Mom and Dad on the cruise. You and I will look around and I might just go by there to see Mia tomorrow and check her out. If I see what you see, we’ll wait. If she’s faking it, we’ll call in Dylan. He can find out sooner than most of us anyway.”
Reed liked that plan. But he thought maybe he’d keep an eye on her as well. Marc was gone and he felt it his responsibility to watch over his business while he was away. Besides, she was a beauty, and maybe he’d ask her out if this turned out to be nothing more than a woman running from someone.
Chapter 3
Marc walked the crime scene again. There were so many imprints there that he was having a hard time figuring out who was who. He thought maybe there had been at least three dozen people in this room as recently as a week ago. He knelt down to the stained floor again.
He could smell her blood and knew that she’d been terrified when she’d been laying there dying. He looked at the size of the stain and thought maybe she’d bled quickly and had died within minutes. But that didn’t ring true with the cuts on her. Marc looked up when he heard someone enter the room. It was the chief of police in this town.
“You said that she didn’t have any other marks on her but the ones that marred her, right?” Eric Campos nodded. “Yet there doesn’t seem to be nearly enough blood for her to have bled to death, do you think?”
“I thought the same thing. Even had one of the coroner guys run tests to see if she was indeed all emptied out like they said. She was.” He bounced on his heels for a few seconds. “Could it be a blood sucker?”
Marc shook his head. He and Eric had been friends for nearly all their lives, and he knew as much about Marc as Marc did about him. Eric was simply a human, but he was a telepath as well.
“Then I’m at a loss. I was thinking of that murder we had a few years ago, the one you came and helped me on. Remember it?” Marc nodded and stood up. “She was beat up pretty bad, and we nearly didn’t see the marks on her throat until we’d been about to send her to her family. You saw them when none of us could.”
“But I smelled him on her first. I don’t smell anything like that here.” Eric nodded. “What do you think happened here?”
“Her husband hired someone to kill her and make it look like some animal did it. But he panicked for some reason and killed her here and had to get rid of the blood.” Eric knelt down to the stain as he handed Marc a picture. “See that? The heel print? It was here when I got here, but after a while of her laying here and bleeding and waiting on the asses at the morgue to show up, it covered it.”
It was there, a little of the heel. He looked at it, then at the stain, and moved to where the heel would have been. Taking out his pocketknife, he asked if he could cut below the carpet, and was told that they were done with this room as far as evidence went.
Marc cut deep through the carpet and lifted a large square of it up. There on the padding was a perfect outline of the boot, also all the extra blood they’d missed. The padding was soaked with it. Eric grinned up at him.
“Wouldn’t have thought of that. I guess when he was standing here she’d already bled enough through the carpet to leave the print.” Marc nodded and lifted it to his nose. “Whatcha got?”
“Male, human pissed.” He looked at the closet, then back at Eric. “Maybe we should check the closet now. We have probable cause.”
Eric had told him that the only place they could look was the floor. The homeowner and the husband of the dead woman had said that anything else was off limits. Eric pulled out his cell and made a call.
“Hey, Judy, can I talk at your husband? Tell him it’s important.” After talking for several minutes to the judge in the town, he and Eric waited on the judge to sign off on a search warrant and have it brought to them. They both knew that the room was being watched, and looked up at the newly installed camera and smiled.
“You figure a pair of his boots is gonna have blood on them?” Marc nodded. “You really sure or are you guessing you’re sure?”
“I’ll smell them before you bag them, but I’m sure that he wouldn’t have gotten rid of them.” He sat down on the chair and looked at Eric when he sat in the other one. “When the maid came into the house the night she was found, you said that he was in the kitchen and that he’d sent the maid up to find his wife. She said that she’d commented on his boots and that they were muddy.” Eric nodded.
“If that is the same pair, he wouldn’t have been able to get rid of them then or since because we’ve been watching the house. Anything going out would have been searched, and he’s even being watched at work. We’re telling him that it’s as a precaution, but I think he knows that we suspect him. He’s a bit cagey.”
They got the warrant twenty minutes later and Eric went to the closet with one of his officers in tow. He lifted one of the three pairs of boots from the rack and handed them to his officer, nearly dropping them on Marc, who’d been kneeling close by. It was a trick they had perfected over the years to get Marc a good whiff of whatever was being handled. Marc shook his head.