Shroud of Fog: (A Cape Trouble Romantic Suspense Novel) (5 page)

“Once Misty Beach becomes a refuge,” Hannah said sturdily,
“I think it should be dedicated to Doreen.  There can be a sign, telling any
visitors about the woman who saved that beautiful piece of land.”

For the first time all day, Sophie was betrayed by tears. 
“Yes,” she whispered.  “That’s how Doreen would have liked to be remembered.”

Although still nearly a stranger, Hannah hugged her.

Daniel had seen some impossible crime scenes in his time,
but this twenty by twenty-five foot storage unit might top the list.  Usually
he – and most cops – dreaded outdoor scenes most.  Trace evidence was easier to
recover indoors, fingerprints were there for the finding, the damn scene was
contained.

The problem in here was an over-abundance.  Fingerprints,
hair, you name it.  Damn near everyone in town had probably traipsed through
here.  Which made recovering a fingerprint or anything else a joke.  Why
collect it at all?

He was too good a cop not to, of course, and you never
knew.  A fingerprint on the glass vase would be good, or a hair that wasn’t
Doreen’s stuck in the blood.  Otherwise, it would probably all be a waste of
everyone’s time and generate paperwork to thicken the murder file.

Well, what was new about that?  TV shows to the contrary,
most murders weren’t cleared by the lab.  The killer did something stupid –
that was the biggie, praise the Lord.  Eyewitnesses willing to come forward,
even confessions when an investigator leaned on a suspect.  Those were good. 
Fingerprints on the butt of the weapon?  Pretty rare.

But Daniel had a bad feeling clearing Doreen Stedmann’s
murder wasn’t going to be easy.  Why not cling to at least faint hope the
evidence techs would come up with something good?

He grimaced.  Sophie Thomsen was right – letting anyone and
everyone in here whenever they felt inclined had been a dumb thing to do, with
worse consequences than any of them could have foreseen.

He had no hope at all for the cord around Doreen’s neck.  It
was garden variety stuff, the kind sold off the the roll at any decent hardware
or home improvement store to be laundry line or tie down a load in a pickup
truck.  This didn’t look to be new, either.  It was interesting, too, that the
cord had been a lot longer than needed for the purpose.  Good bet it had
already been here in the storage unit.  Used to tie a package together, maybe? 
If so, someone would remember.

He sketched the scene – stick figure, but, hey, he wasn’t an
artist -  then took his own photos, dozens of ‘em from every angle, to be sure
he had what he wanted, with the idea of being able to lay them out into a whole
on a board, a picture puzzle put together.  He’d use markers, pointers,
numbers.  These fingerprints were found here, that one there.  A foot had
stomped down exactly…there.  As everything was moved, he could add notations. 
Why had the killer searched in these boxes and not those?  Which was the first
place he’d looked?  The last?  Daniel would really like to know whether Doreen
had already been dead when her murderer began to search, or whether the search
was the point and she was killed because she’d caught someone tearing the
storage space apart.

But if that was so, how was it the killer had happened to
have the new lock on hand?

Daniel called Sophie again that evening, hoping he wouldn’t
wake her but wanting to give her a heads up.  She answered the phone
immediately, sounding alert, and he said, “This is Daniel.  I don’t see why you
can’t get started tomorrow morning, if you’re ready.  By the way, I asked
Marge, and she has another unit the same size vacant.  We’re lucky, too,
because it’s not far away.  Close enough we can carry things back and forth on
foot.”

We?
he asked himself.  Where had that come from?  He
had plenty of angles to pursue on this investigation, and couldn’t abandon the
rest of his job, either.  He wouldn’t be the one watching her inventory the
auction items.  Or, at least, no more than for brief stretches.

“That’ll be a big help,” she agreed.  “I’ll be out there at
ten, then, if that’s okay.  I think that’s when Marge opens.”

“It is,” he agreed.  “I’ll meet you there.”

“Thank you.  Um…you did lock the place up again, I hope.”

He laughed.  “I did.  Marge didn’t even ask me to pay for
the lock.”

He heard her chuckle, although, not surprisingly, it sounded
subdued.  “That’s probably because I’d already told her I’d pay for a lock to
replace the one I was having her cut off.”

“You all right?” he asked.

“As all right as I can be.”  She told him that three of the
other auction volunteers had spent part of the evening with her.

“I’ve had the most to do with Elaine,” he said.  Elaine
Terwilliger was a pain in the butt.  Probably every police department had one
or more of her kind.  He’d swear she averaged a complaint a week.  Somebody was
parked illegally.  A teenage kid was playing his music too loud.  She spent a
lot of time outraged because her next door neighbor, Conrad Neufeld, liked to
start shedding clothes as he wandered through his house on his way to bed. 
Some nights he didn’t pull his bedroom blind until he was stark naked.  Daniel
would rather wrestle down and cuff a two hundred and fifty pound biker hopped
on crack than visit Conrad yet again to discuss how he might avoid offending
his spinster neighbor’s delicate sensibilities.  Daniel had begun to suspect
that Elaine settled down every night at her window to enjoy the show, and that
Conrad was either thumbing his nose – not to mention something else – at her,
or else he was enjoying putting on the show.  Either way, Daniel was not fond
of Elaine Terwilliger, and getting less so by the week of Conrad Neufeld, too.

“I know Hannah, too,” he said.  “I buy a lot of books.  And,
damn, but she makes incredible caramel truffles.  Seems like a nice lady. 
Naomi Kendrick, though, I don’t think I’d ever met.”  Even her voice on the
phone hadn’t rung any bells for him.  He’d eaten in her café – she or whoever
was in the kitchen made the best French toast he’d ever had in his life – but
the waitress who’d waited on him there was a middle-aged woman whose husband
was an insurance agent and he’d never caught even a glimpse of the cook.

“She made fabulous lasagna.”

“I’m glad somebody thought to feed you.”  The minute he said
it, he felt a little embarrassed.  He was going to have to be careful not to
get too personal with Sophie Thomsen.  It had been a mistake, earlier, to beg
lunch off her.  Friends ate together.  Investigators didn’t dine with people
they were interviewing.

Keeping an appropriate distance, he’d been discovering since
he took this job, was one of the toughest parts of small town policing.

It was going to be harder yet keeping that distance from
Sophie.  A voice in him was saying,
You know she didn’t kill her aunt, so
why not get personal?

Since he came to Cape Trouble, he hadn’t had anything but a
couple of one-offs with women staying at a local inn for a weekend of sand,
sun, fog and – it turned out – sex.  Mostly that suited him.  He wasn’t
interested in getting serious, investing that much of himself in a wife and
children.  People died, or couples split up.  Why invite pain? was his
philosophy.  But Sophie not only attracted him, she came with an end date.  She
was in town for four weeks.  After that she’d have no reason to return except
to close out her aunt’s estate, assuming she really was the heir – finding out
for sure was on tomorrow’s to-do list.

You can’t sleep with her until you’ve eliminated her as a
suspect once and for all
, he argued with himself.

So do that, was the easy answer.

And then find out if she was interested.

As they ended the call a little awkwardly, Daniel liked
knowing he’d be seeing her tomorrow morning.

Even if a brutal crime was the excuse.

*****

He could give her a few hours, Daniel told her when they met
out front of the office at the storage facility.  He claimed to want to see for
himself her system, but Sophie suspected he was also being nice.  He had to
have been aware of her shock and distress yesterday, and wanted to be sure she
could actually handle working here so soon after discovering Doreen’s body.

No uniform today – he wore dark brown chinos, athletic
shoes, and a sweater over a T-shirt.  The casual attire did nothing to reduce
his impact or air of authority.  Somehow she couldn’t imagine anyone having the
nerve to give him orders.

He was driving a dark SUV today, too, not a marked city
police car, when he followed her out to 4079, then led the way around the
corner to the new unit, currently unlocked.  This one took a cylinder lock
instead of the traditional padlock type, Sophie saw with approval.  Nobody
would be lopping this one off.  Daniel lifted the door to expose the bare
concrete interior with open wall studs.  Sophie assessed the space before she
turned away and said, “I’m glad this was available.”

They walked back to 4079 in silence and he produced the keys
to unlock, then took one off the ring and gave it to her.  “It goes without
saying I don’t want anyone else in here.”

“Nobody else should be in here anyway,” she said firmly.

Oh God oh God
, she thought, as he hefted this door
up, too.  The morning was foggy as it had been yesterday, making the light in
here murky again.  Her heart was drumming hard, and everything in her revolted
at the idea of stepping inside.  But under Daniel’s watchful gaze, she made
herself.

There was a bare bulb overhead, she saw gratefully, and she
pulled the long cord to turn it on.  A swift glance at the back corner told her
that Doreen’s body was gone as well as the rope and crystal vase.  Nothing else
had been cleaned up, including the blood.  In fact, if anything the mess was
greater now, with a nasty dark powder coating too many surfaces.

His gaze followed hers and he shifted, as if uneasy. 
“Sorry, I should have thought.  We’ll get someone out here to clean that up.”

“I’d appreciate that,” she admitted.  “I don’t mind the
rest, but the blood…”  She had to swallow.  “Tomorrow I’ll bring a broom and
dust pan.”  Yes, think about something besides blood, please do.  “Maybe some
other cleaning supplies, too.  If that’s okay?”

“Yeah, we didn’t help matters, did we?”  He delved in the
pocket of his dark blue windbreaker and handed her a pair of latex gloves.  “To
keep your hands clean.”

“Thank you.  You came prepared.”

“I always carry some.”

Well, that made sense if he was often handling evidence at a
crime scene, but how often was there a crime scene in the bucolic town of Cape
Trouble?  He’d said San Francisco P.D., though.  Something about his automatic
assumption of authority from the moment he’d arrived yesterday made her suspect
he hadn’t been only a patrol officer.  She imagined him getting dressed in the
morning, grabbing his wallet, putting on his watch, scooping loose change into
his pocket, tugging a couple of pairs of latex gloves from a box that lived on
his dresser.  She gave her head a bemused shake.

“What’s the plan?” he asked, surveying the space.

Focus
.  “I’m going to carry everything on one of the
set of shelves over to the other unit, then move the shelves themselves.  I’ll
sit over there, open each and every box, note the contents, write a
description, repack the item or items, then label the box clearly.  Put it on
the shelf.  When I finish that batch, I start over.”

“You won’t be taking things out of here.”

“Yes, I probably will,” she said frankly.  “I’ve got a card
table and folding chair in the car, along with my laptop.  I see there’s an
electrical outlet there and I can plug in.  I’ll enter items on the laptop as I
look at them.  But to write good catalog copy, I need to come up with appealing
descriptions.  For a lot of items, I can borrow off the internet.  Say,” she
glanced around, “that Keurig single cup coffee maker.”  She saw him look, nod. 
“I’ll note the model number, and tonight I can look it up, write down the great
features, use those to create the catalog copy.  I don’t need to take the
coffee maker with me.”

“Okay,” he said cautiously.

“But some of the artwork might be another story.  As much as
possible, I’ll try to describe it without removing it.  I don’t want to risk
scratching a frame, breaking the glass, whatever.  For small, portable stuff
like jewelry and collectibles, though, it makes a lot more sense for me to take
them back to the cottage, study them in better light, do any research I need to
on the internet, package each piece separately, and bring it all back the next
day.  One of the challenges,” she told him, “is assigning a retail value to
each item.  That’s not quite as important for live auction items, but for
silent auction, the bid increments are based on the value.  And while some
donors give an accurate value, others inflate it and some haven’t a clue and
don’t even guess.  I can’t imagine what people putting on an auction did before
the internet.”

“All right,” he said.  “All that makes sense.  Whoever I
have working here with you is going to need to see whatever items you take home
at night, though.”

She didn’t like the idea of having someone watching her with
suspicion at all times, but she understood the reasoning and only nodded.

“Do you have a preference as to where I start?” she asked. 
“Should I be looking first at the things that were searched, or the ones that
weren’t?”

He rocked a couple of times on his heels, hands shoved in
the pockets of the windbreaker.  Finally he shrugged.  “I can’t see that it
matters.  Until you’re all done, we won’t know what if anything is missing
anyway.”

“If we ever know.”

His eyes met hers.  “Yeah.  If.”

“Well, then, let’s start with that one.”  She indicated a
tall set of shelves closest to the entrance filled with unopened boxes and
bags.

“Good enough,” Daniel said.  “Why don’t you go set up your
table and laptop, and I’ll be the pack burro?”

Appreciating both the image and the glimmer of humor in his
dark blue eyes, she gave him a saucy smile.  “I like that,” she decided. 
“Although I can carry something when I go.”  She chose the coffee maker and let
Daniel pile a couple of smaller boxes on top of it, then walked around the
corner to the empty unit.