At the Scene of the Crime Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  SMART ALECK

  BETTER LUCKY THAN GOOD

  THE HIGH LIFE - A HEARTLAND HOMICIDE STORY

  RUST

  I/M-PRINT A TESS CASSIDY SHORT STORY

  A TRACE OF A TRACE

  FIVE SORROWFUL MYSTERIES

  MITT’S MURDER

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  THE RETIRED ARSONIST

  PATRIOTIC GESTURES

  ARTICULATION OF MURDER

  OCCAM’S RAZOR

  ON THE EVIDENCE A LIAM CAMPBELL SHORT STORY

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

  THURSDAY MORNING

  THURSDAY EVENING

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Copyright Page

  COPYRIGHTS

  Introduction by Dana Stabenow

  “Smart Aleck,” copyright © 2008 by Loren D. Estleman

  “Better Lucky Than Good,” copyright © 2008 by Jeanne C. Stein

  “The High Life: A Heartland Homicide Story,” copyright © 2008 by Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens

  “Rust,” copyright © 2008 by N. J. Ayres

  “I/M-Print: A Tess Cassidy Short Story,” copyright © 2008 by Jeremiah Healy

  “A Trace of a Trace,” copyright © 2008 by Brendan DuBois

  “Five Sorrowful Mysteries,” copyright © 2008 by Julie Hyzy

  “Mitt’s Murder,” copyright © 2008 by John Lutz

  “The Retired Arsonist,” copyright © 2008 by Edward D. Hoch

  “Patriotic Gestures,” copyright © 2008 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Articulation of Murder,” copyright © 2008 by Michael A. Black

  “Occam’s Razor,” copyright © 2008 by Maynard F. Thomson

  “On the Evidence: A Liam Campbell Short Story,” copyright © 2008 by Dana Stabenow

  INTRODUCTION

  BY DANA STABENOW

  A COUPLE OF YEARS BACK MARTY GREENBERG, the Anthology King, poked his head up and noticed how popular an obscure little television series called CSI was. He wondered if perhaps a book of short stories involving criminal cases that turn on hard evidence found at the scene might be equally popular. He wondered further if I would edit such a collection, and I replied, as to my cost I often do to Marty, why, sure. He and John Helfers rounded up a stellar cast of writers and found a publisher, and the result is the book you hold in your hand.

  So here, for your enjoyment, thirteen investigations into means, motive, and opportunity that together prove the law of unintended consequences can trip up even the most masterminded criminal, so long as the investigator on the scene is on the ball. I find that kind of comforting.

  The scenes of crime are all over the American map, from Brendan DuBois’ story set in a coastal fishing village in New Hampshire, to Julie Hyzy’s in a retirement home in Florida, to Kristin Katherine Rusch’s in a suburb in Oregon, to mine in a wilderness in Alaska. Anything is grist for the investigator’s mill, from forensic dentistry to the rate of nuclear decay. John Lutz uses satellite imagery as part of his crime scene equipment to solve the murder of a retired major league baseball player.

  Loren Estleman writes about twins separated at birth reunited by murder, Jeremiah Healy sets his story in a McMansion in an Everygated community, and Edward Hoch writes about an arsonist who may or may not be retired. Maynard F. Thomson tells of a retired medical examiner’s memories of his first murder. Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens write about high life in the heartland, and Michael Black’s hero takes a bite out of crime in the Arizona desert. N.J. Ayres writes a haunted memoir set in rural Pennsylvania, and Jeanne C. Stein sets a tough urban narrative in the rare book room of a Denver university.

  And then I, just to be contrary, wrote a Liam and Wy story that proves that sometimes it isn’t all about the evidence. Sometimes it isn’t; sometimes it’s all about the hunch, whatever that is, wherever it comes from, and whatever you call it, at the scene of the crime.

  Pull on your rubber gloves and your paper booties and come on in.

  SMART ALECK

  BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  “WHO CUT HER DOWN?” HENRY ASKED.

  Coopersmith, the young medical examiner who’d replaced old Doc Wingate, never looked up from the gizmo that looked like a Game Boy he was manipulating. “Neighbor from across the hall. Door wasn’t on the latch and she went in to warn her about that for like the thousandth time.”

  “Too bad it didn’t take after nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

  The dead woman was identified as Angela Kaybee. She’d worked as a receptionist for a local optometrist, a job that called for a certain amount of good looks, but her protruding eyes and tongue marred the effect. She’d strangled, as most hanging victims did; snapping the neck was a professional’s game.

  “Suicide?”

  Coopersmith didn’t respond, absorbed as he was with his gadget, which seemed to be designed for measuring body temperature, but apparently it wasn’t working. Sergeant Henry left him, stepping over and around earnest young technicians taking digital photographs and collecting lint in Ziploc bags. Mac Davidoff, his partner, stood out of the way bobbing a tea bag up and down in a cardboard cup.

  “Suicide,” Davidoff said in greeting. “I heard you, even if he didn’t. No ligature marks on the wrists. She tied herself to the ceiling fan and kicked over the chair. Sorry we couldn’t come up with something more stimulating, Aleck. This could be your last case.”

  Henry bent to look at the body sprawled in its taped outline on the floor. “Wears her watch on her right wrist.”

  “I didn’t notice. So you going to travel or what?”

  “I thought I’d come down to headquarters every day and sit and tell stories, then drive home real slow in a big car with a hat on my head. Where’s the neighbor?”

  “In the kitchen. I was about to send her home.”

  “I’m not retired yet, Mac. Let me finish the job.”

  “Okay. Don’t get testy.”

  “It’s not you, it’s these techno-poops. They didn’t used to be such pains in the butt.”

  “That TV show spoiled ‘em.”

  “What TV show?”

  “You’re kidding. How could you miss it? It’s either that or funny home videos on every channel.”

  “I think I saw one once. The CSIs all carried guns and badges and went around interrogating suspects. Makes you wonder what all the real cops are doing.”

  Alexander Henry had been with the department thirty years, twenty-two of them with the detective division. He had a reputation among his contemporaries as a wizard who connected scattered leads into working theories when logic alone failed. They called him “Smart Aleck,” with varying degrees of affection.

  “Hey!”

  Trying to avoid a hefty young woman on her knees with an aerosol can, Henry bumped into Coopersmith, still thumbing buttons on his handheld device. “Sorry.”

  “I wish you gumshoes would go out and get a doughnut or something until we’re finished here.”

  The sergeant found a middle-aged woman worrying her hands at the table in the apartment kitchen. He introduced himself. “You were right to cut her down. A lot of people assume they’re dead already.”

  “I watch TV. I used a knife from the kitchen.” She shuddered.

  “Did you know Miss Kaybee well?”

  “No. She wasn’t that sort of neighbor. But we’ve had some burglaries here. Some of the younger residents don’t lock their doors and it gets around that the building’s an easy mark. When I saw her door wasn’t even closed—”

  “Was she right- or left-handed?”

  “I—I don’t know. I don’t notice that kind of thing.”

  He smiled. His warm, weary smile was his best interview technique. “That’s because you’re right-handed. We lefties have to mess with tools designed for the other hand several times a day, so we’re sensitive to a thing like that.”

  “How did you know I’m right-handed?”

  “You wear your watch on your left wrist. People tend to wear it on the one they don’t use as much, to avoid banging it against things. Miss Kaybee has hers on her right wrist.”

  “I didn’t see her all that much. She was rude the last time I told her she should lock her door. I don’t think she was a nice person. Is it important what hand she favored?”

  “Probably not. I’m supposed to ask these things is all.”

  “Well, if it is, I’m sure the criminalists will figure it out. They’re so dedicated.”

  “Yeah, we’re lucky to have ‘em.”

  Back at headquarters, Davidoff rapped on Henry’s desk. The sergeant was staring at a safety poster that had been on the same wall for ten years. “You’re not retired yet, you said. Plenty of time to daydream when you’re out fishing every day.”

  “I don’t like fish.”

  “There’s always catch and release.”

  “What’s the point?”

  Davidoff shook his head. “We got a positive ID on Angela Kaybee from her boss, the optometrist. Of course, that’s just for the paperwork. Her DNA matches the hair and skin cells all over the apartment.”

  “Prints?”

  “She had no criminal record in this state, so there’s nothing on file, but we printed her postmortem. They matched with the partials all over the apartment and a honey of a full set on a bathroom glass. Pretty soon we won’t have to take civilians down to the morgue anymore. I won’t miss that part of the job.”


  “Pretty soon there won’t be a job. The wonks will vacuum up everything we need and spin it in a dish and e-mail the results straight to the prosecutor. Department’ll gut all the interview rooms and put in handball courts.”

  “What do you care? You’ll be living on your pension.”

  “Did you ask the optometrist if she was left-handed?”

  “How could I forget? You’ve been obsessing over it. He said she was a rightie. He’s a southpaw himself, so he noticed.”

  “Any chance someone else dressed her after she was dead and put the watch on the wrong wrist?”

  “CSIs would’ve reported that, but you can ask.”

  “Did you play the despondent card with the optometrist?”

  Davidoff smiled. “Did you ever notice live people aren’t ever despondent, only sad or depressed? They’re only despondent after they clock themselves.” He shook his head. “He was too preoccupied to judge. He was working up his nerve to fire her. She was rude to patients and he suspected her of dipping into petty cash.”

  “Her neighbor said she was rude too. It’d be a nicer world if people hanged themselves because they were rotten human beings. If she was a thief, she might have a criminal record in another state.”

  “We’re doing a search, that’s routine. It won’t matter to the investigation. We know who she is without having to check any prints she might have on file, and the techs says all the evidence is consistent with suicide.”

  “Toxicity report?”

  “You’ll have it when we get it.”

  Henry looked at the safety poster. “Don’t we usually compare DNA with samples from blood relatives, just to plug all the holes in ID?”

  “No relatives yet. Prescription medicines in her cabinet gave us her doctor. Family history in her records lists a mother, deceased. Nothing on her father. She wrote down Düsseldorf, Germany, under place of birth.”

  “No one said anything about a German accent.”

  “We’re doing a computer search on the mother. That ought to clear up plenty.”

  “Computers and test tubes,” Henry said. “Maybe this time next year we’ll all be fishing.”

  “And the techno-poops shall inherit the earth.”

  “Now I’m despondent.”

  The morgue was all stainless steel and Coopersmith, the medical examiner, all starched white cotton. He got out his cell phone to check the time; Henry seemed to be taking too much of it from the first minute. The young man drew the sheet down from the victim’s naked corpse so the sergeant could examine her left wrist.

  “Doesn’t look like she ever wore a watch there,” Henry said.

  “She didn’t. There are old pressure marks and a tan line on the right, where she wore it all the time.”

  “I’m working on the theory she was left-handed.”

  Coopersmith lifted a sheet on a metal clipboard. “Greater muscle and bone density in the left biceps, humerus, radius, and ulna, indicating more frequent use. Theory checks.” He sounded reluctant to surrender the point.

  “Her boss said she was a rightie.”

  “Witnesses are human. Trust science.”

  Henry straightened. “This isn’t Angela Kaybee.”

  “Based on what, some kind of hunch? Those went out when DNA came in. It’s her. No two people have the same.”

  “That’s what they said about fingerprints.”

  “They said that because it’s true. It’s like snowflakes.”

  “I saw a snowflake last winter that looked just like one I saw in 1963. Nobody’s taken a close look at all of them. If you printed everyone who ever lived and everyone who ever will, the law of averages says there has to be a duplicate set somewhere, sometime.”

  “But not in the same place or time. Odds against it are ridiculous. This is Angela Kaybee.” The M.E. slid the sheet back up over her head as if to seal off any more discussion.

  The mother’s name was Kaybee as well. The computer search established her as a natural-born U.S. citizen who had married a German national named Oskar Bern and accompanied him when he returned to Düsseldorf. Hospitals in that area found no birth records connected with either name.

  “Home delivery,” Henry told Davidoff. “Spread the search to include individual doctors and midwives.”

  “New faith in technology?”

  “It has its advantages when you know where to look. What about that toxicity report?”

  “Next item on the list.” Davidoff turned a page in the folder he’d carried to Henry’s desk. “Barbiturates in her system. Checks with the prescription bottle in the bathroom. Her doctor was treating her for insomnia. That can lead to depression, you know.”

  “Did she take enough to kill her?”

  “No.”

  “Why use a rope when sleeping pills are so much easier?”

  “Let’s ask her. Oh, wait, we can’t. She killed herself!”

  “What effect would the amount she took have on her?”

  “I asked. I’m a detective too, don’t forget. Depends on level of resistance. She’d been taking the pills for a year. Trace amount could put a beginner out for the count or just make a chronic user pleasantly drowsy.”

  “What I hate about science,” Henry said. “It isn’t an exact science. Somebody slipped her a mickey, then strung her up.”

  “I gotta say she was a possible candidate for murder. So far everyone we’ve talked to—coworkers, neighbors, her boss, even her doctor—wouldn’t nominate her for Miss Congeniality. Money seemed to come up missing from purses when she was around. That doesn’t mean they hated her enough to go to any more trouble than just bonk her with a rock.”

  “You’re forgetting it isn’t her in the morgue.”

  Worry lines accordioned his partner’s forehead. “Aleck, you’re running full-tilt into a brick wall of evidence, all because a couple of people who knew her said she was right-handed.”

  “Three so far. It isn’t her. What’s holding up that out-of-state record?”

  “You’ll have to look into it yourself.” His partner spoke coldly. “The brass want this one closed so we can get through the rest of the pile sometime this year. You can afford to be a dinosaur. I’ve got three years till retirement.”

  “Okay, Mac.”

  Davidoff snapped shut the folder. “Oh, hell, I’ll get you what I can. You realize if it turns out she’s wanted for something it’s just another motive for suicide.”

  “I’m okay with suicide, if that’s what it is. I just can’t go fishing until I find out who it was who committed it.”

  It came to him next morning when he was brushing his teeth.

  The evidence clerk didn’t recognize Sergeant Henry at first. A careful dresser, he had his coat buttoned wrong today and the skinny part of his necktie hung down longer than the wide part in front. It was plain he’d thrown everything on at a run.

  “Kaybee case,” Henry said. “I need her driver’s license.”

  He drove with it to the airport, where he showed the clerks at the airline counters Angela Kaybee’s picture on her license with his thumb covering her name. Northwest and American were no help, but as he was turning away from Delta a baggage handler spotted the photo and remembered her as the woman who’d tipped him a quarter to push a half-dozen bags up to the counter. The clerk who’d checked her through was drinking coffee in the break room. She nodded when Henry showed her the picture, shook her head when he moved his thumb away from the name.

  The police in Düsseldorf arrested Angela Kaybee when she stepped off the plane. She was traveling on a passport in the name of Andrea Bern.