In Self Defense Susan Sloan (summer reads .txt) 📖

didn’t know, who stood on the other side of her front door at just past four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon.

“I don’t understand,” she said with a puzzled frown.  “What does this mean?”

“It means we need to come back into the house,” Erin told her.  “We need to take another look at the scene of the shooting.  We’ll be looking around outside again as well.”

“Why?”

“Because we have some new concerns.”

“Does this mean the case isn’t closed anymore?”

“I’m afraid not,” Erin confirmed.  “It’s been reopened.”

“My children are at home,” Clare told them.  “I don’t want them to be upset.”

“We’ll be as quick and as unobtrusive as possible.”

***

They began outside, Erin, Dusty, and Eddie Ridenour, the crime scene investigator, with his black bag in hand, walking around the Tudor mansion, looking at it from all angles.

“Let’s go back over everything we didn’t see any reason to follow up on the first time around,” Dusty suggested.  “What’s the first thing you remember?”

“We didn’t see a vehicle,” Erin said, replaying that night in her mind’s eye.  “The car drove in and didn’t drive back out, but it wasn’t visible when we got up here.”

“Which we now know was because Richard Durant put it in the garage.”

“All right, let’s take a look.”

They walked around to the side of the house.  The garage door was closed, but there was a side entrance that was unlocked, and they let themselves in.  Richard’s Mercedes sat in one of the three bays, the Plymouth Voyager in another.  In the third space, where Clare’s bright red BMW had once sat, was a new dark green Toyota Camry.

“So he drives in -- and what?” Erin mused.

“He gets out of his car and goes into the house, just like he always did, I assume,” Dusty said.

“But the alarm was on.  He would have had to disarm it.  Which means he had to have been able to do that from out here.”

The two detectives and the investigator made their way to the door that opened into the house.  Sure enough, a small keypad, a duplicate of the one at the front door, was installed beside it.  The little red light was off.  Eddie opened his bag, snapped on a pair of latex gloves, and began processing the keypad for fingerprints.

“So he sees the red light, he turns off the alarm, and then he goes into the house, just like he’s done thousands of times before,” Dusty said.  “What does that tell us?”

“It tells us that whoever it was who walked into Clare Durant’s bedroom knew what the code to turn off the alarm was before he came into the house,” Erin replied.

Her partner nodded.  “It also tells us that, not only didn’t we hear the alarm go off, Clare Durant didn’t hear it, either.”

“Could she have taken the chance, though?” Erin wondered.  “Just because she didn’t hear the alarm doesn’t mean the stalker couldn’t have found a way to get in.  We’d told her, on any number of occasions, how clever he was.  She had no way of knowing whether he could have disabled the system somehow.”

“True enough,” Dusty agreed.

“Still,” Erin said, switching sides, as she frequently did when working on cases, “shouldn’t it have given her pause, if just for a second or two?  What if it had been her friend Nina coming into her room?  Or what if the housekeeper had come back early from her day off, and just wanted to check on her?  Doreen is devoted to the family, and under the circumstances, that wouldn’t have been unreasonable.  Clare had the gun.  She had the element of surprise.  Why not determine who it was -- or who it wasn’t -- before pulling the trigger?”

“Fear does things to people, sometimes, distorts perceptions,” Dusty suggested.

“Agreed,” Erin murmured.  But she was already walking away from the door and back toward the Mercedes.  The windows were tinted.  She couldn’t see anything of the interior.  “Eddie,” she called.  “Would you come do your thing here, too?”

The CSU investigator obliged, ever so carefully picking the prints off every door before finally opening one of the rear ones, and letting her look inside.  “Don’t touch,” he cautioned.  “Just look.”

Erin smiled at the admonition, but, while Eddie set about dusting the inside of the car, she just looked.  The Mercedes was surprisingly clean.  No old drink cups, no used Kleenex, no cigarette butts, no newspaper or notepaper, no trash whatsoever, not even a trash receptacle, nothing that spoke of the vehicle being used for regular commuting.  Richard Durant had obviously been a fastidious man.  The only thing she found in the black leather interior was a brown leather briefcase, resting just behind the driver’s seat.

“Pop the trunk for me, please, Eddie, will you?” she requested.  He did so, and she glanced inside.  Except for a spare tire and some tools, the trunk was empty.  She stood there, looking at the car, for a long, thoughtful moment.

“Maybe that’s what’s been bothering me,” she said finally.

“What?” Dusty asked.

“If you’re going out of town for a few days,” she replied, “what do you usually take with you?”

Dusty thought for a moment.  “A suitcase,” he said.

“Exactly,” Erin said.  “So where is it?  We didn’t find it with the body.  It isn’t in the car.  What happened to it?”

“I don’t know,” Dusty conceded, “but why don’t we go find out?”

The master bedroom was pristine.  No trace remained of the terrible tragedy that had occurred less than three weeks earlier.  Not a drop of blood, not an errant bullet hole, nothing.  Someone had gone to considerable lengths to make it seem as though the gruesome incident of that October night had simply never happened.

“We’re interested in your husband’s suitcase,” Erin told Clare.

“His suitcase?” Clare repeated blankly.

“Yes, the one he took with him on his trip to Vermont.  We assume he brought it back.”

“Oh that,” Clare said.  “It’s in the closet.”

Dusty walked over to the closet and opened the door.  The right side of the huge walk-in was completely empty.  Not a hangar, not a