The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights Part 8

"Police?"

"Yes, ma'am. Are you Laurie Lombard?"

"Yes. What do you want with me?"

"Who said I wanted anything with you, ma'am?"

The woman went silent. Decker produced the search warrant. "This says we're allowed to come inside your house and search it. We also have separate doc.u.ments for your car and your husband's car."

"You can't come in here now. My husband's at work."

"He doesn't have to be home for us to execute the warrant. But you can call him if you want."

Laurie said, "I'm calling my lawyer, that's what I'm doing."

"It's up to you, Mrs. Lombard. But we don't have to wait around for either one of them to get here." Decker turned to his detectives. "Let's go." He gently grazed Laurie's shoulder as he sidestepped around her.

Laurie stared as a stream of official interlopers invaded her private s.p.a.ce. "I was just about to go out."

"You can't use your car, ma'am," Marge Dunn told her. "We have to search it. It may be impounded."

"But I have to pick up my children at school!"

"Not at ten-thirty in the morning."

"But what if you're not done?"

"Call a taxi."

Decker said, "Oliver, go over her car first. First of all, the body had to get from the apartment to the house-"

"Body?" Laurie interrupted. There was panic in her eyes. They darted from person to person. "What body are you talking about?"

Decker didn't answer her and went on with his instructions. "If her car interior is clean, you might as well let her have access to it. I'll do the bedrooms, Lee and Wanda can do the rest of the house."

He marched down a small foyer that led to a series of bedrooms. The first belonged to her sons, two beds separated by a nightstand. The bookshelves were repositories of trophies from Little League, toys, CDs, DVDs, and an iPod.

The next room was Matt's office. His bookshelves actually held books. It was neat, clean, and dusty, as if it hadn't been used in many months. Decker suspected that Matt had been doing some of his take-home work at Solana's apartment.

The master bedroom was in the back and was about twice as large as the other two. It had an enormous walk-in closet. Laurie's clothing took up three-fourths of the s.p.a.ce, relegating Matthew's portion to one shoe rack and a couple of poles for suits. It would have been easiest to start on Lombard's side, but that wasn't the focus of Decker's attention. Instead, he began by looking at Laurie's sneakers. Solana had been strangled, meaning there probably wouldn't be big puddles of blood to step in. But Solana did have a big sc.r.a.pe on her head that had bled, and Decker remembered the rusty blob in the corner of the room. The murderer might have stepped in something.

Laurie had decided that Decker was in charge, so she addressed her pleas to him. "Please, Detective, I've got a house to run. I have to get groceries for dinner."

"You might think about doing takeout tonight . . . with delivery." There was a pair of athletic shoes hidden in the back recesses of the closet. Hands encased in latex gloves, Decker pulled out the shoes and studied them. Suede and leather top, with dirty gray laces that had once been white. He sniffed the tops: They smelled of dishwas.h.i.+ng soap. The bottoms gave off a slight foul odor. Lucky for him that today's athletic shoes were made with a topographical map's worth of grooves and ruts. Decker could see specks of brown crud lodged inside one of the furrows. It could have been dirt, it could have been dog t.u.r.d, or it could have been human waste. He turned to Laurie.

"The police have chemicals that can pick up tiny, tiny droplets of human matter-blood, waste, urine, skin. And there are scientists who can get an entire DNA profile from these tiny droplets. What do you think about that?"

Laurie opened her mouth, then closed it.

"Would you mind taking off your scarf for me, please, Mrs. Lombard?"

Her hands flew to her neck. Then her mouth tightened and her chin jutted out in an expression of defiance. "I don't have to do anything for you."

"I'm afraid you're going to have to come to the station house with us."

"I'm not going to talk to you."

"That's your choice. But before I do the tests on this material that's stuck inside the treads of your shoes, you might want to tell me your side of the story. You see, we're already doing tests on the human skin that was found under Solana's fingernails. And I suspect that you have scratches underneath your scarf. You might think about cooperating now, while there's still a question mark. Because once this shoe is tied to Solana's DNA, and the human material under Solana's nails is tied to you, there won't be room for negotiating anything."

Laurie's bottom lip began to quiver.

"But sure, call up your lawyer, if you want." Decker shrugged. "Did you call your lawyer?"

Slowly, Laurie shook her head.

"Well, if you want your lawyer, now's the time to call him or her."

"Him," she whispered.

"You can't tell me anything, if you want your lawyer. You know that. So I guess the powers that be won't hear your side until your lawyer wants us to hear it."

"And if I don't want a lawyer?"

"Well, you've watched enough TV to know the drill, Laurie. You've got to sign a card saying that you were offered a lawyer and you didn't want one. Then you can talk to me."

There was no reaction from the woman. For a brief moment, Decker thought that she might lunge at him and try to wrest the shoes from his grip. Then her mood turned as gray as her skin tone.

"b.i.t.c.h!"

"I'm sure she was . . . carrying on with a married man with two children."

"You don't know the half of it!"

Her nostrils flared with anger. It was easy to see how this big-boned woman could choke the life out of Solana, drag her into a car, and stuff her into a closet.

"I'd like to hear it all, Laurie. So let's go down to the station house. We'll sit and have a cup of coffee together, and you can tell me all about it."

"Do you have French-press coffee?"

"Uh, no, but I'll see what I can do."

"How'd you know it was she and not he who did the choking?" Oliver asked Decker. "Matt was acting pretty guilty, if you ask me."

"Guilty because of what had happened, not because of what he'd done. Initially, it was nothing more than a gut feeling. When the preliminary DNA of Solana's nail sc.r.a.pings came up female, I had no doubt in my mind what had happened." Decker took a sip of his coffee. "She killed his mistress, then set him up to take the blame."

"How did she get inside the open house unless he left a door open for her?" Marge said.

"They originally had gone to the open house together, just as it was closing, and they had a long list of questions to ask the agent. Then Laurie suddenly claimed that she had a headache and had her husband handle it. But not before she'd unlocked a window so she could come back in. In the meantime, Matt had bombarded the agent with enough questions that Adele would be sure to remember him."

"And Laurie knew that her husband's fingerprints would be all over Solana's apartment," Oliver said.

"Right."

"Do you think Matt knew that his wife had done it before she confessed?" Marge asked.

"Definitely," Decker said. "All his talk about taking the Fifth-not to protect himself but to protect his wife."

"She kills his girlfriend and tries to set up her husband. But he still takes the Fifth," Oliver said. "What an idiot."

"He felt guilty, Scott," Marge said.

"I repeat: What an idiot."

"Solana's parents are coming in tomorrow from Texas by bus," Decker said. "They want to take their daughter back to Mexico and bury her there, but they don't have a lot of money."

"We're taking up a collection," Marge said.

Oliver grimaced, then took out his wallet and opened it. "I've got a five."

"You've also got a twenty." Marge plucked it out of his wallet. "We're trying to raise two hundred to give her a good church burial in a decent coffin. Pete and I offered to drive them to their town in Mexico."

Decker said, "I figured I could use a little practice with my Spanish."

"That's how you two want to spend your days off?" Oliver was incredulous.

Marge said, "We've been thinking that maybe afterward we'd go to Acapulco."

Oliver's ears perked up. "Now you're talking my language. Do you know Spanish, Margie?"

"Not really. What about you?"

"Si, no, and Usted cuesta mucho dinero."

Decker smiled. "Coming with us, Scottie?"

"Us?" Again Oliver was surprised. "You're going to Acapulco with us and without your wife?"

"Rina's going to meet me there. We've decided to turn it into a mini-vacation. You two will be on your own."

Marge winked at Oliver. "You come and help split the driving, I'll be your wingman when we hit the bars."

"You've got a deal."

"But don't go too far, Pete," Marge said. "We'll need someone Spanish-speaking to plead his case after he's been arrested for a drunk-and-disorderly."

"You wound me," Oliver said.

"Not as much as you wound yourself," Marge said.

"And not as much as Solana Perez was wounded." Decker shook his head in disgust. "The capacity of human beings to inflict pain on one another is just astonis.h.i.+ng."

"At least we got her a modic.u.m of justice," Marge said. "Until the next one." She gave her words some thought. "And there always is a next one."

"Speaking of which . . ." Decker handed them a detail sheet. "Lee and Bontemps just caught this case. They could use some help."

Marge and Oliver let out a collective moan.

"Aw, quit your b.i.t.c.hin'," Decker said. "Crime may make us cynical and ugly, but it's how we earn our paychecks. It's a nasty job, but someone has to do it."

BULL'S-EYE.

"Bull's-eye" features Peter Decker and.

his daughter Cindy dissecting a

perplexing shooting of an unpopular drill instructor at the Los Angeles

Police Academy. It required a visit to

the academy, a fascinating place within

spitting distance of Dodger Stadium. I