covered and exposed to the elements? Unlikely. I’ll swab for contact DNA, but if he wore gloves—”
“And he’s an idiot if he didn’t. So he doesn’t set up a slam dunk but then he doesn’t leave us any clues, either. Unless our dead lady has surveillance cameras set up, and I don’t see any. Or if the neighbors saw someone dipping into this yard, and they haven’t even poked their heads out to see what all the cop cars are for, so I’m not too optimistic.”
“The perfect murder?” Maggie wondered.
“There’s no such thing,” Jack said. And he, of course, would know.
* * *
Within a half hour both the ME investigators and the search warrant arrived. It never ceased to amaze Maggie how finding a dead body on the stoop was not considered sufficient probable cause to enter a home, but there it was, and in any case she had been too busy with the scene to be in much of a hurry.
The kegerator fridge did not yield any fingerprints, not even with superglue—only a lot of water marks and dirt. Ditto for the outlet and the decorative grill of the screen door, where the black wire had been attached. The white one had been snaked along the edge of the house in the crack between the foundation and the concrete stoop, and accumulated dirt in the crack helped hide the white rubber coating. In terms of fingerprints, the dirt scarcely mattered, since the wires were too narrow for any usable latents, but she collected the length anyway, planning to take a much closer look at it in her lab. She did the same with the metal grate. The blanket of leaves, charming in their reds and browns and golds, made her nervous. The killer could have dropped his glove or his wallet or his business card on his way out and they might miss it in all that debris. But she didn’t particularly want to rake the entire yard, either.
Meanwhile the detectives took the keys from the dead woman’s hand and confirmed that the fob did, indeed, unlock a newish sedan parked at the curb. The front seats were tidy, but the rear ones held a variety of papers, folders, and brochures, all having slid around willy-nilly until no order could be detected. Three empty paper coffee cups, each rimmed with the same dark red lipstick as on the face of the victim, sat on the floorboard in front of the passenger’s seat. The trunk held only a spare tire and an unopened set of jumper cables. Maggie photographed all of this but left it in place until they could decide what might be of significance.
In the grass behind the large oak, she found a black rubber mat with an open weave design—obviously what had been the victim’s welcome mat. The mat was larger and thicker than the metal grate, but what with the leaves, the dark, perhaps hurrying through the rain, the victim did not notice the difference. She would have felt it with that last step, but in that instance it became too late, her hand already on the electrified door handle.
On a whim Maggie looked inside the small refrigerator, but it didn’t seem to be missing a black wire shelf. It held a pony keg, shiny and secure and—she shook the entire unit—apparently empty. The fridge had probably been unplugged now that the season for outdoor parties had faded, but Maggie wondered why the owner would leave it outside. But then she didn’t have a garage and would have needed help to lug the thing inside or down to a basement, or maybe Diane Cragin simply hadn’t gotten around to it. Diane Cragin had been very busy and spent a great deal of time out of town, because Diane Cragin was a sitting U.S. senator, R–Ohio.
And that meant, Riley informed her as if Maggie hadn’t already figured that out for herself, that this case was going to be a snafu of epic proportions.
“She had enemies?” Maggie asked.
“She’s a politician. Would you like enemies listed alphabetically or in order of importance?”
He seemed to have paid more attention to politics than either Jack or Maggie, so he filled them in on what he could as the ME investigator, and Maggie examined the body. Diane Cragin had been the duly elected senator from Ohio for twelve years.
Diane Cragin had been campaigning on the usual issues of bringing jobs back to the rust belt and cleaning up food stamp requirements, didn’t hire any tax-free domestic help, didn’t sleep with her interns, and hadn’t created any major scandals that Riley could remember, but . . .
Maggie looked up as the ME investigator removed the senator’s shoes. “But?”
“A Cleveland guy has been running for her seat, Green. He’s head of economic development or something like that. It’s been a pretty nasty campaign—par for the course these days—and he’s accused her of taking kickbacks, promising Ohio one thing and then flying to DC to agitate for the complete opposite, being paid under the table to lobby for the pharmaceuticals with the large hospitals, trading jobs for votes, basically all the same things she accuses him of doing. Politics as usual, in other words.”
“You’re a cynic,” Maggie said.
“Impossible not to be these days.”
Riley told her the unhappy man standing outside the courtyard had been Cragin’s assigned Secret Service agent for this week. He had dropped her off still breathing the night before and had told anyone who would listen that escorting her only as far as the courtyard had been standard procedure for a senator who put a premium on her privacy and, after two terms in office, was accustomed to getting her own way. She had earned a reputation as an uncooperative client, and it got worse during stressful periods—such as these crazy days before Tuesday’s election. So he had left her alive and inside the gate the night before, then saw the body that morning and had to break the gate door to get in.
“Is that it?” Riley asked Maggie.
“That’s it.” A scorch mark along the bottom of the woman’s right foot had burned through her nylons and peeled a small amount of skin, with only a single round burn on the sole of the shoe.
The ME investigator, a young woman with dark skin and dimples, told them, “It doesn’t take much, especially with AC power. Hey, bird,” she said to the dove in the tree, which had been heaving its heavy sighs nonstop, “knock it off.”
Sudden silence, save for the rustle of leaves in the breeze.
“We’ll see if she had any medical conditions that made her more vulnerable. Do we have doctor information?”
“Not yet. We haven’t been inside or done any notifications,” Riley said.
“She’s wearing nylons,” the investigator said, as if she found this more perplexing than using a screen door as a murder weapon. Nylons and pantyhose had been out of style for years. Women now left their legs bare, cutting industry sales by more than half until nylons were rebranded as lingerie or “sheer tights.” Or worn by older women like Diane Cragin, who wished to wear skirts without exposing every age spot, scar, and mole to the public, always so harsh on women’s looks once they passed twenty-five or so.
“It’s gotten chilly,” Maggie pointed out.
The investigator, who had yet to see an age spot mar her perfect skin, shrugged and put Tyvek bags over the late senator’s hands, pulling the drawstring tight to keep them from slipping off. The manicured fingernails would be scraped for trace evidence, not that anyone expected to find it—there had clearly not been a struggle or physical confrontation. She and Maggie turned the body to one side, but nothing waited underneath it except more dead leaves.
“That’s it, then,” the investigator said, pulling off her latex gloves with a definite snap as the body snatchers moved in to load up the earthly remains of Diane Cragin. “You have
