Free A Ticket to the Boneyard by Lawrence Block Page A

next. The same kitchen knife had been used on all three children and their mother, and it had been found in the bathroom off the master bedroom. In the bedroom itself they’d found the corpse of Connie Sturdevant. Bloody bedclothing indicated she’d been killed in bed, but the chalk outline was on the floor at the foot of the bed.
    “We figure he killed her on the bed,” Havlicek said, “and then threw her down on the floor. She was wearing a nightgown, so she’d evidently gone to sleep, or at least to bed.”
    “How was Sturdevant dressed?”
    “Pajamas.”
    “Slippers on his feet?”
    “Barefoot, I think. We can look at the photos. Why?”
    “Just trying to get the picture. What phone did he use to call you people?”
    “I don’t know. There’s extensions all over the house, and whatever one he used he hung it up afterward.”
    “Did you find bloody fingerprints on any of the phones?”
    “No.”
    “He have blood on his hands?”
    “Sturdevant? He had blood all over him, for God’s sake. He blew the better part of his head all over his living room. You tend to lose a fair amount of blood that way.”
    “I know. Was all of it his?”
    “What are you getting at? Oh, wait a minute, I can see where you’re heading. You’re saying he’d have had their blood on him.”
    “They seem to have done a lot of bleeding. You’d think he’d have got some of it on him.”
    “There was blood in the bathroom sink, where he must have washed his hands. As to whether he got blood on himself that he couldn’t wash off, on his pajamas, say, well, I don’t know. I don’t even know if you could tell their blood apart. They could all have the same type, for all I know.”
    “There are other tests these days.”
    He nodded. “DNA matchups and that sort of thing. I know about that, of course, but an all-out forensic workup didn’t appear indicated. I guess I see your point. If the only blood on him was his own, how did he manage to kill them without getting his hands dirty? Except he did get ’em dirty, we found where he tried washing up.”
    “Then there would have to be foreign bloodstains on his person.”
    “Foreign meaning not his. Why? Oh, because we know he had blood on him to wash off, and you never get all of it. So if there’s none of their blood on his hands or his clothing, and if we do find traces of their blood in the bathroom sink, then somebody else killed them.” He frowned and thought about it. “If there had been a single false note at the crime scene,” he said. “If we had had the slightest reason to suspect this was anything other than what it looked to be, why, we might have taken a longer look at the physical evidence. But for God’s sake, man, he called us up and told us what he’d done. We sent a car out and found him dead. When you’ve got a confession and the killer dead by his own hand, it tends to put a damper on further inquiry.”
    “I understand that,” I said.
    “And I haven’t seen anything here today to change my mind. You saw the padlock on the front door. We put that on after, on account of we had to force the door when we got here. He had it locked with the chain on, the way you’ll do when you’re settled in for the night.”
    “The killer could have gone out another door.”
    “The back door was locked the same way, bolted from inside.”
    “He could have used a window and closed it after him. It wouldn’t have been that hard to do. Sturdevant would already have been dead when the killer made the phone call. Do you automatically record calls to headquarters?”
    “No. We log ’em, but we don’t tape ’em. Is that how they do it in New York?”
    “There’s a tape made of calls to 911.”
    “Then it’s a shame he didn’t do this in New York,” he said, “so there’d be a record, same as your medical examiner could tell us what everybody had for breakfast. But I’m afraid we’re a little backward here.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    He thought a