Free Crime of Privilege: A Novel by Walter Walker

Prentice followed Rinaldo
     back to the body, apparently hobbling with considerable difficulty because of some
     knee condition that required him practically to drag one foot behind him. Once there,
     he didn’t know what to do, either. The two of them seemed to accomplish little more
     than trampling whatever evidence might have existed.
    According to the medical examiner, Dr. Rajit Pardeep, Heidi had died from intracraneal
     and intercerebral bleeding after having been struck on the back of the skull by a
     narrow, dull-bladed metal object. Given the fact that she had been found on a golf
     course, Dr. Pardeep surmised she had been struck by a golf club. He found no semen
     in her body cavities, no evidence of sexual molestation. Her stomach contentswere thirty-three percent liquid, which he attributed to alcohol, and her blood alcohol
     level was .12, enough to be intoxicated but not falling-down drunk.
    The investigation report was prepared by Detective Howard Landry. I knew him only
     by name. He worked serious crimes and I didn’t. His presence on the case meant that,
     at least initially, nobody was trying to sweep this under the rug.
    May 26, 1999, he had been called at home at 6:10 a.m. and arrived at the scene at
     6:42. Other officers as well as EMTs from the fire department were present, and Heidi
     Telford had already been pronounced dead. Barnstable police had put up yellow tape
     to seal off the area, but Landry confirmed my suspicion that irreparable damage had
     been done in terms of failing to preserve evidence of footsteps or drag paths. He
     could find no blood spatters on or around the maple tree beneath which the body was
     found.
    He made a preliminary determination that the body had been brought to its resting
     place from the scene of the killing, and so he checked the roadside for tire marks
     in the dirt. Whatever was there had been obscured by what he called “first responder”
     vehicles. Since he did not otherwise identify them, I assumed he meant police patrol
     cars responding to Mr. Prentice’s 911 call.
    In sum, neither Detective Landry nor anyone working with him found any clues on or
     near the sixteenth fairway of the Wianno Club golf course except the body itself.
    Landry’s report traced the events of Heidi’s last day. It was Memorial Day, and she
     had had her first weekend of work in her summer job as a lifeguard at Dowses Beach
     in Osterville. She had gotten off work at five, driven home to Hyannis in her Jeep
     Wrangler, and arrived in particularly good spirits. Her parents attributed that to
     her really liking her job.
    She had spent about an hour and a half doing “the usual things,” according to her
     parents: ate, showered, changed. At around 7:30 she had gone out, telling her mother
     she was going to walk down to Main Street, which was only a quarter-mile away. On
     a summer night, Main Street, Hyannis, is probably the most active stretch of road
     anyplace on Cape Cod, with the possible exception of Commercial Street in Provincetown.Stores, bars, and restaurants are open, and tourists flood them all, along with the
     sidewalks and the vehicle travel lanes. Locals tend to stay away from Main Street
     at such times, but this was the very end of the holiday weekend and most visitors
     would have gone home.
    What the Telfords thought was peculiar—disturbing, even—was that Heidi had not been
     wearing the blue dress with the red rosettes when she went out. She had been wearing
     white shorts, white sandals, and a yellow Izod shirt, which, her mother insisted,
     she never would have worn without a bra. She was a D-cup, her mother said. She wasn’t
     the kind of girl to show off.
    Her mother remembered that she was carrying a rather large purse, a rope or hemp purse
     with two brown leather handles that you could sling over your shoulder and let ride
     on your hip. She had not thought anything about it at the time. Afterward, she wondered
     if her daughter had been