Free Scent of Evil by Archer Mayor

rugs, a Jacuzzi, and a separate glass-walled shower stall so big it had several nozzles and a redwood bench inside. Again, mirrors predominated throughout.
    “Jesus Christ,” I muttered at last. “Looks like a whorehouse.”
    “Does seem he had a one-track mind. There’s a ton of massage oils and weird creams in there, plus a couple of vibrators.” He gestured to a cabinet over one of the two sinks.
    “What else did you find?” I could tell from his expression that Klesczewski was feeling terribly proud of himself, especially knowing of my own slim pickings downstairs.
    He smiled and led me back into the bedroom. Along another wall, next to the closet door, was a long, low set of drawers. Klesczewski pulled one all the way out and laid it on the floor. “Look at the back.”
    I did and found taped there a Ziploc freezer bag filled with white powder.
    “I didn’t touch it, but I don’t guess it’s sugar.” He paused and frowned. “I always thought coke was supposed to kill your sex drive.”
    “Maybe he wasn’t the one using it.”
    Klesczewski looked slightly abashed. “Oh—right.”
    “Holy fuck.”
    We both turned to see Al Santos standing at the top of the stairs, looking around as if he’d just been exposed to the Sistine Chapel.
    Ron laughed. “Yeah. Literally.”
    I placed a call to J.P. Tyler to let him know what we’d found, and asked him to come over and collect the cocaine. He could check the house more carefully tomorrow, but for now I wanted at least that one piece of evidence under lock and key in the Municipal Building.
    Santos and Mayhew took us on a tour of other parts of the house.
    It became apparent that a good deal of what I’d been missing in my search had merely been relegated to less traveled areas. Both the basement and the garage appeared more normal than the first floor. They were cluttered with skis and winter clothing and empty suitcases and automobile parts and boxes of conventional books. Somehow, that discovery set my mind at ease. I was no closer to finding out why or by whom Charlie Jardine had been killed, but at least now I felt he’d been a real—if slightly exotic—human being.
    I had Mayhew relieve Santos in babysitting the house. The graveyard shift would take over in a quarter hour in any case, since it was now almost midnight. The dread of the publicity and the bureaucratic hassles that had crept into me when we’d uncovered Jardine’s body had by now been replaced by the familiar adrenaline of the hunt. Driving back to the police department with a boxful of evidence in my car trunk made me regret that in order to be halfway functional tomorrow, I would have to call it quits soon and go home to bed.
    I parked near the department’s private outside door, right beside where John Woll, now in uniform, was getting out of the passenger seat of his own car. His wife, Rose, leaned out the window as he circled around and kissed him good-night.
    I’d seen her before at department get-togethers, a pretty, slightly plump, dark-haired woman with an overly and permanently anxious face. I waved to her before I opened my trunk to retrieve the box.
    She waved back and then called out to Woll, who was halfway up the steps to the entrance. “John, you forgot your lunch box.”
    He returned and took it from her, muttering a greeting to me. I stood at the back of my car, watching her drive away and hearing the door slam shut behind him, my heart hammering and my previous good mood destroyed.
    The sense of dread I’d experienced earlier, of being in the way of some threat as implacable as fate, caught hold of me again. Only this time, recognition had made it abruptly more pressing; the urgency I felt now had less to do with solving a complex crime quickly, and more to do with the department’s self-preservation.
    The voice I had heard on Charlie Jardine’s answering machine, the hesitant one who’d left no clear message, had belonged to Rose Woll.

6
    I DIDN’T GET TO