Takeover - By Lisa Black

CHAPTER 1

THURSDAY, JUNE 25

6:42 A.M.

The sun had barely come up, and already it was too hot. Theresa MacLean felt the first prickles of sweat on the back of her neck as she stared down at the dead man, and wished she had left her lab coat in the car. Humidity kept both the dew and the man’s blood from drying, and scattered red spots gleamed against the spring grass. “He hasn’t been here long,” she told the detective.

The dead man’s tie flopped across his chest as he gazed up with sightless eyes, past her to the azure sky. The tiny sidewalk framed his shoulders, and his head rested in the mulch and grass below lush juniper bushes. Two or three heavy blows had caved in his skull; he had tried to defend himself with his bare hands and damaged his fingers in the process. The killer had swung the weapon used with enough force to cut knuckles and dent the man’s wedding ring.

“A lady walking to the bus stop saw the shoes sticking out past the bushes.” Homicide detective Paul Cleary sketched the scene as he spoke, frowning in concentration over his pad and pencil. The damp morning made his blond hair especially unruly. “He could have been here all night before that. The porch light isn’t on, so anyone driving by wouldn’t have seen him from the street. It’s a quiet neighborhood anyway.”

Despite the setting she took a moment just to look at Paul. They would be married in two months and thirteen days. Even her teenage daughter had overcome the instinctive reticence to a stepparent. But Theresa had something to tell him first, and she hadn’t yet figured out how.

“You’d think he’d be damper if he’d been out here all night,” Paul’s partner, veteran detective Frank Patrick, chimed in. He had been in the city all his years and with the police department for the past twenty, but he never tired of complaining about Ohio weather. “This friggin’ humidity soaks everything.”

Theresa prodded the man’s chin with a latex-clad hand; only tiny spatters along one cheek bespoke the damage to the back of his head. A tailored dress shirt held in his expanding girth. A few smears of blood crossed his stomach, probably swiped there by the cut fingers. “He’s cold, and his jaw and arms are pretty stiff. His stomach is still soft, though, so I’d guess between four and eight hours.” As a forensic scientist with the medical examiner’s office, she had learned a lot about rigor mortis, though one of the doctors on the staff would have to give them the official time-of-death frame. She looked up at the two-story Westlake Colonial. “He lives here?”

“Don’t know,” Frank said. “Whoever bashed his head in also took his wallet. The house is locked up, with no signs of forced entry, and no one answers. We don’t know if he belongs here or not.”

She frowned. “We’ve got significant damage to the skull but not a lot of blood spatter, not even a lot of blood soaked into the mulch. It could be lost in the grass or the bushes, washed off by dew, but I would expect to see at least some on this porch railing or the sidewalk.”

“You think he was killed inside and dragged out here?”

“Or dumped out of a passing car. He’s got some dirt on his shoulder, where the jacket is rumpled.” She scraped some particles onto a piece of glassine paper, folding it as a druggist would so none would be lost. “As if someone with dirty hands pulled him from the shoulders.”

Paul bent at the waist to examine the porch outside the front door. “I don’t see any drag marks, either in blood or in dirt.”

“Me neither. But I hate to think the rest of his family is inside, bludgeoned to death. Can’t we go in?”

“The search warrant is on its way to the judge right now.”

She stood up, stretched a crick out of her back. She loathed having to wait on search warrants. Finding a dead body in front of the place should be sufficient probable cause so far as she was concerned, but in these litigious times…“Who does the house belong to? Do we at least know that?”

Frank poked at the dead man’s pockets, producing a slight jingle, which proved to be a set of keys. “Mark Ludlow, white male, fifty-four. It could be him. So he pops out of the house on his way to work this morning and someone cracks