And for the next hour Sean and Michelle again went through what they’d seen and done in minute detail. For all of Sour Face’s irritating characteristics, they both had to admit the man was plenty thorough.
They ended up back in the house staring down at Pam Dutton’s corpse. One forensic photographer was snapping close-ups of the blood-spatter patterns, the death wound, and the trace under Pam Dutton’s nails. Another tech was typing into a laptop the string of alphabet letters on the dead woman’s arms.
“Anybody know what the letters mean?” Michelle asked, pointing to them. “Is it a foreign language?”
One of the techs shook his head. “It’s not any language I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s more like random letters,” suggested Sean.
“There’s good defensive trace under her nails,” Michelle pointed out. “Looks like she was able to scratch the perp up.”
“Nothing we don’t know,” said Sour Face.
“How’re Tuck and the kids?” asked Sean.
“Heading to the hospital now to get some statements.”
“If they had to knock the guy out because he was fighting with them, he might have seen something,” said one of the agents.
“Yeah, but if he did see something you wonder why they didn’t give him the same treatment they gave his wife,” said Michelle. “The kids were drugged, probably saw squat. But why leave an eyewitness?”
Sour Face looked unimpressed. “If I want to talk to you two again, and I probably will, I trust I’ll be able to find you at the addresses you gave?”
“Not a problem,” said Sean.
“Right,” said Sour Face as he and his team trudged off.
Sean said, “Let’s go.”
“How? They shot up your car. Didn’t you notice?”
Sean walked outside and stared over at his ruined Lexus before whipping around to glare at her. “You know, you could’ve told me that before.”
“I’ve had so much time on my hands.”
“I’ll call Triple A, how about that?”
As they waited for the ride, she said, “So are we just going to leave it like this?”
“Like what?”
She pointed to the Duttons’ house. “Like this. One of the pricks tried to kill me. I don’t know about you, but I take that personally. And Pam wanted to hire us. I think we owe it to her to take the case and see it through.”
“Michelle, we have no idea that what she called me about has anything to do with her death.”
“If it doesn’t I’d call that the mother of all coincidences.”
“Okay, but what can we do? The police and the FBI are involved. I don’t see much room for us to operate.”
“Never stopped you before,” she said stubbornly.
“This is different.”
“Why’s that?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Sean?”