Suspects Read Online Free PDF Page A

rigid, and her soft face had become hard. “And you’ll hear it a lot more if you come here! Don’t use that tone with me!”
    â€œAll right,” he said, pushing back his chair and rising in one stark movement. She was not the only one who could be hurt. “You don’t have to listen to it any more.” He wanted to get away from her as soon as he could and therefore headed for the back door. Even so, he thought she might call him back before he took the four steps to get there, but she did not. She had coldly left the kitchen by the time he turned, before stepping onto the back porch, to thank her at least for the coffee and pie. His resentment was not so great as to eradicate his manners. But she was not there to hear him. He left town without attending the funeral.

3
    Detective LeBeau was trying to locate Lawrence Howland, husband of the deceased female, father of the murdered child, but as of six hours after the homicides had been reported, he had had no success. The Jones woman had stated that Howland was out of town on some business matter, but she could not name the firm for which he worked, nor had such information yet been discovered in the search of the house. She did, however, say he had “something to do with air conditioners,” and one of the neighbors across the street, an accountant named Lundquist, confirmed this, but in the same general way without a brand name.
    While Moody was phoning the local airline offices, LeBeau went to the yellow pages and began to call firms listed there under “Air Conditioning.” By the time he was able to get started on the quest it was well into evening. He received no answers at any of the local offices. He then tried the 800 number of the best-known maker of window units and got a woman who worked for the national twenty-four-hour service that provided suggestions for self-help in the case of emergency breakdowns at night or on holidays. She was not equipped to find every employee of the firm, and anyway there was no reason to suppose that Howland worked for that particular company, but like many civilians nowadays, the woman was eager to help the police even when, as in this case, they were halfway across the country from where she said she lived. She gave LeBeau a phone at which the chief engineer could be reached, and this man was able to supply a number for the central personnel office, which, conveniently for LeBeau’s purposes, was on the West Coast, where the time was only four forty-five.
    The result of all this effort was only that he finally learned Howland was not employed by the firm in question—at least not under the name given: you had to allow for all possibilities, though most crimes, murders especially, had no mystery about them. They were almost always committed by the most obvious suspect. Both LeBeau and Moody assumed, routinely, that Donna Howland had been murdered by her husband. True, the killing of the little girl was a complication, but not to have suspected Howland would at this point have been unprofessional. And that the man could not promptly be found was hardly at odds with the routine assumption.
    â€œIsn’t it funny,” LeBeau asked Moody across their facing desks, “nobody knows the name of his company? The neighbors usually do on a street like that.”
    Moody was about to respond when his phone rang. He hardly spoke again after identifying himself, but he took some quick notes on a pad of yellow paper. “Thanks, Doc,” he said finally. “Sure. Okay.” He hung up and spoke across to LeBeau. “Pollack’s going to do the autopsy tomorrow morning. I guess it’s my turn to observe?” Neither enjoyed watching a postmortem, but someone had to, to protect the chain of evidence for legal purposes. Else a defense lawyer was not above suggesting that the medical examiner opened up the wrong body, thus discrediting the whole case against his client.