Flashback (Kendra Michaels #11)

“I doubt it.” Kendra scanned the scene, trying to get some sense of what the intruder might have been looking for. She’d seen several murder scenes where the killer ransacked the place to give the appearance of an interrupted burglary, but this wasn’t one of those. It was clear the searcher had been on a mission, and didn’t leave until every nook and cranny had been explored.

A photographer and four forensics techs were working the scene, and a red-haired detective with a wrinkled shirt and blue sport coat emerged from a back doorway. Kendra had seen Detective Ronald Breen a few times before, and he still wore a short strip of facial hair above his upper lip that creepily resembled a Hitler mustache.

Breen reacted in surprise at seeing them. “Huh. No one told me the FBI was taking over the case. Fine. Give me a sec to pull my guys out.”

“Just the guys?” Kendra said. “Two of the techs and the photographer are women.”

Breen pulled a thin-lipped smile. “No sexism implied, Dr. Michaels. So nice to see you again.”

His voice was dripping with sarcasm. Although several cops had resented her involvement over the years, Breen was often one of the most hostile.

“The Bureau isn’t taking over anything,” Metcalf said. “This is San Diego PD’s show all the way.”

“So you’re just here for an evening’s entertainment?”

“Trust me, I’d rather be in my nice warm bed. Paula Chase was in our offices in the past few days about a missing persons investigation and how it might relate to an old cold case.”

“She’s been beating down our door, too. As a matter of fact, my partner and I may have been among the last people to see her alive.”

“Where?” Kendra asked.

“Downtown, at police HQ. She didn’t think we were doing enough to search for the Morgan sisters.” Breen rolled his eyes in a way that Kendra knew must have infuriated Paula. “That lady thought the girls might have actually cracked a case the police and the FBI couldn’t make a dent in.”

“Those women never gave up,” Kendra said. “They were still at it years after everyone else threw in the towel. You know how details can shake loose after a few years. Maybe they found something no one else did.”

Breen nodded. “Well, that’s what the deceased kept trying to tell us.”

Kendra winced. The deceased. Less than eighteen hours before, Paula Chase had been a vibrant older woman, passionately fighting to help those missing sisters. Now she was the deceased.

“Did you know her from before?” Metcalf asked.

“Nah, Detective Chase was a bit before my time,” Breen said. “Some of the old guard have nice things to say about her, but I really wasn’t fond of the way she implied I wasn’t doing my job, you know?”

Maybe because you weren’t, Kendra wanted to say. Instead she held her tongue for a change and just nodded. There was a reason why she was not popular with a number of officers, but she was working on it… sometimes.

“Are you working her murder?” Metcalf said.

“Nope, I’m not in homicide. Perry and Ellenshaw are on it. They’re around here someplace. I got sent over because I’ve been working the Morgan sisters’ disappearance, and there’s now some thought this might be related, since the deceased had been squawking so much about it.”

Squawking. Kendra shook her head, positive that there was no way she could continue to hide her dislike of the man standing in front of her.

Metcalf obviously saw she was about to lose it. He quickly gestured toward the back doorway. “Murder scene is in here?”

“Yeah. Knock yourselves out.”

Kendra and Metcalf moved through the doorway, where Paula Chase’s bloody body was sprawled on the floor beside her torn-up bed.

As difficult as it was to see, Kendra forced herself to keep looking. She’d never get used to the grisly and depressing sight of someone murdered in cold blood. The two latex-gloved forensics techs leaning over her obviously had no such issues, as they worked with clinical detachment.

Paula Chase wore the same cream-colored suit she’d been sporting at her and Kendra’s one and only meeting at the Pacific Villas retirement community the day before. Her hands were bagged to preserve later evidence collection efforts at the morgue, and there were at least three puncture wounds on her torso. Her face was frozen in a horrible grimace, showing how excruciating her last minutes were for her.

“She definitely walked in on her intruder,” Kendra said, trying to adopt the same steely discipline as the techs. “He continued tearing the place apart after he killed her.”

“How do you figure that?” Metcalf asked.

Kendra pointed toward the mattress stuffing around the corpse. “Most of the stuffing and other debris is beneath her body, but some is on top. He killed her after most of the place had been ransacked, but finished the job after her murder.”

“You’re saying ‘he.’ Is there a reason for that?”