Where the Bodies Are Buried

Chapter One The phone rang at one in the morning. At least that's what the faintly glowing red digits on my clock radio said. As the phone jangled, I struggled from the tangled embrace of sheets, dislodging my cat Abigail, who was curled up at the hollow of my back. As I groped for the switch on the bedside lamp, my other cat, Black Bart, jumped to the floor, as though to escape the hullabaloo. I picked up the telephone receiver, mercifully cutting the racket in midpeal. Before I had time to croak out a greeting, I heard my ex-husband's voice. "You got a client named Rob Lawter?" "And good morning to you, too." I squinted at the clock readout and said what generally comes to mind in a situation such as this. "Do you know what time it is?" "Never mind what time it is," Sid growled. "Rob Lawter, male Caucasian, twenty-nine, brown hair, brown eyes. He lived in a fifth-floor apartment in a building on Alice Street." I picked up on the past tense right away. You notice words like that, particularly when they're used by a homicide detective. "Yeah, he's a client," I said slowly. "What's going on, Sid?" "Was a client. He's dead. He took a header out his living room window a couple of hours ago. Your business card was in his wallet." Chapter Two I'd already cashed the retainer check Rob Lawter had given me. But I hadn't yet started my investigation. I hadn't started because I wasn't quite sure just what he wanted me to do. He'd asked me to hold off, during our initial meeting in my office. Wait, he'd said. I'll give you the details soon. Now I had a dead client and minimal information to go on. On my way to work that warm Friday morning the second week in September, I drove by the building where Rob had lived--and died. It was on Alice Street near Seventeenth, an older L-shaped structure, with its long end pointing toward the street. Built of rosy brown brick, it had an air of faded elegance, unlike the more modern stucco buildings that lined both sides of the street. I found a parking spot farther down Alice and walked back for a closer look at the building. As I went up the sidewalk, aware of the apartment windows and double-door entrance on my left, my attention was focused on the yellow crime scene tape still in place, directly in front of me. It stretched across the entrance to a square concrete patio, where a round table and several plastic chairs had been shoved out of the way, making it easy for me to see the irregular dark stains on the pale gray cement. I stared at the bloodstains for a moment, then raised my eyes from the patio to the building, following a vertical line of windows upward to the top floor, the fifth. The windows, tall and wide, had wooden sills and no screens. That was common in older buildings around here. The one on the fifth floor, Rob's, was still open. Did he jump? Fall? Or was he pushed? As I stood next to the crime scene tape, trying to sort it all out, one of the double doors opened. A woman in a business suit came out, wearing running shoes. She carried a briefcase in one hand and a couple of envelopes in the other. She didn't say anything, but she eyed me suspiciously, as though I were some kind of sick voyeur who got off looking at places where people died. Then she hurried toward the street, moving at quite a clip. I followed her out to the street and saw her drop the envelopes into a blue mail collection box. She set off again toward Seventeenth Street. I headed for my car. Fifteen minutes later, in my office on Franklin Street in downtown Oakland, I opened the window at the back of the long narrow room and started a pot of coffee. While the water dripped through the grounds I unlocked the filing cabinet and pulled the almost empty folder marked "Lawter, Rob" from the drawer thaDawson, Janet is the author of 'Where the Bodies Are Buried' with ISBN 9780449003220 and ISBN 0449003221.