I steeled myself and walked purposefully to Nick’s door, but just as I was about to ring the doorbell, Beatrice came out, her smile vanishing as she saw me standing on the front porch.
“Hello. Kate.” She pointedly looked at my shoes, but I was miles ahead of her; I had dressed up, casually, of course, so it didn’t appear as though I was trying, and was wearing a pair of cute walking shoes that were bright pink with white flowers that paired well with my jeans shorts and short-sleeved lavender blouse. No Crocs or sweats for me today and no sweat marks under my arms. I was looking good.
“Bea,” I responded, forcing my face into a semblance of a smile.
“Kate! Hello! Beatrice and I were just talking about you!” Nick greeted me and turned to Beatrice. “Thanks for all your help, Bea. We’ll see each other soon?”
As we watched Beatrice walk away, Nick told me, “It feels wrong discussing HOA business so soon after Angie…well, you know, but we had a bunch of bids come in for new work around the ‘hood, and I just didn’t know enough to feel good about signing them. I guess I’m the new President, what with Angie being gone and all, so I asked Beatrice to come over to help me sort through all of that.”
“Perfectly understandable. I hope this is a good time?” I held out the loaf of homemade poppyseed bread.
“Yes, we were quite done. What a kind thing for you to do! Would you like to come in?” Nick led the way into the kitchen and indicated for me to sit at the table.
“I apologize for the mess,” he said as he led the way into the kitchen. The “mess” was just a few dirty dishes in the sink and some crumbs on the counter. His house was homey, with scents of fresh wood and warm colors on the furnishings. Photos of gorgeous landscapes, most of them of lakes or streams with mountains and trees in the background, decorated the walls. He pulled out a bread knife. “Ever since Hildy moved out, I just don’t keep up with dishes the way I should. This looks delicious. Would you like a small slice as well?”
“Yes, please.” I watched as he cut into the soft bread, hoping for a bit more than a small slice. I pointed to the photos. “Did you take those?”
“I did. When I was a bit younger and my knee worked better, I took at least one fishing trip every year to a different location. Nothing is more relaxing than standing in a stream, casting a fly over and over, letting the water wash by you.” He laughed. “It was one of the many reasons Hildy left me. She couldn’t stand the fact that I’d rather spend my vacation fishing than spending time with her. Such is life, I guess.”
Nick always had a zen-like attitude about these things. Zen was a word nobody had ever accused me of being.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I had a couple of questions for you.”
“I figured,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “You don’t have to pretend, Kate. We all know you’re trying to solve Angie’s murder.” He set the two slices of the poppyseed bread on dishes and put them on the table. “And a good thing, too. I’m not sure those cops know much. I know you and the chief had a thing going on, so no offense, but it’s not like they’ve had a lot of experience. There hasn’t been a homicide in the city of Palm Hills in, what now? A year? Two years?”
I shrugged and didn’t say anything.
“Milk?’ he asked me.
“Just water, please.”
Nick poured himself some milk and handed me a glass of water and sat, his face open and earnest.
“Have the police already interviewed you about what you might know about Angie’s murder?”
“Yes, they had me down to the station. It was a bit more like an interrogation than it was an interview, if you ask me, but I think I convinced them I didn’t have anything to do with it.” He chuckled, as if the idea was preposterous.
“I can honestly say that nobody believes you murdered Angie.” I took a bite of the poppyseed bread. Man, that was good, even if I did say so myself. I wished his idea of a small slice was just a little bit bigger. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I was wondering if there’s been anything from any of the HOA board members that you might have found suspicious in recent weeks.”
“Now, Kate, I know you have your suspicions, but it’s beyond imaginable that any of our neighbors could have done this.” Nick licked his fingers. “Wow, that is some delicious poppy seed bread! I haven’t had anything this good since Hildy left!”
I looked down and realized that I had already wiped out my slice and wondered if it would be rude to ask for seconds. He did give me a very small piece, after all.
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. I wasn’t sure at all. “But please, just humor me. Did Angie mention anybody that had become difficult? What about any of the contractors?”
“Hmmm…the contractors?” Nick steepled his fingers in front of him. “Now that you mention it, Angie did say that one guy had given her a hard time about his contract renewal. She said he was downright rude, even to the point of yelling at her. She laughed about it, of course. Angie was never afraid of a little confrontation.”
“Let me guess. Max Howard, the pool contractor?”
“No, no, it wasn’t him. It was that nerdy young fellow. The exterminator. Honestly, I was shocked to hear it. He seemed like such a nice young man.”
Ahh, there we go! Brady Strong, Bug Guy. I thought his affable demeanor was a put-on. This explains why he was at Angie’s house that day. I’m guessing Angie was either firing him or giving him a warning about the kickbacks to Felyne. Or Beatrice or Cynthia. Could he have doubled back later and killed her? Possibly.
“Interesting. Can you think of anything else? How did Angie get along in general with the others on the board?”
“We all got along just fine. We weren’t allowed to meet all together unless it was a board meeting, though, so really most of our business was done over email and at the public meetings.” He laughed to himself. “I’m sure that works for really large HOA’s, but here, we all know each other, so if Cynthia and I went to get coffee together, we couldn’t even sit with Angie. That was quite weird, and, if I’m to be honest with you, it all seems quite stupid. We’re planting drought-resistant shrubs here, not planning thermonuclear war.”
“They are very onerous laws, aren’t they?”
HOA boards in California aren’t allowed to meet outside of the formal board meetings that all of the residents are invited to observe, but it wasn’t unusual for board members to meet occasionally in pairs. Angie used to bemoan the fact that it was hard to get anything done when she wasn’t allowed to talk to her board all at once except at the formal meetings.
Nick stood up again. “Would you like another slice? I’m going to indulge in another piece myself.”
“I wouldn’t want to eat too much of your bread, but if you insist, then, yes, please!” I noticed he cut a rather large slice for himself and handed me a more modest slice of poppyseed bread. “Another thing I was wondering. At the HOA meeting last fall, when Angie was elected, Beatrice was awfully angry, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, Bea took that loss very hard. She seemed quite pleased when I asked for her help today.”
I bet she did.
“Tell me about that time. How did the turnover from the old board to the new board go?”
Nick stared into his empty milk glass. “Let me think back. I recall that Bea and Felyne were in a bit of a tizzy about it. Angie asked Beatrice for the password to the community website, and Bea wouldn’t give it to her.”
I recalled Angie mentioning that, but it was months, so I hadn’t remembered.
“Aren’t websites run by the management company, though?”
“Sometimes, but Felyne’s company, SeaSide Management, upcharges for website management, so 15 years ago, we paid a neighbor who was just starting her website creation company to make a site for us for a lot less and no monthly fees. She maintained it for a while, and then when she moved, she showed several people on the board how to make changes. It was pretty easy. When Bea became President, she took it over. I don’t think anybody knew she changed the passwords. As I recall, Angie had to pull the old “I’m a lawyer” bit, since Bea was being so stubborn, and Felyne was no help even though we all knew Felyne also had access to our website.”
“I see. What about Cynthia? Did she seem particularly troubled that Angie had taken over?”
“Oh, no. Cyn was fine with it. I’m not sure how well you know her, but Cynthia…I’m thinking about how to put this nicely. She’s not the fastest hare on the track, if you get my meaning. She’s super kindhearted, and she does a great job keeping the books since she also does her husband’s accounting, but she often doesn’t see the forest from the trees.”
“Do you have any examples?”
“Well, we had a homeowner once who was claiming they couldn’t afford to fix their fence. I’m sure you know the HOA has a fund to help homeowners in need.”
“I didn’t know that.” It was astonishing how little I really knew about the inner workings of our HOA.
“We have a lot of residents in the community who are elderly. They own a nice house, but they are on fixed incomes, and just taxes alone can be too much for them without having to add repairs and things to the mix. Anyway, Cynthia was extremely sympathetic, and she wanted to dip into that fund to help this person out. I drove by the house and started chatting with the son, and he was telling me all about how his mom just bought a new BMW with the money she inherited from his grandfather’s passing. It’s like I said, Cynthia believes the best of everybody even in the face of evidence to the contrary.”
“That’s very interesting.” I looked with regret at my empty plate, but I remembered that I still had poppy seed bread at home. Maybe instead of giving more of it away, I’d keep it for myself.
Nick used his hands to move several crumbs into a small pile out of our way and put his elbows on the table. “Before you go, I’d like to run a few things by you. You’re fairly smart, as I recall.” He grinned with a bit of mischief, and I wondered what he had up his sleeve.
“Sure. What would you like to know?”
“As you know, I’m a bit of a true crime fan myself. I’ve been listening to podcasts and reading up on some famous cases.”
Nick and I had traded ideas about true crime occasionally on our walks, and I’d found him surprisingly knowledgeable about many cases.
“One of the podcasts I listen to is called DNA: ID,” he went on, “where they’re telling story after story about cold cases that are being solved with Forensic Genetic Genealogy. It’s very state-of-the-art. I assume you’re familiar?”
“I am. I’m sure the candlestick holder is being swabbed for fingerprints and DNA as we speak, and if they do find some DNA that they can’t identify, it is possible they’ll try that if they get enough of a sample.”
Nick leaned in, warming to the subject. “I’ve also been following the JonBenet Ramsey case. Any chance you have an opinion on that one?”
I stiffened, trying to measure where Nick was going with this. The JonBenet Ramsey case was one near and dear to my heart, and I’d been following it ever since the first days over 28 years ago, but it was also a case that divided people into camps. Emotions ran high on this case. Some believed JonBenet was killed by her parents or her brother, while the other camp insisted an intruder was responsible for the little girl’s death. This issue could be as divisive as iPhones vs. Android or Free Range Parenting vs. Hands-On Parenting, and one had to tread carefully when discussing such things amongst friendly neighbors. The best way to approach this was to stick a figurative toe into the water and see which way the wind blew, or something like that.
“I think it’s possible the DNA in that case could be important,” I said.
“Yes! Exactly!” Nick leaped up and started pacing, surprising me. “The DNA was found in her underwear, but only where there were blood spots and not in-between. And DNA was found years later on the waistband of her pajamas that matched to a 98% certainty.”
Wow, Nick had really done his homework on this one.
“Until now, though, the DNA they have in the case was considered too degraded or too small. But laboratories are making advances at practically the speed of light! One lab was able to generate a profile from 120 picograms of DNA! Do you know how little that is?” He held up his thumb and forefinger, with just a tiny bit of space between them.
My guess: about 120 picograms. “Very little,” I offered up.
“It’s the size of just a few skin cells. And we just heard that the Boulder Police met with the dad in the case along with a representative of one of these state-of-the-art laboratories!”
“Do you think the case will be solved soon?”
“I think it will be solved this year. But you’re probably asking where I’m going with this.”
I wasn’t, as I thought I knew. Nick was hoping there’d be DNA on that candlestick holder that we could use to make a profile of the killer and use Forensic Genetic Genealogy to solve the case, but I decided to play along. In my mind, any DNA found on the candlestick holder would only be relevant if it was from somebody completely unrelated to the parade of people marching through Angie’s home that Saturday. Anybody who had been there that day could easily have left touch DNA on the candlestick holder in an innocent fashion. A less likely scenario, but still within the realm of probabilities, was that Angie could have shaken hands with a neighbor and then touched the candlestick holder, which could also potentially leave innocent DNA on the murder weapon. I really doubted this was the silver bullet Nick seemed to think it was.
“Maybe, but why don’t you tell me?”
“Let’s say the murderer was somebody we’ve never even thought about.”
“If it’s a total stranger, and there’s no connection between him and Angie, then that would be incriminating evidence. He’d have to explain how his DNA got onto that candlestick holder.”
“But let’s take this a bit further. Let’s assume the killer knew to wipe down the candlestick holder, he might think he’s in the clear, then, right? But because technology is getting so much better at collecting DNA, what if this person yelled or sneezed or coughed while they were there? Wouldn’t their DNA be all over the counter or the floor?”
“You know, that’s a good question. I guess I’m not sure. I think in order to check for that sort of thing, they’d have to conduct a very careful swabbing, or to your point, even the new vacuuming technique might work, and then any DNA they found would have to be analyzed. If they found DNA that didn’t match any people already known to be in Angie’s kitchen, they’d turn to CODIS, the FBI’s DNA data bank, and if none of that worked, they might use Forensic Genealogy to find out who was there.”
“So it’s possible?”
“It’s possible, but there’s a lot of issues with it. There’s the cost, and then the fact that they don’t typically just swab large areas for DNA if they don’t know for sure the killer’s DNA might be on that surface. But it is possible, I think.” Honestly, I couldn’t even imagine convincing our little PHPD police to bring in the specialists needed for such an improbable lead, but Nick was quite satisfied with my answer, so I let him continue to believe he was onto something. Everybody liked to be armchair detectives, believing they held the key to every case. There was no harm in Nick wanting to contribute his ideas, too.
“Thanks, Kate! I knew you’d agree with me!”
Did I really agree?
“And thank you, too, for the poppyseed bread. It’s going to be delicious tomorrow with my morning coffee.” He looked at it and seemed a little puzzled as to why it was already half eaten.
I left Nick’s house with a little bit of a stomachache and no closer to narrowing down my list of suspects. In spite of what Nick thought, I was sure our murderer was amongst us. I just wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees, to use Nick’s analogy.
I also checked my own assumptions. While I felt certain Nick wasn’t involved, I really had no reason to believe that except for my own perceptions.
Look at this analytically, Kate. Throw away your feelings. What does the evidence say?
So far, there was little evidence, but would Nick be asking about DNA and Forensic Genealogy if he had committed the crime? Nobody with half a brain would do that. What if they really had left some DNA behind that they didn’t recall. What if they sneezed or coughed or even yelled, and their spittle got on that candlestick? Stranger things had happened. Perhaps, though, Nick was some sort of next-level criminal, three steps ahead of me. Was Nick smarter than I gave him credit for? I gave it some thought.
Nope, definitely not.