The House Husband, Page 2

  “You can sleep in a little later tomorrow,” I tell Ruth. “I know you had a hard day at work.”

  Another murmur. Perhaps she’s saying Okay? Or Amen? It’s hard to tell.

  “I’ll get the boys to school and bring this little animal here along for the ride, okay?”

  Even though she doesn’t reply, Ruth tucks her body closer to mine.

  I put my hand on her hip and give it a gentle squeeze. “Sweet dreams, honey,” I whisper. I kiss her head, taking in the scent of her shampoo. Somehow, even after a day in the city, her hair is always intoxicating to me.

  We fall asleep together, and I revel in the peace and comfort of it all. I hope the Pancoast family is enjoying a similar kind of peace.

  CHAPTER 6

  For Teaghan, six weeks away from the Job feels like six years. Even the most ordinary routines (the morning briefs over pitifully bitter coffee, checking their vehicle out of the motor pool) all feel like things she did in another life. Is she really a homicide detective? Or is this a dream she’s having after being up way too late with the baby, watching bad cable TV?

  No, Teaghan knows it’s all real. She’s been a homicide detective for three years, all of them partnered with Martin Diaz, who’s always been a laid-back, supportive partner. Until this morning.

  “Hey, T,” he says. “How’s the little one?”

  “Adorable, but he kind of screams all the time.”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right. You getting much sleep?”

  “You’re a dad. What do you think?”

  “I think this is going to be a very long day for you.”

  Teaghan invited Diaz and his wife over to meet the baby, but Diaz begged off, saying he didn’t want to bring germs into their apartment and get the little one sick. Teaghan had to admit she was a little hurt. The Diazes were like family. But she didn’t push it—maybe the germ thing was a real concern.

  But now Diaz didn’t seem exactly thrilled to have his old partner back. Teaghan was gone for six weeks. She had her belly cut open and a new life form airlifted out. And all she gets is a Hey?

  Whatever. Maybe she is reading too much into things. Maybe Diaz has always been a bit distant and Teaghan just doesn’t remember.

  The first case they catch: a multiple homicide in South Philly.

  Diaz looks at Teaghan with concern and asks, “You sure you’re up for this?” It’s something he never would have asked before.

  “Yeah, Diaz,” she says. “I had a baby. I’m not going through chemo.”

  “No, yeah, I mean…” He trails off, fumbling for the words. “It’s a whole family we’re talking about here.”

  “I’ve seen dead kids,” Teaghan says, which is sadly true.

  Diaz is in the driver’s seat for a change, even though he’s a lousy driver. The doc told Teaghan she should wait at least six weeks before getting behind the wheel, so why push it? She grudgingly agreed. Besides, she was so sleep-deprived she felt like a zombie shambling around in the haze of the newly resurrected. Diaz might treat stop signs like mere suggestions, but at least he’s had his solid eight hours of pillow time.

  The weird thing is, their drive over to Christian Street is deathly quiet, as if they’re sitting in a church pew waiting for services to begin. Is Diaz seriously pissed at her or something?

  In her absence, Diaz was shackled with another detective, a burnout named McCafferty, which couldn’t have been fun. (McCafferty’s idea of proper homicide investigation is to glance at the scene of the crime on her way to the nearest bar.) Teaghan is sure the past six weeks were a huge frustration for Diaz. But does Teaghan deserve the silent treatment for that?

  Maybe it’s something else. Diaz wasn’t shy about his opinion when Teaghan told him the supposedly joyous news. “Popping out a kid is gonna hurt you,” he said, and he didn’t mean it in the literal sense. Diaz meant that it would hurt her career.

  Which made Teaghan angry, because plenty of homicide guys had kids, and no one ever gave them grief about it. She supposes it’s okay for a cop dad to be gone all the time, working murders nonstop. But if a cop mom does the same, then whoa, there’s something seriously wrong here. Where are her priorities?

  “Something wrong, D?” Teaghan asks.

  It’s D when she’s talking to him human-to-human and Diaz when it’s cop-to-cop.

  “You mean aside from the fact that we’re about to walk into a house full of dead people?”

  “Come on, you know what I mean.”

  “I’m fine,” he says, making it sound like a sigh. “Why?”

  “You seem unusually quiet.”

  “Been a tough couple of weeks, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, and I missed you, too.”

  Diaz grunts as they pull up to the death house on Christian Street. “I’m sorry, T. I guess I’m just not looking forward to what we’re about to see.”

  Truth is, neither is Teaghan.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Pancoast family died together yet all alone.

  A classmate of the oldest Pancoast child called it in; she thought it was weird that nobody responded to the front door at 7:30 a.m., when the house was usually at its busiest. And their car was still parked in their painted-off disabled spot—a perk someone on City Council threw Mr. Pancoast years ago (even though he was far from disabled).

  The first responders knocked aggressively, kicked in the door, and made the awful discovery. Word travels at lightning speed in tight-knit South Philly neighborhoods like this. Everyone within a four-block radius knew what had happened to the Pancoasts by the time the Homicide Bureau did.

  But that is what puzzles Teaghan and her partner. This sounds like a horrible accident. Why are they tagging it a homicide?

  Teaghan pulls herself out of the passenger seat, trying not to let on how much it hurts. Her stomach muscles seem to be screaming at her, We can’t move this way anymore! Ugh, it feels like she is being torn in half.

  “Ready, Diaz?” she asks, trying to deflect attention away from her own miseries.

  But even a distracted Diaz can’t help but notice that his partner’s in pain. “You’re not going to get morning sickness on me, now, are you, T?”

  She would have ordinarily replied with a creative expletive, but there are lookyloos and TV reporters all over the place.

  The Pancoast residence is a narrow, deep row home, just like the others on this block. Teaghan doesn’t know how people can stand living on top of each other like this—hell, even her apartment feels bigger—but she guesses it saves on the heating bills in the cold, bitter Philadelphia winter.

  The mother is in the living room, her body twisted up over the shattered remains of a wineglass. The CSI tech on duty tells them she died of asphyxia, but that is pretty obvious to both of them. Both Teaghan and Diaz have seen it plenty of times before.

  Teaghan wants to crouch down to take a better look at the mom’s face, but that would most likely end in agony or embarrassment. So she tries to get what impressions she can from a standing position.

  It’s clear that Donna Pancoast was pretty once. Take away the bluish tint of her skin and the extra pounds from drinking too much, and it’s not hard to see the beautiful young bride beneath.

  Don’t judge, T. You used to be young and pretty once, before the Job and the baby and the Frankenstein scar took all of that away.

  So what went wrong? Why all of these worry lines on the woman’s face? Why the dark circles under her eyes, like she’d been drinking her days away?

  “There are three kids?” Diaz asks.

  “Upstairs,” says the CSI tech. “Each in their own room. Two of them were on their cell phones; the other was doing homework. It looks like they just went to sleep.”

  “What about the dad?” Teaghan asks.

  “Well, that’s why we called you guys,” the CSI tech says.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dad is down in the basement.

  Head hanging low, sitting next to the furnace, as if he f
ell asleep trying to keep warm on a wintry night.

  His skin has the same awful blue tint as the rest of his family. But unlike the rest of his family, his body language suggests he wasn’t caught unaware with a sudden flood of natural gas throughout the home. He wasn’t having a drink or checking a social-media site or doing homework. Ray Pancoast was just sitting here, waiting for the dark veil to fall over his eyes a final time.

  “Man,” Diaz says, then catches himself.

  “You think he did this?” Teaghan asks.

  The CSI tech uses a badly gnawed pencil to point to a small square resting next to the body. It’s a piece of notepaper torn off a pad from the Hyatt at the Bellevue Hotel on South Broad Street, a venerable Philly institution—but also infamous for the outbreak of so-called Legionnaires’ disease back in 1976. Thirty-four people died thanks to bacteria in the hotel’s air-conditioning system.

  Now, there’s a bad omen, Teaghan thinks.

  Diaz crouches down to read the note. “‘I’m sorry,’” he reads aloud. “‘I should have been a better father.’”

  So this isn’t an accidental death. This is a suicide-quadruple homicide.

  But something about the whole thing doesn’t sit right with Teaghan. She may not be the world’s quickest detective, but she is one of the more methodical ones. She thinks it through, step by step, and realizes there’s a big hole in this theory.

  “You’re saying the husband opened up a pipe, flooded the whole house with gas.”

  “That’s what it seems like,” the CSI tech replies.

  “So why couldn’t the family smell the leak?” Teaghan asks. “I thought the gas company puts in a rotten-egg odor so you can tell when there’s a leak. Didn’t any of them realize something was wrong?”

  “Ah, see, that’s the clever part,” the CSI tech says. “The husband not only opened up the pipe, but he had some kind of filter device on there to take away the mercaptans—that organosulfur compound you’re talking about. My guess is the family had no idea.”

  “No signs of trauma?” Teaghan asks. “Maybe somebody forced him to do this.”

  The CSI tech points to the back of Pancoast’s head. “Well, there’s a nasty contusion on the back of his skull. But that could be because he was writhing around a little toward the end and banged his head on the wall.”

  “You find traces of his blood anywhere else? Or on any tools?”

  “Nothing yet. Just the wall. But don’t worry, I’ll luminol the heck out of the area and let you know if anything turns up.”

  “Yo, lemme talk to you for a minute,” Diaz says, tugging on Teaghan’s arm.

  “What is it?”

  “C’mon.”

  Up in the kitchen, away from everybody else, Diaz tells her he recognizes the dad, Ray Pancoast.

  “Which means?”

  “He’s the boss of the steamfitters local.”

  “And?”

  “Come on, T, these are the Philly unions we’re talking about. You’ve been in the city long enough to know what that means. Dad was probably up to some dirty business and found himself tap-dancing on the edge of an indictment. Instead of facing the music, he decided to take the coward’s way out and took his family along with him.”

  “Amazing,” Teaghan says. “You just tried and convicted a man based on his street rep and a single sheet of paper.”

  “Naw, we’ll do our thing. I’m just giving you a sneak preview.”

  Teaghan knows Diaz is probably right. Yeah, she has been in this city long enough to know better. But pushing aside the cop inside her, the human part of her can’t wrap her mind around it. What could possibly compel a man to snuff out his entire family? You spend years raising, clothing, feeding, protecting, and loving these little people, and one day you just decide to hit the reset button and wipe them all out? None of it makes sense.

  “I don’t know, D,” she says. “Seems a little extreme to me. I mean, his wife and kids…”

  “You’re new to the joys of being a parent,” Diaz says. “Call me in a few years when you’re pulling your hair out and putting yourself to bed with Jack Daniel’s. You’ll get it.”

  Diaz is married with kids and often seems to regret both parts of that description. Not that he complains overtly. It’s the little things he says, especially when there’s a family gathering on the horizon. There’s also his reluctance to report right home after a shift. More often than not, he’s stopping off at McNally’s in Fox Chase, not too far from home. As if he needs some kind of boozy buffer before walking in his own front door.

  Teaghan doesn’t understand it. Then again, she’s been a parent for all of, what, six weeks now? Maybe that’s what happens.

  “Come on, Diaz. Let’s step outside for some fresh air.”

  CHAPTER 9

  You would think watching a crime scene would be exciting—at least, that’s what all of those psycho-killer-of-the-week shows on TV lead you to believe. But in real life, they’re seriously kind of boring. Lots of people standing around, wondering if they’re going to see a real dead body. TV news reporters and cameramen, wondering if there’s a place nearby with a decent hot pork sandwich.

  My Jenny doesn’t mind, though. She’s strapped to my chest in one of those kangaroo-pouch things and giggling in all the chilly air and sunshine.

  “What the heck happened over there?” some old guy asks me. He has enough hair growing out of his ears to blend in with his sideburns.

  I cover little Jenny’s ears with the palms of my hands. She thinks I’m playing a silly game and giggles even more.

  “They found a dead family in there,” I whisper.

  The old man is more curious than horrified. “Dead? Dead from what?”

  “This isn’t official,” I say, “but they think the father gassed his family to death.”

  At this point, Jenny starts to fuss. Can she hear my words through my hands? Does she know enough words to understand what I’m saying?

  God love him, the old man takes this news in stride.

  “Ah, this crazy town.” As if such a thing is a normal occurrence here in the birthplace of our nation. He swats at an invisible fly, then continues down the block.

  I coo at Jenny, rocking her gently. “You’re okay, baby doll. Daddy’s here. Don’t listen to that old man. You’re growing up in a safe place.”

  We watch the scene for a while longer. I wonder if we should head home. Jenny’s going to need to be changed and have her lunch soon. But some hunch tells me to stick for a while longer. And ten minutes later, my intuition is rewarded.

  Two people step out of the Christian Street house. There’s a squat Latino guy in a sports coat and a tall red-haired woman in a button-down shirt and loose-fitting slacks. He looks bored. She looks like it hurts to walk.

  They’re homicide cops. I’ll bet anything on it.

  My homicide cops.

  You can tell they’re homicide cops because they look like they tour war zones on a daily basis and are in charge of racking up the body count. I’d never want a job like theirs. Too depressing, too pointless.

  The way they talk to each other indicates they’re deep into something. But what? You’d think the case would be open and shut. A father decides to spare his family a lot of grief and ends their time on earth.

  But the pretty red-haired one…yeah, there’s clearly something bothering her.

  “Isn’t there, Jenny? Look at the lady policewoman. She looks awfully worried about something. Wonder what’s on her mind.”

  Her Latino partner looks like he’s carrying a heavy burden, too.

  “And poor Mr. Policeman doesn’t look like he’s having much fun, either. I wonder why. Do you know, Jenny?”

  If she does, Jenny’s not letting on. She squirms impatiently and fusses some more.

  I’m too far away to hear exactly what they’re talking about, but I catch enough words to get the gist. Pancoast, unions, you know this city.

  What kind of detectives are you guys? Ar
e you the never-stop-until-we-get-our-man type? Or are you a bit more laid-back, ready to believe anything the CSI techs tell you?

  Speak of the devil, after a while the CSI guy sticks his head out the front door and summons his colleagues.

  “Detectives Diaz and Beaumont? You got a sec?”

  “Diaz,” I tell Jenny. “Do you know how to spell Diaz? Daddy does. It’s D-I-A-Z…”

  CHAPTER 10

  The day Teaghan thought would never end finally does. She even splits a little early, which earns a raised eyebrow from Diaz. Whatever. Like he’s never bounced ahead of schedule, leaving Teaghan to finish some last bits of paperwork?

  Whatever.

  Back at their West Philly apartment, Charlie hands off the sleeping baby as if Christopher is a bomb he just painstakingly defused.

  “The only way I could get him to stop crying,” Charlie whispers, “was to keep walking with him. Back and forth, up and down, all over the place. My legs are killing me.”

  “Did you try the bouncy seat?”

  “Yeah, and that didn’t do a thing to help. I just think he missed you.”

  And I missed him, too—like you couldn’t believe.

  Charlie seems eager to get back to his laptop; he hasn’t written two coherent words all day. (Nor has he showered, apparently. Her husband looks like an unmade bed.) But Teaghan also needs a moment. She can’t exactly breastfeed with a gun strapped to her torso.

  Of course, the moment the baby realizes that he’s in his mother’s arms, he starts to fuss and pout, which only intensifies as he wakes up. Teaghan is exhausted and sore; she thought she’d have a few minutes to relax before becoming a walking food source.

  “You got him?” Charlie asks. “I’m sorry, but I really have to get back to this article.”

  “Go,” Teaghan says. “I’ll be fine.”

  She’s lying, but that’s what keeps couples together sometimes. The well-placed lie.

  It’s hours before little Christopher calms down again. Ordinarily, after a tough day, she and Charlie would knock back some craft beers while waiting for the delivery guy to show up with their dinner. Now dinner is a lukewarm vegetarian stew, eaten over the sink while gently rocking the baby. No beer for the homicide cop now. Whatever Teaghan eats, the baby eats, and the last thing she needs is a cranky drunk on her hands. She dealt with enough of those early in her career.