Cooking Spirits: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (Angie Amalfi Mysteries) by Joanne Pence Page B

received no
answer. On Friday, when she still hadn’t shown up or answered any phone calls,
the police entered her small, Sunset district home to investigate. And then called Homicide.
    Officer Murphy, who secured the scene, let
Paavo and Yosh into the apartment. The first
thing he pointed out was a piece of notepaper in plain sight on the coffee
table. They read it.
     
    To
Nobody:
    You,
nobody, cared about me.
    You,
nobody, loved me.
    When
I needed you, nobody was there;
    When
I cried alone at night, nobody comforted me.
    I
cannot go on sharing my life with nobody.
    And
so, I have decided to become nobody, too.
     
    Gaia,
no more
     
    Officer Murphy then showed them the way to the bathroom.
Gaia Wyndom , wearing a plain white nightgown, lay in
a tub filled with water. No visible signs of how she had died were evident.
Judging from the condition of the body, she had not been dead long.
    It certainly looked like suicide, but homicide detectives
were taught to never leap to conclusions. Clever murderers could fake a suicide
and a suicide note. On the other hand, sometimes people did kill themselves.
    Findings from the crime scene investigators and the
forensics unit would tell quite a bit.
    As Paavo and Yosh looked over the
house to learn about the victim, the M.E. and her team arrived.
    Gaia Wyndom was 43 years old, and
had owned her house for twenty-two years. Paavo and Yosh could not find a single photo of her or anyone else in it. Both detectives
looked through drawers and closets to find any bit of information about her.
They found bank statements, utility bills and such, but nothing else—no
diaries, journals, or anything similarly personal.
    Even her medicine cabinet didn’t have a single prescription
in it. They started to wonder if she ever really lived in that house, but food
filled the refrigerator as well as the pantry, clean dishes were ready to be
put away in the dishwasher, and a few pieces of clothing were in a laundry
basket.
    “I can’t remember seeing a house so empty of personality,”
Paavo said to Yosh as he went through drawers in
Gaia’s bedroom. “Nothing here indicates she had any contact with anyone else.
Her mail was all bills, and her laptop had no e-mail except a couple pieces of
spam. She may have wiped it clean. I’ll get CSI to look into it.”
    Yosh checked her phone and saw it
had no caller I.D., not even a last number redial feature. He then went out to
the garage to look for boxes of memorabilia—old school yearbooks, anything at
all to show Gaia Wyndom had a life. He came up empty.
    “Does this make sense?” Paavo asked as the two stood in the
living room of the eerily sterile house. The heat was on, but it felt cold.
    Paavo walked back towards the bathroom where Officer Murphy
stood watching the medical team working. He asked, “Who called in the death?”
    “We got a report of a no-show from her place of employment.
After twenty-four hours, we entered the house, found her, and called it in.”
    “It’s amazing they noticed she was gone,” Yosh said. “There’s nothing here to indicate what kind of a
person she was, what she liked, who she knew. Nothing.”
    “When did the employer last hear from her?” Paavo asked.
    “Monday.”
    Paavo was surprised by that. “Five days ago. The body
doesn’t look as if she’s been dead five days. If she killed herself, she must
have thought about it for a few days before acting.” He turned to the M.E. “Any
thoughts on time of death, Evelyn?”
    “I’m going to have to get back to the lab,” Ramirez said.
“The findings aren’t making much sense, but the bath water could be
complicating it. From the condition of the body, I guess—and it’s only a
guess—she’s been dead a day or two.”
    “I wonder what she did all week,” Paavo said.
    “Maybe contemplating suicide, she threw away everything
personal,” Ramirez suggested, then returned to her
team.
    “I’ll be most curious as to what people at her work say
about