His chest heaved, and he put his hands to his eyes and cried. After a minute, he used the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his eyes and said, “I came home late last night or this morning, and was sleeping in my room. I heard a sound, like boom. And so I got up and ran down and found my mom on the floor with blood pouring out of her, from here.”
Wes Beadle grabbed his stomach with hands.
“I tried to get her to speak to me. I tried to wake her up, but she was dead. She was dead.”
He looked horrified. Devastated. And it hurt me to think that he would never be able to forget what he’d seen this morning. That he’d relive the sight of his dead mother for the rest of his life.
Conklin and I left Wes with Officer Adler and, after clearing the barrier tape between the front room and the rest of the house, found Belinda Beadle on the kitchen floor near the sink, lying in an odd position. She was sitting on her left side but leaning about thirty degrees toward the floor. Her light brown hair had been brushed. She was barefoot and wearing makeup and a navy-blue bathrobe.
As Adler had said, there was a lot of blood. It had soaked through the front of her robe and made a wide pool on the floor. The blood appeared to have come from her midsection, but the way her body was leaning, I couldn’t see where she’d been wounded. But I did see that her robe was intact. Unlike like the clothing of the belly bomb victims in the Jeep, the garment hadn’t been shredded.
I conferred with Conklin and then called Clapper and the weekend ME, Dr. Massimo. I reported in to Brady, and my partner and I returned to the front room.
I had more questions for Wesley, who was sitting in a chair flanked by two uniformed police officers.
I asked him, “Do you know of anyone who wanted to hurt your mom? Did she have a boyfriend? Did you or your mom bring home hamburgers? Or any takeout food?”
He answered: No, no, no, and no.
When the Crime Lab van pulled up, I asked Officer Adler to take Wes out to his cruiser and keep him company for a while.
Crime scene analysts streamed into the small house. Conklin and I stood off to the side as they took photos of the body and everything that surrounded it. I asked them to open the kitchen trash bin. I saw no hamburger wrappers. No fast-food packaging of any kind.
The ME arrived and the body was turned and lifted onto a sheet.
That’s when one of Clapper’s techs found the Glock under Ms. Beadle’s body.
I said to the tech, “Do an instant GSR, will you?”
As the tech swabbed the back of Ms. Beadle’s hand, Dr. Massimo opened the woman’s robe.
He said, “Don’t hold me to it, but at first look, death was caused by a bullet to the heart at close range.”
If the wound was self-inflicted, as it appeared to be, Belinda Beadle wanted to have an open-casket funeral. And maybe she thought her teenage son wasn’t home when she took her life.
“Her right hand is positive for GSR,” said the tech, showing me the test vial.
Conklin and I took Wes Beadle down to the Hall and gave him a clean SFPD sweatshirt. Then we interviewed him with tape rolling. He told us, yes, his mom had a gun. Yes, that was her gun. Yes, she’d been sad lately. But he didn’t know she was so sad. And, no, he didn’t always come home on Friday nights.
Wes was crying, blaming himself for being a bad kid, and I just had to do it. I got up and opened my arms to him, and he fell into me, hugged me hard.
Child Protective Services came about then. Wes had an Uncle Robert who lived up the coast, and I promised I would keep calling him until I reached him.
I was speaking with Robert Beadle and had just told him about the morning’s events, when my phone alarm beeped an alert I had programmed into my phone. What was it?
I could hardly believe it. The wedding was starting in forty-five minutes—and Conklin and I were both in work clothes.
Speaking for myself, I could not miss Yuki’s wedding.
I just couldn’t let that happen.
CHAPTER 16
I GAVE CONKLIN the keys to my car and called my husband. “This is an emergency, Joe. SOS.”
It took Joe almost a half hour to get to the Hall. He was wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit that he hardly got to wear anymore, and my hot designer dress was hanging from the hook in the backseat of his Mercedes.
He’d even remembered to bring my shoes.