Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (193 page)

Green flicked the
TV
off in disgust. His thoughts flashed involuntarily to Hannah and Crystal, who thought they understood the world of sex and power. How old were those kids on the sofa? Did they know they were being filmed? Was McIntyre in the room with them, or did he savour the show later in private? Green’s mind ticked off all the charges that could be laid against the man, if ever this evidence could be legally seized, but it was small retribution for what he’d done to the kids.

He came back to reality with a start. He’d been in the house far too long. He replaced everything as it had been and hurried down the hall to the next bedroom, wondering what else the man was up to. This one was a huge master bedroom with a balcony overlooking the backyard paradise. It was more tastefully done in dark mahogany furnishings and shiny red and gold striped wallpaper. The king-sized bed had a luxurious red satin duvet and matching sheets. Green sensed this was the man’s private abode, his own personal sensual palace. The ensuite bathroom was a massive marble extravagance with two sinks, gold-plated faucets and a Jacuzzi almost large enough for an entire hockey team. A quick search of the cupboards revealed one linen closet full not of towels or sheets but bottles of pills and entire cases of sports drinks. Green picked one up.

“Dr. Rosen’s Electro-Boost, the only thirst quencher for the serious athlete” boasted the label. There was no list of ingredients or bar code for commercial sale. He peered at the bottles containing all different sizes and colours of tablets labelled innocuously as Vitamin E, B12, ginseng, garlic. I’d give anything to send all this stuff for analysis, Green thought. I bet I’d find crystal meth, ecstasy, probably all sorts of uppers and downers to relax inhibitions and enhance excitement. Maybe even roofies, so the kids can pleasure him without remembering a thing.

No one opens a candy store for nothing, he thought, and fought back the revulsion that rose in his throat. Reluctantly he replaced the bottles and eased the cupboard shut again. On his way out of the bedroom, he couldn’t resist a quick peek in the man’s mahogany dresser. He was no longer searching for Riley, but for a fuller view of the man’s dark side. Inside the top drawer, instead of the usual array of socks and briefs, he found a jumble of women’s lingerie. Panties, bras, camisoles and teddies in black lace, virginal white silk, leather and flimsy chiffon. Green sifted through it curiously. Were these trophies, to remind him of his conquests? The musky scent of sex tickled his nostrils, and he was about to shut the drawer when a fragment of embroidery caught his eye. Part of a name. He pulled the item free and found himself holding a black satin thong with a name hand-embroidered in red across the skimpy triangle of cloth.

For Riley.

A minute later, Green was back in his car, starting it up and driving up the block out of sight. His heart was pounding. The panties were the closest they had come so far to nailing the connection between Riley, McIntyre and Lea’s death. Physical evidence, straight from the Hog’s Back scene, found in the man’s personal possessions. McIntyre had probably removed the panties from the scene in order to erase all evidence that tied Riley to Lea, but he had been unable to resist keeping them for his own sick titillation.

If only Green could use it. But since the search had been entirely illegal, he couldn’t even let on he knew the panties and the rest of the erotica existed. At least officially. But off the record, Sullivan had to know what the hell they were dealing with, so they could figure out how it all fit together. He turned the car and headed towards the station, his thoughts scrounging for possible ways to justify a search warrant.

He got less than five blocks before his phone rang. He groped for it, expecting it was Sullivan with news from his briefing. But to his surprise, it was a woman’s voice, vaguely familiar but distorted by the urgent whisper.

“He’s here! He came to see me!”

“Who is this?”

“Marija Kovacev. He is in—” Green’s adrenaline spiked.

“Who is there?”

“The boy who was with Lea that night. He came to explain.” Green gripped the wheel with his free hand, all senses alert.

“Where are you?”

“In my bathroom. I told him I need to use the toilet, but I phone you—”

“Where is he right now?”

“In my living room.” Green flipped on his flashing lights and slammed the accelerator to the floor. He was only ten minutes from her house, maybe less at full lights and siren. But ten minutes was way too long. As his mind raced over his choices, Marija was still talking.

“He says it was an accident, Lea take some marijuana and she get very sick. I tell him to call you, but he says he can’t. So I call.”

In a split second, Green had to make a decision. He could ask her to go back and stall Riley until the police arrived, or he could tell her to get away from the house. In the latter case, he risked losing track of his suspect, but in the former, he risked losing Marija herself. He needed to call for back-up, but he had to get her safe first.

“Marija, can you get out the back door without being seen?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then do it. Right now. I’m on my way, and I’ll get him.”

“But he is not dangerous! He is crying! He is afraid.”

“Okay, but let’s do it my way,” he said as he slewed around the corner from McCarthy Road, tires screaming, and accelerated up Walkley. “Go out the back door.”

He listened to the silence over the phone. “Marija? Trust me. Go.”

Finally over the roar of his engine, he heard the line click dead. Praying that she had obeyed him, he called the Com Centre for backup. When he raced up her street five minutes later, he saw a cruiser just pulling up to the curb. There was no sign of a red Mustang in the drive, but Marija herself was standing on the lawn. She looked pale and wide-eyed, but unharmed. Green felt a rush of relief. She walked over as he leaped out of the car, and lifted her hands in an elegant gesture of defeat.

“He ran away. He was afraid. I tried to tell you, but you gave me no chances.”

He took her elbow. “I’m sorry, but I had to put your safety first.”

She stiffened and pulled away. “He is not a criminal.”

“I want to hear the whole story, but give me a moment to speak to these officers first.”

“So you can hunt him down?”

Green stared at her, puzzled. Why this irrational anger? What kind of twisted loyalty would make her take sides with the man responsible for her daughter’s death rather than with those seeking to bring him to account? He tried to sound gentle, belying the urgency he felt. “We need to find him. As you said, he needs to tell us what happened.”

That seemed to mollify her, and she went inside while he spoke to the responding officers and relayed the latest information on Riley’s whereabouts to the Com Centre. Brian Sullivan was just arriving back at the station and was happy to work with the duty inspector to coordinate the manhunt. Riley could not have had more than a ten-minute head start, and the bright red sports car should be easy to spot.

With the search underway, Green went inside and found Marija in the kitchen, boiling the kettle for tea. She paced, avoiding his probing eyes while she fiddled with the cups and tea bags. He gritted his teeth, willing himself to be patient until the tea was prepared and she had taken her first sip. Only then did she seem to sag with defeat.

He forced a gentle tone. “Okay, tell me what happened.” She cradled her tea, and her eyes filled with sudden tears.

“I don’t know who to blame. Lea had such a lot of secrets. This boy, the drugs... I never thought she would smoke marijuana, but this boy—”

“Riley?” She looked startled. “You know?”

“Just his name. Not what happened. I’m sorry I interrupted.”

“You didn’t tell me.” Anger tightened her features again, and he cursed his clumsiness. She sipped her tea in silence for a long moment, as if debating with herself, before she resumed. “Riley said she bought the marijuana, she said it would be fun to try it together. It was very beautiful evening, the first date they have all week, because his sports keeps him so busy. It’s always training, training, publicity, meet this person and that person. All he was thinking about was Lea. He tells me he loved her, because she was very different from the other girls—” She shot him a sharp scowl, perhaps anticipating his doubt. “I believe him. He was very upset. Crying, crying. He said he couldn’t sleep, and he never wanted this to happen. He didn’t want the marijuana. Lea teased him, but he doesn’t want drugs in his body. Now he wish he did take the cigarette too. Lea starts to act very wild. They walked a little and sat on a bench together, but Lea couldn’t stay still. She started running around, to make him chase her, and they were playing—wrestling, he said—and he tried to stop her. To hold her quiet. Not hard, he said, just her arms, but she was fighting and fighting, then suddenly she was not breathing. He says she panicked. He got scared someone would accuse him, because of the drugs and because he was holding her on the ground when she die.”

Her voice faltered on the last word, and she took a shaky sip of her tea. This time Green waited without interruption, although half a dozen questions crowded his thoughts. What about the aborted 911 call, and the call to his agent? What about throwing the body into the river?

“Was Lea taking any medication? For a cold, asthma or dieting?”

She shook her head back and forth vehemently. “Dieting she didn’t believe in. She was all the time very healthy. That’s why this marijuana, I don’t understand it. So many things I don’t understand.” She lapsed into silence again, nursing her pain. It doesn’t mean anything, Green thought. Parents were the least likely to know anything about their teenager’s day-to-day life. Wisely, he kept quiet until she resumed her thread. “He is so ashamed. He thought only of him, not Lea. He didn’t call the police, he put the body in the river so it looks like an accident. So maybe people won’t discover he was with her. But now, he says something else is going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s the reason he came to see me. To apologize that he was a coward and now he had to stop. He saw the paper this morning about the social worker who was killed, and he knew it was because of him. Someone is trying to hide what he did by killing again.”

Green’s eyes narrowed, and he found himself holding his breath. Marija raised her ravaged blue eyes to his. “He was afraid. He was looking all the time out the window like he was looking for something. Like the killer was after him. That’s why he ran away. Not so that he can escape from you, but from the killer. And it is the killer that you need to find, not this boy.”

“But he knows who the killer is.”

She nodded. “I asked who, and he said he couldn’t tell, because it was his fault. The killer did this for him.”

“Did he explain?”

Her shrug was regretful. “I told him he has to tell you. He can’t run forever. I give him your card, but when he said no, I came to the bathroom to phone you. When I came out, he was gone.”

“Did you see anything outside in the street? A person? A car?”

“A few cars. Nothing special.”

Green gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to plant ideas in her head, but he had a very good idea who it might have been. “Do you remember any makes? Colours?”

“Silver one. Another red. And one big black one.”

Green gave her hand a quick squeeze, which he hoped was reassuring, and excused himself to relay the information to the Communications Centre. Inwardly, every muscle was taut with fear. It had to be Vic McIntyre. McIntyre drove a black
SUV
. He was the person Riley had phoned the night Lea died. Moreover, Vic had been a man with a purpose that morning. What if Marija was right? If McIntyre, not Riley, was the villain behind the deaths? Green thought about all the bits of information he learned about McIntyre. The man had a backyard playground worth perhaps a quarter of a million. He threw noisy, extravagant parties where no doubt the drugs flowed as freely as the booze. He drove a car that cost more than many annual incomes. Where did all the money come from? Granted, there was big money to be made in elite sports, but McIntyre wasn’t at the top yet. He was still clawing his way up, pinning all his hopes on the talents of his rising star. A star who had recently become distracted and fallen down on his training, perhaps wanting some pleasures in his life other than the strict regime McIntyre had ordered. What if McIntyre had supplied Crystal with the lethal drug, knowing full well that Riley, the anti-drug poster boy, would refuse to take it, but that the smaller, more daring Lea Kovacev would not hesitate. Had he intended her to die, or just be so stoned that it would turn Riley against her?

Titrating just the right amount of crystal meth into a bag of marijuana was an inexact science. Perhaps McIntyre hadn’t cared whether he killed her or not, as long as it killed the romance. The second murder was a different story, regardless of which woman the victim proved to be. Both Crystal and Jenna knew too much. Of all the men Green had encountered in the case, McIntyre had the ruthlessness needed to chop a woman into pieces to protect his own interests. What if he was on a deadly campaign to erase all signs that pointed to him? The crucial question was—where would he stop? Riley O’Shaughnessy was his protégé, almost his surrogate son, not to mention his meal ticket to the big time. He had done all this to protect that asset, if not the boy himself. What would he do now that the boy had become a liability? Green didn’t have a moment’s doubt. McIntyre had other irons in the fire—other clients, maybe even an exclusive drug business. Riley would be a loss, but some other dream kid would come along. A man who could decapitate a young woman didn’t have much room in his heart for sentiment. Now that man was on the loose, chasing down the boy who could bring it all down.

Eighteen

 W
hile the duty inspector snapped out fresh orders over the radio, Brian Sullivan studied the wall map in the Communications Centre, tracing routes with his finger. The Com Centre had all sorts of computer maps and satellite surveillance systems, but despite all the fancy high-tech, the search for Riley O’Shaughnessy had turned up nothing. Sometimes there was nothing like good old-fashioned paper to get the big picture.