Pretty Dead (17 page)

It was true. “Yes,” Elise said with reluctance.

“See that Agent Lamont is moved from the task force station into your office as smoothly as possible, and let’s catch this killer. Not tomorrow and not next week. Now.”

The next couple of hours were taken up with getting Lamont settled in. He was smirky and cocky about it, and Elise was glad David wasn’t there since he would’ve punched him all over again.

Strange how one person could change the feel of everything. Lamont exuded a man’s-world vibe, and Elise got the sense he didn’t consider her on his level, but then maybe that was typical FBI behavior.

By the time evening rolled around, the day felt wasted. In the parking lot, Jay Thomas Paul was waiting next to her car.

“I thought you’d left for the day,” Elise said when she spotted him.

“I didn’t want to talk about this in front of Agent Lamont, but is it true about Detective Gould? Did he get fired?”

“I suspect he’ll be back.” But as she spoke the words, she had her doubts.

“I was writing a story about the two of you . . .”

“Oh, that’s right.” She made a face. “I’m sorry.”

“What was the fight about?”

“Will that end up in your story?”

“Maybe. This is what I do. I can’t shut it off.”

“I appreciate your honesty.” Annoying Twitter photos aside, she’d started to like Jay Thomas Paul. He’d never pretended to be anything he wasn’t.

“Would you like to grab a bite to eat before heading home?” he asked.

“Not tonight.”

He immediately looked embarrassed.

“But thanks for asking. Maybe we can get a drink sometime.”

That cheered him up.

While Jay Thomas walked away, a bit of a bounce in his step, Elise called home. Audrey answered to tell her Strata Luna was there, cooking.

“Cooking?” Elise asked. “Strata Luna?”

“Well, her houseboy is cooking. Strata Luna is bossing him around.” Mother and daughter laughed. “She says she has to fatten Grandpa up.”

Elise cringed whenever Audrey called the man staying with them Grandpa.

“How’d his chemo go?” Unbelievably, Audrey had been able to talk him into getting it. She’d apparently inherited his power of persuasion.

“He seems normal. Like it was nothing. He even met me after school.” Her voice dropped. “He still doesn’t want Strata Luna to know. I feel weird about that.”

Had he even gotten the chemo? Elise wondered. The plan had been for him to take a cab to the hospital and back once a week for five weeks, and he’d insisted upon going by himself. “Don’t hold dinner for me.” She’d deal with Sweet later. “As long as everything’s under control, I’m going to stop by David’s.” Even before the incident with Lamont, David had been acting strange. Few realized it, but he was fragile.

CHAPTER 25

A
t David’s apartment, located in a dark and foreboding building called Mary of the Angels, Elise’s knock went unanswered, so she pulled out her mobile phone and hit “Speed Dial.” From the other side of the door came the sound of a ring tone.

David didn’t pick up.

His car was outside. He might have been jogging, but that didn’t fit his routine. She rattled the knob and pounded, this time shouting his name. Could be he just wanted to be left alone, but his volatile behavior at the police station worried her. Added to that were past mental issues and his predisposition to breakdowns.

After another minute of no response she took the stairs to the caretaker’s apartment on the first floor.

“I can’t let you into someone’s rental,” the old man said. He was as decrepit as the building itself, and Elise seriously doubted there was much care going on at Mary of the Angels. She hated to do it because it was so needlessly dramatic, but she pulled her jacket aside and flashed the badge on her belt.

“Oh yeah. Now I remember you.” He was referring to an unpleasant incident that had almost led to David’s eviction. Getting kicked out seemed to be a recurring theme in her partner’s life.

“I wouldn’t do this if you weren’t both cops,” he let her know as they rode the ancient elevator cage to the third floor. At the apartment, he turned the master key in the lock and swung the door wide.

David’s cat, Isobel, let out a hiss, skidded around the corner, and disappeared down the hall in the direction of the bedroom.

Barefoot, dressed in a gray T-shirt and faded jeans, was the man of the hour. From his sprawled position on the floor, he turned his head in an attempt to see who’d invaded his space. “Oh, hey.”

It was hard to believe this wasted David had come about in just a few hours. He looked like he’d spent the last week living on a deserted island.

“He’s drunk, that’s all,” the caretaker said with a tone that conveyed satisfaction and maybe even approval. Yeah, cops let go sometimes.

David’s place was small, probably not much more than four hundred square feet. The combined living room and kitchen made it impossible to miss the evidence of his one-man party—which amounted to an uncapped half-empty fifth of vodka on the kitchen counter and a glass on the floor.

Standing in the doorway, the caretaker said, “He looks pretty happy to me.”

“He seems to be good at finding his happy place,” Elise said with distraction as she eyed a brown prescription bottle next to the sink.

From the floor, David let out a chuckle while the caretaker shuffled away without further comment and Elise stepped inside and closed the door.

At the sink, she read the label on the prescription bottle. “Did you take any of these?”

He blinked and narrowed his eyes, trying to bring the thing in her hand into focus. “Don’t know. What are they?”

“Sleeping pills. Slumberon.” She recognized the name. A newer sedative that had been getting negative press. Like some other sleep aids, it was said to cause sleepwalking and sleep driving, among other alarming types of behavior.

“Don’t think so.” He groped the floor beside him, found what he was after, and lifted a short glass to his mouth, looking like an invalid giving himself a much-needed sip of water.

“You’re not an attractive drunk.”

He let out a snort and sprayed vodka, most of it landing on his chest, where it left a dark splotch on his T-shirt. “That’s funny as hell.”

“Just being honest.”

He raised the glass to his mouth again for another attempt. She thought about telling him it would be easier if he sat up but decided that would only encourage him.

“Where’s your coffee?” She opened a cupboard, closed it, opened another.

“I don’t want coffee. I worked hard to get to this point. I don’t wanna come down.”

“Are those song lyrics?”

“From my brain to your ears.”

She found the coffee, popped the top on the plastic canister, scooped some grounds into a paper filter nestled inside a cheap plastic coffeemaker, added water, and turned on the machine. While it dripped and made agonized sounds, Elise kicked off her shoes and curled up in the corner of the couch.

It looked like he’d been working at some point before the vodka—the table between them was strewn with papers and photos.

The squeak of couch springs transmitted a signal to the normally antisocial Isobel, who came sauntering out of the bedroom. “I’m sorry about Major Hoffman,” Elise told David as the cat jumped on her lap. “About you and Major Hoffman.”

“You think that’s why I’m arse over tit?” He lifted his glass high in a salute to his drinking.

That’s exactly what she thought. Spurned lover and all that. “Okay,” she said, petting Isobel. “Then the job.”

“It’s not the job and it’s not Hoffman. Well, unless I’m celebrating.”

That surprised her. Had he broken up with Hoffman instead of the other way around? Probably not. Hoffman would have felt compelled to end it if she’d suspended him.

Expecting to see crime photos, she shifted her focus to the table, and her petting hand went still. A few heartbeats later she picked up one of the images and stared at it. “He’s beautiful.” Blond curly hair and blue eyes. Even though the hair was unlike David’s, she could see a resemblance in the face.

David rolled to his side, head braced against his hand, elbow on the floor. “I like that you used present tense. Most people don’t.”

She examined the photo more closely. “He looks so alive.”

Elise knew David’s son had died in May. She wasn’t sure of the date, but she had a suspicion. “It was today, wasn’t it?”

Heavy eyes locked with hers, and his freshly awakened pain made her breath catch. “Don’t take me there,” he whispered.

She almost wished she hadn’t come. Not because she didn’t want to see him like this, but because until her interruption, he’d been able to numb that pain.

It was weird when she thought about it. About how he’d brought some levity into her life when she’d needed it, and yet his own life was so tragic.

“I don’t know why I care about dates, because dead is dead,” he said, shoving the now-empty glass across the table. “I wish I could wipe the date from my mind, but I can’t.”

The coffeemaker let out one final burst of steam, indicating it was finished. Elise unfolded herself from the couch, walked to the kitchen area, and went to work filling a couple of mugs. She carried them back to the living room and handed one to David. “Careful. It’s hot.”

He took a cautious sip. “Sweet kitty, that’s strong.”

She tried hers. “And it tastes a little like plastic.”

“My mother bought the coffeemaker. She was wailing about how it didn’t look like anybody lived here, so she went shopping for that nasty thing. Nothing like the taste of plastic to say home sweet home.” He took another sip, made a face, and put the cup aside.

Reluctant to leave him alone considering his state of mind and the bottle of sleeping pills on the counter, Elise texted Audrey, letting her know she wouldn’t be home for a few more hours.

Audrey replied, telling her Jackson Sweet was in the bathroom throwing up. Sad face.
He couldn’t eat the food Javier fixed
.
Strata Luna got mad. Told Grandpa to tell her what was going on, so now she knows. Relief.

So he did get the treatment, and it was apparently hitting him harder than anticipated. But then again, doctors always downplayed side effects and recovery.

Do you need me there?
Elise asked
.

No, Strata Luna and Javier are going to put him to bed and give him his antinausea pill.

Okay. I’ll be home later. Love you.

Despite the coffee, David fell asleep, only waking when Elise gave him a nudge. A couple of hours later, after more coffee and no more vodka, he appeared sober enough for her to leave.

“You’re going to have to move,” Elise told Isobel.

David eyed the cat on Elise’s lap. “I’ll bet she saw him die.”

Maybe he wasn’t as sober as she’d thought. “What are you talking about?”

“Isobel. I’ll bet Isobel saw my son die. She was his cat,” he went on to explain. “One day when I was driving home from Quantico, I found her along the road. Thought she’d make a nice friend for Christian.”

His eyes became unfocused as he traveled back in time. “He loved that cat, but maybe I should have gotten him a dog, you know? A dog might have protected him.” He went through the motions of taking another sip of coffee, then replaced the mug on the table. “Dogs are smarter. But Isobel . . . She probably just watched it happen, hoping she’d get some salmon when it was all over.”

There were no words that would help, but Elise tried anyway. “No matter how much we think we know, we can never be prepared for aberrant behavior in the people closest to us. You’ve seen it again and again in interviews with the families of killers. Most of them have the same response—they just couldn’t think their son or husband could possibly have done such an awful thing.”

“Yeah, but when you
press
them, they usually say there was something there.”

True.

“Isobel.” He patted the floor. “Come here.”

The cat jumped from Elise’s lap to join David on the floor, curling against his stomach.

“It’s usually just a feeling. Killers are good at keeping secrets from the people who think they know them best,” Elise said.

“I appreciate your attempt to reassure me, but I should have known. It’s my job. Lamont’s profile might be off, but he was right about me. I was a profiler. I lived with her. I lived with evil.”

“Okay, I’ll quit trying to convince you of the human flaw that blinds us to the people we love. The reason I stopped by was because I want you to know you’re still my partner. No matter what happens, I still want your input on this case.”

“You shouldn’t listen to me. You should listen to the asshole. He’s the expert. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Several times over the past two weeks he’d been evasive when speaking about the case, even though she knew his focus was on nothing else. “You’re thinking something you aren’t sharing.”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m off the case.”

“I don’t care.” She wouldn’t tell him Lamont was using his desk. If he found out, there might be another death in the city.

“You could be fired,” David said.

“Has that ever stopped me before?”

He shook his head and smiled slightly. “My idea—it has no foundation.”

“Let me decide.”

Careful of Isobel, David got to his feet and sat next to Elise on the couch. With the back of his hand, he swept the photos aside, clearing a spot. Then he opened a yellow legal pad and flipped through the pages until he came to a blank sheet. Settling the tablet against his knee and uncapping a pen, he began to doodle. She’d witnessed this many times. Doodling helped him think.

“We agree that this person is a pro. He’s killed a lot, and he’s perfected his style,” David said. “For him it’s not about method. Everything he’s doing is deliberate. Everything he’s doing is designed to lead us just where he wants to lead us, to make us believe whatever he wants us to believe. And Lamont has walked right into it. That’s what I think.”

“Let’s say this is a valid theory. How is it different from Lamont’s profile?”