The Witness (30 page)

The chief smiled. “You get used to managing them too.”

“Sure you do,” Connor agreed, reflecting on the fact that Luke had been wading into reporters for half his career now. “I’ve no desire to ever make a higher grade than lieutenant and detective.”

Granger chuckled. “Want me to let you off at the back door?”

“Just park and get out first, Chief. They’ll ignore me, thankfully, when they have you to swarm.”

Luke parked beside Marsh’s personal car. “First rule of handling the press: don’t let them see you sweat.”

“They didn’t teach that part at the academy.” Connor waited until the chief opened his door and stepped out of the car before pushing his open and using the doorframe to push two cameramen trying to get photos of the chief back far enough he could step out. The day was going to be full of this insanity, Connor knew.

Sykes got into his face with a handheld cassette recorder and a question Connor couldn’t sort out from the mayhem around him, and instinct had him moving one hand around the reporter’s wrist and the other toward his shoulder to force him back and out of his face. It was like getting pressed into a sardine can.

He broke free and straightened his shirt and wondered how his boss had ever learned to cope with it. He slipped his badge face out in his pocket and went to find Marsh.

The apartment was furnished more expensively than most homes, Connor decided, getting a taste of it from the inset stone in the entryway and the artwork facing him at eye level. “How did someone get past this security system?”

“Our victim let him in, same as with Nolan,” Marsh replied, sitting on the steps leading to the second floor of the apartment and writing notes down on his pocket pad of paper. He glanced up. “How’s the chief?”

“Saying a lot of words while saying little. He’ll buy us some time. You cleared this floor?”

“Yep. Tossed everyone out that I didn’t personally want to see at 4 a.m., and that was everyone. Joe and Rachel promised to wake up enough to work the scene for me since they have some experience with this guy’s MO.”

“Where’s our victim?”

Marsh nodded to his right. “Staining an absolutely gorgeous and expensive rug in the living room.”

Connor was in no hurry to follow the smell. “How long?”

“Probably killed after Nolan, just from the way the murder looks done, but probably also a Monday night hit. The decay looks about the same.”

“Thanks, I needed that image. His name?”

“Sorry, I thought I said.” Marsh handed over a driver’s license.

Connor studied the photo. “Philip Rich, sixty-seven. He looks like the plastic-surgery type.”

“It didn’t help him die any prettier. Same knife attack with rage features, probably a blitz attack. Looks like the same kind of narrow blade, but that’s a guess.”

Connor reluctantly went to see the scene. He didn’t react to the body, didn’t let himself do it. Some things were just sights a person shouldn’t see. The splattered blood had spotted a priceless chess set of ivory pieces and left streaks on the mirror above the fireplace. “No signs of robbery?” he asked quietly.

Marsh stopped beside him to also study the room. “No. I passed a few items that would fit in my pocket and clear a few thousand even with a fence taking most of the cash, and they’re still sitting in plain sight.”

“Someone knew this man, wanted him dead, and came with the intent to make very sure he was dead. Did he wash up again?”

“Yes. The downstairs bath—upstairs is a massive master-bedroom-and-bath suite, with a private sitting area, but it looks undisturbed. I’m guessing our killer brought a change of clothes to this one; there’s a smear on the bathroom floor that looks like bloody fabric rested there, probably a pair of jeans from the texture captured in the stain.”

“The knife?”

“No sign of it that I saw in the initial walk around.”

Connor accepted reality and walked closer to the body. He pulled on latex gloves. “Again, no defensive wounds on the hands. Maybe the same stunning blow to the head and then straddle and start stabbing?”

“I think so.”

“Philip Rich—Daniel said he retired almost eight months ago, before Henry had the last heart attack. He worked out at the estate most days, even though he had a business office downtown, and we know our chauffeur was around the estate most days. So it’s pretty straightforward to assume our two victims knew each other. But I don’t think from looking at this place and having seen Nolan’s that the two men traveled in the same circles.”

“Philip was a man desiring to be as wealthy as those he worked for,” Marsh agreed.

“There’s a message?”

Marsh turned and shined his light on the painting over the couch.

Pay me to go away
was written in blood across a priceless work of art.

“Marie would cringe,” Connor said softly, the first thought crossing his mind at the sight of all that blood on those nicely brushed layers of oil paints. “I’d say that is a definite demand.”

“How much does he want, who does he want it from, where does he want it delivered … the note just raises all kinds of questions of its own.”

“At least this guy is not crazy, as in ask us to stop the moon from rising or some such fantasy crazy.”

“Two murders and one explicit blackmail demand ...this guy is going to be twisted when we find him.”

Connor shook his head. “No. He’s the kind you meet, shake hands with, interview, and until forensics matches DNA and tells you that’s the killer, you would swear he was just another interview in the files,” he replied, beginning to worry for the first time about a case. This one was out of his league.

“It will crack the same way every case does, by shoe leather and persistence. And he’s already made one mistake.”

“What?”

Marsh walked over to the painting and studied the message, and when he turned it was a hard smile on his face, the kind Connor knew to be wary about. “He got greedy. A man who wants money—he won’t disappear into the shadows and do his best to get away from here and his killings. No, he’ll sit back and wait for the time to demand his payment. And we’ll be waiting for him.”

He nodded. “He did his two murders, left his notes, and he’ll still be around.”

Connor moved back to the doorway to get a sense of the room again and how the initial struggle must have gone down. “You don’t ask a dead guy for money, so that leaves out our victims. You don’t ask the cops for money, because that is a simple waste of your breath. So this guy is targeting the guy with the most money—that would be Daniel—and working his way through the employees, proving he’s dangerous enough to Daniel that it is better to pay up than risk another person in that circle dying.”

“That’s the way I see it. Daniel is going to need better security. And everyone who worked at the estate in the last few years. Marie and Tracey—at least they’re already pretty tightly covered.”

“Granger is already looking at answering the most critical question—is there a third murder out there we just haven’t discovered yet? It’s possible the amount and the directions are already waiting for us at another crime scene.”

“Let’s hope that is a no; I want a full night’s sleep first.” Connor let himself smile. “This is getting very, very old,” he agreed. “You want the living room or the kitchen?”

“I’ll take this room. Start on the kitchen, and when the forensics folks get here you and I will leave them to it and go see Granger, then begin the interviews. I think we’ve seen enough to go start asking people who aren’t dead some questions.”

Chapter Seventeen

CONNOR RELAXED against the bench of the restaurant booth and considered the odds that pancakes might solve the odd mismatch of sensations in his stomach that had lingered for days. He felt like something the dog had brought in dead.

“You can’t keep your eyes open.”

He smiled at Marie or at least hoped that was what his expression came out looking like. “Not fully,” Connor agreed. “But it’s not dimmed my perceptive abilities. You look as lovely as ever.”

She smiled but pushed the coffee toward him. “Drink it; they refill for free.”

“Who’s keeping the tabloid reporters at bay? We’ve been sitting here five minutes with relative normalcy.”

“A back-corner booth with Bryce at the next table over—it works most of the time. What are you thinking about trying?”

“Pancakes.” It seemed to be one of the few words he could read. He was so tired he thought his eyes were going to swell shut just to get some darkness.

Marie signaled a waitress and they placed their orders.

“You should have canceled and gone to bed.”

“I’m not canceling and standing you up more than three times in a row short of someone shooting me and there being a tube stuffed down my throat when I wake up.” He put both hands around the coffee cup and thought the double vision might be one eye going to sleep on him.

“How long has it been since you really slept?”

He smiled. “Sixty hours, but who is counting? I’m not driving myself home; a patrol guy is taking pity on me. I think the bed is still at the old apartment, but everything else got moved to the new one. At this point I don’t care. I’ll sleep on the floor somewhere.”

“Where’s Marsh?”

“Comatose in his own bed, I expect,” Connor replied, pleased the coffee actually tasted like coffee to his spinning senses. “Let’s not talk about my work—you’ll see it all in the paper anyway. Let’s talk about you and me going out somewhere for dinner.”

Marie smiled. “We’ll see if you can manage breakfast at four in the afternoon first. You really should have just gone home, Connor.”

He looked at her over the coffee cup and let his smile fade. His gaze held hers, and he let the last day show in his eyes, just a bit, never more than a bit, and told her the truth. “I wanted a better image in my mind to drift to sleep on.”

She blinked, gave a very slight nod, and then smiled at him. “Want me to sing you a bedtime song over the phone so you can listen to me too?”

He chuckled but thought he might push her to do exactly that later on. “It’s been a brutal couple days.”

She reached over and touched his hand, for her, quite a shift to be the one reaching out first, and it felt nice as her hand settled firmly on his. “Eat, sleep. Tomorrow the world will still be insanely crazy, but you’ll be back standing upright to face it.”

“Exactly.” He nodded at the waitress’s offer of more coffee. “I left the chief at the office where he planned to shut the door on his office and catnap on the couch, and Marsh at home, threatening the world at large if anyone bothered him in the next eight hours. I figured half an hour for food and twelve hours of comatose time and I might figure out what day of the week it is again.”

He yawned and it cracked his jaw. “Talk to me, Marie, and I don’t care about what. I’m just going to sit here and wilt some more while I eat and enjoy looking at you.”

She dumped a packet of sugar in her coffee, and he would put her on a full blush starting, but she gamely nodded and took up the challenge. “The paintings came in as magnificent as I expected. I think Tracey is going to take the lake painting as a gift for Marsh as she loved it on sight. And I think I might give Daniel that Gibson you knew he would like so I can make room for this really gorgeous study in the color red. It’s cubes and squares and firework bursts, and it reaches out and grabs you from across the gallery.”

Connor listened and smiled and thought about having a future with her one day, the idea growing stronger with every moment together. She was a hole filler in his life, a hole that had needed to be filled for a very long time.

“What?” She paused her chatting to smile at him, the blush growing.

“Our breakfast is here.”

“That was not what you were thinking.”

“I know.” He shifted aside his coffee and ice-water glass to accept the plate, suddenly feeling a smidgen more awake. “Eat.”

“Connor.”

He just smiled at her. “You want to share those strawberries? They look good.”

She’d ordered a cheeseburger and a fruit bowl. She set the bowl between them. “You’re going to tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Not right now I’m not.” He smiled at her, because she amused him and pleased him and he liked looking at her over breakfast foods. “I told the patrol guy to pick me up in forty minutes. Tell the rest of the stuff about the paintings.”

She unfolded her napkin. “Do you like art?”

“I will by the time you tell me all the reasons you love it.” He picked up his coffee and smiled at her. “Going to keep the Denart?”

“It’s already been moved upstairs to the apartment,” she admitted.

“I knew it. What else was in the recent shipment?”

She talked and he ate and he thought about maybe next week … that would be a good time to talk with Marsh about the two of them starting to double-date. Nothing too hard to sort out, just two sisters, two partners, figuring out how to shove the job aside for long enough to do some courting in proper fashion.

Marsh held out the second coffee mug he carried and stepped back to let Connor enter his home Sunday afternoon. “You don’t look that much more awake than when I left you yesterday. You were supposed to sleep, remember?”