Читать книгу Point Of Departure - Laurie Breton, Laurie Breton - Страница 8

A single unmarked police car sat at the curb behind Sam’s Volvo. Mia parked three houses down and locked the Blazer. Adjusting the soft leather gloves she’d worn to ward off the evening chill, she walked up the three steps to the door and rang the bell. A plainclothes cop wearing a shoulder holster and a deliberately neutral expression answered the door. Beneath the police academy stiffness, he was cute as the proverbial button. Tall and lanky and handsome. But he looked so young that she felt like a pedophile for the salacious thoughts that raced through her head. She shoved them aside and followed him into the living room, where her brother sat on the cream-colored leather couch. His hair was mussed, as though he’d been running his fingers through it.

In the armchair across from him sat another plainclothes cop, a fortyish woman in a gray suit, her chestnut hair clipped in a short, no-nonsense style. Her blue eyes were sharp and intelligent as she gave Mia a thorough once-over.

Sam glanced up, looking unfocused and weary. When he saw Mia, his entire face changed. Warmth flooded his eyes, and one corner of his mouth turned up in a half smile so loaded with gratitude it was almost painful to witness. He looked like a drowning man who’d just been thrown a life preserver. “Mia,” he said, standing and crossing the room. He took her in his arms and hugged her, hard. “Thank God you got here so quickly.”

She glanced past his shoulder at the cops and whispered, “Sam? What the hell is going on here?”

“Ms. DeLucca,” the female cop said in a brisk voice as no-nonsense as her hairstyle. “Detective Lorna Abrams.” She gave a brief nod toward the younger cop. “Detective Policzki. We’d appreciate it if you could sit down with us and answer a few questions.”

Mia stepped free of her brother’s arms. Policzki, her erstwhile doorman, stood in front of the bay window, feet planted firmly apart, arms crossed, his silent demeanor rivaling that of the guards at Buckingham Palace. Mia had an overwhelming urge to tickle him, just to see if he was human.

Squelching it, she removed her coat and gloves and, tossing them over the back of the couch, took a seat. “Kaye is missing?” she said, her gaze moving back and forth between the two detectives.

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Abrams said.

“Meaning?”

“This afternoon,” she explained, “Kaye Winslow had an appointment to show one of your listings. The Worthington house on Commonwealth.”

“Yes, of course. She mentioned it this morning.”

“When the buyer arrived, nobody answered his knock, but the house was unlocked, so he walked in—” Abrams and Policzki met each other’s eyes before she turned her gaze back on Mia “—directly into a homicide scene.”

Mia felt the color draining from her face. “Homicide,” she whispered. “Is Kaye—”

“We don’t know where Kaye is, Ms. DeLucca. The victim was a male, and so far we’ve been unable to identify him. Mrs. Winslow wasn’t at the scene.” Abrams paused. “But her briefcase was.”

“Oh, God.” This was every Realtor’s secret nightmare, the fear that they would place their trust in the wrong person and end up paying the price for the mistake. How many hours had Mia spent alone with some stranger in an empty house? Every time she met a new client, the fear was there, hovering at the periphery of her mind. Some of her peers had taken to carrying stun guns for protection. Just last week a fellow broker had shown her the Taser she kept hidden in her purse.

“What about the buyer?” Mia demanded. “Has anybody talked to him?”

Policzki spoke up. “Philip Armentrout. CEO of Geminicorp in Cambridge. They manufacture medical equipment. Mr. Armentrout has been questioned, and his whereabouts prior to arriving at the Comm Ave residence verified. He’s still not off the hook, but he looks clean.”

“He looks clean? What the hell does that mean?”

Policzki’s eyes were brown, a soft, rich shade that was completely at odds with his cool demeanor. “It means,” he said, “that we have no reason to believe Philip Armentrout was involved.”

“That’s just ducky,” she said. “In the meantime, what are you doing to try to find Kaye?”

It was Abrams who answered. “We’re following standard protocol—”

“Standard protocol? What the hell does that mean? My brother’s wife is missing. A man is dead. She could be in terrible danger! While you’re sitting here talking to me, the trail could be going cold. She might be—”

“Mia,” Sam warned, “please. Just listen to what she has to say.”

“Let me finish,” Abrams said, not unkindly. “We’re pouring all our available resources into locating Mrs. Winslow. But these things take time. In the absence of a crystal ball, we need to talk to a lot of people, ask a lot of questions. Which is why I’m sitting here talking to you right now.”

Mia reminded herself to keep her cool, reminded herself that these two people were supposed to know what they were doing. They were professionals who did this kind of thing every day, and they weren’t frazzled and frightened like she was. As Johnny Winslow’s daughter, she’d learned early that it didn’t pay to antagonize the cops. Taking a deep breath to quell her rising temper, she said, “I’m sorry. But I’ve never been faced with a situation like this before. Go ahead. Ask me anything. I’ll answer as best I can.”

From across the room, Policzki inquired, “Ms. DeLucca, can you think of any reason why Kaye Winslow might want to disappear?”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “Right? You’re not suggesting she disappeared of her own free will?”

“We have to look at all the possibilities.”

He was too damn cool, and her temper began to flare again. “There is no reason. I’m sure Sam has already told you that.”

Policzki barely gave Sam a glance. “We’ve heard what Dr. Winslow had to say. Now we want to hear your point of view.”

“You just heard it. This is preposterous. Tell me, Detective, exactly what do you know so far?”

“Three things,” Policzki said, with such unflappable cool that he reminded her of the infamous Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame. All that was missing was the pointed ears. “Number one,” he said, “a man is dead. Number two, Mrs. Winslow’s briefcase was found at the scene. Her BlackBerry, her wallet, her credit cards and identification were all there. Number three, Mrs. Winslow herself was absent.” He paused, those brown eyes of his burning a hole in Mia. “You do the math.”

“It’s all circumstantial. It means nothing.”

“Which is why,” Lorna Abrams said, “we have to ask so many questions. That’s how we find the truth.”

“Fine,” she said. “Here’s the truth. I have no idea why Kaye might want to disappear. She leads a charmed life. Look around you, Detectives. She has a successful business, a lovely home, a picture-perfect family. What possible reason could she have for wanting to leave that behind?”

“Homicide,” Policzki stated, “is a pretty compelling reason.”

“But there’s no reason why she would be involved in a homicide! Not unless she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time!”

“That’s a possibility we’re looking into,” Abrams said. “What about enemies? Anybody you can think of who doesn’t like her?”

Mia clasped her hands in her lap and tried to find a diplomatic way of answering the question. “We all have people who dislike us,” she said. “Nobody’s universally loved. Kaye is a strong, vibrant, forceful businesswoman. A salesperson, with all the attendant clichés that go along with the title. She’s good at marketing, good at persuasion, good at manipulating people into doing what she wants. She’s a bit ruthless, and I mean that only in the most positive of ways. Because of that, she moves a lot of real estate. In our business, that’s the ultimate goal. Kaye can be very charming. She can also be—” she shot a glance at Sam “—shall we say difficult? A little abrasive at times. She goes after what she wants, and sometimes her methods aren’t quite conducive to winning friends and influencing people.” Mia gave an apologetic shrug of her shoulders. “But as far as anybody wanting to do her harm, no. That I can’t imagine.”

“Do you think you might come up with any names? People she may have had problems with in the recent past? Anybody who thought they got cheated in a real estate deal? Somebody she had words with? Somebody she cut off in traffic?”

“No. You’re going on a wild-goose chase. Whoever this dead man is, he was obviously the target. Not Kaye. Otherwise—” She shot another glance at Sam, took a deep breath and continued “—otherwise, you’d have found two victims. Or a different one. Am I not correct?”

“Possibly,” Abrams said. “Possibly not. It’s too soon to start theorizing about what happened. We have to look at all the information first, and we just don’t have that yet.”

“And while you’re gathering information, my sister-in-law could be dying. Or already dead.” Mia glanced at her brother, who sat beside her on the couch, his hands in his lap, his expression slack, as though he was in shock. “Has it even occurred to you people that she might be injured?” Mia turned her attention back to the cops. “That she might have driven herself to the hospital? Have you checked the local emergency rooms?”

“We have somebody looking into that.”

“I’d like to backtrack a minute,” Policzki said. “You said that people sometimes found Kaye to be difficult. In your personal dealings with her, have you found that to be true?”

Mia didn’t like the direction this was headed. Coolly, she said, “Only occasionally. I’m more of a soft sell than Kaye. For the most part, our personalities mesh in a way that works for us. We have good chemistry. Surprisingly few disagreements. We work well together.”

“Okay,” Abrams said. “She’s married to your brother. You worked together. You saw each other every day. Women in relationships like that often share the intimate details of their lives. Did she have any deep, dark secrets? Maybe something—” Abrams eyed Sam “—she didn’t want her husband to know about?”

Mia didn’t like the way the woman spoke of Kaye in the past tense, as if it were a foregone conclusion that she wasn’t coming back. “Kaye and I aren’t that close,” she said, deliberately using present tense. “We have a good working relationship, but we don’t share the intimate details of our lives with each other. She isn’t the type to share confidences. And neither am I.”

Don’t trust, don’t tell. That was what she’d learned at Johnny Winslow’s knee. The less said to outsiders, the better. The fewer people you trusted, the safer you were. She’d learned it as a little girl and still, at thirty-six, she hadn’t been able to erase it. If you don’t tell anybody your secrets, they stay secret. They still resonated in her head, the philosophies of the petty thief and small-time crook whose DNA she shared. Johnny Winslow’s legacy to his kids.

Thanks, Dad.

The policewoman’s cool blue eyes elicited in her an inexplicable desire to squirm like a little kid sitting on the miscreants’ bench outside the principal’s office. Mia hadn’t done a thing wrong, yet the woman’s intense scrutiny made her feel guilty. “Would you call her a friend?” Abrams asked.

Again, she pondered how to answer, finally decided on the truth. “We’re friendly,” she said.

“Which isn’t quite the same thing as being friends.”

“There are different levels of friendship, Detective.”

“Interesting answer. How long have you and Kaye been partners?”

“Three years. I started the agency four years ago. The market was strong and, as the business grew, I found myself with more work than I could handle. So I decided to take on a partner. It was a good business decision. Kaye’s brought in a tremendous number of new clients. Both buyers and sellers. As I said, she’s a real go-getter.”

“And has the agency been lucrative?”

“Lucrative enough. There are always start-up costs involved in running your own business, and it takes a year or two before you really begin to see any profits. But yes, the last three years, since Kaye came on board, we’ve done quite well.”

“And she’s been married to your brother for how long?”

“Two and a half years. They met at a dinner party at my house.”

“So you knew Kaye before your brother did.”

“Yes. Over the years, we’d met two or three times—real estate’s a small world. Even in a city the size of Boston, you keep running into the same people. But we didn’t really know each other as anything more than nodding acquaintances. She was recommended to me by Marty Scalia, a close friend of mine. He runs the Scalia Agency. I worked for five years for Marty before I left to start my own agency. When I realized I needed a partner, I turned to Marty because I knew he had his finger on the pulse of the local real estate world. Kaye had come to work for him after changing agencies a couple of times. She was a rising star, on her way up. He recommended her to me. It’s a decision I’ve never had reason to regret.”

“Is that common?” Policzki said. “Hopping from agency to agency?”

“It’s not uncommon. An agent can sell real estate anywhere, but like anything else, it’s better to have the right fit.”

Policzki crossed the room and sat on the arm of the couch, uncomfortably close to her. “Where were you today, Ms. DeLucca?”

Another facet of Johnny Winslow’s legacy sprang to life in full Technicolor: rampant paranoia. “Excuse me?” she said. “Are you implying that I might have had something to do with this—this mess? Because if you are, Detective, I resent the implication.”

“It’s a routine question,” Abrams said. “You’re one of the most significant people in Kaye Winslow’s life. The homicide, and her disappearance, took place at one of your real estate listings. We have to ask.”

Mia raised her chin. “I was at a conference in Springfield. I left at six-thirty this morning and got back about a half hour ago.”

Policzki said, “Is there anybody who can confirm your whereabouts?”

Every time the young detective opened his mouth, she liked him a little less. Of their own volition, her fists clenched. Forcing them to relax, she snapped, “Just the hundred and fifty real estate agents who attended the seminar I ran from two to four this afternoon, ‘Maintaining Strong Sales in a Troubled Economy.’ I can give you a brochure if you don’t believe me.”

Abrams scribbled something on a notepad. Ignoring Mia’s sarcasm, she said, “If we need it, we’ll ask.” She dropped the pad into her briefcase and snapped it shut. Rising from the chair, she said, “Dr. Winslow, we’ll need a recent photo of your wife. A good, clear one.”

“Check the agency Web page,” Mia said. “You’ll find a recent photo.”

Policzki reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat, briefly flashing his service revolver in its underarm holster, and pulled out a couple of business cards and a pen. He handed one of the cards to Mia, then flipped over the second one and wrote the URL she gave him on the back.

“That’ll do for now,” Abrams said. “I trust you’ll both be available if we have any more questions.”

To Mia, it sounded vaguely like a threat. She glared at Abrams, then at her stone-faced partner. “So what happens next?”

“We keep doing what we’ve been doing, and hope we get a break. We’ll contact you if there’s anything you need to know. We’d appreciate you doing the same. If you think of anything, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem, please call. Oh, and one more thing. We’ll need you to make up a list of Kaye Winslow’s friends, coworkers, people she sees on a regular basis. Names, addresses, phone numbers if you have them. Everybody who’s a significant part of her life. We’d like it as soon as possible.”

Was there any end to the woman’s demands? Mia followed them to the front hall and held the door for them. Abrams breezed out without so much as a goodbye, but Policzki paused at the threshold. His eyes met Mia’s and stayed there for an instant. “Have a nice evening,” he said.

“Right,” Mia said. “You, too.”

And she slammed the door behind them.

The house seemed too quiet. Even the movement of traffic on nearby Tremont Street seemed hushed and distant. Sam returned to the living room, his footsteps silent on the Aubusson carpet. His coloring was ashen, his hair a mess from his habit of raking nervous fingers through it. “Can I get you a drink?” he offered. “Glass of wine? Something stronger? You look like you could use one.”

“That goes double for you,” Mia said. “Scotch, if you have it. What the hell is this all about, Sam?”

He moved to the bar, dropped ice from a bucket into a pair of squat glasses and poured two fingers of Glenlivet into them. Crossing the room, he handed one to her. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Who is this dead guy? Is there something going on that I don’t know about?”

He sat down across from her, in the chair that Lorna Abrams had used. “Of course not,” he said. But he didn’t meet her eyes, and Mia felt a flicker of fear.

“Sam?” she prodded.

He let out a long-suffering sigh and closed his eyes. “Fine,” he said, opening them again. “I might as well tell you. We had a terrible fight the other night.” Still avoiding her gaze, he lowered his chin to his chest and studied the movement of the ice cubes swirling around in his glass. “I said reprehensible things to her. Every one of them true, but still—” He raised the drink and knocked it back in a single swallow. “I didn’t tell them.”

“The cops? Why?”

His troubled eyes finally met hers. “There’s no sense in confusing the issue,” he stated. “I don’t want Abrams and Policzki wasting their time focusing on me. They need to find her.”

This wasn’t adding up. “Why would they focus on you?”

“Are you kidding? The husband’s always the first person they look at. And I don’t have an alibi for the time in question. If only I’d known she was going to disappear—” He choked back a laugh. “I could have managed to manufacture one.”

“Oh, Sam.”

Darkly, he said, “Good thing Mom never lived to see this day.”

Their mother had died far too young. Johnny Winslow had seen to that, and Mia still hated him for it. But Mom’s death had nothing to do with this situation. Bringing it up was Sam’s way of redirecting Mia’s attention.

“Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself,” she said.

“Damn right, I’m feeling sorry for myself! Yesterday, my life was rolling along the way it always does. Stale and boring and comfortably predictable. Now my wife is missing, she might have been involved in a homicide, and I can’t even tell the cops the truth for fear of tying a noose around my neck.”

“You don’t think her disappearance has anything to do with your fight?”

“I don’t know what the hell to think.”

“What was the fight about?”

He lifted clear blue eyes to hers. “Please. Allow me a little dignity. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.”

“When was any fight ever pretty? But why keep it from the cops, if you don’t have anything to hide?” She gave her brother a long, considering look. “You don’t have anything to hide, do you?”

“For God’s sake, Mia. Don’t you know me better than that?”

She’d thought she did. But something wasn’t adding up here. Were there problems in the relationship? Issues she wasn’t aware of? She’d always believed that Kaye and Sam’s marriage was solid. Neither of them had given her any reason to believe anything else.

But now, he’d planted a seed of doubt. She wanted to prod, wanted to shake him if that’s what it took to get the truth out of him. But she knew her brother too well to push. If he’d thought it was any of her business, he would have told her. It would be pointless to pry. Instead, she asked, “Have you told Gracie yet?”

Sam shook his head. “She’s upstairs. I suppose I have to tell her something, don’t I?”

“Do you want me to do it?”

The ambivalence in his eyes told her he wanted to say yes. But to his credit, he shook his head again. “She’s my daughter. It’s my job. But thanks for offering.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. Or, for that matter, what to do.” He rose from the chair, walked to the bar and poured himself a refill. This time, he didn’t bother with ice. “I have a job I need to get to tomorrow morning. Classes to teach. Exams to grade. The semester won’t grind to a halt because my wife has disappeared.”

For the first time, the enormity of the situation landed squarely on top of her. Mia set down her untouched glass. “I think you should tell the police about the fight,” she said. “Better they should hear it from you than from some loudmouthed neighbor.”

“How the hell do you propose I do that? Call Abrams up and tell her I forgot one tiny detail? That’ll go over big.”

“Abrams won’t be happy no matter how she hears it. But if she has to find out from someone else, it’ll make you look as if you’re trying to hide something. And they’ll waste precious time trying to prove that you had something to do with Kaye’s disappearance. Time they could spend on finding out what really happened. We don’t know who this dead man is. Or where Kaye is. If somebody’s taken her…” Mia paused, her own words sounding implausible “…there might not be much time.”

Gracie Lee Winslow was fat.

Kaye kept telling her it was all in her head, but Gracie knew the truth. She saw it every time she looked in the mirror. She was chunky. Hideous. In response to this catastrophe, Gracie had tried every diet under creation: Atkins, South Beach, low-fat, low-carb, grapefruit, watermelon, vegetarian and plain old starvation. She’d even tried that crazy Bible diet, the one where you only ate foods that were mentioned in the Bible. She’d joined an online chapter of Weight Watchers, had bought a totally gay workout video and exercised until she grew so weak she nearly passed out. She’d even given laxatives a try. But nothing she’d attempted had managed to change the reflection gazing back at her from the mirror. All she could see were her chipmunk cheeks, her pudgy belly that curved out instead of in, and the thunder thighs that rubbed together when she walked. Gracie hated her oversize nose, hated her frizzy hair, hated her snooty private school with its cliques of skinny girls with their perfect hair and their perfect faces and their perfect bodies and their perfect lives. She hated that her mom was dead, hated that her dad barely noticed she was alive. Hated everything about her wretched life.

Most of all, she hated her stepmother.

If Kaye had been a nicer person, Gracie might have been willing to tolerate her. But there was something about the woman that set her teeth on edge. Not that she didn’t understand why her dad had married Kaye. Like those perfect girls at school, her stepmother was drop-dead gorgeous. The woman exuded sex like a cloud of perfume. Pheromones. What man could resist? Even though it was beyond gross to imagine her dad having sex with Kaye, Gracie understood that he was a man, and men were all alike. They all wanted the same thing, and any woman who looked like Kaye Winslow would always have men groveling at her feet.

It made Gracie want to hurl.

For the last two years and seven months, her stepmother had been destroying her life. Like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Kaye tiptoed around the house, silently following Gracie from room to room, spying on her. Watching. Listening. Judging. Kaye had snooped in her bedroom while she was at school; she’d pawed through Gracie’s backpack, looking for God only knew what. She’d even gone through the call list on Gracie’s cell phone to find out who she’d been talking to. The bitch undoubtedly would have read all her e-mails, too, if Gracie hadn’t password protected her computer.

It was infuriating. At fifteen, she was entitled to her privacy. But Kaye was determined to know every move her stepdaughter made. Determined to turn over every rock and uncover every last one of Gracie’s secrets.

But if Kaye thought she held the upper hand, she had another thing coming, because Gracie wasn’t the only one with secrets. Her darling stepmother had more than her share, and the secrets Kaye held would blow her marriage right out of the water if Dad ever found out about them. Thanks to the floor register in her bedroom, Gracie had a front-row seat to everything that went on downstairs. All she had to do was roll back the Oriental carpet and lie on the floor, and she could see and hear everything through that register. Kaye was so damn stupid she didn’t even notice. Which meant that Gracie had accumulated a lot of dirt on her stepmother. A lot of dirt.

None of which meant diddly-squat compared to what she’d just heard. This was some serious shit.

When the cops had first come to the door, she’d freaked, afraid they were here about her. Afraid they knew what she’d done. But that hadn’t been it at all. Something had happened today, something bad. Kaye was missing, and a man was dead. There was talk of a gun. Murder. And Gracie had the sick feeling that she might have been the one to set all this in motion.

He was only supposed to follow Kaye. Find out where she went, who she saw, what she did when she was away from the house. Gracie’s directions to him had been very clear: Be discreet. Whatever you do, don’t let her know you’re following her.

Something had gone horribly wrong. Dad was downstairs right now, pacing the floor and drinking Glenlivet straight from the bottle. That wasn’t a good sign; Dad wasn’t much of a drinker, and that stuff tasted like crap. She knew how awful it was because she’d been taking the occasional nip since she was thirteen, since the day Dad first brought Kaye to the house and he’d looked at the woman that way. Like she was some piece of meat on a stick. That was the night Gracie’s life had started its downhill slide. It was also the first time she’d ever gotten shit-faced drunk. She’d woken up the next day with the mother of all hangovers, but at least she’d remembered to refill the bottle with water so nobody would notice how low the level of the liquid inside had dropped.

She flipped the carpet back over the floor register, went to her desk and logged on to her laptop. Please let him be online, she thought as she signed into AIM. Please, please, PLEASE let him be online. She typed in his screen name, then checked his availability.

AIM told her: Magnum357 is not currently signed on.

Gracie let out a hard breath as dread bottled up inside her chest. She swallowed a couple of times, just to make sure her throat still worked. She didn’t know any other way to reach him. They’d only started hanging out together a couple of months ago. She didn’t know where he lived, didn’t have his cell phone number. All she knew was his screen name—Magnum357—and his real name—Carlos—which, for all she knew, might not even be the real deal.

This was bad. This was really bad. If Dad found out she’d been seeing Carlos, who was definitely on the wrong side of twenty, not to mention dangerous, she’d be grounded for the next thirty years. And if the cops thought she knew something about Kaye’s disappearance—not that she did, but if they found out what she’d done it would make her look pretty damn guilty—she could go to jail. For a really long time.

This was a lose-lose situation, and guess who the loser would turn out to be? Sooner or later the truth would come out about what she’d asked Carlos to do. When it did, the shit would hit the fan.

And at that point, no matter how you looked at it, she was toast.