Читать книгу The Private Concierge - Suzanne Forster, Suzanne Forster - Страница 10

Rick prowled the darkened house using only a penlight. He wore latex gloves and slipcovers over his shoes the way evidence technicians did to avoid contamination. He was familiar enough with the place to find his way around in the dark, but didn’t want to chance disturbing the crime scene evidence and signaling that someone had been here.

Not that anyone would notice, he suspected. It was just after midnight, and the guard had changed. The rookie had been replaced by a retiree. Sound asleep in a chair by the house’s front entrance, the night-shift guy was doing a good imitation of a rusty buzz saw.

Rick had parked on a side street, walked over and let himself in through the back way, using a customized attachment on his pocketknife to jimmy the lock, rather than touch the knob, which should have been dusted for prints but didn’t appear to have been. He was here to check out the crime scene, but he was also looking for the package he’d passed off to Ned all those years ago for safekeeping. And maybe the darkness would help him focus on his mission, instead of the countless reminders of his friend.

He’d identified the body at the morgue today. It was Ned without question. Rick saw the faded scar on his friend’s chin even before he saw the bullet hole. When they were kids, he and Ned had believed they could do anything—jump off roofs and fly, walk on water—and they had the scars to prove it. Nothing daunted them, even when Ned missed a branch playing Tarzan, fell to the earth and split open his chin. They’d been eight at the time.

Rick turned off the light and stopped, needing a moment to deal with all of it, to breathe against the suffocating weight in his chest. He’d gone numb after his visit to the morgue, and he wished to hell he could stay that way. Scarred or not, the face he’d seen on the concrete slab wasn’t his friend. It was a death mask with Ned’s features. The body that had housed his larger-than-life spirit was an empty shell. He was gone.

Rick didn’t believe in heaven and hell. He couldn’t console himself with the belief that he would ever see his friend again. The Ned who’d been like a part of him had vanished, leaving Rick feeling as empty as the body in the morgue. He couldn’t even hold a clear picture of Ned in his mind without having it replaced by a corpse with a bullet through its brain. There was no comfort to be found, even in his memories. That was why he had to find out what had happened. At least then he wouldn’t be haunted by questions.

When he left the morgue, he’d driven straight over to the West L.A. station to talk with his buddy, Don Cooper, in homicide, who wasn’t on the case but had confirmed that it was being handled by the big guns of the elite Robbery Homicide Division. Coop had heard unofficially that Ned’s celebrity status in the sports world warranted the high-level involvement, not because they believed it was anything other than a murder-suicide. Coop also confirmed that a suicide note had been found at the scene, but the contents had not been revealed.

And then, for some reason, he’d volunteered the kind of gun Ned had used. None of this information should have been shared with an outsider, which was why Rick had come to Coop. He was a talker. One of these days Coop was going to talk himself right out of a job, Rick imagined.

Rick beamed the light over the leather chair where Ned had been sitting when he pressed the barrel of a full-size 9 mm Glock to his right temple and pulled the trigger. The chalked outline showed him knocked to the left by the force of the discharge and slumped over the arm of the chair.

Jesus, what had made him do that?

Rick’s head swam with questions that were almost unbearable. Did Ned get that idea from him? Had the scene at the cabin triggered something in his friend? They’d done everything together as kids, and Rick had almost always been the leader, the instigator.

But Rick couldn’t let himself believe that, despite the lacerating guilt he felt. Ned was an adult, his own man. He wouldn’t have copycatted a suicide. Rick needed to start thinking like an investigator. What was Ned doing with a Glock? He didn’t own a gun and had no use for them. He’d always said he could do more damage with a baseball bat. Rick wondered if anyone had checked to see if Ned had bought a gun recently or had a permit to carry the gun that was used. Or dusted the empty shell casings for prints.

Rick flashed the beam from the chalked outline of Ned’s body to the woman’s on the floor at the foot of his chair. According to Coop, she’d died in a sexually degrading position while partially naked and restrained. The cause of death was suffocation. She’d had a cheap grocery-store plastic bag tied around her head.

Rick had asked Coop if burn marks were found on her genitals. He’d looked at Rick funny but hadn’t asked any questions. He’d said he didn’t know, but she probably hadn’t died quickly. The condition of the plastic bag, plus the way the vessels in her eyes had hemorrhaged indicated the suffocation might have been interrupted several times, perhaps intentionally.

Rick breathed a curse word. This was all wrong. He knew it to the depths of his being. This wasn’t a hero’s death. Suffocating a bound woman and then shooting yourself was cowardly. Ned wouldn’t have wanted to go out this way, or take her with him. He was trying to save Holly, not kill her.

Ned was drawn to self-destructive women, probably because of his mother. Her heroin habit had driven her to extremes, including hooking to get money for drugs. She’d died of an overdose when Ned was really young, and like a lot of kids with parents who screw up, he’d felt responsible. He’d been picking questionable women ever since, maybe thinking he could fix whatever was wrong. Or maybe they’d picked him. Nice guys like Ned were easy targets.

Rick looked from one chalked form to the other, trying to get a sense of the dominant emotion involved. Every crime scene had clues; the trick was to read them correctly. Murder was usually driven by fear or rage, but he didn’t pick up either here. There was a methodical feel to these crimes—and that wasn’t Ned. He’d said he was being blackmailed because of his sex practices, but he’d also said it was all lies. This crime scene said he was the liar. Only blind rage could have driven him to this. And why take his rage out on Holly? Unless he was being blackmailed by her.

Rick had no answers as he slowly flashed the beam around the rest of the room. The blood and spatter patterns were typical of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, and according to Coop, there’d been no sign of forced entry. Rick saw nothing else that stood out, and with every passing second the risk of being discovered increased. But there was one last thing that had to be done.

He moved silently to the hallway that led to the master bedroom. He passed a writing desk on the way, and the beam of his penlight struck something small and shiny. The desk drawer was partially open and a high-gloss business card was stuck in the sliding mechanism on the side. Rick could imagine a technician opening the drawer and finding the card, along with other things to be bagged as evidence, then unknowingly dropping the card while closing the drawer. Or it might have been something else entirely. Someone may have been in a great hurry to cover his tracks and grabbed for the card but dropped it. The killer perhaps?

Rick fished the card out and held it under the light. The initials TPC were elegantly scrolled down the left side in gold leaf. Laddered across the card just as elegantly were the words The Private Concierge. On the bottom right was a woman’s name, a phone number and an e-mail address. Lane Chandler.

The name was familiar, but Rick couldn’t place it. He turned the card over and found a one-word question scrawled in what looked like Ned’s handwriting: Extortion?

Was Ned accusing The Private Concierge of extortion or had he been looking for a surface to write on, grabbed the card and then tossed it in the desk drawer without realizing it had fallen down the side? And why hadn’t homicide or the crime scene guys noticed it? Rick had spotted it in the dark.

Rick was running out of time. He continued down the hall to the bedroom and went straight to the maple armoire. The largest drawer had a secret compartment with a safe in the back, but Rick found it unlocked—and empty. Either Ned had moved the package, which he wouldn’t have done without telling Rick, or the police had found it and taken it as evidence. And Rick couldn’t avoid the other possibility—that certain people still had a vested interest in the contents of the package, and one of them had been here. But if that was the case, what connection did it have to last night’s carnage?

Rick heard a scraping sound, metal chair legs against concrete. The officer was awake, maybe shifting position or getting up. He checked his pocket to make sure the business card was there, clicked off the penlight and headed for the back door. He’d watched Ned put the package in the compartment, but it was gone. And he couldn’t risk taking any more time to search for it.

Monday, October 7

Two days earlier

Lane Chandler? Rick stared hard at the business card, aware that his eyes were tired and stinging. He rubbed them, massaging the sockets with his thumbs to relieve the pressure. It was six in the morning, and he’d been up and down all night. His mind wouldn’t let him sleep for any length of time. There were too many questions, and primary among them was why her name had struck a chord.

He wasn’t familiar with the concierge service, and he didn’t know anyone named Lane Chandler, personally or otherwise. He’d heard the name somewhere, but he was exhausted and emotionally spent. He just couldn’t seem to place it. He thought back, mentally sorting through the names of his clients over the years. He could check the actual files, but something kept him stuck in the chair in his cubbyhole of a home office, playing alphabet games. It didn’t sound real. Who had a name like Lane Chandler? A movie star, maybe.

L.C. What other women’s name began with L? Not that many: Linda, Lydia, Lilly, Laurie, Leigh, Lucille, Lucy. Lucy?

Oh, Jesus. He rocked up from the chair and left it teetering. He didn’t know any women, but he knew a girl named Lane Chandler. Or had known one. He’d arrested the little brat fifteen years ago. She’d assumed the name of a B-movie star when she ran away from home. She’d told Rick’s partner, Mimi, that she’d picked some bit player from the old celluloid westerns with the stage name Lane Chandler. She liked the name, but not because the initials were L.C. That had been a coincidence. Taking on a man’s name had made her feel stronger and tougher, like she could handle herself on the mean streets of L.A.

And then what had she done but trash herself on those streets?

Rick paced the room, feeling like he was in a cage, but maybe he needed the confinement right now. Where would he go if he wasn’t hemmed in by these L-shaped walls? He might head south and never stop. South to the border. Run, don’t walk. Go, Rick, go. Get the holy hell out of here. Have some semblance of a life while you can. Meet a woman, fall in love for ten minutes. Give your heart away. It’s the only thing you have left of any worth.

Lane Chandler.

He slowed up and let his thoughts roll back a decade and a half. She was Lucy Cox. What a dangerously precocious kid that one had been, a real handful, the Jodi Foster of her time. Rick had picked her up for street prostitution—an open-and-shut case, given that she’d propositioned him. Blue-eyed and bold, she’d actually made him wish she was fifteen years older—and that had never happened before.

He’d been working juvenile vice since he’d signed on with the force, and dealing with drugged-out street urchins was enough to make any normal man want to put them in a straitjacket so they couldn’t hurt themselves or someone else. They were sad, angry and desperate. Too often they ended up dead. But she wasn’t one of them. She was something else, an underage madonna, luminous enough to light up skid row. The courts had put her in juvie, and Rick had helped make sure she didn’t get out until she was legal, eighteen.

Rick walked to the window and stood there, shirtless, in the rising beam of light, letting it warm him. Jeans were all he’d bothered with this morning. There wasn’t a woman around to complain about his bare chest—or appreciate it, for that matter. Hadn’t been for quite a while. His last long-term relationship, and only marriage, ended ten years ago, for the same reason most law enforcement marriages ended. Criminal neglect. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her. He just didn’t have the time or energy to love her the way she needed it. Couldn’t blame her for that. He shouldn’t have married in the first place, but he’d been young—and probably just selfish enough to want someone around on those interminable nights of soul-searching, someone to ease the loneliness.

The slam of a neighboring door brought his attention back to the view. His cubby was a converted storage room, and its only window looked out on the alley behind his house, exposing the back sides of a half block of badly weathered beach houses. The alley had little to recommend it, except bower after bower of glorious red and orange bougainvillea. Rick loved the stuff. It festooned the courtyard out front, too, and as far as he was concerned, it made his beach cottage look like a small palazzo.

Lane Chandler. God, he didn’t want to go back there. It wasn’t going to help anyone to dredge up that muck, least of all Ned. And there were so many other reasons not to pursue this investigation. A case like this could take months, years, even for a seasoned homicide detective, which Rick wasn’t. You needed the right resources, computer databases, labs and technicians to investigate a murder. He had access to none of that, and he was running out of time. Everything pointed to murder-suicide. The police had already written it off.

But foremost among the reasons to let this investigation go was her, Lucy Cox, all grown up and running her own concierge service. Why didn’t that surprise him?

He walked back to his desk, swept up her card, crushed it in his fist and dropped it in the trash. And then he left the room.

He got as far as the living room, as far as the doors to his beloved courtyard, before a realization stopped him. Like a bomb it hit him. What were the odds of so many seemingly disparate things converging on that one night at Ned’s place? Rick had found Ned and his girlfriend dead, the package missing and Lane Chandler’s card stuck to Ned’s desk, all within the same time frame. Or what appeared to be the same time frame. The package could have been missing awhile, but Rick didn’t think so. Ned would have mentioned it. And Rick suspected the card was recent, too. Ned wouldn’t have let that slip, either. But maybe that was what Ned had been trying to say the night he showed up at the cabin.

What Ned didn’t know, what no one knew except Rick, was that Lucy Cox was connected to that missing package. She was the catalyst for what had happened fifteen years ago—and the reason Rick had left the force.

If she really was Lane Chandler now, Rick questioned whether it was a coincidence that Ned had come across her somewhere. Had she approached him because she wanted the package herself? Why? He could think of people who might want to get their hands on it, but why her? Blackmail, most likely. And how did she know that Ned had it?

He turned and slammed back through the house, swearing to himself. He nearly took the door off the hinges as he entered his office, and the first thing he did was pick up the trash can. Now, where the hell was that card?