Perish Page 27

  Guilt.

  She knew that covering up Jack’s murders—and her own—violated the laws she had by association sworn to uphold. She felt the guilt of the reflexively obedient. She felt guilty for leaving unsolved murders on her colleagues’ books when she could clear them. She felt guilty for lying by omission to every single person in her life—other than Jack—Denny, Carol, Alex, Riley. But did she feel guilty that these people, the child pornographer, the elder abuser, the rapist, Gerry Graham, were dead?

  No.

  Not at all.

  Where did that leave her?

  She patted the cat while the phone rang in her hand.

  *

  Ned and his crew had been busily fund-raising for Kurt Resnick’s defense. Jack didn’t tell him that they would be releasing their cause célèbre as soon as they returned to the station. But they took a moment out to study the photo of Patrick Jason Caldwell, cluck to themselves, and insist that they had never seen him before. The beard made it difficult to be sure, of course, but each protester and Ned himself seemed certain they had never encountered the man, on either side of the picket line. They also denied knowing who took a shot at Anna and/or Maggie. Most seemed genuinely horrified at the idea.

  “You think he killed Anna Hernandez?” Ned Swift asked them.

  “We’d like to talk to him,” Riley hedged.

  “I have over a hundred affidavits telling the story of Sterling Financial, and that’s right here in Cuyahoga County. Multiply that by the rest of the country, and the question isn’t which of Sterling’s ex-clients would want to murder their staff. It’s which ones wouldn’t.”

  “But Anna Hernandez didn’t work for Sterling. In a sense, she worked against them.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying all along! The Federal Reserve pretends it’s a gatekeeper, but all it’s done is hold the gate open for the Wall Street firms who want to keep making money hand over fist. Who talked Morgan into buying Bear Sterns? Who bailed them out back in 2009? Who’s been printing money in order to keep them shored up without inflation sucking us all into a downward vortex? The Fed! And as their representative, this Hernandez woman—”

  “Deserved to die?” Jack finished, his jaw set.

  “I’m not exactly saying that—” Ned looked up at Jack, and something he saw there made him pale slightly and backpedal. “I’m not saying that, of course. I’m saying an unbalanced personality might see it that way.”

  “Someone overly biased, in other words,” Jack said. He didn’t truly suspect Ned Swift, more interested in camera angles than in actually getting his hands dirty. But he wanted to yank the guy’s chain a little. He wanted to yank it until it ripped his head from his body.

  Ned opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again. “I want to do anything we can possibly do to help you find this murderer, Detective. But I have never seen that man or heard his name before in my life.”

  *

  Maggie, curled on her couch, cat in her lap, had the phone pressed to her ear, glad her brother had happened to call. He was the only person she wanted to talk to after such a day. His bandmates had already told him twice that he needed to mosey himself and his guitar toward the stage, their set time approached, but he kept asking her questions. “How are you doing with all this?”

  “It’s not like we were friends.” Although they had been shot at together. Which, of course, she did not tell Alex now.

  “You were on your way to becoming them. You connected; that’s the important thing.”

  Musicians loved connections. “I know. I feel so sorry for her, that’s all. I’m not … I’m not used to being personally acquainted with murder victims. And bewilderment doesn’t help—the cops don’t have a clue who this guy is or what he has against Sterling.”

  “Turn your mind off.” He frequently gave her this, for her, impossible advice. Alex believed in meditation. Also in all-organic foods and P90X, but those came up in different conversations.

  “For once I think I can. I’m so exhausted I’ll barely be able to stumble to my bed.” She could hear his drummer calling him a third time as a light knock sounded at her door. “Go play your music, bro.”

  “Go to bed, sis.”

  They each promised to obey and Maggie hung up, then gently removed the cat from her lap. The cat protested, but Maggie left it on the couch as she walked toward her kitchen, automatically checking to see if she had locked the door. Once again, she hadn’t. And a shadow hovered through the crack at the bottom.

  A stab of irrational fear pierced the back of her neck.

  Nothing to worry about, she told herself. Gerry Graham was dead. His cronies would hardly bother to off the obscure fingerprint analyst who hadn’t had a chance to convict him.

  Still, she padded silently forward on bare feet. She reached for the dead bolt.

  Someone knocked again.

  Startled all out of proportion, she froze, her heart pounding. Deep breath. An assassin wouldn’t knock. Don’t be stupid. She put a cautious eye to the peephole.

  In the hallway stood the nice delivery boy from Totally Fresh! He held up a white paper sack with the restaurant’s logo. “New customer thank-you gift. Compliments of Totally Fresh!”

  She opened the door, and suddenly everything made sense.

  Chapter 32

  Jack leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the portable whiteboard Riley had installed in the aisle. Photos of their three victims stared back at him, their photographed faces relaxed and happy—or in Joanna’s case, as happy as she could emulate. They would be right to look more accusing, he thought. He had failed them completely. He still had no idea why Patrick Jason Caldwell had killed them or where the man might be right now.

  “Let’s sum up,” Riley began.

  “Let’s not,” Jack groaned.

  “We’ve released Kurt Resnick, who’s still pretending he killed Joanna Moorehouse, has no idea about Tyra, and, obviously, couldn’t have done anything to Anna. Ned and his protesters say they don’t know anything about a Patrick Caldwell. Let’s say they’re lying and this is some elaborate charade to call attention to Sterling’s misdeeds, they hire Caldwell and then use Resnick as a spokesman, knowing that they can always pull Caldwell out of a hat for a last-minute not-guilty—”

  “They couldn’t know we’d find the print. Or the semen. And if they did, how’d they talk Caldwell into leaving clues to his own identity at two murders?”

  Riley paced silently, back and forth in front of the whiteboard. “I said it was a theory. I didn’t say it was a good one.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “Most likely Kurt is a whack job and Ned and his gang are opportunists. Then we have the esteemed Mr. Bowman, who will be picked up by the feds for bribery as soon as he steps out of his extra-roomy, drinks-included first-class seat from New York. Of all our players I can most easily see him having the balls and the resources to hire a guy like Caldwell. Maybe he balked on the merger and Joanna let spill that she had him on video. Maybe Tyra wasn’t as squeaky clean as everybody thought, or maybe she figured she’d help Joanna this one last time, put the squeeze on Bowman, get the company sold, and then she—Tyra, I mean—could wash her hands of the whole sordid mess. Bowman should have been afraid of Anna, who would have been digging into this for all she was worth. White collar has gone over her briefcase. It seems she had her suspicions about some missing funds—no doubt part of Joanna’s six hundred million—and had reams of information implicating Carter & Poe in the price fixing. But her boss at the Fed says she would e-mail weekly updates. They already had half her investigation on file and killing her would have been pointless. On the other hand, Bowman wouldn’t have known that.”

  Jack said, “Why not Mearan? Bowman could have guessed that Tyra and Anna knew about the payoff, but he had to assume Mearan knew whatever Joanna did.”

  Now Riley slumped into his desk chair. “We keep coming back to little Jeremy, don’t we? If our killer, or whoever hired Caldwell, cons
idered Joanna a threat, then they had to include Mearan. He belonged in her pocket, career-wise and in every other respect. Why kill her and yet he’s still walking around? Unless he’s the one who did it? He hired Caldwell. How do we know he isn’t Caldwell? Young man, dark hair—”

  “Fingerprints,” Jack said. “He gave his to us, and his DNA. Maggie already checked and they don’t match.”

  “Okay, back to Caldwell as gun hired by Mearan. He gets rid of Joanna, figures he’ll move right into her spot and go to New York where big money is made and big parties are had.”

  “Sterling isn’t a monarchy. He can’t inherit the CEO spot, and besides, what about Lauren? She’s in his way.”

  Riley said, “She’s got the husband and kids. He can’t attack her in her living room, and apparently Caldwell doesn’t know any other way to do it. He’s only comfortable working in the home. Like a midwife. This is why when my girls start talking about getting a place of their own …”

  Jack raised one eyebrow at the midwife analogy. “Maybe he’s got an arrangement with Lauren. They cooked this up between them, and her outward contempt for him is just a show. They both want to make the move to Wall Street.”

  “That would fit. They kill Tyra because her conscience can’t be trusted and string Anna along until she wants some real evidence. He promises her the Holy Grail to get her to open the door.”

  Riley got up to walk around some more. “All we need to do is prove a conspiracy between Lauren—and our only evidence for same is that she isn’t dead—and Mearan, and Caldwell.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Except.”

  “Except I hate it,” Riley said miserably. “I don’t see it. Mearan couldn’t conspire to sell a used car without screwing it up and I could see Lauren simply killing him instead of allying.”

  “It’s more likely that Lauren is behind the whole thing— the only evidence being that she’s still breathing—and she let Mearan live because she knows he’d be as useless to us as he is to her.”

  Jack rubbed his face. “If we could only find Caldwell, we could reverse engineer the whole structure.”

  “Except we can’t find Caldwell. So, moving on …” Riley continued to pace, making a lazy circle around the whiteboard, brushing past coworkers’ desks as they tried to finish their own paperwork amid his steady stream of words. “The handsome Mr. Fourtner at Carter & Poe. A venerable firm that could suffer mightily if it came to light that one of their own had been taking bribes—monetary and personal—to give Sterling’s crap a triple-A rating. I can totally see him slicing Joanna open without mussing his perfect hair and walking away with naught a bloody footprint. But Tyra and Anna? That would be overkill.”

  “No pun intended,” Jack added for him. “Unless he found he had a taste for it. Killing.”

  “Beautiful-people poster boy turned serial killer,” Riley said. “I like it. Got no evidence for it, but I like it. But he knew Joanna, so he knew she’d never let Tyra in on the secret. And Anna had no proof.”

  “Even if Tyra stumbled on it, that still leaves out Anna,” Jack said. “These three women are like trying to draw a triangle. If you can get two points to connect, the third one won’t.”

  “No one had a motive against all three,” Riley agreed. “Maybe Lauren. She wants Joanna’s job, doesn’t know Joanna is planning to bail anyway. Knows Tyra is a liability.”

  “But Anna. To her Anna is a gnat, annoying but harmless.” This case had been bothering Jack from the moment he’d arrived at Joanna’s mansion and seen the carnage. They had gotten onto the wrong track, he thought, and still hadn’t found the right one. They had conducted the investigation just as they should have, following up all the leads, going where the evidence took them. But pulling on all those strings led only to loose, stray strings. No prizes.

  “And the third falls out,” Riley said. “Still no triangle.”

  “Can you guys shut up?” A portly detective up the aisle loosened his tie. “I can’t get anything done with all your yammering.”

  “No,” Riley said. “Or someone else will be dead by bedtime. The ladies of Greater Cleveland are depending upon our detective skills.”

  The other detective now rubbed his shiny black cheek. “Then they’re doomed.”

  Jack said, “That seems to be the only thing they do have in common. That office is ninety-five percent male, but the victims are all women.”

  Riley went with it. “Okay. Women. Because they’re in a position to damage him or because they’re smaller, weaker? Unarmed?”

  “Slender. Thirtyish. Dark hair.” Jack stood up, a sudden realization pounding at his skull.

  “So is Lauren.”

  “Lauren doesn’t live alone.”

  “That other woman, Deb Fischer. Thirtyish.”

  “Short hair. Doesn’t live alone.”

  “Oh yeah, husband and big dog. See what I mean about dogs? I floated the Rottweiler idea to Natalie but she balked. The neighbor’s Pomeranian nipped her when she was a baby and she’s never forgiven the species. Hannah was all for it, though, been nagging her mother for a dog since preschool. What are you thinking, partner?”

  Jack stood up again, returned to the case board as if that would help him see more clearly; of course it wouldn’t. The problem had always been, from the start, a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. “The money distracted us. Money always distracts. We saw millions of dollars and figured that had to be the motive, somehow, in some conformation.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What if it’s not? What if he killed these women because he freakin’ likes killing women? Caldwell likes raping them and he likes knives. It’s not a stretch. It’s not even a step.”

  Riley played devil’s advocate. “And he just coincidentally picks three women from the same workplace?”

  “No, it’s not coincidental at all. He saw them there, knew them there.”

  “But doesn’t work there and still got their home addresses?”

  “That can’t be that hard. Even without phone books, no one guards their home address like they do a Social Security number. He could have followed them from the office building, observed them at home, got the lay of the land. That’s how he knows they live alone.”

  “Which leaves us back to the beginning,” Riley sighed. “Where is he now?”

  “Picking out his next victim. Who may be connected to Sterling and will look like these three.” He studied the photos intently, willing the dead women to give him some sort of clue as to how to stop Patrick Caldwell. “They look similar in so many ways…. They look … they look like …”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Maggie.” Jack pulled out his cell phone.

  Chapter 33

  The nice young delivery man from Totally Fresh! held up a white paper bag. “We bring thank-yous to all our new customers,” he said. “May I come in?”

  “No,” Maggie responded instantly. Because as so often happened, her subconscious had summed up the situation much more quickly than her conscious mind could ever hope to. The clean-shaven man with black hair wore a full-length Tyvek jumpsuit that covered his shoes. He had used colored markers to create a passable imitation of the Totally Fresh! logo on the upper right chest so that through the apartment door’s peephole he appeared to be wearing one of their uniformly snow-white smocks.

  In his right hand, the one not holding the bag, he carried a short, thick baton like the kind used by some police forces. As the last “o” sound of her answer came from her mouth he raised it and slammed its length against her throat. She raised both hands to ward off the blow but far too late in this split-second contest; she succeeded only in getting one or two of her fingers broken, to judge from the sharp pain that pierced her mind just as he struck her throat with enough force to throw her backward.

  She heard that crackling sound, the one that always reminded her of crushing a bag of potato chips.

  The back of her head hit the floo
r, cushioned slightly by the carpeting.

  The cat howled. She could barely hear it over the blood rushing in her ears. He kicked her legs with a sweeping motion and she pulled her knees up, reacting into the automatic fetal position response to attack. Unfortunately, this cleared the way for him to shut the door, closing out her neighbors along the hall.

  She opened her mouth to scream but he straddled her stomach, forcing the air out of her lungs. While she gasped for air he zipped up the jumpsuit to his neck, then removed a knife from the white bag. He pulled off the leather sheath, and its thick but razor-sharp length glinted in the flash of lightning through her windows.

  She rocked her hips trying to buck him off and clasped both hands over her agonized throat, not because of the pain but because she knew what he would do next—stab her in the neck, severing her vocal cords and possibly killing her. Again she tried to suck in a breath, but the full weight of him kept her diaphragm trapped and her lungs compressed.

  He raised the knife.

  The nameless cat leapt from the back of her sofa and sank its claws into Patrick Caldwell’s forearm. Through this blur of activity Maggie saw it bite down on the back of his hand, but she couldn’t be sure. In any case, the man waved the knife hand from side to side in sharp motions and shook the animal off like a drop of rain. The cat landed somewhere with a thump and howled again.

  But in the meantime Maggie had removed her right hand, leaving only the left to protect her neck, and stretched it to her side. Her hand grabbed frantically at the empty floor until it found the cat’s food—the dry Purina mix nestled in the hand-carved bowl her brother had sent her.

  The bowl carved from a single chunk of basalt. The bowl that cost thirty-eight dollars to ship.

  The bowl so heavy she could barely lift it with only one arm and no breath.

  Panic gave her strength enough to bring the bowl up, even with Caldwell holding down her right shoulder and again raising the knife above her neck. She swung it though the air the best she could, knowing it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be nearly enough. But if she could just distract him long enough to ease the weight, get a breath before she passed out. Her vision had already clouded with stars. She didn’t have much time.