Perish Page 5

  “Yeah, she took over the scene for me.”

  A pause ensued. She was about to say good-bye when Denny said, “Maggie, a heads-up—you might be recalled in the Graham trial.”

  Prosecution could put on rebuttal witnesses after the defense presented their case and rested, in order to refute something brought up during the defense phase of the trial. Despite the boisterous trial activity portrayed on television shows, this very rarely happened. The defense could even recall prosecution witnesses during their own phase of questioning. “Okay. Why?”

  “The prosecutor says defense is going to bring in an expert witness to argue the fingerprint ID.”

  “Oh. Well, good luck to them.” That was their right, and they could parade in all the paid testimony they wanted. It wouldn’t change the facts, and the facts were that Graham had left his prints on the murder weapon. Which had also been found in his house, under his bed, where the cops found him twenty minutes after the murder occurred. The case was, one might say, as solid as polished granite.

  “I wanted to let you know. Keep me posted on your rich hottie. And keep out of the way if those Wall Street people start throwing chairs at each other.”

  Maggie slowed at her destination, a white marble building on St. Clair near 30th. “It’s some sort of mortgage loan company. I doubt they’re the chair-throwing types.”

  “You ever been around money people? I mean real money? They are a different breed, Maggie.”

  “You and Fitzgerald, on the same page.”

  “I’m not kidding. Chairs will be the most innocuous things they throw.”

  She looked up at the stone edifice. Pretty, probably historic, but not particularly intimidating in itself. A group of seven or eight people on its sidewalk carrying signs concerned her more. “You may be right.”

  The signs read PREDATORY LENDERS and something about stolen homes. That was all Maggie had time to catch before her car slid by. The protesters waved their signs at her, their voices rising, trying to call attention to their plight with desperate abandon. “Help the victims!” “Fraud took my home!” “Thieves!” Maggie turned right at the corner to find a place to park.

  A small lot behind the building had a monitored lot, and it took her a minute or two to convince the attendant that she was with the two detectives in the previous car and thus would not be ponying up the four dollars per hour it cost nonstaff to park there. The older man hmpfed and peered at her through heavy eyebrows and quite literally dragged his feet over to lift the gate for her, then stared at the back of her moving car as if to memorize the license number. Unauthorized parkers would not be allowed on his shift. At least, she thought, when the cops ask him if anyone strange has been hanging about, he’s going to know.

  She grabbed her camera and some swabs and swab boxes, an ink pad, and the few fingerprint cards she had in her trunk—perhaps four. If the staff actually cooperated she would have to use plain copy paper to roll their prints on. Not ideal, but workable. As long as the prints were clear it didn’t matter if she rolled them on the back of a menu.

  She caught up to the detectives on their way through the rear door with Jeremy Mearan. The young man seemed to panic now that the moment to face his friends had arrived. His hand trembled as he pulled open the heavy glass-and-brass doors.

  They entered a lobby much more impressive than the exterior of the building warranted. Original marble covered not only the floor but the walls, its richly aged texture turning Joanna Moorehouse’s mansion into a shoddy nouveau riche imitation. Leather sofas formed a waiting area and the receptionist’s sweeping desk had been carved out of mahogany. A thick carpet runner in deep red muffled their footsteps as they passed through.

  On the other side of the filmy curtains she could see the protesters on the front sidewalk milling about. They didn’t seem interested in the lobby, more focused on shaking their signs at passing cars.

  “Is that a piano?” Riley asked—not that the shiny black full-sized grand in a corner could have been anything else. Mearan didn’t bother to answer, just nodded at the receptionist and pressed the button for the elevator. As the doors opened, Riley added, “Anybody ever play it?”

  Mearan glanced at the piano as if he had never seen it before. “I don’t think so.”

  Maggie shook her head as the doors closed. Denny had been right. The rich were different.

  Or at least they pretended to be.

  Two patrol officers, different ones from the crime scene, had joined them and the antique elevator barely held the whole group.

  Maggie took a breath, feeling not only claustrophobic but oddly nervous. Give her dead bodies any day. Live ones always proved much more troublesome. She glanced up at Jack, who immediately hissed, “Stop looking at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m supposed to know what I’m doing.”

  Riley chuckled.

  Chapter 6

  The elevator opened into a noisy cauldron of sound and scurrying, despite thick rugs and a waiting area with a heavy antique coffee table and a chocolate-colored couch that Maggie wanted to dive into. The office cubicles weren’t cubicles in the traditional sense but beautiful wood desks separated by live plants and cleverly disguised file cabinets, with ergonomic chairs on silent casters. Not even the stacks of plain buff-colored file folders and giveaway pens could hide their beauty. Natural light streamed in from all the windows, sometimes passing through the glass walls of private offices with even more opulent fixtures. But somehow none of this elegance soothed; instead, the traditional wood and the modern walls clashed instead of melding. Or that could be the effect of so many combined voices all talking at once, with no one listening.

  Desk phones, cell phones, speakerphones were all employed. At least nine people sat at the twelve-odd desks in the open area, ringed by five of the glass offices. Two sat empty, perhaps Joanna’s (the largest) and Jeremy Mearan’s. The other three were occupied by two men and a woman, respectively, all talking on phones. Through another glass wall sat a long conference table with two people at each end, boxes and files unceremoniously piled onto the glossy wood. Even the file room had glass walls.

  It seemed an unlikely place to plot a murder, or be able to keep any secret at all.

  On the other hand, since no one seemed to pay any attention to anyone else, the murderer could have done his planning right there and still escaped notice.

  A woman at one end of the conference table looked up just then and apparently pegged them as out of place. Without turning her head she stood, moved around the table, and walked toward them.

  Jeremy Mearan let out an earsplitting whistle, of which Maggie would not have believed him possible. He didn’t seem like he’d had the upbringing for that kind of a talent.

  Not everyone paused in their speech, but enough did for him to be heard. “Sorry to interrupt, but I need everyone to listen to this right now. Hang up, put the phones away. Tell clients you’ll get back to them.”

  Most of the men—and they were mostly men—working the phones got a stubborn look, resenting the disruption, but when Mearan added, “I have bad news,” in a voice beginning to tremble, even they made quick excuses and clicked off.

  Of the three in the glass offices, an older man rubbed his face and swung his feet off the desk. The woman had hung up anyway but looked superbly annoyed, either at the interruption or at Mearan being the interrupter. The other man had his door shut and had somehow missed the whistle. Turned toward the window, he continued his conversation until the woman banged on his outer wall as she strode past.

  As she did she demanded, “What the hell is going on, Jeremy? Where is Joanna? How could she—”

  The young man waved a limp hand at the cops. “They’re … they’re going to tell you.” Then he collapsed into one of the waiting-area chairs and hunched forward, chin in his hands, fingers over his mouth tightly enough to press white streaks into his cheeks.

  Jack told them only that Joanna Mooreho
use had been found dead.

  Reactions ran the gamut. A man near Maggie simply said, “Huh.” The woman from the conference room paled. The woman from the nice office frowned. A stocky man in the center of the room asked if Joanna had killed herself.

  “We’re still investigating the circumstances.”

  The man persisted. “Easy question. Did she off herself or not?”

  Jack barely moved but somehow straightened into a steel-hard figure with a voice to match and repeated, “We are investigating the circumstances.”

  Maggie felt the stab of fear he could still arouse in her, but the people in the room had no idea how close they were to seeing the real Jack, the one who felt able to judge whether someone lived or died. The stocky man certainly didn’t. He turned to the guy across the aisle from him and said, “I bet she killed herself.”

  A dam broke and the room erupted into similar speculation. Voices asked questions that no one could answer: What would happen now? Was the merger off? Who would take over? To this, names were bandied and refuted.

  Jack spoke over them, requesting that they remain to speak with the detectives. No one agreed but no one argued. They were more interested in talking with each other.

  Everyone, as Maggie studied them, seemed shocked and surprised, annoyed and concerned, but not grieving—this was a business, not a family. Joanna’s death created a vacuum in that business and it would have to be filled. No one—to her relief, since she stood in front of the elevator—seemed interested in leaving. No one apparently felt the need to, as Riley had suggested, go home to cry in their hankies.

  “We will also need to collect your DNA swabs and fingerprints for elimination purposes.”

  That silenced the room. For about one full second.

  “Say what?”

  “No friggin’ way.”

  “You can’t make us do that.”

  “Only so we can eliminate any of your prints from prints found on items at her house and in her office. They won’t be entered into any police database.” He still looked commanding and more than a bit terrifying to Maggie, but still couldn’t make much of a dent in this crowd’s general paranoia.

  “No.”

  “You can’t make us do that,” the woman from the nice office repeated.

  “No, we can’t,” Jack agreed. “It would be voluntary. If you don’t wish to cooperate with our investigation, that is entirely up to you.”

  The woman glared, seeing the trap.

  The expressions on some faces in the room changed to those of curiosity as their owners wondered how this was going to play out. Who would balk, and, more importantly, why?

  Riley strode through them to commandeer the conference room. There didn’t seem to be another option. Obviously it wouldn’t be a good idea to parade an army of suspects through the victim’s office, in case it held any evidence worth having.

  “I don’t believe that you won’t put it in your database.” The young man pulled his tie away from his throat. “You guys always say that but you never throw anything out.”

  Jack pointed at Maggie. “Maggie handles our AFIS. If she says your prints will be destroyed, they’ll be destroyed.”

  Every pair of eyes in the room turned toward her, only for a moment, but long enough to make her want to run screaming for the stairwell. She didn’t do this personal confrontation crap. That was why she had gone into forensics and not policing. Now she glared at Jack, who hadn’t taken his gaze from the young man in the tie.

  “Again, it’s entirely up to you,” he said. “If you’re worried about it.”

  The stares of his coworkers forced the man back into his seat. He said nothing further. But one of the few women at the desks gestured toward the two patrol officers flanking the elevator. “But we can’t leave until they do.”

  Jack said, “You can go any time you want. We are asking you to stay and help us investigate the death of your colleague.”

  The office woman said to him, “This is the headquarters of a four billion–dollar national business. We’re all very sorry about Joanna, but—”

  “This is a murder,” Jack snapped.

  The room gasped, and Maggie could see him mentally kicking himself in the form of a vein bulging at his temple.

  A new wave of shock rounded the room.

  “What the crap?”

  “Someone murdered her?”

  “Are you sure? Are you sure she’s not on a beach in Aruba with last quarter’s profits?”

  The woman recovered. “Well, that’s—”

  One of the older men from the private offices finally spoke. “Come off it, Lauren. You’re not filling her boots just yet.” To Jack, he said, “Whatever you need, say the word. You’ll have our complete cooperation.”

  A very pretty girl with very dark skin at one of the desks nodded fiercely. “We owe it to Joanna.” For some reason this produced some eye rolling among her coworkers. One muttered, “Tyra,” with exasperation.

  The older man said, more curiously, “Was it … really murder? How’d she die?”

  “We’re still investigating—”

  “The circumstances. Got it. Help yourself to the conference room, which I see you already have. Okay, folks. Tell these guys anything they want to know. Otherwise get back to work.”

  Lauren said, “You’re not filling her boots just yet either, Pierce.”

  He ignored her and returned to his desk. Maggie let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

  Lauren marched up to Jack. “You might as well start with me.”

  She might as well have added, “Because I’m the most important person here,” it seemed to be so strongly implied … but then again, it could be true. Maggie followed them into the conference room. Because of the glass walls, this interview would be completely visible to the sea of eyes they had passed through. It might encourage all interviewees to stay on their best behavior, or it might stifle any spontaneous admissions. Either way, it made an interesting setting for an interrogation.

  The man and woman Riley evicted had gathered up their files and briefcases and booklets. The woman had an entire file box, and Maggie picked it up as she said, “Sorry about the disruption.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” the woman said and gathered the rest of her items. “I wasn’t making a lot of progress anyway.” They carried their loads out the door. “I guess I’ll take the waiting area. It’s that or the floor in the file room, and I’m too old to do the cross-legged thing for very long.”

  She looked about thirty and perfectly flexible, but Maggie said nothing and followed her through the desks. The workers had reverted to their original state, on the phones, talking fast, wireless headsets bobbing as they typed at the same time. “Won’t the noise bother you?”

  “They’re all like that. Financial firms, I mean.” She set her files on the coffee table and motioned for Maggie to do the same with the box. Her fellow evictee had already claimed half of it. “I’m a regulator. From the Fed—Federal Reserve. I go into these places to make sure they’re conforming to the capital requirements and compensation limits, if any, the rate charges—anyway, that’s what I do.”

  “Hence, the conference room.”

  “Yep. I’m a temporary squatter, like Dhaval here. He’s from DJ Bryan, doing the due diligence before they buy Sterling.” She waved at the dark-hued young man who had plopped his files on the other side of the coffee table. Happily the coffee table spanned at least seven feet end to end, so they had plenty of room, but he did not look remotely pleased about the new digs.

  “If we buy Sterling,” he said sourly, pulled out his phone, and took no further notice of them.

  “How long have you been here?” Maggie asked.

  “Huh. It’s been about three years since I moved from DC—oh, you mean at Sterling. Two weeks, no, a little less. I’ve been here before, though, I think about seven months ago. I’m Anna, by the way. Anna Hernandez.”

  “Maggie Gardiner. I’m the forensic spe
cialist.”

  “Cool. Is that guy waiting for you?”

  Jack held the door to the conference room, watching them.

  “I think he may be.”

  Sitting in on witness interviews was not her job, but she slipped into the room and took a seat as unobtrusively as possible. The detectives might want her on hand to take samples before the interviewees changed their minds, and having to call her in could interrupt the flow. An interview, or interrogation, often meant convincing someone to bare their soul, to dredge up events they hadn’t noticed at the time, to confess to things they didn’t want to admit, even if criminally innocuous. A give-and-take would be created, weaving a spell that if broken would not be regained. Maggie never interrupted a detective’s interview for any reason. So, since Riley and Jack seemed to want her there, she sat.

  The woman’s name was Lauren Schneider, and she was the regional manager for the western states, from California to the Mississippi and including Alaska and Hawaii. Leroy Sherman handled the east. Pierce Bowman was from DJ Bryan, the large investment bank planning to buy them, and from his behavior you would think they already had. Sterling Financial was a mortgage banking firm; they originated loans that they then sold to investors. The DJ Bryan sale was desired by all parties, once details were worked out. Lauren had known Joanna Moorehouse since she had come to work for her four years previously, and Lauren had no idea who might have wanted to kill her. She asked again how Joanna had been killed, a reasonable question, and again Jack and Riley refused to answer. They were welcome to collect her saliva and fingerprints. She had nothing to hide, unlike a few of the district managers out there on the floor.

  Riley asked her to clarify that remark.

  The woman tossed her perfectly coiffed brown hair, releasing a subtle perfume. Maggie wasn’t much into perfume but even she thought it smelled of exotic places with hammocks on the beach and linen-draped cabanas. “Oh, I don’t mean anything really criminal. But this is a cutthroat business. We’re not a bunch of kindly bankers helping ordinary folks achieve the American Dream of home ownership, like we’re wearing scuffed shoes in the only two-story building on Main Street in Podunk, Nebraska—even though we are helping people achieve the American Dream much more than the small bank in Podunk. But we’re also doing it for the profit margin.” As Riley opened his mouth she added, “I meant that I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the managers have a tax violation here or an illegal housemaid there. Their expense reports sure as hell get creative.”