Exposed (16 page)

“I’m not most women. And like I said, people miss things. Even seasoned investigators.”
Which you are not
. But she didn’t say that, because she didn’t think he’d appreciate the criticism.

He watched her for a long moment. She bent down and retrieved a couple of baseballs from the dirt.

“You’re up again.” She walked over to the pitching machine and started reloading balls. When she turned around, he had his phone pressed to his ear. Maddie hadn’t heard a ring tone, so she guessed it had been set to vibrate.

His expression looked serious as he ended the call. She joined him beside the gate.

“You have to go, don’t you?”

“That was Sam,” he said, tucking his phone into his pocket. “And yeah, I need to go in.” He rested his hands on his hips and gazed down at her, and she resisted the urge to reach up and brush her fingertips over his stubble. She should feel relieved that he had to go, but instead, she felt disappointed.

She enjoyed being with him. It had been so long since she’d really enjoyed a man, she’d forgotten how it felt. His gaze held hers, and she knew she was on slippery ground here.

“Sorry you didn’t get much of a turn.” He sounded genuinely sorry.

“Hey, I understand. Duty calls.”

“We’ll do a rain check on breakfast.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She forced a smile. “I’m not much of a breakfast person.”

Brian made a quick detour by the vending machine before joining Sam in a meeting room. He was on the phone and glanced up as Brian sank into a chair and twisted the top off a Gatorade.

“Okay, keep us posted.” Sam hung up the conference-room phone and looked at him. “How’s Maddie?”

“What makes you think I was with Maddie?”

“Because you look frustrated.” Sam smiled and leaned back in his chair. “What, she shut you down again?”

Brian swigged his drink. One of the disadvantages to working with Sam was that he didn’t miss much—meaning he was fully aware that Brian had developed a fixation on a certain Delphi Center CSI. He plunked down his bottle. Maybe
fixation
wasn’t the right word, but it was definitely bothering him that she seemed dead set on ignoring his attempts to get to know her outside of work.

“She’s fine,” he said now, because dodging the question would only pique Sam’s curiosity. He scooted his chair in. “So tell me what we got. You come up with a link?”

“Elizabeth’s still working on it,” Sam said. “She was here half the night looking for anything to connect this girl in California to Jolene Murphy. So far, nothing.” Sam thumbed through the file in front of him. “But we did get some lab results back.”

“That was fast.”

“They put a rush on it. The blood in Volansky’s bathroom comes back to Jolene.”

Brian didn’t say anything. He would have been surprised if it hadn’t.

“And we sent a tool marks expert over to look at those marks on the side of the tub,” Sam said. “He agreed they’re from a hammer.”

Brian felt sick thinking about it. “So they cuffed her under the sink so they could torture her in there.”

“That’s what it looks like. Thing I don’t get is why.”

“Because Mladovic is a sadistic shithead?”

“It’s got to be more than that.” Sam tapped his pen on the table. “I think he was trying to get information out of her.”

“Or maybe punish her for sharing information with us,” Brian said, feeling guiltier than ever. Why hadn’t he fought for surveillance of this witness?

“Maybe,” Sam said. “But she hadn’t shared much of anything. Not yet.”

“But what was she
planning
to tell us? It had to have been something important for him to risk a murder rap in order to shut her up.”

They stared at each other.

“I keep coming back to the daughter,” Sam said. “Maybe it had to do with Katya.”

“Katya’s dead.”

“Maybe Jolene knew something about that. Take a look at what else we got.” Sam fished a paper from the file and slid it across the table.

“What’s this?” Brian studied the page. It was a copy of a color photograph showing a brown prescription bottle on what looked like a bedside table.

“Investigator who handled Katya’s case e-mailed that over. That’s the bottle of pills she supposedly OD’d on.”

“Supposedly?”

“Her prints are on it. ME’s still saying suicide. Says there were no marks on the body or any indication someone forced her to take the pills.”

“Lot of ways to force someone to do something,” Brian said.

“And listen to this. The pharmacy listed on that bottle? They claim they have no record of this prescription.”

Brian studied the picture more closely, trying to read the address, but the photo only showed the name of the pharmacy and the first few digits of a phone number.

He looked at Sam. “Where is this place?”

“It’s right by Mladovic’s house, but apparently, his wife used a pharmacy in her grocery store. The obvious question is, where’d this bottle come from that has her name on it?”

“And why didn’t the police notice this a year ago?” Brian shook his head with disgust. “Where’s this bottle?”

“Who the hell knows? Nobody kept it. When the ME ruled the death a suicide, the cops basically washed their hands of it. Their file on this thing is a joke. We’re lucky to have the photos, but that’s about it in terms of physical evidence. ’Less someone plans to exhume the body and take another look.”

Brian stared down at the photo as questions flooded into his head. “We’re talking about a phony prescription with Mladovic’s name on it.” He looked at Sam.

“Could be.”

“Which makes me think either he orchestrated his daughter’s death or someone else did. Or maybe it really was a suicide, and the bottle was Katya’s idea, to
get her dad in trouble. He’d already been in all kinds of shit for his prescription-writing practices. She had to know that. Maybe she set this up as a dying ‘fuck you’ to her father.”

“Maybe.” Sam was being evasive, and Brian knew he had another theory of what happened.

“At the very least, Mladovic had to know something was wrong. He knows he didn’t write that script,” Brian said. “And his wife’s bound to know she didn’t fill it at that pharmacy. Any normal parent would raise a big red flag and demand a murder investigation.”

“This guy’s not your normal parent,” Sam said. “Not by a long stretch.”

Brian stared at the picture and wondered for the thousandth time how the hell Katya and her friends had become tangled up in Mladovic’s mess.

“So there’s a very real possibility he murdered his daughter and staged it as a suicide.”

Sam nodded. “Either that—or he knows who did.”

Goran watched his wife step out of the shower as he zipped his pants. Maybe it was the excitement left over from last night, but he actually found himself taking a second look.

Sylvia was tall and blond and had had the requisite plastic surgery for a woman in her late forties. She had a degree in political science and had begun their marriage on what she perceived to be equal footing. He liked that about her. Sylvia had opinions, and she fought back—which was also to his liking—but she
knew the limits, and in twenty-four years of marriage, she’d never crossed them.

Except once.

After Katya’s death, she’d become hysterical and threatened to go to the police with everything. Goran had promised that if she did, he would kill her.

And he didn’t break his promises.

Sylvia wrapped herself in a towel. Goran scooped his Mercedes keys from the dresser and headed for the garage. His wife could wait until tonight—one of the few benefits of marriage. Goran checked his trunk to make sure his clubs had been loaded properly and slid behind the wheel. He raised the garage door and backed out of the drive, taking note of the gray Taurus parked conspicuously in front of his neighbor’s house.

They were going to follow him around today, hoping to glean some sort of useful information, but as usual, they’d come up with nothing. Goran was careful. He’d learned how and when to slip through their surveillance, and these days, he did it only when absolutely necessary. Last night, for example.

Last night had been good but not perfect. Through skill and patience, he’d extracted most of what he wanted.

But not all.

If he didn’t get the rest next time, he’d sworn that next visit would be his last.

Most people did. It was a fact. Because of this, he trusted no one—not his attorney, not his accountant, not his business associates, and definitely not his wife.

Goran didn’t trust people; he controlled them. It was a much more reliable way to manage things.

The one thing Goran
did
trust was his product.

No matter what, no matter who, it could be relied upon to get the job done. People thought they were better than science, above chemistry. Rich people, especially, thought they could game the system. But that was because they were either too dim or too deluded to understand the nature of the beast.

Goran understood it well, from both a scientific standpoint and a personal one, which was why he never touched the stuff.

Once it had you in its clutches, it didn’t let go. It would sink its teeth in and bleed you of every dollar and every drop of pride. People—no matter what their socioeconomic status—would do anything for it. They might do it in an expensive hotel room or in the back of a Lexus, but ultimately, they would do anything he wanted and pay anything he asked, because they needed what he had.

Supply and demand.

Simple as that.

Jolene was freezing.

She’d been trapped inside the tiny room for hours, with only a sweatshirt and a pile of newspapers. The wind whistled under the door, and whenever there was a big gust, she heard the walls groan and bow inward.

Jolene’s hand throbbed. All her fingers were swollen and misshapen, and her thumb poked out at an impossible angle. Two of her nails were gone. Her cuticles were black and crusted with blood. Ever since the drugs
had worn off, she’d kept her hand uncovered, hoping the icy air might numb the pain, but it hadn’t. Her hand felt like fire.

They’d left her right hand alone. As she’d spent the last hour comparing it with the ruined one, she’d realized the reason. Contrast. They were taunting her, making her focus on the power they had over her. They were reminding her that things could still get worse, that there could be more to come.

Jolene closed her eyes and tried not to think. If she thought too much, she’d cry again. If she let her mind focus on what had happened and what was probably going to happen, she’d lose it. And they got off on that. They got off on her terror.

Her teeth chattered, and she pulled her knees in closer and thought of a song her mother used to sing.

Bye baby bunting. Daddy’s gone a-hunting. To get a little rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunting in
.

She shivered harder. Her eyes filled as she pictured her mom and dad. She’d made so many mistakes she was ashamed to tell them about. Over and over, she’d messed up. She’d lied. She’d done things behind their backs. But if she ever saw them again, she was going to come clean. She’d tell them everything.