Ruthless Game (A Captivating Suspense Novel) (13 page)

Next, she rummaged through the drawers where she kept the tea strainer, opened the teakettle, emptied out the teapots that had been her mother's, sitting high on shelves. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

What the hell present was he talking about? She pushed her bangs off her forehead and flinched at the bruise, still tender beneath her hand. Determined, she decided to make herself a cup of tea just like she had the other night before her bath.

She filled the kettle with water, scanning the area around the sink. Then, opening a canister where she kept some specialty teas, she searched through it and found one cranberry craze. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. She opened the cupboard and pulled down a mug and set it on the counter. As she did, she frowned and looked back up at the shelf that housed her eclectic collection of mugs. Two back, she spotted one she didn't recognize.

Pulling up a chair, she took a dishcloth and reached for the unfamiliar mug. Touching it only along one edge to avoid destroying fingerprints, Alex lifted it off the shelf. She twisted it until she saw a photograph that had been scanned onto one side of the mug. She'd seen similar mugs being sold in souvenir shops. It was a casual snapshot of a man and a woman on a beach. She stared at the woman. She wasn't familiar. Turning her gaze to the man, she gasped. The teakettle whistle blew and Alex spun around, the mug leaping from her hand and making a loud popping sound as it broke on the floor.

Alex didn't move, listening to the screaming kettle as though it were her own voice. From a jagged piece of broken mug, William Loeffler stared up at her.

Chapter 9

Alex closed the paper bag containing the pieces of the coffee mug and put it on the shelf next to the bags containing the caller's fingerprint and the fragments of her window. Then, taking a last look around her kitchen, she climbed the stairs toward bed. She thought about the first call and then the break-in. She'd been stupid not to report it. It was unprofessional.

A cop should always obey the law to the letter. She knew that's the way James would see it. And as soon as she'd realized someone was in her house, a smart cop would have called the police. Why hadn't she? She tried to get inside her own mind, remembering the morning before, waking up in her car, then seeing Loeffler. Because she didn't know what had happened that night. And someone else did. What if she'd done something bad—something terrible. Could she have killed Loeffler? No. It was impossible. She couldn't have killed anyone. She refused to believe it. But she wished she'd handled the situation differently.

There was nothing she could do about the past now. She could hardly call the police about a break-in that had happened over twenty-four hours ago. Better to just keep it to herself. If it got out now, it would look like she had something to hide. Plus, she needed to follow this through. It was personal now, and she'd be taken off the Loeffler investigation. Loeffler wasn't someone she knew. How had she suddenly been thrown into a dead man's life? With that thought echoing through her head, she lay down and tried to sleep.

* * *

Sleep had not been kind. Behind her eyelids, all she had pictured was Loeffler's face. The way it had looked on the mug, the way it had looked when he called her by her first name at Noah's, and the way it had looked in death flashing back and forth. When morning came, it was almost a relief. But even as she drove to Loeffler's house the next morning, she pictured his face on that mug. The woman beside him was dark-haired and round-faced and their expressions held the simple satisfaction that marriage seemed to give to some people.

Lying in bed last night, she'd gone through her affiliations: grade school, middle school and high school in Berkeley. It was hard to remember grade school, but Loeffler wasn't in her high school yearbook. She searched for his wife, too, under her maiden name, Sandy Bree. Alex had gone to Cal, Loeffler to Stanford. She'd walked through her sports, friends, the academy, L.A., the club where she'd worked, friends of friends, classes she'd taken down there. Nowhere could she come up with a William Loeffler. And she was good with names and faces. If she'd seen either Loeffler or his wife before, she would have remembered them.

Maybe the killer had seen her at the house, and had somehow found out she was a cop. Maybe he was just screwing with her. Why stick around to torment her? It seemed too risky. Unless her reaction was part of the game. Had he stumbled upon her sleeping and just followed her? She shook her head. It depended on too many variables, too much coincidence. She didn't buy coincidence. What had he taken from her house? And, more importantly, where was it going to end up?

Today was a second chance to find out what possible connection there was between her and Loeffler. And since she still hadn't heard back from Elsa, this was all she could do. When Alex arrived at Loeffler's house, the yellow crime scene tape and a standard patrol car greeted her. Waving to the officer, she hurried up the stairs and found Lombardi in the den. Another detective, whom she recognized from the station, stood beside him, and she hesitated in the doorway until Lombardi waved her forward.

"Look more like a detective today," he said.

She looked down at her jeans and sweatshirt. "Yeah, no uniform."

"That, and the circles under your eyes are becoming a permanent feature. All you need is a lucky coat and a potbelly and you're set."

Refusing the urge to let her fingers touch the sunken skin beneath her eyes, she forced a smile. "I'll think about it." She thought about the taunting phone calls she'd received. Maybe Lombardi was getting them, too. No, she'd have heard.

"Alex Kincaid, Jimmy Norton. Jimmy, Alex."

She shook hands with a short balding man in an oversized UC Davis sweatshirt. His perfectly round face made his head look like a red beach ball, with a full nose and high, bulging ruddy cheeks to complete the image.

"Jimmy's going to deal with the tapes."

She nodded.

Jimmy's expression was unchanged and she wondered if he didn't know what was on the tapes or if he was just used to dealing with that sort of perversion.

"He'll be handling it at the station, creating photos from the video via a computer and trying to match the faces with names. Once he's done, he may ask you to help with the matching."

"No problem."

"In the meantime, you can continue to work in there. Once you've gotten through all that shit, we need to box anything relevant and get it to the station. Someone else will come through for a second round tomorrow. Think you can handle that today?"

She glanced around the room and forced herself to nod. It didn't seem possible to get through the rest of the room today, but she knew the answer Lombardi wanted. And she wanted to be the one to go through Loeffler's things first.

Before she could say another word, Lombardi led Jimmy out of the den and closed the door behind them. She looked around at the piles on the floor, pushing her hair off her face. There was a ton of work to do.

On her knees, she opened the second file cabinet drawer, continuing where she'd left off. What had seemed interesting to her yesterday now left her agitated and impatient. Loeffler kept voluminous records of his cases, but as in his Palm Pilot, his notes were in shorthand she didn't understand. She had started a list of his abbreviations yesterday and glanced at it again now, trying to match one she'd found to the list. She had hoped by seeing them more than once, they would start to make sense. So far she'd had no such luck.

She made it through every piece of paper in the room by noon, and still nothing. Looking around, she searched for anything she'd missed. Besides the books on the shelves and a few framed pictures, she'd turned the place upside down. She thought about the other rooms in the house. Was her name written down somewhere? Why had Loeffler's killer presumably taken a mug from this house and put it in
hers?

Frustrated, she pulled the rubber band out of her hair. The band snapped against her hand. "Damn." A small red welt appeared beside her thumb. Rubbing it, she blew out her breath. "Move on, Kincaid," she told herself.

As she stooped to pick up the hair band, something on the bookshelf caught her eye. She crossed the room and sat down on the carpet. A line of tall, thin books filled the bottom shelf of the case. But in between two of them was a manila folder. Pulling out one of the books to loosen them, she placed it beside her and pulled out the folder. The tab read "S.S."

Alex opened the file on her lap and found a picture and a pile of newspaper clippings. The picture was of a man with pumpkin-colored hair and an awkward smile. On the back were the initials B.A. She turned her attention to the heading on the first newspaper clipping: "Sesame Street Murder leaves Palo Alto City District Horrified." Alex read the story, dated March 18, 1971.

In what police officials are calling the most heinous crime in county history, Walter Androus kidnapped a class of fourteen second-grade students from Florence Hemingway School during a class outing to the Ghiradelli Chocolate Factory. It is believed that Androus intercepted the bus carrying the students on a small street behind the school by pretending to be a chaperone arriving late.

He then hijacked the vehicle and killed the driver, a chaperone and two parent volunteers. Their bodies were found in an empty Dumpster near the abandoned warehouse where he forced the children to ingest low doses of Valium, then blindfolded all of them, raped at least three and killed eleven of the fourteen.

Police responded to a phone call they believe was made by one of the children and arrived at the scene.

Walter Androus was found...

Alex flipped over the photocopy, but the back was blank. Where was the rest of the story? She looked at the date again. 1971. It was so long ago. From the diploma on the wall, she guessed Loeffler would have been six years old. She and Loeffler had graduated from college the same year. She would have been six, too.

Could he have been working on something related to this case? Was he prosecuting the killer after all these years? She focused on his diploma again. It could be Loeffler's class, she thought, glancing at the date on the article, or someone he knew. She searched for the class photo she'd seen the day before. It was from the same year as the murders.

Across the room, she found the picture and stared at it again, studying the two young boys whose faces remained X-less. One looked vaguely like Loeffler, but it was impossible to be sure.

She stared at the picture of the man with the red hair again. The initials were B.A. Was this man Walter Androus? The article mentioned Palo Alto. She'd seen Palo Alto somewhere else, too. Picking up the phone on Loeffler's desk, she called the station and asked one of the secretaries to call Palo Alto to get the old file on the murders. Maybe something would turn up there.

Turning back, she set down the class picture and clenched her hand to her chest, trying to steady its tremor. Why was she behaving so strangely? None of this had anything to do with her.

The door opened and Greg walked in. She put the newspaper article down on top of the class photo and turned to greet him. "What's going on?"

"I thought we could talk."

Alex didn't like the tone of his voice. He sounded like he had a surprise, and it didn't sound good. She couldn't take any more bad surprises. "I'm kind of busy. Can I take a rain check?"

"I don't think so."

Alex knelt down to one of her piles and began to sort it again. "Come on, Roback. I'll see you later."

He grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet in an angry motion. "You've got some explaining to do."

"The hell I do," she said, jerking her arm free and stepping back. "Don't fucking touch me." She looked at the closed door, knowing there were a dozen cops within earshot. "You're not my damn keeper," she snapped in a harsh whisper. "I don't owe you shit."

"I'm not trying to keep you, Kincaid," he said, his face more angry than she'd ever seen. "I'm trying to fucking save you."

"What makes you think I need saving?"

"This." He pulled a photo out of his pocket and handed it to her. She recognized it as an evidence photo. Just that fact made her feel suddenly shaky. Without touching the picture, she stared at it. It was of something lying on carpet in what she recognized as Loeffler's living room. But she couldn't make out the item. "What the hell is it?"