Sasha McCandless 03 - Irretrievably Broken (10 page)

CHAPTER 17

Sasha was not uncomfortable with silence. She could sit companionably next to a friend, a relative, or a total stranger and be alone with her thoughts. Truth be told, she preferred it to incessant yammering on about nothing, just to have something to say. Usually.

Tonight, though, with Connelly sprawled across her couch, pretending to read some behavioral economics book, the quiet was making her edgy—the quiet, and the fact that Connelly hadn’t turned a page in at least twenty minutes. He was just staring into the book.

Their dinner conversation had been strained and awkwardly polite, as they danced around the topics of her new murder case and his potential new job. It had felt like a bad first date.

She perched on the arm of the couch behind his head.

“So, how’s the book?”

“Uh, good,” he said, turning it over on his lap to hold his place and twisting his neck to look at her. “I think you’d like it.”

“Really? How would you know?”

He wrinkled his brow at the question, then he laughed. “Yeah, I guess I’m pretty distracted tonight.”

“Thinking about the job offer?” she asked

“Yeah.”

It hung there between them for a while, then he pushed himself up on an elbow to turn to face her full on, and said, “You could come with me.”

“I really can’t. I have to spend the weekend getting my arms around the Lang case.”

“Not this weekend. For good.”

He looked at her for a long time.

“So, you
are
going to take it?” she asked, ignoring his question for the time being.

“Yes,” he confirmed.

She’d figured that was the case—that this visit was a formality. But, hearing him say it felt like a hammer fist punch to the sternum.

She nodded. He reached up and put his hand over hers, waiting for her to respond to his offer. He wanted her to give up her practice and move to D.C. with him.

“I ... need to think about it,” she said, finally.

They sat like that, silent, for a moment, then she stood and crossed the room to get the criminal practice materials Larry had lent her. She had work to do.

Connelly watched her with sad eyes as she gathered her papers. Then he turned back to the book he wasn’t reading, and silence filled the room again.

THURSDAY

CHAPTER 18

Caroline worried one pearl earring: she pinched her earlobe with her thumb and index finger, turning and rubbing the glossy white globe over and over. Where was Mr. Prescott?

She glanced down at her desk. It was still there.

She’d arrived, as always, at precisely ten minutes before eight and had unlocked the door to her office. When she’d crossed the threshold to turn on the light, she’d heard a rustling and had looked down to see a white, Tyvek envelope underfoot. She could see the thick block letters spelling out “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.”

Her heart started to flutter in her chest, like a trapped bird. She bent to retrieve the envelope, then carried it as if it were glass and gently placed it in the center of her desk. Where it had now been sitting for forty minutes. Waiting for her to do something.

It’s marked
‘
personal and confidential
.’
Mr. Prescott will be here soon. Just disregard it.

She repeated the three sentences in an effort to slow her heart and quell her imagination. It wasn’t working.

Caroline turned her attention to her computer monitor and busied herself with completing an expense report. Her right hand, unbidden, returned to her earring. It was no use. She wheeled her chair back to the center of her desk and stared down at the envelope.

The door opened at eighty-thirty, and Mr. Prescott strode into the room.

“Good morning, Mrs. Masters,” he said, raising his attaché case in greeting.

“Good morning,” she said, as she snatched the envelope from her desk and hurried around to hand it to him. “This was on the floor when I arrived. Someone must have slid it under the door.”

They had never discussed the first envelope, but she could tell from the way his face turned gray that he recognized that this one was its twin.

He took the envelope from her slowly, as if he really didn’t want to, but only said, “Very good. Thank you.”

He went into his office and shut the door behind him.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Cinco rubbed his mouth and stared at the envelope. He didn’t want to open it. He had to, though. He cracked his knuckles and wished he’d gone to design school instead of law school. Then, he steeled himself and slid the edge of his letter opener under the seal.

He turned the envelope upside-down and shook out a five-by-seven photograph. It landed face-down on his standing desk. He flipped it over with the tip of the letter opener.

Ellen, Clarissa, and Martine smiled up at him in their party gowns. Ellen and Clarissa’s grins were partially obscured by red Xs. “TWO DOWN” was written across the bottom of the picture.

Cinco closed his eyes and willed himself not to vomit. He took several breaths. When the nausea subsided, he pressed a button on his phone and buzzed Caroline.

“Mrs. Masters,” he said, working to keep his voice even, “call down and tell Clarissa Costopolous to come up to see me. If she’s not in yet, leave a message for her to come up as soon as she arrives.” 

“Right away, Mr. Prescott,” she assured him in a voice that betrayed nothing.

He released the button and stared out the window. Despite her calm tone, he was pretty sure his secretary knew as well as he did that Clarissa wouldn’t be coming to work today.

Cinco wasn’t sure how long he stood like that, looking out the window without seeing the city skyline that unfolded in front of him. He thought about calling Greta. But, he didn’t know what help his wife could offer at the moment. Besides, what would he say?
Darling, someone’s serially killing the female partners at the firm; what should I do?
He shook his head at himself. No, don’t bring anyone else into this ... mess.

He was about to buzz Caroline again to tell her to round up the Management Committee, when she raced through the door with a stricken expression.

“Clarissa’s in the parking garage. She’s ... dead.”

CHAPTER 19

Cinco, flanked by the four other members of the Management Committee, stepped off the elevator and scanned the parking garage’s third floor, where a shopper returning to her car with an armful of bags from the clothing boutique in the building had found Clarissa’s body.

Cinco spotted the sobbing shopper sitting on the trunk of a black-and-white police cruiser with a blanket thrown over her shoulders and a sympathetic female patrol officer rubbing the woman’s arm. He headed in that direction.

As he neared, he nodded to Samantha Davis, the firm’s chief security officer, who was standing with an older African-American man in a navy suit. They were huddled close to Clarissa’s Lexus.

“Mr. Prescott,” Sam said, as they approached, “this is homicide detective Burton Gilbert. Detective Gilbert, Charles Prescott, V. He’s the head of the firm.”

The detective slipped a small notepad and pen into his breast pocket and extended a hand.

“Mr. Prescott,” he said in a deep, gravelly voice.

“Detective,” Cinco said.

He waved a hand behind him. “These men are my senior advisors.”

Detective Gilbert nodded to the cluster of anxious faces over Cinco’s shoulder. “I’ll need to get names and contact information here from you gentlemen, but first Ms. Davis and I can walk you through what we know.”

Sam smoothed back her wavy silver hair and looked down at her own small notepad.

“Okay, at oh-nine-ten, building security got a call that a female was screaming on the third floor of the garage.”

She pointed to the uniformed officer and the shopper, and Cinco noticed for the first time the building’s rent-a-cop standing alongside the patrol car.

The building provided security for its tenants, but Cinco had not found it particularly impressive. In fact, it appeared to be principally decorative. After a Christmas season in which sixteen firm-issued laptops had walked out of the building, four secretaries’ pocketbooks had been stolen from their desks, and innumerable young associates had complained of missing electronic devices that Cinco had never heard of nor cared about, he’d hired Sam Davis.

Sam was a former FBI agent and a member of his wife’s book club. She had retired from the Bureau and moved to Pittsburgh when her husband had been offered a position as the chief financial officer at some technology company in the Strip District. She was well credentialed, bored senseless, and didn’t need the money. Cinco had made her a low-ball offer and she’d taken it.

Her eyes were shining now, and Cinco could see she was hopped up on the excitement that had been in short supply as the chief security officer of a staid law firm.

She gestured at the green Buick LaCrosse parked to the left of Clarissa’s car and continued, “Mrs. Woolson, the woman who found the body, had hit some VIP early-morning sale at Creations Boutique. She was coming around to the passenger side of her car here to put her packages on the front seat—”

Porter interrupted her, asking “Why not in the trunk? Or the back seat?”

Cinco turned to frown at him. “What difference does it make?”

Sam shook her head and said, “No, it’s a good question. She has some kind of long-haired dogs and the backseat is full of dog hair. Their crates are in the trunk because she dropped them off at the groomer this morning. So, she walked around to open the front passenger side door and noticed the blood.”

She stepped in front of Cinco and pointed with her pen to the front driver’s side window of Clarissa’s car. Five sets of eyes followed her hand.

Red blood splattered the driver’s side window in a spray pattern that reminded Cinco of spin art.

When he was a child, his father had insisted the entire family attend the firm’s annual Kennywood picnic. Even then, Cinco had found the amusement park to be sticky, dirty, and inexplicable. He couldn’t fathom why people would wait in line to be scared, jerked around on a rickety wooden roller coaster, or spun in circles until they were queasy.

He had, however, loved the spin art booth. You paid your money and chose your colors. Then you would squeeze the paint from plastic condiment bottles onto your canvas, while it spun around like a record album.

The firm still held an annual Kennywood picnic, and Cinco still went to it each year. It had been at least ten years since he’d last looked for the spin art booth. At the time, the high school student manning the recording studio, where the talentless and hapless recorded abysmal covers of popular songs, had looked at him blankly.

He stared at the window. Clarissa’s vibrant blood and clotty gray matter clung to it and obscured his view, but he could see her body slumped across the center console.

The detective said, “I took a look inside when I got here, but I can’t let you do so. We need to wait for the coroner and the forensics team to get here and do their thing. Can’t risk disturbing the scene. But, the doors were unlocked. She appears to have been beaten with a blunt object. My guess is a claw hammer.”

Marco spoke up. “You can tell that by looking at her?”

Sam swallowed a laugh, and Detective Gilbert twisted his mouth into a smile.

“No,” he said, “there’s a blood-covered claw hammer on the floor of the passenger side, so I have deduced as much.”

Cinco watched as Marco reddened.

Then he turned back to the homicide detective and said, “The firm will cooperate with your investigation, of course, limited only by our obligations to our clients to preserve their confidentiality. Let Ms. Davis know if you need anything.”

“I’ll be in touch,” Detective Gilbert promised.

Cinco nodded his goodbyes and turned to head back toward the elevators, stepping over the yellow crime scene tape. The others trailed behind him, whispering. He stifled a sigh. He saw more meetings in his future.

CHAPTER 20

Sasha, Naya, Larry, and Greg squeezed around the small round conference table in Sasha’s office. A takeout container of coffee and pastries from the coffee shop below sat, untouched, in the center of the table.

Greg squirmed under the weight of the unimpressed stares he faced. He’d been there for twenty minutes and, so far, he’d done a lot of tap dancing instead of answering Sasha’s questions. Naya rapped her pen against the table and bit her lip.

Sasha wondered if Naya would continue to hold her peace in the face of Greg’s apparent refusal to help himself. She hadn’t asked Naya to join her practice because of Naya’s diplomacy: she was outspoken, and her instincts about people were sound. If Greg continued to feed them a line, Naya would eventually lose her patience.

“Let’s try this again,” Sasha said to Greg, holding up the picture of him with the earliest date. It showed him at a poker table at 10:30 a.m. on the third Tuesday in June. “Do you remember how you came to be at the casino instead of at work this day?”

Greg exhaled through his nose. “I told you, I don’t know. I guess I just got the idea to stop by on my way to work. I drive right by the North Shore, you know.”

“Okay, sure, but why that day?” Sasha probed.

“I. Don’t. Know.”  Greg cut off each word, making his irritation clear.

Finally, Naya made hers clear, too.

“Listen, Mr. Lang,” she began, pushing back from the table, “we’re trying to help you. Do you think someone who knew your gambling would set off your wife
just happened
to be at the casino, with a camera, on the same Tuesday morning that you got an urge to pull off the exit from 279 instead of taking your sorry ass to work?”

Greg stared at her, slack-jawed, then said, “I guess I never thought about it.”