Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery (22 page)

I fired up my desktop computer. There was already a smattering of articles online about Rachel’s pregnancy. Many speculated on how far along she was, who the father was, and whether this mystery man was also the killer. ABC News had an online piece referencing a study that said murder accounted for 20 percent of deaths among pregnant women. Almost every article linked to the video of
Whorelick
interviewing the medical examiner. He had confirmed that Rachel was with child at her time of death and refused to make any further comments on her case. I kicked the wall in frustration. We’d gotten creamed.

But worse than that, Rachel’s autopsy—the semen, her pregnancy—threw doubt on what Andrey Kaminski had told me. He’d claimed it had been over between them for a long time, but now that it was apparent that Rachel had indeed been sleeping with a man while she was dating Olivia, I no longer bought it. It was possible that Rachel and Michael had slept together in the midst of their divorce battle—that sort of thing sometimes happened—or that Rachel had a more active and varied sex life than any of us realized, but Andrey as the father seemed like the most plausible explanation. Could their rekindled affair be the reason Olivia and Rachel had been arguing that night?

I picked up my phone and dialed Kaminski. “You have a whole lot of explaining to do,” I said into the receiver.

“I’m at work.”

That was a surprise. “They haven’t fired you yet?”

“No.”

“I take it you’ve seen the news.”

He sighed. “We should probably talk in person. I got tomorrow night off.”

“Saturday night?” I couldn’t help myself. I pictured Andrey at my stove, his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal that tattoo. Hell, his shirt off. A bottle of red open on the table. Dave Matthews on the stereo. There were worse ways to spend an evening—if I hadn’t also suspected him of impregnating a murder victim. “Tell me something: Did you get Rachel pregnant? The baby’s obviously not Olivia’s. And I’m guessing it’s not Michael’s, either.”

“I can’t talk about that now.”

His deep voice rolled over me, awakening something it shouldn’t. What was it about this guy? Why was I so damn attracted to him? “Fine. Tomorrow. When and where?”

“Seven.” He named a pub on First Avenue. Then there was silence. He’d hung up on me.

The bastard stood me up. Saturday at seven, he was nowhere to be seen and not answering his cell. I was two cranberry-and-seltzers in by the time I gave up, walked home and nuked a frozen Marie Callander’s for dinner. I went to sleep pissed as hell, and woke up even angrier. I went swimming at a pool near my apartment and ate a Belgian waffle smothered in maple syrup and butter for brunch. By Sunday mid-afternoon, I was ready to get back in the game. Georgia had barred me from the FirstNews building but she couldn’t stop me from getting back to work.

First thing I did was work up a new timeline. Rachel and Olivia came back to the Haverford around ten p.m. The neighbors heard them arguing shortly thereafter. Olivia probably retreated to her office, Rachel the bedroom or living room. That’s when the killer made his move, and my guess is he went for Rachel first. Olivia’s death was messy and quick whereas Rachel’s killing seemed more methodical and clean, almost clinical. The killer had also taken the time to wrap Rachel’s body in a garbage bag, which I knew could be significant because of a case we’d covered about five years ago.

A young Denver mom’s remains were found in a nature preserve fifteen miles away from their two-story Tudor. The killer turned out to be her husband, who had been having an affair with a twenty-two-year-old he’d met while taking his kids out for hot-fudge sundaes at a local ice-cream shop. He’d slit his wife’s throat, sawed her body into pieces in their toddler’s bathroom, bagged her body (minus the head, which he tossed into the Arkansas, according to a later confession), and buried the whole thing six feet underground. We’d had a forensic psychologist on the show say the use of garbage bags was telling, because it meant that the killer wanted to literally dispose of his wife.

Assuming Rachel had been attacked first, the killer had to incapacitate Rachel—tie her up, knock her over the head, maybe suffocate her
—
before going after Olivia, because it would have been too risky to spring on Olivia with someone else moving around in the apartment. That was my theory, anyway. Killer was there when the women got back at ten. He waited for them to separate, then went to work. No cleanup for Olivia but Rachel was carted off to the basement and locked away in Olivia’s storage space so it would look like she was the murderer. That would at least buy him a few days to get his story straight. Olivia had been killed for loving Rachel, but Rachel was the killer’s real prize.

There was only one problem with this theory. It didn’t explain why Olivia had texted me that night that she needed to tell me something.
It’s time you know the truth.
The truth about Rachel? Or about something else?

I called up the schedule that Olivia’s assistant, Emma, had emailed over to me, and looked again for anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing, but then again if Olivia was doing something she didn’t want others to know about, it wouldn’t be on her official schedule. I started looking for big holes in her calendar. There were maybe a dozen total, but few were recent. In August and the first two weeks of September, it looked like she left the office every Tuesday and Thursday at three, and didn’t come back until the next day. October she was back into work mode, with the exception of one Friday, which was just a holiday—a trip to a spa in the Berkshires, if memory served me correctly. Then, the week she was killed, she was also out of the office without explanation on a Wednesday. I flagged all these dates and times and sent an email to Emma asking her to try to remember what Olivia might have said she was doing on those days.

Though it was a Sunday, she called me back in less than an hour. “The Tuesdays and Thursdays in August were spent at her father’s place. She was helping Charles’s ghostwriter go through some of his old boxes of memorabilia for pictures and handwritten letters they could print alongside text in his memoir.”

“And the days in October?”

“That Friday was a vacation day. The Wednesday she said she had a meeting, but she didn’t tell me who she met with or where she was going.”

“Was that unusual?”

“I assumed it was a doctor visit.”

“Why? Was she going to the doctor frequently?”

Emma hesitated. “No. Not that I know of. I only said that because she usually told me where she was going, so I figured this was something private, like a—you know—gyno visit.”

“Did she take a company car to this meeting?”

“I’ll have to check on that for you.”

After our call, I broke for a cranberry seltzer and handful of salted cashews. Then I called Detective Ehlers under the guise of wanting to know if they’d found out who’d spiked my drink, although what I really wanted to know was how far along Rachel was and whether they thought her pregnancy had anything to do with the double—make that now triple—homicide. Ehlers didn’t get back to me, but Restivo did and not until I was halfway through another Marie Callander’s.

“Good news first?” he asked.

“Give me the bad.”

There was virtually no way of telling who had drugged me. The surveillance cameras weren’t positioned to catch someone spiking my drink or following me into the bathroom, and no one from the catering company had been busted for anything more serious than petty larceny. There also weren’t any surveillance cameras outside my building, which was contrary to what the super had told me, but not entirely surprising. The cops had no idea who had tried to break into my apartment the previous night.

I felt frustrated, but it wasn’t Restivo’s fault they had nothing. “What’s the good?”

“You’re alive.”

That much was true, but I wanted to shift the discussion to the case. “Can you answer something for me?”

“Have you figured out what Olivia’s text message meant?” he asked.

“No, but I’m working on it.” I pressed my temples, feeling another headache coming on. “Andrey Kaminski was in the building. He’s knowledgeable enough about the building’s storage facilities and security cameras, and was presumably having an affair with one of the murder victims who, it turns out, was pregnant. Why aren’t you taking a closer look at him?”

“Who says were not?”

In the background, I could hear the sounds of a busy precinct. People calling to each other, chairs scraping across the floor. It was Sunday night and there was another big football game on ESPN, Jets vs. Patriots. But these guys were putting in hours. Even if Restivo was being tightlipped, he was putting up with my questions. That meant he was in a good mood. It all added up to something: They had a lead. I popped open my Excedrin bottle and dry-swallowed two pills.

“Is the baby Kaminski’s or the husband’s?” I was convinced Andrey was the baby’s father. The question was why he’d lied to me about being dumped by Rachel. If he was the killer, he would know that it was only a matter of time before Rachel’s body was found and her pregnancy revealed. He would also know that there would be physical evidence on her corpse disproving what he’d told me—and presumably the cops—about the status of their relationship.

“You know I can’t answer that,” Restivo said.

“Well, how far along was Rachel?”

Restivo gave a low chuckle into the receiver. “That will be in the autopsy, Ms. Shaw.”

“Which is not currently available.”

“Correct.”

“When will it be?” I pounded on my chest to help the pills on their way.

“Can’t say. Why don’t you ask the ME?”

“You’ll call me as soon as it comes in?”

“You got it, lady. Because I got nothing better to do.”

Monday

Monday

M
onday got off to a rough start. Diskin reamed me out for losing the Rockwell pregnancy scoop to GSBC. Then Jon Wallace yelled at me. And then Alex. None of them seemed to remember or care that all this had happened after I’d been drugged at a company function and explicitly banned from the office by Georgia. I was almost grateful once it was time for our weekly storyboard meeting, which was preceded by a morning of making phone calls that were never returned and putting together a package that was entirely made up of regurgitated news and too many question marks. That got me to lunch.

In the afternoon we taped an interview with Olivia’s housekeeper, Ilsa Chavez, but she was old news, and basically had nothing to add except that she hadn’t noticed that Rachel was pregnant. Alex dug a little, and the housekeeper revealed that Rachel had been wearing an oversize pajama top that could have easily concealed a nascent baby mound when she’d been introduced to her at Olivia’s apartment. Not my—or the network’s—finest hour, but we wouldn’t pitch it that way to our viewers.
Shocking new information in the Kravis murder case
was how’d we sell it. Our audience deserved better than a nightshirt that revealed nothing.

I checked my watch. It was already six p.m. Time to get rolling if I was going to make it to the fundraiser on time. “You going home first?” I asked Alex, who was sitting next to me in the editing room.

He leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms overhead. “Gonna change in the bathroom. You?”

I got up from the desk. “Same.”

He gave me another one of his quarterback smiles. “Holler if you need help with a zipper.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” I said lightly. Letting myself out of the tiny room with my stack of papers tucked up against my chest, I marched my sorry mood into the ladies room, where I slipped on a black knee-length column that displayed just the right amount of cleavage and did some sort of voodoo on my waist to make it look half its usual size. Last, I strapped on the sparkly black stilettos I’d purchased at Olivia’s insistence; she believed every woman should own at least one pair of leg-lengthening, confidence-boosting shoes, no matter how much they cost or how much they hurt. These were sheer torture after fifteen minutes of standing, which explained why I barely ever wore them.

I might consider wearing them more often, though, if Phil Drucker’s reaction to seeing me was what I could expect every time I slipped them on. He picked me up outside the FirstNews building in a hired Town Car and whistled. “That dress looks like it was made for you.”

I touched my chignon. It had taken about twenty bobby pins and half a can of hairspray, but the results were better than expected. “I clean up all right,” I said, blushing a little.

He held open the car door for me. “That’s a whopping understatement.”

In the car, Phil asked me how work was going. He and I had corresponded a few times over the weekend—he’d actually asked me out for a drink on Sunday afternoon, a “pre-game warmup” for our big date night—and I’d begged off, using work as an excuse to stay home and finish recuperating in sweatpants. “Could be better, could be worse,” I said.

He tapped his fingers on the faux-wood paneling on the car door. “Well, tonight should be interesting.”