The Oxygen Murder (29 page)

Lori stepped along, frame by frame, moving across the floor to the woman’s leg, down to her ankle, until she came to a bracelet.
Aha.
She remembered that Rachel wore an ankle bracelet on the day of their interview—
and so did fifty percent of the women in Manhattan,
Lori thought. Her memory of the design of Rachel’s bracelet wasn’t that good, either, just that it was gold and shiny and had a flat plate where a name might have been engraved. Another dead end.

She scanned forward and backward among the frames a few times and finally gave up. Lori knew that even with all her zooming and enhancement capabilities she wouldn’t be able to find what wasn’t on the tape in the first place, and that was determined by the camera settings. She and Amber shook their heads all the time over television crime shows where a technician would enhance a videotape of a license plate that was shot at a great distance, or a blurry reflection from a mirror, and the images would end up clearer than if you’d been standing there.

Right now she wished she could zoom up and see if there was a name and title on that office door. Preferably
PRESIDENT
, or better yet,
MARRIED PRESIDENT WITH A LOT TO LOSE
. Speaking of a lot to lose, Rachel might be in deep trouble if whoever was subsidizing her lifestyle found out. It took a minute for Lori to admit to herself the extent to which she was building a case out of pure imagination. She had no direct evidence that Rachel even
had
a sugar daddy, let alone one who would object to extracurricular activities. For all she knew, Rachel’s ankle was in the sugar daddy’s office.

Nevertheless, she told herself, she did some of her best work this way. There was nothing wrong with a little wild theorizing as long as no one was listening just yet.

If that shapely calf was Rachel’s, then it was likely that Rachel was another potential victim for Amber. Lori figured Rachel approached Amber and tried to talk her out of blackmailing her. When that didn’t work, she wrote threatening letters, including one to Lori just in case. She’d obviously gotten smarter the second time, with Lori’s letter, and had torn off the letterhead.

The big question was, Did Rachel stop at letters, or did she end up suffocating Amber with one of Lori’s pillows? The police had taken the offending pillow, but Lori still glanced over at her couch, where similar ones were stacked, and shivered.

The second big question was what she should do next. She could go to the NYPD directly, or to Uncle Matt, but with what? The tape certainly didn’t show anything incriminating, not even that it was definitively Rachel on the floor.

She thought back to their interview. What if she had Rachel’s fingerprints on something? The police could compare them to the prints on the two letters they had in custody. If Rachel was dumb enough to leave the hotel letterhead intact the first time, she probably didn’t use gloves to handle the paper.

Too bad Lori hadn’t stuck one of those expensive china teacups in her purse. Rachel had offered to take her jacket, but Lori had kept it. Well, probably fingerprints didn’t stick to fabric anyway. It would have to be wood or ceramic or paper or—

Paper. That was it. She jumped up and went to her desk. Luckily she hadn’t tossed the PR package Rachel had foisted on her.

Lori rushed back to the kitchen, found her rubber gloves under the sink, and looked for a plastic storage bag big enough to hold the nine-by-twelve envelope. She settled for a freezer bag from the bagel shop and carefully inserted the package.
Too little, too late,
she thought, but she might as well do what she could to preserve any evidence.

An image flashed through Lori’s mind. Rachel’s ankle bracelet again.
What if . . .

She removed the envelope from the bag and emptied the contents onto her kitchen counter. Rachel had mentioned a recruiting brochure in the packet.

There it was, and sure enough the team photo on the cover featured
Rachel standing at the front tip of a small triangle of people.
Rachel Hartman, PR, and her team,
the caption said.

Rachel Hartman had a wide smile across her face and a thin bracelet around her ankle.

Lori switched from her thick kitchen gloves to the thin white cotton gloves she kept handy in the darkroom and took the brochure to her scanner. What she needed was a dual image on the screen so she could compare bracelets. The triangle of people had been shot from an angle, from above, but Amber had shot from above also. Not the same angle, since in the brochure photo Rachel was upright on the lawn in front of Blake’s, but it might work.

Lori scanned in the front page of the brochure and worked at the two pictures on her monitor—the frame from the office video and the photo from the brochure—so the dual images were the same size and magnification. No doubt in Lori’s mind. It was the same ankle and the same bracelet. She figured the NYPD had a better system and could make some meaningful measurements, but this was a good start.

She printed out the two photos and looked up at the clock over the sink. Eight ten. Not a good time to reach Uncle Matt. She remembered they were all going to visit someone in Rose’s family in the West Seventies. She’d be seeing Gloria tomorrow afternoon at Curry’s. That would be soon enough to lay out her theory and her evidence.

Lori went to the window and peeked through the blinds. The unmarked was there. Nothing to worry about. It wasn’t as if Rachel was going to come after her tonight. Funny how Uncle Matt thought it was Billy Keenan she should be wary of.

“Make up an excuse for him to not come here,” he’d said.

She drew a nervous breath and stretched out on her couch. After a minute she got up, took the remaining pillows that matched the one used to smother Amber to the kitchen, and stuffed them all into a large garbage bag. She dragged the bag across the loft to the fire escape window and threw the pillows four stories down to the Dumpster. She should have done that right away.

She checked the chain on her door and went back to her pillowless couch.

Lori woke up with a stiff neck, disoriented, and hungry. Midevening naps were not her norm. Neither was skipping dinner. It was almost ten o’clock, and as good as lunch had been, it was way too long ago. If she was going to work for another couple of hours she needed sustenance.

She was glad her fridge was full of leftovers from Raoul’s. Lori piled a plate with helpings of roast chicken and olive salad and two slices of dill bread. She grabbed a sesame cookie from the jar on the counter on her way to the living room.

This session called for her TV setup only. She planned just to review the latest Curry DVD so it would be fresh in her mind for tomorrow. She shifted a couple of pillows from her chairs to the couch and placed her dinner and a glass of white wine on the coffee table. She’d spend a few minutes reviewing the video and then take a break and watch the news or a Lifetime movie.

Lori looked through the DVDs on her Currently Active shelf. She plucked
CURRY II
, the second of the Curry DVDs Amber had burned. The police still hadn’t returned all her videos. She pictured some rookie bleary-eyed going through boring outtakes.

She opened the neon green jewel case and stared at the round label on the disk inside.

Julia Roberts, her hair blond and in an upsweep, carrying a child, looked off to the side of the cover art.

What?

A DVD of the movie
Erin Brockovich
was in the case marked
CURRY II: CFCS
. Strange. How had this happened? Where was the
CURRY II
disk?

A
duh
moment. She must have put the Curry DVD in the
Erin Brockovich
case she’d returned to the video store.

She’d recently rented
Erin.
It was the kind of movie she wished she’d written—a little person bringing a big corporation to its knees. Like the old Paul Newman favorite
The Verdict,
but with even wider social consequences. She’d studied
Erin
and then returned it when she got her third late notice from Red Carpet Video. She hadn’t gotten around yet to buying her own copy.

Now she wondered what was in the
CURRY I
case she’d given Gloria.

You’d think the video store would have called her. Probably some kid, like chunky Eddie at Family Suites, logged it in without opening the case, just marking time at a minimum wage job.

She picked up her landline and her address book and punched in the number for the video store.

“Red Carpet.” After about ten rings, a voice as young as Eddie’s. At least they were still open and had an actual human answering.

Lori told the clerk about leaving a personal DVD in the
Erin Brockovich
case.

“Oh, yeah. We were just going to call you.”

Right.
“Can I come down now and switch them?”

“Uh, no. We’re almost closing. We open at nine tomorrow.”

“I’m just a couple of blocks away, and I really need to see that other DVD.”

“Sorry. I’m all packed up here, and I got a date. And you know you’re gonna have to pay for the extra days.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lori said, and hung up. Fat chance that guy had a date.

Not that she did, either. It had been a while, in fact. Too busy. She sighed loudly, puffing out her cheeks. More likely just too lazy to try again. She’d been with Sean for so long she didn’t even know the dating protocol, as evidenced by her pitiful attempt with Craig.

Lori thought of the box full of photos she had of Sean and of the two of them together. She couldn’t bring herself to toss them, but she didn’t display them, either. They were in the basement with other relics of her past. She pictured Sean in a Back Bay apartment now with—who knew?—some hotshot lawyer. At least Sean had never lived in this loft, so it was easier to move on.

Well, no Curry footage, and certainly no date. The perfect excuse to watch a Lifetime movie. She had several in the bank on her DVR. She scrolled down the list. Kelli Martin and Tori Spelling in that cheerleader movie. Susan Lucci seducing her hunk of a contractor, with the sexy stubble on his cheeks. Nancy McKeon as a Mafia wife. Gail O’Grady leading three lives.

Lori clicked on the Mafia movie. She cleaned her plate of the last shreds of chicken and pasta, then leaned back. She was ready for Julia’s brother, Eric Roberts, who always made a convincing bad guy.

Thump! Creak!

Lori snapped upright. The elevator. Passing the third floor. She pushed the mute button and tipped the glass of wine over putting the remote back on the table.

Click. Click.
The noise sounded louder than a welding torch.

She sat still, listening.

She remembered the unmarked and took a breath. They must know not to let Billy up—but would they be suspicious of an attractive, nicely dressed woman?

Bzzzz. Bzzzz.

She tightened her sweater around her and went to the peephole.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-F
O
R

A
hat shop? I don’t think so,” I told Rose at breakfast in the café attached to our hotel.

Matt and Rose had brought their outer clothing downstairs so they could leave after breakfast without going back to their rooms. It was the same at every table in the café—one chair per group was used exclusively to hold all the coats, scarves, hats, and gloves that were needed in the increasingly low temperatures outside. Although I’d planned to stay put for a while and use one of the computers at the back tables, I’d brought my outerwear, too. I tried to convince myself that it was
not
because I didn’t want to take a chance on being in the elevator alone again.

Rose picked at a low-fat bran muffin. “Grace wants to show us the shop her mother opened up on her own years ago. It’s over on East Sixty-fourth, off Lexington. The place has been sold many times over since then, and they’ve added some premade things, but they still do custom millinery for special clients.”

“That’s very interesting, Rose. I wish I could join you, but I have to do a little prep work for my trip to Curry Industries with Lori this afternoon.”