The Perfect Suspect (34 page)

“Thank you,” she said. “A close friend is coming. She'll know what to do about the . . .” She stopped, unable to work her tongue around the word “remains.”

The doctor nodded. “Can we get you anything?”

“I'd like to see her,” Catherine said. “I'd like to say good-bye.”

She glanced at the officer who had gotten to his feet. He gave her a quick nod, and she followed the doctor's broad shoulders and green scrubs down a wide corridor, through a series of stainless steel doors that seemed to swing open on their own and into a small room with a gurney in the middle and a lifeless form under a thin sheet. Out in the corridor, a trolley clanked past, glass bottles rattling. The swoosh of a door opening sounded like a little gust of wind. Chemical odors drifted in the air. The doctor stepped back into the corridor, and Catherine folded the sheet back from Kim's face. She looked at peace, she thought, all the effort she had made in the condo to name her killer—Detective Beckman—was gone, leaving only the pale, clear skin and the colorless lips.

Catherine dipped her own face into her clasped hands. “I'm so sorry,” she whispered. She closed her eyes against the tears that were starting. She could hear the girl's voice in her head, the fear for herself, but running through the fear, the outraged demand for justice. She had expected Catherine, a reporter, to write the truth.

It was a moment before she could look at the dead girl again. There must be something appropriate to say, but she couldn't think what it might be. Then she remembered the prayer the elder had said at the wake Dulcie had taken her to. “You'll want to come,” Dulcie had told her when Catherine balked at attending a funeral service for a woman she had never met. “Until you know the way in which we send our dead to the afterlife, you won't understand your own people.” Catherine had met her at the Indian Center and taken part in the wake—the bowls of beef stew, the plates of Jell-O that had covered the tables, the steady rhythm of the drums and the voices of the singers, the sweet smell of cedar smoke that the elders had wafted through the room, and the prayers.

Catherine lifted the sheet and pulled it back over Kim Gregory's face. The doctor was still in the corridor when she left the room, a quiet, prayerful look on his own face. “I'll see you out,” he said.

33

Ryan avoided the main highways. Darkness was falling, streetlights snapping on, lights glowing in the houses she passed. They would be looking for her by now. Somebody would have reported the shooting at the strip mall, and it was always possible Catherine McLeod had told her boyfriend everything Kim the whore had said. The department would want to ask her a lot of stupid questions. Best to stay off I-25, where a cop might spot the black BMW. All kinds of ways to track vehicles—video cameras nobody knew about, unmarked black police cars cruising along as if the drivers were ordinary citizens, state patrol and other busybodies who would insert themselves in the hunt.

She had taken care not to leave any evidence at either the shopping mall or the condo. Nothing to connect her to the shootings of a whore and her pimp, apart from the bullets the lab techs would dig out of the walls. They wouldn't matter, because by then she would have gotten rid of the Ruger. She understood the logical minds of detectives. She had attended the same schools. Start with the obvious, the victim's background and associates, look for the evidence left behind. There was no evidence left behind. Which left the background and the associates. Bustamante or whoever got the cases would quickly link Kim with the escort service—two homicides with the same gun!—and conclude they had been shot by a disgruntled associate or client. Or maybe a gang banger, the kind that could have mugged and shot Jeremy Whitman.

Beautiful. Ryan hit the brake at a stop sign and laughed out loud. She realized she was trembling. She would not lose it! She was still in control. Control. Then she crossed the intersection and passed brown brick bungalows with wide porches shaded by massive oaks and elms. Neighborhoods like this existed everywhere in Denver. Quiet, comfortable, no need for patrolling cop cars. She took a right, then a left onto another bungalow-lined street that the GPS showed running a mile or so ahead without stop signs. Everything was working out as if she had planned it. Anyone who might connect her to David Mathews had been safely taken care of, except for the guy in Aspen, but he was a voice crying in the wilderness with no one to back up the story. No doubt there were blemishes and slipups on his record—drugs, alcohol, DUIs—that she would find. There was always something. It was easy to discredit anyone.

The lights of Speer Boulevard twinkled ahead, a dangerous street. Cops could be everywhere. She stopped at the red light and glanced around, muscles tightening, her forehead damp with perspiration. No sign of any patrol cars. The instant the light changed, she crossed the boulevard and continued north onto another side street. The rush and noise of traffic on Speer receded. She felt like a runner who had passed another marker and settled into her stride, and her hands relaxed on the steering wheel. The panic and uncontrollable shaking that had overtaken her when things started spiraling out of control had given way to an odd, yet comforting exhilaration. She was in control now.

The houses passing by were larger, set farther back from the street, two-stories with gabled windows and wide lawns and flower beds that required gardeners. She and David would have lived in a fine house, the sprawling governor's mansion, a historic mansion, he had told her, the former residence of an old Denver family. Not that she cared. The fact that the house was elegant was all that mattered. He had promised that, after a decent interval in which his people would plant stories in the newspaper that the governor and his wife were having difficulties and he had attended a few state occasions alone that sent the gossipers chirping, Sydney would move out of the mansion. The divorce would be swift, both parties amicable. Another discreet interval, and she and David would marry in a tasteful ceremony at a church in Evergreen. She had selected the church herself, perched on top of a mountain with panoramic views of the surrounding peaks.

She felt as if a movie were running in her head that she had watched many times. All of it familiar, as if it had actually happened. In the garage at the mansion, there would be a BMW, like the one she was driving now, and an expensive SUV, a Mercedes or Lexus perhaps. David would be governor. Chauffeurs and private jets and trips to Japan or India or Europe, wherever she and David had wanted to go. All to spur the state's economy. No kids, though. David didn't want children, and she had taken steps when she was twenty-two to insure she never had any.

David. David. She could feel the control beginning to slip. She sat forward, pulling herself up straight and clasping the steering wheel hard. All the dreams, all the plans they made—the movie in her mind—he had tossed aside, as if they were nothing. Tossed her aside, like trailer trash from the backwoods of Minnesota. She had tried to explain that she had gone far, earned the respect of her superiors and bosses, taken home medals and honors. She was somebody!

But it was finished. She couldn't turn back time, say the things that would have convinced David but didn't come to her until he had crumbled onto the floor. What a fool he had been to throw away so much. And yet, and yet—something new had been moving at the edges of her mind since that night: perhaps it was meant to be. David had deceived her; he wasn't the man she had thought. He'd had no intention of leaving Sydney and her money and striking out with a wife as beautiful and accomplished as Detective Ryan Beckman. She had lowered herself to get involved with David Mathews, just as she had lowered herself to marry the software geek who had turned out to be a child-man, groveling, begging her to stay with him. She wouldn't make that mistake again.

She was in perfect control, but that was because she had eliminated most of the problems. Only one left: the nosy, persistent reporter who knew more than she had any right to know and was capable of causing trouble. Ryan glanced over at the bag on the passenger seat. She would use the Ruger one more time before she broke it apart and went on another Dumpster dump. Even if a few pieces were found, the gun could never be traced to her.

Unless Devon Waters decided to shoot off his mouth. She had spotted him in the roundup of gang members getting out of the van behind headquarters this morning, and for a moment, she had felt herself faltering. Devon could link her to the Ruger, swear he had given it to her, that she had blackmailed him, threatened to arrest him for the downtown assaults. But what difference could it possibly make, she had told herself, if a drug-addled homeboy told a preposterous story in a pathetic effort to save himself? No one would believe Devon Waters.

That left the final problem: Catherine McLeod.

Catherine rode the escalator down into the cavernous lobby of Denver Health Sciences, illuminated in the glow of ceiling lights overhead. The officer stayed a couple steps behind her. Next to her, the up escalator was filled with white-faced visitors gripping the black hand rest. A crowd of visitors pressed against the reception counter below while others came and went through the sliding glass doors or stood about looking dazed and lost. She stepped off the escalator and threaded her way through the crowd out into the cool evening, the officer at her shoulder. A long walkway emptied into the parking lot. There was something indescribably sad about the hospital and the little room upstairs with the lifeless form of a girl called Kim lying on a gurney. It had seemed wrong to leave her, and even now, in the parking lot with headlights shooting into the blackness and traffic rumbling in the distance, Catherine had to fight off the urge to return and sit with her a while longer.

She realized she had walked past the convertible. She retraced her steps and crawled inside, and the pink-faced officer leaned over and said he would follow her home and keep a watch on her house tonight. Within minutes she had threaded her way out of the parking lot and onto a side street, guilt and helplessness pulling on her like heavy weights. She shouldn't blame herself, Nick had said. There was nothing more she could have done. She felt numb, as if her hands were floating above the steering wheel. The sky was overcast, and the black night spread all around. Downtown lights looked dim in the distance. The air was suffused with autumn smells of dead leaves and grass and an almost imperceptible sense of the end of things.

She dabbed a finger at the tears that started even though she thought she was done crying. She had stayed in the waiting room until Misty swept in, wearing a long, red gown slit to her thigh, silver heels and carrying a little sequined bag, tears streaming down her cheeks. She had gotten the message on her cell, she'd said, and left what she called “work” as soon as she could. Then she had wanted to know if it was true that Ericka had also been shot to death, and when Catherine told her it was, she sank onto a chair and buried her face in her hands. Her world had collapsed, she said. Her employer and now her best friend dead! What was left for her now? Where would she go?

Catherine had given her a moment before she asked if Kim had said anything about David Mathews's murder, and Misty had shaken her head. No. No. And that explained why Misty was still alive, Catherine had thought. She waited until Misty collected herself, stood up and marched across the corridor toward the metallic-haired woman with black-rimmed glasses who had materialized behind a desk. Kim had a mother somewhere, Misty announced. The name would be somewhere in Kim's things, she was sure. The woman blinked up at the girl in the long red dress and said she would pass the information onto the police. “One more thing,” Misty said. “If no one comes for her, I mean no one else shows up, you should call me. I don't want her tossed into some burial pit with a lot of people nobody loved.”

Now Catherine turned onto Speer Boulevard and drove toward Highland, past the light-rail tracks with the headlights of the train bearing down, past the lights of downtown and the Auraria campus and across the viaduct, climbing up into Highland. She took Federal Boulevard to the neighborhood liquor store on the chance it might still be open. The neon light in the window was dark, the place shuttered. But there were still two bottles of wine on the counter, she was thinking. She would need a drink tonight.

Ten minutes later she turned into the alley that ran behind the houses on her block, her headlights boring through the darkness and shadows. The headlights on the police car had disappeared, but there was comfort in knowing the young officer was a half block behind. He would see her safely inside. Keep a watch on the house tonight. She could hear Rex barking as the car bucked over the weeds that poked through the concrete and the headlights swarmed across the garages, bushes and utility poles. The dog had an uncanny way of sensing when she was close to home. She felt another stab of guilt. He had been alone all day; she had intended to be home hours ago. Nothing had gone as she had intended.