Court walked by the main entrance to headquarters, noting the small gathering of reporters outside. He pulled his hood up to hide his face in case anyone noticed him sneak past toward the side entrance. The Times report had said there would be a press conference later this morning. Stensland, no doubt, had set this up without even consulting him. He raced into the squad room, relaxing when he saw only three others in house yet. It was early on a Monday, and things were a little slow to get moving. In spite of his lingering in bed, he was actually early. He dropped to the floor in his cubicle and did a set of fifty pushups to make up for skipping Krav.
He set his desktop computer up to share with the computer in the conference room, and had the tech working by the time the others trickled in with cups and mugs of coffee in hand. A few held purchased drinks from local coffee shops. Two women detectives held BPA-free water bottles—one glass, one metal. Three women in a sea of men. No wonder Ivy had been so prickly about her long-sought-after promotion. The word about Drummond’s death had gotten around. People talked in excited tones as they waited for the briefing to start. As much as high-profile cases were a pain to work, they were exciting and made excellent gossip fodder.
Lieutenant Stensland walked in, waving the morning paper over his head like a lasso rounding people up. “We’ve got a front pager, people. Someone finally noticed Berkeley Drummond died. This means press, and press means stupidity, and everyone being followed for a juicy story.” He pointed the paper at Court and Ivy before tucking it under his arm. “Before you begin, I want to remind everyone in this room everything you’re about to hear is confidential. You must not leak anything said today to anyone outside this room.” He looked over the top of his thick glasses, through his heavy eyebrow fringe at everyone in the room to emphasize the point. His gaze landed longer on the dozen uniformed officers he had brought in for some extra feet on the ground. Once the silence became uncomfortable, he gave Court the signal to start.
Court flipped on the smart board, starting with the crime scene photos. “This is Berkeley Drummond. The Lieutenant was able to get a generic press release out on Friday night, but once the word gets out that we’re investigating this as homicide, it will immediately turn into the word murder in the press. We honestly don’t know if this is ultimately going to be murder or manslaughter or even accidental. We can be reasonably assured it will be one of those three classifications, likely murder given the circumstances.”
He told them about the brain tumor and the planned suicide. “The one thing we know for certain is Berkeley Drummond did not end up like this of his own accord. Our chief objective is to find whoever got him into this position and left him. Why, and whether it was accidental or purposeful will become clear when we find said person.”
He put up a photo of Berkeley Drummond he’d pulled from Colchuck Down’s site—the living, healthy looking entrepreneur he had been. The fact he’d been a big donor to the current mayor was well known, but the list of other donations he’d made in the last five years was a little more diverse, crossing traditional political party lines a good deal. He tended to play toward left-wing social politics and right-wing business interests.
He clicked on a photo of Hunter he’d found on her daughter’s Facebook page. “This is Karen Hunter, AKA Mistress Fidelma.” In spite of the innocuous and wholly boring clothing, a few catcalls and other appreciative sounds made him pause for a couple of beats before he continued. “Drummond was seeing her on a regular basis in her office, where she found his body. She was the 911 caller.”
He ran them through the working theory about how the killer gained access, fooling Drummond into thinking he was the dominatrix. It sounded a little iffy, and Court could see more than one skeptical face in his audience. “We’re pretty sure Hunter’s in the clear, but there is a chance she was working with an accomplice.”
He outlined the work Ashena had done with the card keys and how they figured into that theory. “We’re about ninety-nine-percent sure whoever has the duplicate card key is the person of interest or let the person of interest into the office.”
The next photo was of Audrey Drummond, in a sparkling evening gown taken at one of her many fundraising events. According to his internet search, it was all she did. With her kids gone, he wondered what else she had to do. Had she grown bored with giving money away?
“The victim’s wife is a prominent socialite. She’s an obvious suspect, and we’re looking into her alibi for Wednesday evening. She said she was home all night, and her personal assistant backs that up. If Drummond did have the brain tumor, we can probably knock her off our list. It makes no sense to kill someone who is dying soon.”
A few chuckles made him pause for a moment. Close friends and employees don’t always make for the most reliable witnesses. Anyone who made it to Homicide had been lied to plenty of times. It made them all skeptical of everyone. Not exactly in a healthy way, either.
“We interviewed both the domme and Drummond’s wife on Saturday. Both confirmed Drummond had an appointment to see the domme on Wednesday evening. The wife says she wasn’t expecting to see Drummond home after his appointment.” A hand shot up.
“You’re telling us the vic not only told his wife he was seeing a domme, but she was okay with it. I heard that right?”
A buzz of concurring disbelief filled the room.
“Yeah, I know. I know. The wife told us herself she knew about the domme before we asked her about it.” Court raised his arms overhead with his hands stretched out, waving them to silence. “Trust me, I was pretty dumbfounded by this, too. But apparently, it’s good. We need to accept the fact Audrey Drummond knew about the domme. Whether she’s as cool with it as she makes herself out to be is still in question.”
He went to the next slide. “We’re reasonably sure neither had a direct hand in the murder. However, we have some more things to look at before we can remove them from the list.”
He put up a slide of the three Drummond offspring, their names and their current locations underneath. “As you can see, Katharine Drummond is local. However, she was in Hawaii at the time of death. David Drummond lives in Texas, and he has a solid alibi with plenty of witnesses. Their youngest, you may have heard of him. He’s Samuel Drummond, the civil-rights lawyer. He was appearing before the U. S. Supreme Court on Thursday and Friday. It’s unlikely he could have been in Seattle on Wednesday night and still make an early court appearance across the country. Besides, we’ve confirmed he was out to dinner with Senator Murray on Wednesday in DC, so I think he’s got a couple of pretty reliable alibis there.”
More laughter.
“All of them had planned to be in Seattle by Saturday evening. All canceled their trips when they got the news late Friday night their father had died. All said they would come for the service next week instead of flying home immediately, with the exception of Katharine who returned home on her planned flight Saturday morning.
“They all thought their dad was stand-up. Samuel mentioned a huge shift in his dad’s politics. Sounds like they felt pretty bad after Samuel’s attack. Looks like they did an about-face when it came to gay teens, in particular.” Court summarized Samuel’s street history, his being kicked out of the house for being gay, his beating, Audrey and Berkeley’s subsequent political shift, and their focus on street youth—a penance for their sin against their son.
“We’ve identified most of Hunter’s clients. All but two”—he paused to give Stensland the eye—“are cleared as suspects. I’ve left a message with one, Jim Schorr, but he hasn’t responded. I’d like”—he pointed to two officers—“you two to find him and bring him to the station sometime today for questioning. You can let me know when you’ve got him here.”
Court forwarded to the slide of Giovani Duffy. “This is Giovanni Duffy. He came in yesterday and was fairly cooperative. He claimed to be at the Belle Nuit club Wednesday evening. Langston and I’ll be checking it out tonight.”
A few laughs, more catcalls. There
wasn’t much difference between a room full of cops and a room full of middle-schoolers when it came to anything sexual.
“Next steps…” He pointed to the remaining uniformed police in the back row. “You’ll be interviewing everyone in the office building—all of the businesses sharing the same hallway are traditional nine-to-fivers and all the tenants of the apartments above Allegiance Investments. I want you to talk to everyone in the buildings adjacent, behind and across the street. Even the teens we talked to on Saturday should be questioned again. Langston and I will head over to Colchuck and talk to Drummond’s assistant and other employees. We’ll also hit Haubek to see what they can tell us about the security system and how the second key was made.”
30
Court was adjusting his gun into the small of his back, getting ready to head over to Colchuck, when Ivy reappeared, waving a bunch of papers at him. “Is that the toll report?” There was an excited twinkle in her eyes he’d never seen before, telling him there was something more than what he had been expecting.
Almost every car owned by someone crossing the bridge on a regular basis had a little electronic sticker—a transponder—on the windshield that was scanned when it entered the toll zone. Court had found the system useful in more than one investigation.
Ivy spread the papers flat on his desk. Three lines were highlighted. The first indicated an Audi passing under the toll device heading Westbound on the I-520 bridge at 18:35:10 Wednesday. The second indicated a Mercedes passing under the same ticker at 18:35:24. The third indicated the Mercedes returning Eastbound at 19:43:22. Both vehicles were registered to Berkeley and Audrey Drummond.
“Shit. I knew she was lying about something.”
Ivy tapped the paper for emphasis. “Fourteen seconds behind? She followed him in. Maybe even went inside with him.”
“It only proves they drove across the bridge at the same time. She could have gone anywhere after that.”
“Sure, but the fact she lied and said she was home all evening indicates she was trying to hide she’d come into town. If she’d come into town and wasn’t following him, she wouldn’t have lied to cover her tracks. She would have told us where she went.”
“But those kids said they talked to him. They didn’t mention seeing anyone else with him,” Court said.
Ivy frowned for a second. “Doesn’t mean that she wasn’t there. She probably parked somewhere along the street, watched for him to go inside. Maybe she stepped into the café to wait for him while he talked to the kids.”
That left about half an hour for her to follow him inside, tie him up and leave him hanging. Court let the implications sink in for a second. “Assisted suicide?”
“Makes a lot of sense.”
“I don’t know. Why would Drummond do something that would bring Hunter under scrutiny like this? Remember how Duffy acted when we brought him in? His first reaction was to protect her.” Audrey Drummond had lied to them about being home all evening. He couldn’t let that drop. “Let’s see what she has to say when confronted with the log. Get her off her own turf, too. Let’s bring her in.”
It was going to take at least an hour before Audrey Drummond could be located and brought in. They had time to get over to Colchuck Down and back. If she came in before they were done down there, she could cool her heels in an interview room like a normal person.
The morning commute was reduced to its usual mid-morning trickle, and it only took them ten minutes to get to the Colchuck Down building. Decrepit buildings were the mainstay of the area, but the occasional company was coming in and buying up old and replacing it with new. Drummond had done this in 2009, when the real-estate markets across the country plummeted with foreclosures everywhere. He tore down everything on half a city block and replaced it with a white metal and glass structure. The press had called Drummond a leader in American industry, bringing manufacturing into the dawn of a new architectural era. The building’s design had been hailed as a shining example of modernity and progressive pragmatism. Clean, well-lit, well-ventilated work spaces with an outdoor courtyard for breaks were touted as the new way of doing business. For workers, anyway.
Add in the fact Colchuck Down started pay at thirty bucks an hour for their lowliest workers, and the company employees were fiercely loyal.
They pulled up to the largest building on the block and parked in the space marked off for Berkeley Drummond. Large plate-glass windows across the entire front of the building gave them a view of a modern lobby sectioned off from the factory floor beyond. Large machines surrounded by people, their bodies moving in fluid synchronicity, took up the ground floor of the building.
It was hard to tell exactly what each machine did. Bolts of fabric were fed into one end of a machine, disappeared into its depths and were spit out at the other end in various shapes. At the far end of the floor, the process became more obvious with people sitting at sewing machines piecing long strips together. It looked like the entire factory was set on sleeping bag mode. Maybe they produced sleeping bags for a week then switched everything over to vests or jackets. Everyone on the floor worked with a quick precision Court would find boring after a day doing it. Centralized offices hovered over the factory in a dramatic yet not looming way.
They entered the lobby, a spare but clean space with no seating area leading up to a broad wooden desk. A woman in her late thirties sat behind the desk, her face splotchy and swollen. She did her best to smile at them when they entered. She waved to where they had parked. “I’m going to have to ask you to move. No one is allowed to park there.” Her words were thickened by obvious grief.
Court pulled out his shield and one of his personal cards. “Sorry, but the space was empty.”
She wiped at her nose with a tissue. “No respect for the dead. Are you here to see Ms. Mooring?”
Court nodded and the woman pointed to the door to the side as she buzzed them in. She directed them to a row of polished leather chairs within the inner door. “Wait there. I’ve paged her. She’ll be down in a minute or two.”
The steady thrumming, thumping and thwacking of the factory machines would give him a headache within an hour. Everyone working inside wore orange or red plastic earmuffs, which he doubted would cut all the noise. Being cooped up inside all day, every day, doing the exact same thing over and over was about as boring as anything imaginable. Being a cop was dangerous, but it wasn’t monotonous, and it sure as hell wasn’t boring.
A woman appeared around the corner, her quick step negating her heft with a surprising lightness. She was tall, wide and round all at once. Instead of a sweet cherubic face such bulk often conveyed, hers was angular enough to compete with the Wicked Witch of the West. Her eyes were bright, almost hawk-like in the way they stared at him. Unblinking. Critical. Court felt like he was a schoolkid at the principal’s office.
“This way, then.” Agnes Mooring guided them up, past an inner office sporting a desk with her name on it, and directly into Berkeley Drummond’s office.
This was a large spacious room, but not beyond what might be considered simply “well-appointed.” Its furnishings were high quality, but functional. It bore no resemblance to the Drummond home. The house and office were two entirely separate fiefdoms.
Agnes Mooring spun around, hands on hips, or at least where he thought there might be hips underneath the roundness of her flesh. “Now. Detectives. The news hasn’t said anything of substance about his death. But you and I know Berkeley Drummond didn’t die from his brain tumor, now did he?” The last two words were less a question than a scolding statement.
Court had wondered how open Drummond had been at work about his illness. “The media can’t report on information they don’t have. We’ll be doing the autopsy tomorrow. Did everyone at the company know about his condition?”
She snorted. “The news often doesn’t have any of the details. I know more about glioblastomas than I ever wanted to.” Her bright eyes focused on Court again. “Only the family and a few key
people here knew about it.”
She picked up a pad of paper and pen from the desk. “This is all the people at Colchuck who knew. We kept it quiet because news like that could affect stock prices. Not in a good way, I might add. His death has us down fifteen percent this morning.”
Court watched as she made the list. Her writing was neat and refined, easy to read upside down. Her sausage-like fingers worked the thin pen in delicate strokes across the page with a grace defying their bulk.
She ripped off the paper, thrusting it at him. “Everyone on the list is either on the board or at a level with a ‘need to know’ kind of job. So, what really happened?”
“We’d like to see his official calendar,” Court said.
Court could tell Agnes was not used to being put off, but she bucked up and waved at the computer on his desk. “He had dropped most of his work obligations. The last month he’d been coming in one day a week to guide us in operations. Mr. Greer, the current vice-president of operations, was going to be made CEO officially at this coming Thursday’s board meeting.”
She typed away, fingers moving with deft control, stopping abruptly after a few moments to stare at the screen with a furrowed brow. “This is strange.” She clicked a few more times, shaking her head and harrumphing. “There’s nothing on his calendar. Everything from Friday onward is gone. Even this week’s board meeting. Not that there was much left on his calendar anyway. He had been handing things off pretty steadily.”
“Did he shunt his appointments to anyone else?” Ivy asked.
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