A Perfect Obsession

by Heather Graham

  “I was always close to law enforcement,” she said. It wasn’t really a lie. It depended on how one chose to define the word close.

  “I do thank God you’re with Craig,” he told her.

  “I worry about Craig. His work is dangerous.”

  “Yeah, his work is dangerous, but he’s trained to handle it. I worry about you. You get into these things all on your own—even without Danny’s help,” Kevin told her.

  The officer driving them cleared his throat.

  “I believe this is it,” the officer said pleasantly. “But I’m staying. Have to go around to find parking—even for a cop car.”

  A minute later, he found a spot. Shutting off the car, he ran around to open the car door for them, but Kevin was already out and helping Kieran.

  They both thanked him. “Nice neighborhood,” he told Kieran. “I’d love to live in the Village.”

  “Took a long time to find the apartment,” Kieran assured him.

  It was late but, as usual, the karaoke bar was still going strong. Japanese Country Western Night! the sign in front advised. Someone with an excellent deep Johnny Cash–like voice was singing a great version of “Folsom Prison Blues.”

  “Not bad,” Kevin commented.

  “Yep, the guy is pretty good,” the officer agreed.

  “Did you want to head into the karaoke?” Kieran asked them both, smiling.

  “Not tonight,” the officer said.

  “Have you seen yourself?” Kevin asked Kieran. “You look like one of those ghost dolls. Think we should head on up. But one night we’ll have to drag Craig in there. I wonder if there are karaoke loving G-men? Maybe Mike—he’s pretty good at cracking a smile now and then!”

  “Craig smiles and you know it,” Kieran said.

  “I’ll be out there. Sleep soundly,” the officer told her when he’d checked out the apartment and let them in.

  “I feel badly, having you just stand guard out here,” Kieran replied.

  “Overtime!” he told her cheerfully.

  They both thanked him.

  As soon as they were alone, Kevin plopped on the sofa and turned on the television. He flicked around until he found local news.

  “Is Le Club Vampyre as doomed as those creatures upon whom the name is based?” a dramatic reporter asked. “Tonight, there was a major power surge and outage in the middle of an elite party filled with the who’s who of the entertainment industry and the political scene! Not even a week ago, the body of actress Jeannette Gilbert was found in a secret crypt below the venue opened by famed billionaire Roger Gleason. While no one knows as yet what caused the exodus following the power outage, there’s a rumor that shots were fired—rather than served. Stay tuned and we’ll bring you the latest!”

  Kieran watched her brother’s face as they’d flashed an image of Jeannette Gilbert on the screen.

  Kevin’s expression was pained and dark.

  She kissed the top of his head. “I’m going to take a shower,” she told him.

  “A very good idea.”

  When she emerged twenty minutes later, Kevin had opted to change the channel, watching bits of the Broadway shows that were currently available. Her brother truly loved the theater, whether working in it or going to it. She was sure the evening had been ironic for him—filled with opportunity, yet, hauntingly painful.

  “Kevin?”

  He didn’t answer her. She walked over and saw that he had fallen asleep.

  Kieran drew a blanket over her brother and headed into her bedroom.

  She was far too restless to sleep herself. Turning on the television did no good. No movie or show would capture her attention at the moment.

  She headed to the bookcases wedged between the window and her dresser and finally found something called A Complete and Comprehensive History of New York City.

  The book was about a thousand pages long, and yet, she thought, no one could really do a complete and comprehensive history of a three-hundred-year-old city in that kind of space. And still, she remembered that she loved the quirky voice of the historian who had written the book, so she picked it up, carrying it into bed with her.

  Kieran glanced at the clock. Past midnight. She had work in the morning. She should sleep.

  She couldn’t.

  She was waiting for Craig to come, and there was no hope for sleep until he returned.

  She might as well learn more about the City of New York.

  * * *

  In the crypt a top-notch forensic team was busy trying to put the pieces together.

  “I have to tell you, this is like the impossible task,” Lynda Gomez, head of the forensic team for the FBI, told Craig. “We’ve located seven bullet casings, all 9 mm caliber. Thing is—of course, we’ll have to test—but I think they all came from the security guys who were working there. They’ve all got legal firearms—the guards for the night were all off-duty cops, permitted to carry through the security company. I’m just trying to figure out what they thought they were firing at, because I haven’t found anything that might have been fired at them. You didn’t fire, right?” she asked Craig.

  “No.”

  “You?” she asked Mike.

  “I did not,” he said.

  “I’m still looking. But...there are hundreds of corpses down here. Only way to really do a thorough search is to pull every corpse apart, and, oh, boy...the legal that goes with that!”

  “Thanks, Gomez,” Craig told her. “Fingerprints, shoe prints...anything? Anything out of the ordinary?”

  “What’s ordinary in a crypt?” she asked, shaking her head. “We’re taking everything we can find. Anything and everything.”

  Egan stood silently by Craig, grim as he watched the action. His phone apparently vibrated in his jacket. He answered it, listened briefly.

  Then he turned to Craig.

  “We’ve got the search warrant. It’s pretty inclusive. Just came through. ADA Birney found Judge Monahan out at a party and...I don’t think he believes a man as rich and powerful as Gleason could have done any of this, but, with all that’s circumstantial...” He paused and shrugged. “No one ever wants the rich and powerful to be guilty. Maybe they just don’t want to go after them, I don’t know.”

  “They searched for Gleason. No one could find him,” Craig said. “Which might... Hell, I guess that all things point in his direction.”

  McBride came down the stairs then.

  “Did they find Gleason yet?” Craig asked him.

  “Officers were looking over half the city—and we found him in his office. Said he was out talking to guests, telling them he’d get it together over whatever was going on here or close the place down.”

  “Truth or lie?” Egan murmured. “Anyway, a deputy is on the way with the physical warrant. Figure you can go ahead and tell Gleason—the warrant will be here before he has time to destroy any evidence or do anything.”

  Craig nodded and turned to Mike. “All right, then.”

  “Serve the warrant together,” Egan said, nodding toward McBride. “I want everyone knowing that the city and the federal government are in on this together.”

  “You got it, sir,” McBride assured Egan.

  Gleason had—until he’d disappeared that night—been accessible, open and decent with the police.

  Had it all been an act?

  Craig sure as hell couldn’t pinpoint the lie, if there was one. And yet, circumstances pointed to the man.

  Gleason’s place.

  His security footage.

  His alarm system.

  Darkness, chaos and shots fired—and in the midst of it, he had been nowhere to be seen.

  Craig, Mike and McBride headed up the stairs. “Okay, so we have people down here. We’ll need a
small army for the club and his office. What about his home?”

  “I have a team in place, set to go,” Egan assured him. “We’ve been waiting for the call. Still, I’d like to have that warrant in hand.”

  “I’ll go to the entrance and wait,” Mike said. “It should be a matter of minutes. You two go and make sure Gleason is still in his office.”

  Mike headed toward the door; Craig, with McBride in tow, headed to Gleason’s office. He tapped on the door and Gleason called out, “Come on in.”

  Craig and McBride entered the office. Gleason leaned back in his chair, looking at them with surprise at first.

  Then he knew.

  “Well, I guess it’s about time,” he said. “Especially since I was, according to the officer I spoke with a few minutes ago, missing during the blackout.”

  “Where were you?” Craig asked him.

  “With the crowd. Everyone was shoving and pushing. I was afraid someone was going to get hurt in it all. Liability, of course, and I guess you don’t believe it at the moment, but I don’t like it when people are hurt.”

  “No one saw you,” McBride informed him.

  “No one? Who is the ‘no one’ you’re speaking about? I talked to Mark Thresher, producer of Prime Time in Paris, and William Arrow—Hey! I even spoke with Leo Holt. He suggested that with all my other enterprises, I give up on this place.”

  Craig nodded. “We’ll check that out, of course. In the meantime, I’m sorry, but we have a search warrant to serve. Naturally, you’re welcome to call your attorney, but the search will go on.”

  Gleason nodded and rose. “Well. Yes, I suppose, under the circumstances, I understand. Gentlemen, you didn’t need a warrant. You were welcome to search anything of mine anywhere at any time.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Gleason,” Craig said. “Your cooperation is—and has been—deeply appreciated.”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever,” Gleason said. “Knock yourselves out. I’ll be...staring at the Gothic features in the club area. Don’t worry—there are a dozen cops out there. I’m sure they’ll make sure that I don’t go anywhere. Come get me if you need me.”

  Gleason left his office. Craig headed for the desk. McBride headed for a file cabinet.

  He never even opened the cabinet.

  “Frasier!” McBride said.

  “What?”

  The detective turned to Craig. “I’m no expert, but I’ve been around a long time. If this isn’t blood on the cabinet, I’ll be damned.”

  Craig frowned and quickly strode across the room to look.

  And McBride was right.

  On the handsome wood face of the cabinet, right beneath one of the brass pull rings, was a darker splotch of color.

  He’d be damned himself if it wasn’t blood.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  KIERAN’S PHONE RANG at 7:00 a.m.

  She’d slept, but not until very late, and even as she recognized Craig’s ringtone, she spread a hand out over his side of the bed.

  He’d never come in last night.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Morning to you, too. Everything okay with you?” he asked her.

  “Fine. I was reading most of the night, barely slept. I was waiting for you... I don’t mean in a bad way. I mean in a good way. I knew after everything that went on you’d be late or working through the night. You must be exhausted.”

  “It just hit about an hour ago,” he told her.

  “Well, in a way, I think I might have figured something out,” she told him. “First of all, you have to remember that the city—especially downtown—is old. It has been occupied by European settlers for nearly four hundred years. The Dutch came first, and they were really run by the Dutch West India Company because of wars with the Spanish Empire, so much so that there was no one to fight the English, and the city was surrendered and then became English. Okay, so the English were building over the Dutch. You had Broadway and Wall Street. You had Trinity. You had the Revolutionary War, British occupation and a fire that destroyed huge portions of what existed.”

  “Kieran,” he said quietly over the phone.

  “Craig, wait, listen and hear me out. Then, the Americans came in and Washington was inaugurated president. Everything was a shambles, everything needed to be rebuilt. Everyone was rebuilding, blasting—creating foundations, since they weren’t just slapping up wooden structures. They were creating storehouses, cold places beneath the earth...places beneath the earth that weren’t necessarily catacombs or crypts,” Kieran told him. “Do you understand?”

  “Basements and foundations? Pretty much so. Yes, Finnegan’s has a basement and a foundation dating from the 1800s,” Craig said. “And almost every building has a deep foundation and a basement. We’re on a really nice big pile of rock here. But—”

  “A big pile of rock that people have been digging into and blasting into forever. People need water. Water needs pipes to travel. Some electric is underground—and then, there’s the subway!” she said triumphantly. “And really the subway is the point.”

  “The point of...?”

  “How the killer is getting into and out of the crypt without being seen. Somewhere, somehow, there’s another basement, forgotten subway tunnel, some other underground venue that attaches to the crypt.”

  “Kieran, we’ve looked for another entrance. And all we’ve found in the crypt is rows and rows of bodies.”

  “All the bodies haven’t been moved.”

  “Kieran, a forensic team was down there for hours, searching—even through the bodies—for bullets. So far, no one can even tell who was firing at whom and from where. Everything found seems to be from the security detail’s firearms. It’s going to take time for our forensic teams to go through everything, especially when no one can understand what happened down there as of yet.”

  “I’m telling you what happened down there. The killer gets in from somewhere else beneath the ground. A building with a basement or an abandoned subway tunnel or some kind of a utilities access.”

  “Kieran, I believe that could have been a really logical answer. But, had it been, not even the FBI has the power, the resources or the know-how to go ripping up all the buildings in the area. And,” he added softly, “the question doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked him.

  “We arrested Roger Gleason last night. Or early this morning.”

  “Gleason!” she exclaimed.

  “We knew he had the access and controlled his alarm and the cameras, but last night cinched it. He disappeared during everything going on, and the blackout was planned, caused by a disruption in the main breaker system. And there was blood in his office. The DNA isn’t back on it yet, but they’re expecting to find that the blood belonged to Jeannette Gilbert.”

  “But isn’t that all circumstantial? Is that enough to...to...”

  “Convict him? I don’t know. Egan made the call to go ahead and bring him in. He’ll be arraigned in federal court in a few hours.”

  “Oh,” Kieran said.

  He didn’t reply right away.

  “That’s all—oh?”

  “I guess I’m surprised. Maybe I shouldn’t be. I don’t know why. With what evidence there was, I suppose it was one of those instances when the obvious should have been obvious. He could turn off the alarm and his cameras. But...”

  “But what?”

  “I thought that the FBI techs said that the footage hadn’t been rigged.”

  “They couldn’t find how it had been rigged. Not the same thing.”

  “Has he confessed?”

  “He emphatically denies that he had anything to do with Jeannette Gilbert’s death or the deaths of any other young women. He lawyered up pretty quickly.�
��

  “Of course. And you feel that this is...right?”

  “If the DNA comes back as a match to Jeannette Gilbert, I don’t think there will be much choice.”

  “Maybe not. But he couldn’t have killed her in his office. There would be a blood spill a mile wide.”

  “No, she wasn’t killed in the office. But it could be a blood transfer. He might still have had it on his hands or clothing. There’s a whole team still in there, ripping things to shreds. And his home.”

  “They won’t find anything,” Kieran said.

  “Because you’re sure he had a work area—underground—as he did in Virginia.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, maybe he’ll talk eventually. I interviewed him at length,” Craig said. “Four of us, playing interrogation tag—me, Egan, McBride and Mike. For hours. He held to his story, and in the end, said he wanted a lawyer. We couldn’t trip him up on anything. Once he’s arraigned...well, he may want to make a deal. New York has no death penalty, but federal charges can carry a death penalty. However, we need to connect him to the other murders.” He was quiet for a minute. “And find out if there are more bodies out there we haven’t discovered yet.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  “Anyway, he’s been arrested, he’ll be arraigned. And I doubt that even he will manage to get out on bail, though I never try to outthink a judge on the bench. I’ve got to get some sleep. There’s a new officer on duty out in your hall. Change of shift about an hour ago. He’ll see you to work.”

  “If they’ve arrested Gleason, I should be fine.”

  “Humor me for today.”

  “Okay.”

  “Kevin still there? Why am I asking? Of course he is. He’s your brother.”

  “Yes. He’s out on the sofa.”

  “Good. You can bring him up to speed. I’m sure the media will get wind of this soon. It will be all over the news. I’ll call you later this afternoon.”

  “Sure. Get some rest.”

  She sat in bed awhile after they finished their conversation. Pity, she was sure that one of the buildings near the old church had a basement that somehow led to the forgotten crypt. She’d thought she could find a way to provide some necessary answers.