The Guardian

by Dee Henderson

  She ran her hand through her hair. “Let me get my hair brushed. I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

  “I’ll find you those aspirins.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  In the bathroom she washed her face in cold water, looking in the mirror at eyes that were weary and dull. There was no life left inside. She forced herself to get ready, to brush her teeth, then picked up her hairbrush and ruthlessly tamed the matted hair. She went to join Marcus.

  He would have had a great deal less sleep than she had, and yet he looked alert and focused as he stood by the window scanning the street below. Again his stillness struck her. She had met only a few men able to function under stress with that kind of focus.

  He turned when she entered the room, and she didn’t miss the fact the suit jacket he wore concealed his gun. It was odd, how rarely she thought of him as a cop. It was the memory of their first meeting that prevailed.

  He handed her two aspirins. “See if these help.” She took them, grateful. He held out a coffee mug. “I promised you coffee. I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances.”

  “So am I. I was rather looking forward to that date.”

  Her words caused his impersonal, assessing look to disappear momentarily, and she was enveloped once again in the warmth of his smile. “So was I.”

  Marcus. How I would have preferred this weekend to be different. I would have more than just enjoyed sharing coffee with you; I would have been hoping for your phone number. I don’t want to lose this potential friendship to the crisis this has become.

  She returned his smile with a brief one of her own, wishing she had more emotion left she could put behind it. She settled down on the couch. The coffee was strong and hot and it helped give her something to focus on.

  “I’ve got something for you.” Marcus reached into his pocket. He handed over what looked like a pager, but it had no LED display.

  “What is it?”

  “A pager with a special frequency. Depress the button and it sounds on our security net. It’s a precaution. Get in the habit of wearing it clipped on your jeans. If you get in a situation that makes you uncomfortable for any reason, and I mean any reason, and one of us is not already at your side, press it. Don’t think twice about it.”

  She turned it over in her hand and nodded. It was an indication of what might happen. She was a witness. It was settling in what that meant. It wasn’t just testifying one day in the future; it was getting her safely from now to the time the shooter was caught and she could testify.

  Just looking at the device strengthened her resolve. “How can I help with the case? This guy killed my father. I need something concrete I can do. I hate feeling this helpless.” She could see from his expression that he didn’t want to pursue it right now. “Please.”

  He settled into the chair he had sat in last night, his expression guarded. “You knew Carl well.”

  She knew how he liked his eggs for breakfast, what his favorite comic strip was, what musicals he enjoyed, what authors he favored . . . Somehow she doubted that was what Marcus needed to know. “He and Dad went to law school together. I’ve known him all my life,” she replied softly.

  “Then help me figure out motive.”

  I’ve been thinking about nothing else and I don’t know. He was a good man. “What can I answer?”

  “Tell me about Carl’s family.”

  “His only family is an aunt on his mother’s side. She’s eighty-nine, has Alzheimer’s, and doesn’t recognize anyone. Carl has been her legal guardian for years.”

  “No one else?”

  “Carl was an only child and he never married.”

  “His estate is large?”

  “He was conservative with his money. He didn’t travel. Other than upkeep on his estate, books were probably his largest expense. Maybe 8 million?”

  Marcus’s eyes narrowed at that estimate. “Who benefits?”

  “Charities. The house is slated to be sold with the proceeds going into trust to care for his aunt.”

  “Any business ventures? Active investments that might be having problems?”

  She shook her head. “Stock index funds, bond funds, and cash. He didn’t want to have to worry about it.”

  “Anyone in his life? Was he seeing someone?”

  “The law was his life. He had a lot of friends, but no one in particular he was seeing.”

  “That leaves his work.”

  “The obvious connection, given where he was killed.”

  “Tell me about his career.”

  “Going back to the beginning—he was a district attorney, a state judge, a federal judge, then Court of Appeals for his last seven years. In one word, his record is conservative.”

  “Your brief listed several cases. Which do you think merit attention?”

  “Last year on the appeals court, there was a bank fraud case that cost a lot of people their retirement savings. Carl wrote the opinion that upheld the lower courts’ finding dismissing the central charge. It was the right legal decision, but not necessarily the right moral one if you wanted justice.”

  “A judge and jury can’t convict if the evidence isn’t there.”

  “I know, but that didn’t stop the hate.”

  “What about your family, Shari? Any enemies?”

  His question threw her, and then what he was asking settled in. She felt cold suddenly, very cold. “You think it relates to us? I surprised the shooter.”

  “Yes. But why didn’t he lock the door? I can’t dismiss that you might have somehow been a target as well.”

  “Dad has been in corporate law and estates; there has been no personal threats that I know of. Joshua—he works for the DA, some of his cases are intense.” Shari thought about that in detail. “But no, I don’t think so. I’ve been in politics for years. Behind the scenes but definitely in the center of things. I’d be the one with enemies. But they would be political enemies. No one likes to lose, and these races and policy issues can consume a lot of cash.”

  “Any names keep you up at night?”

  “No.”

  “Think about it.”

  “You’re just trying to scare me.”

  “Trying to open your eyes,” Marcus said soberly.

  * * *

  Connor dropped the newspaper on the park bench, the sketch on the front page below the fold. “We’ve got a problem.”

  His cousin Frank didn’t look up from the crossword puzzle he was working. “So I saw.”

  “It’s got to be dealt with before Titus gets back from Europe.”

  “It’s going to take some planning. I already checked. She’s under tight security.”

  “And we’re only going to get one chance. Contract it out?”

  “I can handle it,” Frank replied. He turned over the newspaper and tapped the article. “That’s where we act.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Lisa, what do we have?”

  Marcus found his sister seated at the round work table in her office, one hand wrapped around a carryout Chinese carton showing two protruding chopsticks, the other around a small cassette recorder being used to record observations as she studied eight-by-ten photos from the crime scene. How she was managing to eat was a mystery.

  The lab he had walked through was pristine, her office another matter as she chased every idea that occurred to her. He cleared the spare chair of files to have a place to sit.

  “You look horrible,” Lisa observed.

  “Thanks. Tell me you have something.” It had been six days of frustration and he would really like to end this week with some good news. They were chasing leads in four states with nothing substantial to go on.

  “Fibers,” she replied.

  She handed him the Chinese carton. “Eat. You look like you’ve been skipping meals.” Spinning her chair around, she reached for the pale blue folder balanced on top of her phone.

  “In your interview with Shari, she said the shooter was well dressed, wear
ing a navy suit.”

  Marcus nodded. The chow mein was lukewarm. Lisa must have been holding the carton for the good part of the last hour.

  “It’s blue-gray actually. European wool, European dye. I doubt it’s a suit that comes off the rack. I’m working on getting a manufacturer. That’s a freebie. I’ve got something better.” She shifted the photographs on the table to one side and laid out large perspective shots. “Look at where the shell casings fell.”

  Seven of them were shown in one photograph of the room, four in the other. “Okay. What am I supposed to be seeing?”

  “Where was the shooter standing when he shot Carl?”

  “Somewhere about here, at the end of the bed,” Marcus indicated.

  She nodded. “I used Carl’s exact height, the entry and exit wounds, and the blood traces and projected those back. The shooter was standing right here.” She pointed with a pen. “He shot Carl. That gives us these three shell casings.” She indicated the three in a close grouping. “What did he do next?”

  “Turned to shoot Shari.”

  “And hit the door frame kicking up wood. He was firing as he turned.” She held out her right hand and swiveled. “Like this?”

  It hit him then, what she was showing him. “The bullet should have been buried in the door frame or the wall as his hand came around, not splintered the door frame.”

  “He’s left handed.”

  Marcus reached over, wrapped his hand behind her neck, tugged her over, and planted a kiss on her forehead. “You angel. Can you prove it?”

  She giggled. “What do you think?”

  “Show me.”

  She pointed to the picture. “Okay. That fourth shot, the shell casing is up here; it struck and nicked the side of the dresser. The only way to get it angled in there is if he was firing with the gun in his left hand as he swiveled left to right.”

  She laid down a close up of the door frame. “See the angle of entry? The way the wood chip was kicked up? Here’s the line.” She laid down a ruler on the master grid she was using. “Same thing. The only way to generate the chip and throw it out like this is to be at this angle. Either the shooter stepped back before he turned and fired, or the gun was in his left hand.”

  She pushed aside the photos to lay down one that was a contrast photo. “And look at this. The bright white is the gunpowder residue luminescing. We’re looking straight down at the carpet in this photo; this is the edge of the bed. Look at the bright line of the arc.”

  “It goes left to right relative to the bed.”

  “And if the gun was in his right hand, the gunpowder residue would have fallen more on the top of the bedspread and it wouldn’t have hit the draped portion. Instead it’s bright on the falling edge of the bedspread.”

  “You’ve convinced me.”

  Lisa leaned back in her chair. “Good, because that’s the most useful news I’ve got. The rest you’re not necessarily going to like.”

  “What is it?”

  She had to search her office to find it. She retrieved a red folder from the floor by the whiteboard. She opened it and handed it to him. He recognized a photo taken from a microscope; the bottom index showing it was taken at 120 times magnification. It was a blowup of a dark, curved fiber.

  “See the change in color at the base of the curl?”

  Marcus nodded.

  “Your shooter doesn’t have thick, dark hair. He has a very good hairpiece.”

  “Our sketch is wrong.”

  “Distorted. A hairpiece suggests he might actually be bald. This was found lying on a blood splatter, so it’s not a historical fiber to the room.”

  Marcus rubbed his eyes. He did not want to have to tell Shari this news. They had begun to suspect something like this as the hours and then days went by without the sketch producing the leads they expected. “Anything else?”

  “The shell casings don’t match anything in the national databases. But the firing pin impressions on the shell casings do show a unique off-center flaw. We’ll be able to get a definite match if we ever get the gun, even if they try to destroy the barrel riflings.”

  “What about the shoes?”

  “He’s a size nine and a half. We don’t have enough to generate a brand. We do have a wear pattern that we might be able to match if we get the shoes.”

  “No fingerprints?”

  “Actually, forty-three distinct prints, but they are all tracing to people who work in the hotel or who stayed in that room in the past. Dave has the list.”

  Marcus knew how hard she had been working to get them this much inside of a week. He needed more. The threat to Shari, rather than lessening with time, had only intensified. The shooter was out there, thinking, planning, knowing he had made only one real mistake. Shari. Marcus could feel the danger, and Quinn was coiled tight with the frustration of having nothing but one dead end after another to chase. “What next, Lisa?”

  “The scuff mark on the thirteenth floor stairwell door. I want permission to take crime technicians through all those hotel rooms. We never found a trace of where he went once he reached that floor. Maybe he never left it.”

  Marcus absorbed that observation. “He had one of those hotel rooms.”

  “He had to dump the disguise somewhere, and if he had yanked it off in the hallway, the search should have found fibers similar to this one. We didn’t.”

  “Thirty-seven rooms? It will take some significant crime technician work and time.”

  “I’m more worried about the hotel having a fit.”

  “I can take care of that,” Dave said from the doorway.

  Marcus swiveled around.

  Dave smiled. “Hotels rent rooms. We’ll just rent the entire floor. That should keep them happy.”

  “Your own pocketbook?”

  “Consider it a cheap solution to the fact I would like to see Kate this month. A few more weeks of these kind of hours, and she’ll forget why she’s dating me.”

  Dave didn’t make a big deal about his family’s wealth, but he did use it on occasion to move obstacles out of the way. That family wealth had led to the kidnapping and death of Dave’s sister Kim. What other people saw as only good, Dave knew for both its good and bad. And having grown up in Britain, he had a cool practicality to his sense of the family fortune. It wasn’t something he owned as much as something his family for generations would have. Marcus knew Kate was still struggling to get used to the idea she was going out with a guy who could spend whatever he liked whenever he chose to. Marcus thought about Dave’s offer for a moment, accepted the practicality of it, and nodded. “Thanks. Arrange it.”

  “What are you hoping for, Lisa?” Dave asked.

  “That he used a room to change his suit. There should be gunpowder residue on that suit, and very probably blood splatters. If he set it down on the bed, dropped it on the floor, we’ll find traces. And we can match fibers. Find the room he used, and maybe we get the grand jewel—that he took off his gloves and left us a few prints.”

  Marcus trusted her hunches. “Sweep the rooms, Lisa.”

  * * *

  It was after 11:00 P.M.. Monday; the hospital floor was quiet. Shari took a handful of jellybeans from the dish at the nurses’ station and ate them as she walked back to meet Marcus. Over the last nine days, life had fallen into a routine, if it could be called that.

  Waiting for leads on the shooter; waiting for Joshua to get back his strength. Adjusting to having security with her at all times . . . she would be so relieved when this was over. All the family but mom’s sister Margaret had returned to Virginia. The funerals were scheduled tentatively for Friday depending on Josh’s ability to travel.

  She found the extra time on her hands hard to cope with. The two deaths had ripped a void in her life. The hole in her heart regarding God ached. She no longer tried to pray. She was simply too tired to want to risk getting hurt again.

  Left unspoken was the fear of what would happen if the shooter was not found soon. Life could
n’t go on like this indefinitely. And she didn’t want to leave the protection of having Marcus around. He was a strong shelter against the danger.

  He was sitting in what she had come to think of as his seat, one of the cushioned chairs in the open area just across from the elevators where he noticed everyone who came and went on the floor. The television was off. She had noticed he preferred not to watch the news, while she was feeling the withdrawal from its absence.

  Craig normally had the day shift, but at about 10 P.M.. Marcus took over after having spent his day working the case. Shari had to admit she looked forward to the evenings. They talked about the investigation, but they also talked about family, both his and hers. Marcus had been intentionally drawing her out about her dad, Carl, and that helped. He was being the one thing she most needed right now. A friend.

  He was reading a book while he waited for her, taking a moment to relax. It was a different one than last night she realized when she saw the spine. She’d read it last month. She was restless. She glanced at the page he was on: 69. “Do you know who did it yet?”

  “Davidson, the brother-in-law.”

  She settled on the arm of the chair near him, hearing the certainty. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.” He looked over at her, settled the open book on his chest. “Read it?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  His slow smile caught her attention and she wished she could say no. “Yes, you are.”

  “The only author I’ve found that consistently stumps me is H. Q. Victor, but since she’s soon to be extended family, that’s okay.”

  The thick crime novels by the British writer were some of her favorite reads. They were so real: stories about children who disappeared, were found murdered, and the hunt to find those responsible. “H. Q. Victor is a lady? You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Dave’s sister, Sara.”