I laughed and could feel a blush touch my cheeks. “Your favorite, huh? I bet you say that to all your clients.”
“Only the ones who fork over such generous retainers. To what do I owe the pleasure of your call?”
“Well, I just want to double check and make sure that Chanel was processed out of jail without any issues.”
There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the call. “Yes. She was processed out this morning at eleven-thirty. I personally arranged for her car to be released from the tow lot and gave her cab fare to get there. Didn’t she tell you all that when she called you?”
It was my turn to be silent for a moment. “No, Marcus. She never called me.”
There was another pause, then, “I’m sorry for the confusion, but I had a lengthy conversation with Ms. Downey and told her all about your generosity. She was anxious to call and thank you. I personally texted her your contact information.”
I felt a chill run through me. “Marcus . . . you don’t think something’s happened to her, do you?”
He blew out a heavy sigh. “I hope not. The lot would be closed right now, but I’ll call them first thing in the morning to see if she picked up her car.”
I hung up the phone and stared at Gilley. “Something bad has happened to Chanel, hasn’t it?” he said.
“I don’t know, Gilley. But Marcus insisted that she was anxious to call me, and she never did.”
“Did he give her the right phone number?”
“He says he texted her my contact info, which means he probably just shared it with her, so it all would’ve been accurate.”
I began to pace the kitchen, wondering what might’ve happened to her. And then I had an idea. Sorting through my phone, I found the number I’d called in Connecticut for Chanel’s grandaunt, and tried it again.
It rang twice and was picked up. “Hello?” said a male voice.
I was so surprised by the male voice on the other end of the call that I was thrown into a confused silence. And then my brain began to work again, and I was about to speak when the voice said, “Hello? Who’s calling?”
My brow furrowed. “Shepherd?” I said.
“Catherine?” he replied.
“What are you doing answering Miranda Downey’s phone?”
“What’re you doing calling it?”
In the background I heard several other voices. It almost sounded like there was a party going on. “I’m . . . I’m looking for Chanel.”
“So am I!” he barked. “No thanks to you, I might add.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped. I’d had quite enough of Shepherd’s flinty attitude of late.
“It means . . .” Shepherd’s voice trailed off with a sigh. “Listen, I need to talk to you, but I’m gonna be late here. Any chance you’ll be up around midnight?”
“Are you kidding?” He wanted to talk to me at midnight? What the heck was going on?
“No. I’m not kidding. It might even be later, Catherine, but I’ll try and get there by then.”
“Wait, you’re coming over?”
“I have to talk to you,” Shepherd insisted, and I realized that he’d lowered his voice and the sounds in the background weren’t nearly as distinct anymore. “It’s important.”
I shook my head, and Gilley was looking at me oddly, but I finally offered him an exasperated sigh. “Fine,” I said. “I’m at the main house. I’ll try and wait up for you.”
“Take a nap,” he said. “I’ll text you when I’m outside your door.”
I could tell that he was about to hang up, so I called out to him and asked, “Wait! Steve, just answer me this: where is Miranda and why is she letting you answer her phone?”
“Miranda’s dead, Catherine. She’s been murdered.”
Chapter 15
I sat at the counter while Gilley fussed over me. “Here, Cat, drink this.”
I stared down with little interest at the cup of tea he’d made me. Still, I lifted it into my hands and felt the warmth from the mug breathe a little life into my cold fingers, and that sort of brought me out of the deep mental rabbit hole I’d traveled down.
“Ready to talk about it?” Gilley asked.
I took an unsteady sip of the tea. It was a little sweeter than I was expecting, but it helped. “Chanel’s grandaunt is dead. She’s been . . . murdered.”
Gilley sucked in a breath. “No!”
I nodded.
Gilley took up the chair next to me, pushing his dinner plate to the side. “How?” he asked.
“I don’t know. That’s all Shepherd would say.”
“Chanel . . . ?” Gilley said.
I shook my head. “He didn’t say if she was there or not, but I suspect she is. He probably heard about Miranda’s murder and hightailed it over to New Canaan, thinking Chanel had something to do with it, knowing him.”
Gilley frowned. “That girl wouldn’t hurt a fly, much less her grandauntie!”
“I know, Gil, but it is Shepherd we’re talking about. Arresting people for things they had no hand in is his calling card.”
“But he’s coming here? Tonight?”
“Yes. But not until around midnight. He’s in Connecticut, so he’s at least two and a half hours away.”
Gil eyed the clock. It was quarter to eight. “He’s not coming here to arrest you, is he?”
I smirked. “Let’s hope not, but make sure you have Marcus’s info handy, just in case.”
Gilley reached out and rubbed my arm. “Do you want me to stay here tonight?”
I sighed wearily. I felt like all the air had been let out of me. “No, lovey. I think we both need a little rest, and if we’re together we’ll just chat each other into exhaustion. You head to Chez Kitty. I’ll clean up here, then get a few hours of sleep before Shepherd shows up.”
Gilley popped off the bar stool. “You cooked, I’ll clean up,” he said, then promptly set about fussing in the kitchen. Before storing the leftover pasta, he heated a small plate of it for me and set it in front of me. “I know you’re not hungry, but this was too good not to sample, sugar,” he said.
I smiled and gamely swirled some pasta around my fork while moody thoughts tumbled inside my head like hyperactive children.
At around nine Gilley left me tucked into an afghan on the sofa in the family room off the kitchen. I fell almost immediately to sleep, but was awakened just a short time later by loud knocking.
Bolting upright, I shook my head to clear it and padded to the door to peer into the peephole. Shepherd stood on my front step, looking much worse for wear.
“You got here sooner than I expected,” I said.
Shepherd’s brow furrowed. “It’s quarter past midnight,” he said. “I’m fifteen minutes late.”
My eyes widened and I looked to my wrist, but I’d already taken off my watch. “It’s after midnight?” It felt like I’d only closed my eyes and he’d knocked.
“Can I come in?” he asked, and I realized he was still standing on my front step. Behind him a drizzling rain had begun and it was a cold night.
“Yes, I’m sorry,” I said, stepping out of the way. We walked through the foyer, me leading the way to the kitchen. “Did you want some coffee? Or tea?”
“Do you have anything decaffeinated? And I’d prefer tea if you have it.”
“I do. I’ll make you a cup.”
Shepherd sat at the counter and we didn’t speak while I turned on the stove and got a cup and tea bag ready. And then I had another thought and went to the fridge, removing the Tupperware of leftover pasta. I heated Shepherd up a plate of that in the microwave, and both his dinner and the tea were ready at the same time.
Without a word I set him a place at the counter, and offered him the food and drink.
He closed his eyes for a moment and inhaled the aroma of the pasta. “Damn, that smells good.”
I came around to sit next to him. “I figure that if I feed you, you’re less likely to arrest me.”
<
br /> Shepherd took a bite of pasta, closing his eyes again with pleasure. “Why would I arrest you?”
“Isn’t that what you do, Detective? You arrest people who’re obviously innocent all the time.”
“Are you referring to yourself, or Chanel?” he asked, without looking at me while he tucked into more pasta.
“Both.”
Shepherd chewed thoughtfully, took a sip of his tea, and said, “You really do have a way of throwing a monkey wrench into things, don’t you?”
“Me? What did I do?”
“You set Chanel Downey free.”
I threw my hands up in exasperation. “She didn’t do it!”
“Of course she didn’t,” he said softly.
I blinked. “Wait. What?”
“I know she didn’t murder Basayev.”
“Then why’d you arrest her?”
“To keep her safe.”
“From who?”
“Don’t you mean whom?”
“Don’t even think about playing coy with me, Detective. It’s after midnight, I’ve had quite the day, and I’m willing to entertain this late-night chat only so far.”
Shepherd nodded with a sigh, but then he polished off the final bite of pasta, wiped his mouth, and pushed his plate away. Turning to me, he said, “The biggest crime boss this side of Manhattan is murdered in his love nest, and all the evidence points to his real estate agent. If I hadn’t arrested her, she would’ve been dead before yesterday morning.”
I put a hand to my mouth. “Oh, my God . . . I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I know. And instead of coming to me for an explanation, you send your slick city lawyer over to get her bonded out of the isolation cell I’d personally put her in. And now she’s gone.”
I felt the blood drain from my face, and then I felt dizzy and light-headed. “She’s . . . she’s . . . dead?”
“What? No. She’s not dead. At least, not that I know of. She’s gone off-grid, and now that her grandaunt is dead, I have no way of tracking her down.”
“Who murdered Miranda?” I asked next.
Shepherd shook his head. “Don’t know. She was killed with a single shot to the forehead, so someone got up close and personal. They murdered her and set her dogs free, which is how the New Canaan P.D. discovered her. A neighbor captured all four dogs and put a note on Miranda’s door that she’d found them roaming the neighborhood—apparently this is a pretty common thing. The dogs are escape artists, according to the neighbor.
“Anyway, when Miranda didn’t come over to retrieve the dogs, the neighbor got worried. She sent a text to Chanel, but then Chanel never showed up—”
“Because you’d arrested her,” I interrupted.
Shepherd dipped his chin in acknowledgment and continued. “And when she couldn’t get ahold of Chanel, the neighbor called police to do a wellness check on Miranda.”
“How did you get involved?” I asked, thinking it was odd for the New Canaan police to reach out to Shepherd.
“I arrived just after they discovered the body. I was headed there to see if Chanel was hiding out at the only relative she has close by.”
“So who killed Miranda? Someone looking for revenge against Chanel for killing Basayev?”
Shepherd shook his head. “That’s the part that’s creepy,” he said. “Miranda was murdered at least seventy-two hours ago. Well before Basayev.”
Again the blood drained from my face. I’d called Miranda just about three nights ago. There’d been a knock at the door when I’d called. Had that been . . . the killer?
“Where . . . where was her body found?” I asked.
“Front hall,” Shepherd said, stifling a yawn. He was so tired he didn’t seem to notice my distress. “Right in front of the door. It’s like she answered the door, took one step back, then blamo. Lights out. Poor old woman never had a chance.”
I looked at Shepherd, wondering if I should tell him, and decided I probably needed to. “I called Miranda three days ago. She and I chatted for only a moment before she said she had to go because someone was knocking on her door.”
It was Shepherd’s turn to stare at me in shock. “What time?”
“It was around ten in the morning.”
He nodded. “That fits with the timeline. Did she say anything about who was at the door? Or even give you any kind of a description?”
“No. She simply said to call her back because she had to answer the door.”
“Damn,” Shepherd said. “I’d really like to know who’d kill an old woman in cold blood like that.”
“Do you think her murder could in some way be connected to Chanel?”
“I want to say that it’s a random fluke, a robbery gone wrong, but my gut says that somebody came looking for Chanel and shot Miranda so there wouldn’t be any witnesses.”
I shuddered. It was all so cold blooded.
Shepherd then seemed to focus on me. “Hey, what were you doing calling Miranda Downey anyway? And for that matter, what were you doing touring Boris Basayev’s house when I know for a fact that you’re not looking to move out of this place?”
I squared my shoulders, putting up a little bravado in the face of being called out for my investigative shenanigans. “How do you know I’m not thinking of moving? Maybe I’d like a change of scenery.”
Shepherd dipped his chin to look at me with half-lidded eyes. He wasn’t buying it.
I sighed and dropped the bravado. “Fine. I called Miranda looking for Chanel. I learned that she was Lenny’s partner, and I wanted to talk to her about the clients she passed on to Sara Beth Sullivan.”
Shepherd cocked his head. “Sara Beth Sullivan? What’s she or Chanel’s clients got to do with anything?”
“The clients in question were Jason and Paul Sutton.”
Shepherd’s face lit with recognition. “I’m listening.”
“Gilley and I did a little snooping, and we discovered that the house where Lenny was murdered had been listed for considerably more than it eventually sold for. After Lenny was murdered, the price dropped in half. The people who bought that house were the Suttons, and they paid cash.”
Shepherd scratched his head. He looked like he was trying to keep up, but was having trouble. So I backed up a bit. “Gil and I formed a theory,” I said. “And our theory goes like this: Basayev is looking to launder money out here in the Hamptons, away from prying eyes in the city. And through what business could he do that very effectively without raising a lot of suspicion but an art gallery?”
Shepherd nodded as he was following along.
I continued. “Basayev decides to recruit the Suttons; they’ve been struggling with their gallery in Manhattan, and they need a place to relocate it to, but they’ve fallen on hard times and they can’t afford the housing prices out here. They connect with Chanel, who may or may not have shown them a listing or two, but then they stumble onto the listing that Lenny has, and they want that house, but they can’t afford it.
“So they report back to Basayev that they’re in if he can get them a deal on the house. Basayev learns that Lenny is your ex-wife, and he thinks that he can kill two birds with one stone. In ordering a hit on Lenny, he knows that East Hampton’s top detective will likely become obsessed with finding out who murdered her, and get so distracted by solving that crime that he’ll overlook some others. He also knows that any house where there’s a murder becomes stigmatized, and sure enough the owner of the house that the Suttons purchased—the house where Lenny was killed—did in fact accept a half-priced offer because the owner was so worried she wouldn’t get another one for months or maybe even years.”
Shepherd’s jaw dropped. I could see that the theory that Lenny was murdered as a way to lower the value of the house she was showing, while simultaneously entrenching him into a murder investigation that would most certainly become an obsession, had never occurred to him.
“Holy shit,” he whispered.
As a mother, I’ve always trie
d to mind my language, but in this case, I couldn’t agree more.
Shepherd got up and walked a few steps on shaky legs. He looked as if he might crumple to the floor, in fact. I hurried to his side and guided him to the couch. “It’s diabolical!” he said.
“It is,” I agreed. “And it makes sense, right?”
Shepherd nodded dully, his gaze staring off into space and his mouth still agape. “I had all the pieces, all this time, but I could never put them together to form a coherent theory. I mean, I suspected Basayev was behind Lenny’s murder, but I could never figure out why. He wasn’t somebody I would’ve messed with. I would’ve left him to the Feds.”
“But you didn’t,” I said. “You were investigating Tony Holland’s murder, remember?”
Shepherd closed his eyes, as if he now understood. “Yes,” he said.
My former neighbor, Heather Holland, who’d also been murdered, had been married to a man who’d laundered money through his construction firm for Basayev. When Tony Holland began skimming some off the top, Basayev put a hit out on him, and Greta did the deed. That was Shepherd’s first Angel of Death investigation. And, it was the reason, I suspected, that Boris had eyed Shepherd as an annoyance to be dealt with.
“It’s so clear,” he said, shaking his head. “Why didn’t I see it?”
I put my hand over his. “Sometimes, when we’re too close to things, we can’t see the whole picture.”
Shepherd looked up at me, his expression a mixture of emotions, from gratitude, to regret, and even something else. Something that made my pulse quicken. I could feel the chemistry between us charging, like a current running down a wire. Without realizing it, I leaned forward, and so did Shepherd.
And then our lips hovered over each other, and I could feel his breath against my skin. The pulse of the current strengthened, and I closed my eyes against its power.
I felt Shepherd’s hand come up to cup the side of my jaw, and then his lips touched mine, and it was such a delicate, gentle movement. It completely belied the personality of the man I’d come to know.
I leaned in another few centimeters, desiring more, but Shepherd only brushed my lips again with his, drawing out the moment, luring me forward to the cliff’s edge. And then, when I thought I couldn’t stand another second of our lips not pressed tightly together, he swept me into his arms and unleashed all of his desire.
To Coach a Killer Page 24