by Lisa Black
William Rosedale.
“I guess you know.”
She threw on the brakes to leave some distance between them, the knowledge of what must have happened to her daughter solidifying in a nauseating ball of crushing density, imploding somewhere in the middle of her torso. “Where is she?”
Light from a window in the room behind him cast his face into shadows, and she could see only the silhouette of a somber expression, eerily calm. “I understand how you must feel.”
“William. Where is my daughter?”
“I just want you to know, I would never hurt Rachael. I’ve never hurt anybody.”
His mind had broken from reality. Either that or there was hope. “Where is she?”
“This way.” He turned and disappeared.
She followed him through the doorway, every inch of her skin tingling as her body fought conflicting impulses—the drive to fling herself headlong into hell itself if her daughter were there and the fear that all its demons waited around each corner for her.
But then she heard the scrape of shoes on metal and realized that William was not in either observation room but was climbing the stairs to the upper, outside deck. She slipped inside the interior well, in time to see his feet turn on the first landing. She had no choice but to follow, and at least he didn’t seem to be trying to corner her. Perhaps he really had snapped.
A single outline of brilliant light edged the door to the outside. William pulled it open and waited there for her.
Sunlight flooded in around him, and once again she followed him without hesitation. He had probably already killed her daughter, and he seemed sturdy enough to throw her over the side and send her plummeting seven hundred feet to the streets below. But Theresa would be sure to take him with her.
The wind off the lake hit her in the face as soon as she stepped into the open air. It never stopped, not at that height, only varied in intensity, and now it was strong enough to instantly tangle her hair and chap her skin. William had turned to the north and disappeared around the horizon of the deck’s circle, and she followed. Then she saw Rachael.
Alive.
Relief weakened her only for a moment. Rachael’s cheeks were red, and her face held an all-too-adult expression of terror and distress. “Mom!”
William stood between them. Was this an exhibition, an attempt to show Theresa that she was wrong about him? Or did he plan to murder her daughter in front of her, to punish Theresa for knowing his secret?
But then he did nothing as Rachael brushed by him, put her arms around her mother, and said, “I’m sorry.”
Sorry? For what? Not believing her?
And Theresa held her daughter tightly, feeling the strong beat of the girl’s heart, the pinned-on name tag biting into her breast, and smelled the ridiculously expensive shampoo that Rachael insisted on buying. Once again relief made her weak, but not weak enough to take her eyes off William.
He merely watched them, though, his expression tense and angry.
Then a shadow in the curve of the building deck moved. The pudgy, dark-haired friend of William’s—Ray? Roy?—was also present, and he looked as upset as Rachael. The shade of his skin approached beet red, and his eyes shed unabashed tears. What the hell was going on?
“I’m sorry,” Rachael said again.
“I should think so! You scared the crap out of me. All I heard was ‘observation,’ and then the phone went dead.”
“Oh.” Rachael stepped back, one arm still on her mother’s shoulder, her body hiding Theresa’s movements as she slipped her cell phone out of her pocket. “I tried to call back, but you didn’t pick up. Were you in the elevator? Look, I—”
“You told him,” Theresa asked, her gaze still on William, keeping her voice low and hoping the wind would carry it away from him.
“I know you told me not to, but I had to know—that’s why we came up here, so that no one would overhear us. You can’t keep a secret in this place. Mom, I believe him, he totally didn’t—Anyway, that’s when we found … it.” She gave Theresa another half hug, putting her head briefly on her mother’s shoulder. “Mom, I’m really sorry.”
Theresa’s mind, which had been charging along in one direction, had to stop and regroup. She glanced at William and then Ray; neither had moved or changed expression. Then she looked at her daughter as the girl released her and straightened up, wind-tossed, relatively calm, and somber in a very grown-up way.
“Rachael,” she said. “What are you talking about?”
Her daughter tugged her gently at the sleeve, and they moved another fifteen degrees around the observation circle, until Theresa could see something resting in its white hollow. A person, or what used to be a person, sprawled at the foot of the scaffold.
At first it appeared to be only a ball of white, heavy flesh, but after a few shocked moments the various areas sorted themselves out into arms and legs, tied together by an understated navy blue tie. What had been blobs of muted colors here and there were articles of clothing, discarded and left to the elements, a corner of the white blouse giving a halfhearted flap as a finger of wind caught it. A face, turned to the side, the left cheek mashed against the curved shingle floor. Blood covered this face, running and pooling over the uneven surface, a distinct red against the white. It had dried in the brisk wind, matting the dishwater-blond hair.
Sonia Battle.
Rachael grasped her mother’s shoulder, and suddenly all her words made sense.
PART IV
*
SONIA
CHAPTER 33
*
Not Sonia. Marie Corrigan and Bruce Raffel yes—people who had lived by the sword, decimating the lives of victims and those who tried to help them without concern, they could die by it—but not Sonia. Sonia was not some soulless, avaricious vulture who thrived on conflict and domination. Sonia cared.
Theresa wept as she called Neil Kelly. That and the wind made conversation difficult, but he said he would respond and not to move. She warned him that Rachael, William, and Ray were also present, without letting Rachael know that she had told another person William’s secret.
“So let me get this straight.” Theresa leaned against the outer wall. She had not moved, did not go any closer to Sonia’s corpse. There would be plenty of time for that. “You came up here to talk.”
“I had my morning break. I hadn’t left the desk since I started at nine—I really was trying to do what you wanted.” Rachael spoke without defense or rebellion in her voice. Stumbling on a dead body and seeing her mother cry—both extremely rare events—had that effect on her, to the point where she actually tried to use the cuff of her sleeve to dry Theresa’s cheeks. Neither one of them ever carried tissues.
“And you came up here.”
“I went to the kitchen to see William. It’s what I do every day. I thought it would look odd if I didn’t.”
“The restaurant’s closed.”
The wind whipped around them like a live thing, a constant, annoying third party who wanted in on the conversation, keeping Rachael’s hair in motion and stinging Theresa’s eyes. “We use the back halls. And when I saw him … well, I hadn’t believed it before, but I really didn’t believe it. He’s so nice to everyone, Mom. He was helping Ray unload the dishwasher when that’s not even his job—”
“Okay.”
“So I said I needed to talk to him, and we came up here, and I told him I heard about this Jenna girl, and he didn’t get mad or anything, just said he knows he didn’t do it but doesn’t know who did. Then Ray came up to join us—he does that sometimes—so I didn’t say anything else, but William said he’d understand if I didn’t want to see him anymore and started walking away, and I followed, and then we saw … her.”
“Then what did you do?”
“Screamed, I think. Then I called you. Then I told William to go down and meet you at the elevator.”
“Not you?” Do you know how many deaths I died, following him up those stairs?
“I figured you’d be mad if I left him guarding the crime scene, even with Ray here, too,” Rachael said. “Given his circumstances.”
Theresa could only stare at her, deeply proud but deeply ashamed. “Honey, it’s not your job to worry about the integrity of the crime scene. Don’t ever put that above your personal safety.”
“But I was safe. The killer was long gone.”
“And how do you know that? You can only see a small portion of this ring at one time. How could you know he wasn’t out of sight around the curve of the deck?” With only one means of egress, and Rachael standing in front of it.
“Because the blood had dried,” Rachael said, as if that were obvious, prompting another feeling of pride mixed with What have I done? to course through Theresa. “And the way the clothes are sort of scattered around the edges, it kind of looked to me like they’d been left in a pile, but then the wind blew them around a little bit.”
“Oh. Good point. Rachael, I want you to think carefully. Whose idea was it to come up here? Yours or William’s?”
Her daughter frowned, almost a scowl, making her thoughts plain. All her hard work to protect and observe the crime scene, and her mother only wanted to pin the whole thing on her new boyfriend. “He didn’t do it, Mom. Come on!”
“It’s just a question, and one that I’m sure Neil Kelly is going to ask you in another few minutes.”
Rachael sulked for a moment but then said, “Neither of us—really. We always come here on our breaks, so I guess we just automatically did. You have to admit, Mom, if he wanted to kill me, he could have already.”
“I do admit that he’s had ample opportunity. I want to believe him, honey, I want to believe your judgment, but I can’t help the facts, and all the facts say that he killed Jenna Simone. So maybe you both gravitated here because it’s your usual break spot, or maybe he wanted to show you his handiwork.”
“Mom!”
“I can’t ignore the possibility—but look, because it’s only one of many possibilities, will you both go down and guide Detective Kelly up here?” With her mother upstairs and a police detective about to spill out of the elevator, the girl ought to be perfectly safe, and this tiny show of faith seemed to cheer Rachael up. It might give Neil a start, though.
Theresa called Frank, who remained silent at this news a little longer than she would have expected. But he was currently waiting in a dingy hallway at the Justice Center to testify in the officer-involved shooting trial and couldn’t leave.
The other boy, Ray, had watched his friends walk away. “Can I go now?” he asked as she hung up. “I think I’d really like to go home.”
“I’m afraid the officers will need a statement from you. It will be simple—you’ll just tell them what happened.”
This seemed to distress him further. He put one hand to his eyes and moaned.
“Are you all right?” Theresa asked, as gently as she could.
“This is just so awful. And they’ll suspect him—I heard what they were talking about and what you just said to Rachael. Will didn’t kill Jenna, and he sure didn’t kill this lady here.”
Theresa blinked in the strong wind. “You know about Jenna Simone?”
Duh. Of course he did. “We all went to the same school. Will and I have been friends since the seventh grade. I mean, he’s always been a cool kid. He could be the coolest if he wanted to, but he’s friends with a super-geek like me. Will is a really, really nice guy. He would never have hurt Jenna.” Thinking about the incident apparently upset him all over again. “And now maybe they’ll think he did this. It’s not fair! I should never have gone to that dance. We should never have come up here today.”
Should she warn him not to mention Jenna Simone to the officers? The juvenile records were sealed, so the odds were much better than Ray supposed that the officers might never make the connection between William the witness and William the suspect three years ago. Keep William’s secret under wraps so it didn’t muddy the investigative waters or risk Rachael’s ire?
Risk, Theresa decided. It was not her job to protect William Rosedale from his past. Besides, Neil Kelly already knew. He could take it from there, or not, as he saw fit. “Do you remember William’s trial?”
“Yeah,” Ray sniffled. “I cut school to go, until my mother found out and said she’d ground me for life.”
“Do you remember William’s lawyer?”
“The hot chick?” A haze of goggle-eyed puppy love came over his face, drying his tears. “She was terrific! She totally cracked every witness they put on.”
Theresa tried not to frown at this. “Did you know she was murdered on Thursday?”
Ray nodded, hard and rapidly. “Yeah, that was too bad. Really too bad. She smoked. That guy she was with was totally out of her range.”
Theresa tried to sort out this statement. “What guy?”
“That other lawyer dude who was murdered. I saw his picture on the news. He looked … well, kinda like me. Totally out of range.”
“Bruce Raffel?”
“Yeah, that was the name. The one who just got offed yesterday, right?”
“You saw them together?”
“Yeah,” he said, as if that should be common knowledge.
“Here at the hotel?”
The tears had dried up. Now he looked at Theresa, apparently perplexed that she was apparently perplexed. “No, at William’s trial. He was like her, whatever, co-chair? He’d come in and sit with her and William at their table sometimes. Not all the time, just sometimes.”
“He assisted her at William’s trial?”
“Yeah.” Ray’s face turned a shade of worry. “Why? It’s … it’s got nothing to do with William, you know, the dude turning up dead here. Will was with me all night—last night … I mean, the night before. I mean, we worked—”
“No, no, of course not,” she soothed. “Did you see Marie and Bruce Raffel together this week? Here at the hotel?”
“No.” He still seemed skittish; he’d said something wrong, and he knew it. He wanted to keep his friend out of trouble and instead had thrown him right into a thicket of it.
Theresa gestured toward Sonia’s body. “What about this attorney? Did you see her and Bruce or Marie together this week? Any week?”
“Nope.” He seemed more certain of that.
“Do you know her?”
The boy—young man, really—studiously avoided looking at the corpse. “No, man, I don’t think so. I don’t know any lawyers, and … I didn’t get a good look at her. And I’m not going to.”
Noises behind them spared him any further questions. Neil Kelly, Angela Sanchez, Rachael and William, and a uniformed patrol officer spilled out of the stairwell door.
Neil glanced at Ray, gave Theresa a more searching look, and asked if she was all right. But he barely waited for a reply before approaching the body. Just as well. She could hardly fold herself into his arms—even when it was the only thing she wanted to do at the moment—in front of Rachael and a bunch of cops.
“Stay here,” Theresa instructed her daughter, and joined him.
Stop looking at Sonia as a friend, she told herself, and look at her as a vitally important piece of evidence. Without this evidence the guy will stay free to kill again.
Sonia Battle’s wrists and ankles had been bent behind her and secured with a necktie. Her knees showed a few scrape marks, fresh but only slightly bloodied. Her hands were clean except for a light smudging of dirt on her right index and middle fingers. Theresa could count at least two deep lacerations to the skull. A bloodied two-by-four, about two feet in length, lay on the other side of her—most likely debris from the renovation of the inside observation deck. The killer had probably picked it up there, just as he’d picked up a chair in the hotel rooms. Why did this killer use weapons of opportunity? So he couldn’t be caught with the incriminating item or because the crimes were truly unplanned, spur-of-the-moment’spassion attacks? But how could someone that impulsive
avoid detection this long?
Why had Sonia come up here? She hadn’t been afraid of the height but had hardly seemed entranced by it. Theresa prodded a fleshy thigh, startled at its pliability. Sonia hadn’t been dead very long, probably not more than four hours. She certainly hadn’t been there all night and so had not come here for a romantic starlight stroll.
Theresa didn’t disturb the clothing since she hadn’t photographed it, but it seemed to be Sonia’s typical work uniform of black skirt, white blouse, nylons poking out from the bottom of the pile, and a pair of sensible, square-heeled shoes in patent leather. Their smooth surface, Theresa thought, might be able to hold a decent set of fingerprints.
Sonia had come to the deck early that morning, while Theresa had been brooding in the amphitheater next to Don, and Rachael had possibly been handing the killer his bill and telling him to have a good flight home. Why? To watch the sun rise? Or because, like Rachael, she needed to talk to someone and didn’t want to be overheard. Someone who’d brought a two-by-four along to the meeting.
Sonia lay almost straight across the walkway, facing the scaffold with the top of her head touching the outer wall, pointing north toward the lake. It would have been incredibly uncomfortable, if not impossible, to sexually assault someone in that position. Theresa had no faith that they would find semen and its attendant DNA. The nudity, the hog-tying were all for show, a final indignity heaped upon a hated enemy.
And this wind. The killer could have dropped more hairs, more fibers, his driver’s license, and Social Security card, and it all might be across the Cuyahoga, sailing over the old steel mill.
“Has anyone cleared the other side of this deck?” Angela asked, with good reason. The killer could be waiting there, out of sight around the bend of the ring, trapped. She and Theresa argued briefly, as Theresa wanted her to put protective booties over her shoes before traveling any further into what was now their crime scene, and none of them had any. Finally Angela agreed to go down to Marcus Dean’s office and retrieve Theresa’s crime-scene kit, full of booties and gloves and other items, while the armed patrol officer would stand guard at the door in case the killer decided to flee from the unseen curves of the deck. Angela would also escort Rachael back to the front desk, with strict instructions to remain there until Theresa returned for her. The strictest of instructions, Theresa emphasized, watching her daughter lean against William’s chest, his arms around her. The girl closed her eyes, obviously finding great comfort in this gentle support. He rubbed her back with one hand, then patted her hair and held it steady against the wind. Basically, he did to her daughter exactly what only a few moments before Theresa had been wishing Neil Kelly would do to her. Maybe, she thought suddenly, her daughter was right. William was a truly nice kid and someone else had killed Jenna Simone.