by Joanne Pence
Her cheeks reddened, giving away, as if she hadn’t already, that Seymour asked her to spy on Richie. “Do you think I’d tell him anything?”
“Yes, I do—if you thought it was necessary. He shows up to talk to you often enough. I can’t think of any other reason for his visits. Well, actually I can, but not one that’s work related. Also, your face when I told you I was going to Claire Baxter’s house told me I was right. You’ve really got to learn not to give away so much in your expressions.”
“My expressions are just fine. But I told Bran”—she knew that could irk him and his expression proved she was right—“that he was quite wrong about you being involved in all this.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Probably not. And there goes my chance of ever transferring to the FBI.”
“Good,” he said. A lock of her hair had slid forward almost to her eye, and he gently tucked it behind her ear. “I cause you a bit of trouble, don’t I?”
“Yes, you do,” she said a lot more emphatically than she meant to.
Shay stood. “I’ll see what’s going on with the lawyer, and put a guy on to watch him. Also, Vito reports nothing at all going on at Baxter’s home. Maybe he should give up on it.”
Richie agreed. “Move Vito to the lawyer if that makes more sense. And let me know if you crack any more of those burner phones.”
“Will do. See you both,” Shay said, giving Rebecca what she figured was as close as he ever came to a smile.
Richie drove Rebecca back to her apartment. She looked forward to inviting him inside—just the two of them. Finally. But as soon as he turned into the alley, everything changed.
“FBI,” she said, seeing the black van in front of her building. “I’ll talk to them.”
She got out of the car.
“Stop!” Brandon Seymour yelled as he ran towards them.
No sooner had she shut the car door than Richie backed out of Mulford and took off.
“Damn it to hell!” Seymour stopped and glared at Rebecca.
“Don’t you swear at me! What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” she demanded. “And before you ask, no, I haven’t learned anything new.”
“You’re lying. You were at Claire Baxter’s home last night,” he roared. “What did she tell you?”
She gawked at him. “You mean you don’t know?”
“No! I …” Then he stopped at looked at her. His voice turned quiet. “Don’t know what?
“She wasn’t there. She’s missing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It looked to me like a struggle and abduction, but I can’t be sure. How can you not know that? I thought your men were watching her.”
“Goddammit!” He got on his cell phone and walked back to his SUV.
Rebecca watched him drive off. As she stepped into the breezeway—alone—she shared his sentiments exactly.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The next morning, Evelyn Ramirez presented the results of Neda Fourman’s postmortem to Rebecca. With no relatives to object, it took no time to obtain needed approvals to dig up the body. Evelyn was so curious about what she might find, she performed the autopsy during the night.
She was over the moon that she now had autopsied two—count them, two—cases of batrachotoxin poisoning. She was even thinking of doing a paper about it.
Rebecca brought evidence of the poisonings and life insurance policies to Lt. Eastwood. She had been working like crazy the past week to find hard proof of Geller’s hand in the murders, but so far could find no evidence beyond circumstantial. Although Eastwood had been skeptical of why she was even looking into such a thing, he was now convinced that the two deaths were the tip of a very dangerous iceberg, given the type of poison being used.
He decided she could bring Sandor Geller in for questioning, although she didn’t yet have enough evidence to ask for a search warrant of his files. She didn’t tell her boss she didn’t need a search warrant; she had Shay. She also didn’t tell him that, for some reason, she found it hard to believe Sandor Geller was a killer, despite so much pointing towards him. But it wouldn’t be the first time a killer had surprised her.
She would lay the facts in front of Geller and see what his explanation was for everything going on. And if she had to lean on him to get his cooperation, so be it.
After quickly briefing Sutter on what she’d been working on, the two of them left for Geller’s Octavia Street office.
“I’ll drive,” Sutter announced. “You’re looking awfully tired these days, Rebecca. Usually when homicides are kind of quiet, I use the time to catch up on my sleep. You look like you’re doing the exact opposite.”
“Guess I’ve had a lot on my mind lately,” she said. Like bodies supposedly dying of natural causes that weren’t so natural. Like FBI agents bugging her. And like Richie Amalfi back in her life.
That very morning, as she drove to work listening to the radio, Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” came on, a song full of warning about feeling desire for the wrong person. Her thoughts had immediately gone to Richie. She had flipped through the dial and stopped when she heard Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” Now that was a song she could relate to.
As much as she wished Bran Seymour hadn’t been there to ruin her evening with Richie, if he had come in, she knew where it would have led and she wondered if she wanted her already messed up life to get even worse.
“Rebecca?”
Richie?
“Time to wake up.”
Abruptly, she sat up and looked at Sutter. “I wasn’t sleeping, just resting my eyes.”
“Sure. You weren’t snoring either. We’ve arrived.”
“I never …” But he was already out of the car, and then, so was she.
They walked into Geller’s reception room and asked to see him.
“He’s not in,” the young receptionist said, eying the detectives cautiously since they’d questioned her and the other staff members about Candace Carter. “Can I take a message for him?”
“Is he home?” Rebecca asked.
“I’m not sure. He left at noon and hasn’t returned.”
“We’ll need the address.”
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Geller—”
Simultaneously, both inspectors flashed their badges. Without another word, she wrote down Geller’s home address.
o0o
Sandy Geller lived in a multi-million dollar condo at the top of Russian Hill, near the apartment Richie’s cousin, Angie Amalfi, had lived in before she got married. Rebecca and Sutter walked into the opulent, marble-floor foyer. A suited doorman, middle-aged and balding with a fresh-scrubbed look, greeted them.
Rebecca and Sutter showed their badges and asked for Geller. The doorman buzzed him twice, but received no answer.
“He must not be home,” the doorman said.
“Check your logs,” Sutter ordered. “I know how your security system works.”
Rebecca smirked at Sutter as the doorman did as he was told. She knew Sutter loved to play the tough cop now and then.
“Well, he is home according to our logs of everyone who enters and exits the premises,” the befuddled doorman said, staring at the two inspectors. “And his car is in the garage. So I’m afraid he must be indisposed.”
“Then get his indisposed ass to answer the door,” Sutter demanded. “We don’t have all day.”
“But if he chooses not to answer, I’m not sure—.”
“What if he’s sick?” Sutter interrupted. “Or hurt and in desperate need of attention? Do you really want to ignore us and leave him there, possibly bleeding, maybe dying? When would you open the door in that case? After someone complains of the stink, or wonders why bloated flies are pouring out of his apartment vents?”
The doorman swallowed hard. He put in a call to the building manager and explained the situation. “Yes, sir,” he said, then hung up and faced the inspectors. “This way, please.”
o0o
Rebecca sensed some
thing was wrong from the moment the doorman stood in front of Geller’s apartment and knocked. Not that she believed in ESP, but cops quickly developed a sense of what was going on around them. It helped keep them alive.
Finally, the doorman gave up and used his key to unlock the door.
Rebecca and Sutter entered. As opposed to the rococo style of the building’s foyer, Geller’s apartment was completely modern, all in grays and browns with crisp lines. It didn’t take them long in the starkly decorated space to find out why Geller didn’t answer. He was in the living room, face down in a pool of blood still dripping from the spot where his skull had been bashed in.
CHAPTER TWENTY
After finding Geller’s body, Rebecca called the crime scene unit and the medical examiner, while Sutter requested patrolmen to secure the crime scene.
She was torn about handling the investigation. She and Sutter were the on-call team this week, and as someone who knew the deceased she already had some insight—especially since he had been her prime suspect in two other murders.
On the other hand, it was already known she’d spent personal time with him and even had gone to one of his séances. Maybe that hadn’t been one of her finer moments, yet, she told herself, it was good investigative work to follow a lead or a hunch.
She phoned Lt. Eastwood and told him of her concerns. Eastwood realized this case would get a lot of press. Geller might not have been hugely popular, but he did have a following. And him being a psychic would lend to all kinds of quips and nasty headlines: Psychic Fails to Foresee his own Murder or Psychic Finally Gets Answers about the Great Beyond.
Eastwood decided Rebecca needed to remain on the case, but that Bill Sutter should be its public face.
“I’m the what?” Sutter asked, shocked, when Rebecca gave him the news. She was glad it would be him, not her, facing news cameras.
They spent the rest of the day canvassing Geller’s apartment building, asking if anyone had seen or heard anything suspicious. When they learned nothing, they expanded their questions to neighbors, and then asked for footage from the surrounding city streets.
Rebecca showed the doorman a photo of Lucian Tully. The doorman recognized him, but hadn’t seen him for several days. Although she had initially thought Sandy must have been somehow involved in the ladies’ deaths, she now wondered if he wasn’t completely innocent. After all, Lucian’s name was the one shown as the beneficiary on Neda and Candace’s life insurance forms. Was Lucian the one behind everything? Had he fooled her and everyone else so completely?
But then, many people never failed to surprise her—some being a lot worse than she expected, and others, like a certain Richard Joseph Francis Amalfi, surprisingly better. Or so she hoped.
She asked to speak to the building manager, Jim Perkins. He immediately announced he knew nothing because he never spoke with Sandy Geller.
“Never?” That was a surprise to Rebecca.
“No. If he wanted anything, I’d get a call from his secretary,” Perkins frowned. “It was made clear to me that all my interaction with him should be in writing. Period.”
“I see. Do you recognize this man?” She showed him a photo of Lucian Tully.
“No. I’ve never seen anyone connected to Geller. I suspect most of his visitors, if any, came in with him through the garage and then took the elevator from there directly up to his floor.”
“So anyone entering via the garage would by-pass all security?” she asked.
“Sure. Our tenants deserve some privacy from doormen and cameras. Anyway, a person needs a code to get into the garage, so it’s not as if anyone could sneak inside.”
“Of course,” she said drily, as if no one had ever managed to sneak into a garage with a security code as its doors slowly opened or closed. “Do you have any cameras or security tapes?”
“Certainly. We have four cameras—and tapes. Our system works.”
She didn’t bother to voice the opinion that a building this size would need a few more than four cameras. “I’d like to see those tapes.”
He grimaced with annoyance. “They won’t tell you anything we haven’t.”
“How do you know that?” She gave him a cold stare.
He backed down. “I’ll send them to you right away.”
o0o
From Geller’s building, Rebecca and Sutter went to Lucian’s apartment to take him in for questioning. He wasn’t there. They talked to his neighbors, but none had any idea about his comings or goings. All said he was quiet, shy, and pleasant, but said little beyond “hello” to any of them.
It wasn’t only Lucian, however, who was a suspect. She had nothing to rule out Geller’s other employees, clients, and even friends. All were in play until she was able to find something to help narrow the field. And, as yet, that wasn’t happening.
Back in Homicide, Rebecca was pleased to find the surveillance tapes from Geller’s apartment building had already been delivered.
Sutter gave a brief update to the press, and as soon as it was over, he escaped for home. Rebecca decided to stay, review the tapes, and see what else she could find out.
She was going through exceedingly boring tapes when Brandon Seymour phoned, and asked if she had heard anything more about Claire Baxter’s disappearance.
“Nope,” was her quick reply.
“See what you can get out of Amalfi. He probably knows a lot more than he’s said so far.”
“Ask him yourself and leave me out of it.” How many more ways could she say that to Seymour before he understood she meant it?
“I have no interest in wasting my time trying to get him to cooperate,” Seymour said. “You’re my best source at the moment. This situation could become dangerous, and I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“I can take care of myself,” she said tiredly, and hung up.
She went back to the tapes. Now that her prime suspect in Fourman and Carter’s deaths was gone, who else would have motive to kill them and Geller? The three deaths had to be connected.
As expected, the surveillance tapes showed nothing, which meant that whoever went to Geller’s condo might have been aware of camera placements—or he let his killer in with him.
Just then her phone rang. It was Seymour again.
“I thought you’d want to know,” he began. “We’ve found Claire Baxter and Amalfi. We’re moving in on them.”
That jarred her. “Moving in? What do you mean? Where are you?”
o0o
Rebecca rushed down to the docks in the Hunters Point area. It was one of the few areas in the city that hadn’t yet gone through the gentrification that was transforming most of San Francisco. Crime was high; the homes and apartments were mostly small, run down, and covered with bars, boards, and graffiti; and good people did their best to stay off the streets after dark. Near the bay were old piers and warehouses that handled West Coast shipping.
From the appointed meeting place, Seymour led Rebecca to a side street that looked down on a one story building and the empty parking area surrounding it. It was dusk, and a light fog had rolled in. The area was bare of traffic and people, surrounded by gray mist.
One side of the building had a heavy-looking door with the word “Office” painted on it. The other side had one door and three truck bays with roll-up garage doors. Because of the many parking spaces, they couldn’t get any closer to the building without being seen.
“It’s a furniture supply warehouse,” Seymour said. “Overseas shipments are stored there until retailers come to pick them up. From what we’ve learned, the front office is fairly small, and most of the building is one big open space filled with furniture crates. We suspect something is going down soon,” Seymour said. “My men are in position.”
“How do you know Claire Baxter is in there?” Rebecca asked. She didn’t like the looks of this at all.
“When we got word of Claire Baxter’s disappearance”—Rebecca liked the way he worded that, careful not to admit that sh
e was the one who gave the word to Seymour—“I had my men look at any cameras near her apartment, as well as her phone records. We suspect she may be in hot water because of the artifacts we confiscated, and now has to pay up. We found she has access to a valuable Assyrian relief that recently was removed from its spot in a local gallery, along with her getting an updated appraisal record about it.
“We also started following Amalfi yesterday, and tracking his phone calls as well. We found that first Claire, and now Amalfi, have been calling the same number. Then, late this afternoon, we spotted Amalfi leaving a security vault storage facility—one of those places the rich leave art work too big for a bank—with a box very much the size of the Assyrian relief.
“Tonight, he didn’t go to his club. Instead, he headed down here. We suspect arrangements have been made to exchange Claire for the art work. Now, he seems to be waiting. And so are we.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“We’ve got infra-red scanners that show heat signatures for five people in the office. Four keep moving around, and one is still, and the form is such we suspect it’s Claire and that she’s sitting on one spot, not moving. The people with her are most likely the smugglers Interpol has been tracking. The problem is, they aren’t ‘mere’ smugglers. They’re killers. Five in Europe. Also, the Iraqi who alerted Interpol about the Nimrud jewelry being sold in San Francisco was found dead this morning.”
“What? Why would they kill him?”
“As a warning to others who might turn to authorities to report wrong-doing.”
Rebecca felt a chill run down her back. She wondered if Richie knew the extent of the danger he might be facing.
“We’re pretty sure Claire Baxter—and Amalfi—aren’t going to make it out of there alive. Now, we’ve got to decide if we use hostage negotiators, or simply storm in and do whatever it takes to rescue her.”
“But you try to storm the place, they’ll all but certainly kill her,” she said.
Seymour folded his arms, staring at the warehouse. “We might not have a choice.”