The Triple Threat Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  Allison’s coworkers were solicitous—and curious. There were only so many ways to respond to their questions and awkward condolences. She wanted to hold Cassidy close in her thoughts—the real Cassidy, warts and all—but the more Allison talked about her, the more she became a simpler and slightly smaller version of herself, more fit for public consumption.

  Through a blur of tears, Allison stared at Cassidy’s image, frozen on the screen. Could Rick McEwan really have murdered her for dragging his abuse out into the open? In the middle of the night, seeing that text from Nicole, Allison had been half convinced it was possible. Now, in the bright light of day, the idea seemed a stretch.

  She got up and paced the office, thinking it through one more time. Everyone in Portland had known that Rick was dating Cassidy. He had liked to show her off. So when she came out with her accusations, his ego must have been bruised. Maybe more than bruised. But was Rick the kind of man to bide his time for a year?

  This high above the city, the freeway sounded like a distant river. Allison was cocooned away in her office, cut off from the heat and sweat of the day. The pale blue walls behind her never witnessed raised voices. By the time the crimes she prosecuted reached her, they had been leached of emotion. Even the color photos of the horrific aftermaths were all neatly closed up in binders.

  Pausing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, Allison squinted in the bright sunlight. The steel-gray Willamette River was directly underneath her, cutting through the heart of the city. On the other side of the river, the city stretched for miles in an orderly grid. Mount Hood, pictured on a thousand postcards, loomed in the background, snowcapped even at this time of year. She had spent enough years with the spectacular view that now she seldom focused on it.

  But Cassidy would never see it again. Allison remembered how her friend’s eyes, dull and fixed, had stared out from under the kitchen sink. Stared at nothing. Cassidy would never see anything again, beautiful or ugly.

  On Allison’s desk, her cell phone buzzed. She walked over, ready to dismiss the call, but saw that it was Nicole and snatched it up instead.

  “Where are you?” Nicole said without preamble. “We need to talk.”

  “At work, but I’m pretty useless. Why? Is there something new about Cassidy?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you.”

  Fifteen minutes later there was a knock on the door. After Allison called out that it was open, Nicole nudged the door open with her hip. In one hand she held a white paper Starbucks cup that looked a foot tall, and in the other a second cup that was only slightly smaller.

  Dan Wilcox, Allison’s boss, was walking past, and he glanced over at them curiously. That morning he had expressed his sympathies and told Allison to “take as much time” as she needed. But he had been fiddling with a pen when he said it, and he hadn’t met her eyes.

  Nicole closed the door and handed Allison the second cup. “Here. You probably need this. I’m guessing you got just about as much sleep as I did.” Only in an air-conditioned office did hot coffee on such a hot day make sense, but Allison took it gratefully. Nicole continued, “I was at the autopsy today.”

  “You watched? How could you stand to?” The few times Allison had witnessed autopsies she had gotten through them by pretending she was watching a particularly grisly movie—detailed but ultimately fake. And those times the bodies had all belonged to strangers.

  “Actually, I didn’t.” Nic sat down. “Jensen turned up and wouldn’t let me stay. He even threatened to go to Bond about it. Since I haven’t even had my one-on-one with him yet, I didn’t protest. I have a feeling that wouldn’t get things off on the right foot.”

  “I hate to say it, Nicole, but if Jensen showed up on a case of ours and started acting like he didn’t trust us to get it right, we’d kick him out too. This is a job for PPB. Not us.”

  “Do you really think that?” Nicole snorted. “Tony called me just a little bit ago. Off the record.”

  Allison blinked in surprise. “Why?”

  “He said they found bruises around Cassidy’s wrists. The skin was practically rubbed off in places.” Nicole circled one wrist with her finger and thumb, then turned it back and forth before grasping the other wrist and repeating the motion.

  Allison’s scalp prickled. “Handcuffs?”

  “Exactly. Now, who do you know who carries a pair of handcuffs on his belt every day?”

  Allison ignored the question. “What was the cause of death?”

  “She was strangled first and then stabbed. It’s possible she was still alive when she was stabbed.”

  Cassidy, struggling to breathe. No way to defend herself. Her hands locked uselessly behind her back, wrists bruising as she writhed in desperation.

  “Handcuffs aren’t the only things Rick has on his belt,” Allison pointed out. “If it was him, then why didn’t he shoot her?”

  “And have the ballistics match? Rick’s too smart to do something that dumb. Besides, this feels personal. Killers who strangle their victims feel them die.”

  Nausea bubbled up in Allison, and she swallowed it back down. How could anyone stand to do that? “I don’t know, Nicole. Why would Rick kill Cassidy now? Things have been over between them for more than a year.”

  “Maybe he waited until he figured no one would connect him to it. He’s not the kind to forgive and forget. You remember how he treated her. And what kind of incentive do the cops have for looking at Rick too closely? If they have a murderer on the force, they’ll never live it down. They were already mad at Cassidy for shaming Rick in public and then leaking that story about the smuggling at the jail. Do you think Jensen really wants to take a close look at his best man?”

  Allison remembered the set of the detective’s jaw. “Jensen seems like a professional. I think he’ll be turning over rocks, even if one of them ends up having Rick under it. You really think he would let a killer go free to teach a dead woman a lesson?”

  Nicole crossed her arms. “Cops tend to stick together.”

  “So do FBI agents,” Allison pointed out. “So does pretty much any group. That’s what makes them effective, because they know they’ve got each other’s backs. But this is going to be a high-profile case, and they know people will be watching.” Exhaustion crested over her like a wave. She raised the cup to her lips. “PPB knows they have to connect the dots and follow where they lead.”

  Coffee normally smelled enticing, but today it just smelled burnt. Nausea thickened her throat. Allison hadn’t eaten since last night, and now the thought of those spicy shrimp made her hold herself very still for a few seconds, trying to decide if she was going to retch. Finally the urge receded. Swallowing hard, she set the coffee down and looked up to find Nicole watching her.

  “Sorry. Just a little sick to my stomach. I’ve already drunk so much coffee I probably shouldn’t have any more.” She moved the cup to the far edge of her desk.

  “Nauseated?” Nicole tilted her head.

  “I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Allison and Marshall hadn’t talked about trying again for months. The idea of actually having a baby seemed more remote with each passing day. She wasn’t even disappointed anymore when her period showed up every fourth Friday, just like clockwork. She sighed. “Look, I get that you think it’s probably Rick. But we have to look at the other possibilities.”

  “Oh, so it’s we now.” Nicole looked at her with hooded eyes.

  “Come on, Nicole. No one is going to listen to us if we just have a gut feeling. We have to look at this logically. And looking at it logically, there are three choices. The first one is that Cassidy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it’s her bad luck that she’s the one who ended up dead. That covers a botched burglary. Or even a serial killer who likes blondes.”

  Nicole wasn’t buying it. “I pulled up the crime reports this morning. There haven’t been any recent burglaries or break-ins in the area. And there’s been no unso
lved murder with a similar MO anyplace in the Pacific Northwest.”

  “Okay, then there’s the second choice,” Allison said. “It could have had something to do with who she is. Something personal. That means not only Rick, but any other past or current boyfriend.” She thought of something. “Was she sexually assaulted?”

  Nicole shook her head, and Allison felt the faintest relief.

  “So it’s possible it was even a woman, maybe someone who got mad thinking that Cassidy poached her man. Maybe that explains the handcuffs—someone who needed her incapacitated to make sure they were strong enough to kill her.” Allison took a deep breath that shook at the end. “And the third choice is that this has something to do with her work. We need to figure out what stories she’s covered that might have left someone mad at her.”

  “That shouldn’t be too hard.” Nicole raised one eyebrow. “Heck, you and I worked a lot of the same cases Cassidy did.”

  “I think our first priority is figuring out what lead she was working on when she texted us. I’m going to call Brad and see if he knows what it was about.”

  She picked up the phone, but she must not have been the only one calling Channel Four. The only way Allison succeeded in getting through to Brad Buffet was by using her title.

  “Have you made an arrest?” he asked as soon as he came on the line. He must think she was officially on the case.

  “Not yet,” she said noncommittally. It wasn’t really a lie. “Brad, Cassidy texted me and Nicole Hedges right before she died. She told us she would be late to meet us for dinner because she was following up on a lead. Do you know what story she was working on?”

  “The cops already took away her computer and most of the contents of her cubicle.”

  “Oh.” Allison should have expected as much.

  “But I backed up her most recent files before they did.”

  “You did?”

  “Hey,” Brad said, sounding defensive, “I need to know what it is we’re dealing with here. What if it’s someone targeting the reporters at Channel Four? There are a lot of crazies out there. We never really take that kind of thing seriously, but maybe Cassidy should have. I mean, look how things turned out.”

  “What do you mean, Brad?” Allison asked as Nicole looked at her curiously.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No. What are you talking about?”

  “Cassidy had a stalker.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Nic had been so focused on Rick McEwan. Maybe, she realized now, too focused. Was it possible that the person who had killed Cassidy hadn’t really known her at all, except in his twisted imagination?

  “Someone like Cassidy was probably stalker bait,” she told Allison as they drove to Channel Four. At the Denver field office, Nic had worked a couple of stalker cases. Both were women in the public eye, like Cassidy. “I should have talked to her more about whether she was having any problems. You know, Cassidy loves—loved—her fans, but sometimes they can cross the line into crazy, and you have to be careful.”

  Allison leaned closer to the air-conditioning vent. Her face was shiny with sweat. “What kind of crazy? Some kind of personality disorder?”

  “Definitely not in touch with reality. These guys can’t have normal personal relationships, so instead they retreat to fantasy ones.”

  A delivery truck had narrowed the road to a single lane, and they were forced to idle in place. Nic imagined she could feel the heat rising off the soft black asphalt. The people shambling by looked like zombies, with slack faces and half-open mouths.

  “So you take a guy who’s unbalanced and lonely. He turns on his TV, suddenly he’s looking at a beautiful young woman. She’s warm, she’s talking to him and looking him right in the eye. Maybe he’s the kind of guy who goes through his whole day—his whole week—and no one looks at him. But this girl on TV, she comes on every day at the same time and says hello and good-bye to him. That kind of thing is tailor-made for someone with a delusional disorder.”

  Nic managed to nose the Crown Vic into the other lane. The driver she cut off started to make a gesture, then abruptly stopped himself, probably noting the signs that the car belonged to law enforcement.

  “These guys think they really have a relationship with their victims,” she continued. “The problem comes when they try to act out their imaginary plots in the real world. Say this guy went to Cassidy’s condo last night and tried to talk to her, maybe even kiss her. A guy like this is convinced that his victim loves him back. That she sends him signals by the words she chooses or how she wears her hair. He believes that the victim is his perfect match and they’re destined to be together forever. It’s not even really sexual. It’s romantic. Idealized.”

  “That could explain why Cassidy wasn’t raped,” Allison said. “But if he romanticized her, why would he kill her?”

  “Someone like this can go from a love obsession to a hate obsession in the blink of an eye. The love obsession validated his life, and when it’s threatened, his very being is threatened. He panics. He might think, If I can’t have her, then no one can.”

  “So if this guy showed up at her condo, acting like they really were a couple,” Allison said slowly, “and Cassidy managed to convince him that her feelings didn’t match his . . .”

  “If he realized he could never be part of Cassidy’s life,” Nic said grimly, “then maybe he decided to kill her.”

  Aside from Marcy, the station’s receptionist, Channel Four’s huge lobby was unoccupied. Empty overstuffed chairs and couches were grouped around a low table topped with a fan of the latest magazines. No one was watching the flat-screen TV—showing Channel Four, of course—that murmured in one corner.

  Heels echoing on the wooden floor, they walked the fifty feet toward the reception desk. Even from a distance it was clear that Marcy’s eyes were red, her nose swollen. She pushed back her chair and gave them each a hug. Nic submitted to it though her history with Marcy did not go much beyond hello and good-bye.

  “I can’t believe Cassidy’s gone.” Marcy sniffed. “I didn’t even say good-bye to her last night.”

  “So she was still at work when you left?” Nic asked.

  “I saw her walking out as I was pulling out of the parking lot.” Marcy’s gaze was unfocused. “That was about six fifteen. I waved, but I don’t think she saw me. That’s what I told the detective who was here earlier.” Marcy seemed to think the two of them were there in their official capacity.

  “A lot of leads are being followed,” Allison said, neatly sidestepping just who was following those leads.

  “Where can we find Brad?” Nic asked.

  “He’s in the makeup room getting ready for the five o’clock.” Marcy plucked a tissue from a box and blew her nose with a loud honk.

  Nic and Allison walked down a short hallway that doglegged to the right and then opened up into the newsroom. This room definitely wasn’t meant for public consumption. A single large open space, the newsroom was crowded with cheap metal desks split up by a few waist-high partitions. It smelled faintly of sweat and stale food. The desks were cluttered with coffee cups, half-eaten bags of chips, family photos, and advertiser or station giveaways: logo-laden mugs, sports bottles, pens, lunch bags, and even bobblehead dolls.

  Nic had always liked seeing behind the facade. She liked knowing that when Cassidy appeared on the news in the studio next door, the skyline behind her was a huge photograph framed by a fake window. A photograph that on closer inspection showed a few dings.

  Normally the newsroom would be filled with the buzz of talk and the click-clack of computer keys. Now people stood in knots on the stained carpet, speaking in low voices while the air-conditioning labored mightily to bring the temperature below eighty degrees.

  Heads turned and conversation stilled as Nic and Allison walked back toward the makeup room. Most of the women and quite a few of the men looked like they’d been crying. Nic nodded and made eye contact, but kept her expression unreadabl
e. Her blouse stuck to the small of her back, and she reached back to pluck it free, wondering why she had even bothered to iron it.

  Brad wasn’t alone in the makeup room. Sitting next to him was Phoebe Sennett, his latest co-anchor. Both were using what looked liked turbo-powered silver pens to carefully apply spray-on foundation. Unforgiving HD cameras required perfect skin—or at least skin that appeared perfect.

  When he caught sight of them in the mirror, Brad tugged a small white towel out of his shirt collar and set it and the airbrush on the long, cluttered counter. He got to his feet and gave them each an awkward embrace—the hug equivalent of an air kiss. Phoebe settled for nods.

  Three months earlier Phoebe had joined Channel Four when the station once again passed over Cassidy for the co-anchor spot. The previous co-anchor, Alissa Fontaine, had only lasted nine months. While on vacation in Florida and under the influence of too much rum, she had entered a wet T-shirt contest that had degenerated into an impromptu striptease. Which, of course, ended up all over the Web. Rather than being hounded out in shame, Alissa had quit the station to star on a reality show.

  After the station hired Phoebe, Cassidy had consoled herself with the idea that the other woman at least had a degree in broadcasting. Before the stripping incident, Alissa’s sole claim to fame had been being a former Miss Connecticut.

  Nic saw Brad press something into Allison’s hand. A thumb drive, which she guessed held the stories Brad had surreptitiously copied from Cassidy’s computer. He gave them both a nod and then shot a meaningful glance in Phoebe’s direction. Nic took the hint and didn’t say anything.

  “How are you guys holding up?” Brad asked.

  “We’re in shock,” Allison said. “Like everyone else.”

  “And yet the show must go on.” Brad settled back down into his chair and regarded his jawline critically. “We’re leading off the newscast with a special tribute to Cassidy.”