“That’s fresh,” I said, handing it to a tech for bagging.
Then I picked up the creamer containers and the sugar packet. I tasted them. Nothing. When I twisted the carafe open and sniffed the contents, I smelled only coffee. I almost stuck my finger in it, but the sudden racing of my heart stopped me.
Dizzy, I set the carafe down and had to hold on to the table a moment before my heart slowed and that upended feeling went away.
“Sorry, Doc,” I said to Bracket, who was taking the corpse’s temperature. “We’re treating this as a murder until proved otherwise.”
“Why?” asked Sampson, who was going through the closets.
I gestured at the coffee carafe. “I’m not going near that again without a gas mask, but either I just had a coincidental heart arrhythmia or the coffee was laced with something mucho bad.”
“Where’d he get the coffee?” Sampson asked, coming over and looking at the carafe as if it smelled gross.
“Exactly,” I said.
From digital records provided by the security staff at the Mandarin Oriental, we knew almost immediately that Jackson’s hotel room door was opened at 5:25 a.m., and again at 5:29, about an hour and eighteen minutes before room service discovered the body.
We also found that someone had sprayed some kind of goo on the security camera lenses a few minutes before the door to Jackson’s room was opened, leaving the feed a blur. Was that what was on the attorney’s pants?
In any case, while the crime scene techs worked and the hotel security staff made copies of all closed-circuit feeds for the last five hours, Sampson and I went to find Mandy Bell Lee Francones. The country-western star was in her room two floors below Jackson’s, wearing the same clothes we’d seen her in the night before, sitting up against the headboard with her feet drawn up under her. She was tear-streaked, mascara-streaked, nursing a hangover, in shock and grieving.
“People dying all around me,” she said in a trembling voice.
“We wondered about that,” Sampson said.
“Someone said it was a heart attack?” she asked.
“We don’t know exactly,” I said. “When was the last time you saw Mr. Jackson?”
“I don’t know. Nine? Ten? I’d had a lot to drink.”
“Here the entire night?” Sampson asked.
“Yes, I …” Mandy Bell stared at her lap, looking lost. “I passed out in my clothes, woke up when security came knocking.”
Knowing that the electronic records backed up her timeline, I said, “For the moment, let’s say it wasn’t a heart attack. I’m not saying it wasn’t, but I have to ask in any case. Do you have any stalkers? Someone who’d want Mad Man and Mr. Jackson out of your life?”
The country-western star began to weep softly. “Two or three. I got restraining orders on all of … Timmy had a son, you know? From before the divorce? Garth’s only two and now he’s never gonna know his daddy. And I …”
That last thought seemed to crush the spirit out of her and she started to sob. “’Scuse me,” she said, got up and went to the bathroom, and shut the door.
She returned several moments later, having cleaned the makeup off her face and looking pale and bedraggled.
“Can you give us the names of the stalkers?” Sampson asked.
She nodded numbly, sat on the bed again, said, “I hate them.”
“You got someone you want us to call?” I asked.
“You mean like another lawyer?” She sniffled.
“Like someone who could be with you,” Sampson offered. “This is kind of a lot to deal with, don’t you think?”
“My parents are dead,” she said dully. “Got a sister in Omaha. Cindy Bell.”
“Give me Cindy Bell’s number,” I said.
Ten minutes later, I hung up, said, “She’s catching the next—”
There was a knock at the hotel room door. I went and opened it to see the hotel’s security chief, a small man named Waters.
“One of our waiters just staggered in here bleeding from the head,” Waters said. “He says a guy who looked like Elvis knocked him out.”
We found Carl Raynor being attended to by EMTs in a locker room off the hotel kitchen. Raynor told us it was still dark out when Elvis came up claiming that he was arriving for his first day of work.
“Next thing I know,” Raynor said, “I come to in the bushes, my head feels like World War Three … and my ID’s gone.”
Now we had an even better time frame, and using electronic records and the cameras in and around the security entrance, we were able to get several looks at the man we believed had killed Mandy Bell Lee’s childhood sweetheart.
Elvis was smart, though. Like the suspect we’d seen in street camera footage near the Superior Spa, he walked hunched over, seemingly aware of the lenses trying to capture his image. We saw him wheeling a food cart and heading to Jackson’s floor. We saw him leave through the service entrance fifteen minutes later. But we never got a solid look at his face.
One of the hotel’s bakers came forward, said she’d come face to face with the killer, talked to him even, and gave us a much better sense of his features after looking at still shots of him from the surveillance cameras.
“He seemed like a nice guy,” she said. “Cheerful, you know?”
Sampson nodded sadly. “We’ve been investigating murders a long time, ma’am, and I’m sorry to say that you almost never hear someone say they met someone who turned out to be a killer and they just knew from the get-go that he was an out-and-out psychopath.”
CHAPTER 33
Around a quarter to eight the next morning, Kelli Adams blinked at the dregs of a migraine, checked her makeup, and then walked confidently to the door of a luxury row house in Georgetown, near Foggy Bottom. Gone was her conservative blue suit. Today she was dressed as a recent graduate of Catholic University, at least according to her Windbreaker.
Adams pulled her right hand into the sleeve of the jacket and used her knuckle through the fabric to press the doorbell. She heard a man shouting almost immediately. No one came. She rang again and this time heard feet stomping before the door swung wide, revealing a harried-looking professional woman in her thirties, carrying an eight-month-old baby boy in her arms.
“Kelli?” the woman asked.
“Hi,” Adams said brightly. “Dr. Lancaster?”
“Ellen,” Dr. Lancaster replied, extending her hand. “Come in?”
“Yes, please,” Adams said, shaking her hand, stepping across the threshold, and winking at the boy, who took to sucking furiously on his thumb.
“This is Evan,” Dr. Lancaster said. “He’s fallen in love with his thumb.”
Adams tickled the boy, said, “Hi, Evan. We’re going to be great friends.”
Evan giggled and ducked his head shyly.
“This is good,” his mother said. “We’ve tried a couple of other nannies before this. It’s difficult for him to attach at first, but he seems to like you.”
“That’s what you mentioned,” Adams said. “But we’ll do fine.”
“So good of you to be available on short notice,” Dr. Lancaster said, handing over her son. “The last one gave us no warning she was quitting.”
Adams began to rock the baby expertly in her arms. “I saw the ad go up on the jobs board and called you immediately.”
“Well, I’m glad you did. Your references gave you rave reviews.”
“Both families were wonderful to babysit for, but I am looking for full-time work now.”
Dr. Lancaster’s hand covered her heart as if she were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. “Perfect. You don’t know what a hassle it is finding someone to—”
“Got to go, gonna be late!” cried a man in a business suit, crisp white shirt, and rep tie, who was hustling down the stairs while looking at his iPhone.
“Bill, this is Kelli,” Dr. Lancaster began.
“Charmed, but I’m due in Senator McCord’s office in twenty minutes,” her husband said, cha
rging past and out the door.
Dr. Lancaster glanced after her husband, said, “Say good-bye to Daddy, Evan. And I have to hurry, too. Don’t want anyone dying of a broken heart, do we?”
“What time should I expect you?” Adams asked.
“I’ve left you a list on the kitchen table, my phone numbers, my husband’s numbers, Evan’s likes and dislikes, his routine. I pumped enough milk for the day. It’s in the fridge. Oh, and there’s medicine for the earache he’s been fighting. The rest is self-explanatory.”
“I’m sure,” Adams said.
Dr. Lancaster blew her son a kiss. “Mommy’s only working until two.”
She went out the door and Adams followed, cradling little Evan, holding his forearm, which she waved at his mother’s retreating figure.
Softly, she whispered in the baby’s ear, “Say bye-bye, Evan. Say bye-bye to Mommy.”
CHAPTER 34
I got to my desk late that Monday morning to find two reports from Detective Paul Brefka, one of the part-time detectives Captain Quintus had promised us.
Brefka was obviously an efficient and intuitive investigator. Given the name of the holding company that owned the Superior Spa — Relax LLC — he followed a hunch and searched for other limited-liability corporations with the word relax in their name. He found nineteen, all registered in Delaware.
Trenton Wiggs — the listed owner of the Superior Spa — was not named in connection with any of those companies. But a Harold Trenton and a Charles Wiggs were. According to the papers, the men were partners in Total Relaxation Ventures, with offices in Reston, Virginia. It sounded to Brefka and it sounded to me as if one person was using at least three identities to control a massage parlor empire. I jotted a note: Pay a visit to Total Relaxation.
Detective Brefka’s second report focused on Cam Nguyen.
Using the texts and recent phone calls on her iPhone, he identified and talked to many of her friends and fellow students, all of whom claimed to be dumbfounded when they learned she’d been working as a prostitute. So did her boyfriend, a GW student who’d been washing dishes at the Froggy Bottom Pub the night of the killings. He and the rest of Cam Nguyen’s friends had not heard from her since.
A check of her bank account showed she had nearly fifteen thousand dollars in savings. According to her debit card records, the missing girl had a history of spending freely, a history that had come to a screeching halt the night of the murders.
“Are they connected?” Captain Quintus asked, startling me as I stared at the reports. “The shooting of Francones and the poisoning of Jackson?”
“Got to be a hell of a lot more than a coincidence.”
“Security tapes?” the homicide supervisor said, moving to take a seat.
“Elvis was good,” I replied. “Real good. Never gave us a decent look at his face, and he must have been wearing gloves because he left nothing in Jackson’s hotel room. At least so far.”
“Who would want Francones and his widow’s lawyer dead?”
“Maybe the Mad Man’s widow, though I doubt it,” said Sampson, coming in with coffee. “Or maybe one of the three creeps who’ve been stalking Mandy Bell. Or Francones’s agent and manager.”
“Snyder and Timmons,” I said, nodding. “They did have a strong reaction when they found out Mandy had married Mad Man.”
“They trying to control her in some way, killing Jackson?” Quintus asked.
“Seems heavy-handed,” Sampson replied. “I mean, their future earnings were tied to Mad Man, not her.”
“Check it,” Quintus said. “Check all of it.”
I smiled wearily. “We always do, Captain.”
CHAPTER 35
While Sampson tried to reconnect with Mad Man Francones’s agent and manager, I got a car and drove toward the Fourteenth Street Bridge, bound for the offices of Total Relaxation Ventures in Reston, Virginia.
Until my cell phone rang. It was Bree.
“Hey, you,” I said. “Finish with Prough’s statement?”
“Yes, but I haven’t turned it in, and I still feel shitty about letting Prough go yesterday.”
“No reason to hold him,” I said.
There was a pause. “Hold on a second.”
There was silence for several moments, and then she came back on the line with urgency in her voice. “Where are you?”
“Heading toward Reston. What’s wrong?”
“There’s been another kidnapping,” she replied. “And this time it’s high-profile. He’s the baby boy of a cardiologist at GW and a big-time lobbyist on the Hill. I need you on this.”
“I’m working four capital cases as it is, and I’m getting nowhere on all of them,” I said in a strained voice.
“Just the initial interviews,” Bree insisted. “I believe this could be a serial kidnapper now. Isn’t that one of your areas of expertise?”
“I’ve dealt with one other,” I said. “Doesn’t make me exactly an expert.”
“More expert than I am,” Bree said. “The kidnapped boy is only eight months old, Alex. He’s their only child.”
I sighed, checked my watch, saw it was nearly three, and said, “Give me the address.”
When I called Quintus and told him I was going to Georgetown to help for two hours maximum, he reluctantly agreed and said he’d send Detective Brefka to pay the massage parlor tycoons a visit.
I got turned around, heading back toward Georgetown, thinking, Eight months old? In turn, I flashed on each of my children at that age: Ali, Jannie, and Damon, wide-eyed, full of contradictions, delighted one minute and hysterical the next. What if one of mine had been taken at that age?
A pit soured in my stomach. I had the sudden urge to hear my kids’ voices, especially Damon’s. We hadn’t spoken in a week. Midterms, he’d said.
I pulled out my phone and punched in his number.
The phone rang and rang and rang. I called him six times, and six times I got voice mail. Parking and getting out down the street from the yellow tape that surrounded the town house, I couldn’t help thinking how annoying the whole cell phone and teenager thing was. You buy them a phone. You pay for a national plan so they can keep in touch, and they’ve never got the damn thing on. Then again, midterms were coming up and—
“Dr. Cross?” someone called as I got near the tape.
I looked to my right and recognized the eager baby-faced patrolman who’d so smartly sealed off the Superior Spa when he’d seen the bodies.
“Officer Carney, right?” I said.
“Yes, sir,” the patrolman said, beaming. “I thought you worked homicide?”
“I do,” I replied, ducking under the tape. “Just doing a colleague a favor.”
“Sounds like they’ll need the help,” Carney said, glancing over at the house. “Scary, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“You know, some psycho stealing babies?”
“You’re right, Carney. It is scary. Something no parent should go through.”
“But they’ll catch her, right? The nanny?”
“Sure going to try,” I said. “Hold down the fort.”
“Yes, sir,” Carney said, and I moved on.
Another patrolman stood at the door, opened it to let me in.
Even from the foyer, I could hear a woman sobbing.
CHAPTER 36
On the kraft school campus in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, Damon Cross ignored the phone whining in his pocket and gestured at an ivy-covered building. “This will be our first stop. Commons, where all students eat.”
Damon was leading the final campus tour of the day for seven prospective students and their parents. He enjoyed being a tour guide. He’d been doing it since sophomore year.
He held the door to the school dining hall open as his group filed inside and was about to follow them when he heard a woman cry in a southern accent, “Hold that door, sugar. Am I too late to join the tour?”
Damon looked back over his should
er and saw a seriously attractive woman with wild blond hair and the kind of body that … well, the black stirrup pants and the white turtleneck clung to her beneath a smart leather jacket and sunglasses. She was hurrying across the quad toward him.
“It’s not too late,” he said. “We’re just starting.”
“So good,” she said, clapping her hands and coming right up to him. She smelled faintly of perfume. “You are a tall one, aren’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Damon said, embarrassed. “I’m on the basketball team.”
“‘Ma’am’?” she drawled, sounding offended. “You make me sound like some old crone. I’m only twenty-six. You?”
Damon glanced inside the Commons door, where one of the dads was eyeing him and the woman. “I’ll be eighteen in January.”
“Almost a man,” she said.
“Right,” he said, feeling his cheeks flush. “We should go in.”
“Of course,” she said gaily, and started through the door. “What is your name, tall boy tour guide?”
“Damon,” he said, following her. “Damon Cross.”
“I’m Karla Mepps. Don’t you forget my name now, Damon. Karla Mepps,” she drawled, and sidled into the dining hall, leaving the light scent of perfume in her wake.
Damon followed, fascinated. He’d never had anyone like Karla Mepps on a campus tour before. He’d never smelled anyone like her before.
But instead of engaging her in further conversation, he returned to the task at hand, describing the meal plans and the times of day when Commons was open. After answering several questions about lactose intolerance and the availability of gluten-free items, he ushered his group outside again, heading toward the library.
“You do this a long time?” Karla Mepps asked, sliding alongside him.
“Two years,” Damon said, feeling flushed again. “It’s fun.”
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