Ron went past us and banged on apartment 302’s door, but there was no answer, so he banged again. I was tempted to point out that if Judie Lawton was inside and if she was dead, banging on the door wasn’t going to help. Toni recognized this, so she said, “I’ll run down to the beauty shop and see if they know how to contact the manager—someone to get us in.”
“Hold up,” I said. I turned to Ron. “Give me a glove.” Homicide cops always have a few pairs of standard-issue blue rubber gloves in their jacket pocket so as not to disturb evidence at a crime scene. Ron pulled out a pair and handed them to me. I slipped one on and reached for the doorknob. It turned easily. I turned to Toni and smiled. “See? Saved you a trip.”
“Let me go,” Ron said, stepping in front of me. He and Yoshi both drew their service weapons. Ron nodded at Yoshi and said, “Ready?”
Yoshi nodded. Ron pushed the door wide open and yelled inside, “Seattle Police!” There was no answer, so they stepped quickly into the living room. Toni and I followed. Toni had her Glock 23 drawn, but I didn’t bother. I had three trained professionals going in in front of me. Besides, judging by the smell, it wasn’t going to be necessary. I covered my mouth and nose with my jacket, and when I looked at Toni, I saw that she was doing the same thing. A quick look around the room showed that no one was here.
Seattle Police!” Ron yelled again as he stepped farther into the room. Doing so forced him to step over sofa cushions and other items strewn on the floor. The living room was a mess. Books had been pulled off shelves, vases knocked over; even the sofa itself was pulled away from the wall. The living room opened onto a small dining area and a kitchen. The cabinets and drawers were opened, contents strewn onto the countertop and the floor.
Yoshi leaned in and checked the part of the kitchen not visible from the living room. “We’re clear in here,” he said. He nodded to Ron and pointed toward a small hallway connected to the living room. Ron, his sidearm at the high, ready position, stepped down the hall and took a quick peek into the bedroom located off one side of the hallway, and then into the bathroom off the other. Satisfied that there was no threat in either area, he stepped into the bedroom doorway and put his sleeve over his mouth and nose as he returned his Glock to his holster.
“Clear!” he called back to us. “Back here. It looks like her.”
I followed Yoshi and Toni into the bedroom. Judie Lawton was dead, eyes frozen wide open, as if she was shocked at her own murder. She was sprawled across her bed, fully clothed although a pair of panties was stuffed into her mouth. I’m no expert, but judging by the smell, the lividity, and the distension of her body, I’d guess that she’d been dead for a few days, anyway.
I grabbed a quick breath through my coat and glanced about the room. All of the dresser drawers and nightstand drawers had been opened, the contents dumped onto the floor.
I turned back and took a closer look at the body. “Son of a bitch—look at that.” There were three small, circular marks on her arm, right in a line. They looked like burn marks. “Are those—?”
“Cigarette burns,” Ron said with disgust. He looked around the room. “Seen ’em before. Some asshole was looking for something. Apparently, she didn’t know the answer—or else she didn’t want to tell him—so he beat her and tortured her and then—” he pointed to Judie’s neck, “—he strangled her.”
I looked at Judie’s neck. “The rope’s still there.” Judie’s skin was distended and almost entirely obscured by the rope, but it was still visible in spots, dark gray and sinister looking.
Ron nodded. “Yep.”
I noticed Yoshi pull a small vial from his pocket, dip a finger in, and smear a cream-type product under his nose. He offered the vial to Ron. “NOXO?” NOXO is a deodorizing cream that blocks smells.
Ron looked at the vial, then shook his head. “Nah. I’ll get used to it in a minute.” Toni and I also declined when Yoshi offered it to us.
Ron looked around, then he looked at the body again for a second. “Yoshi, go call it in. Make sure they send the unit.”
The Crime Scene Investigation unit detectives arrived twenty minutes later. The first thing they did when they reached the apartment was to turn right around without saying a word and march back downstairs. Five minutes later, they reappeared, this time hauling a large fan, which they proceeded to set up just outside the living room window to circulate fresh air throughout the apartment. Even on a very low speed so as not to disturb any evidence, the effect was immediate and now, an hour after they’d arrived, either the fans were really working well or else I’d become totally used to the odor, because I couldn’t smell Judie Lawton’s body anymore even though the ME team hadn’t moved her yet. I did note that something had caused the beauty salon to pretty much empty right out. It might have been all the police traffic, but I really thought it had more to do with the ME’s fans pumping the odor out of the apartment and down the hall where it wafted right on downstairs. Probably didn’t fit in too well with the facials and pedicures.
Now, the four-person CSI team was conducting a thorough search of every square inch of the apartment. They’d already taken pictures and measurements and collected numerous fingerprints, hairs, and fibers when one of the techs working in the bathroom called out, “Got something here!”
People moved toward the hallway and the bathroom to see what it was. I tried to look across the top of those in front of me, but the place was too small and too crowded, so I had to rely only on what I heard.
“Look there, boss,” the tech said to her supervisor. “Up under the vanity.”
A second later, the supervisor said, “What is that?”
“It’s a pretty good-sized plastic bag. From the looks of it, I’d say it’s full of some white powdery substance, most likely cocaine with a bag that size. It’s strapped way up there out of sight.” She paused. “I almost missed it.”
“Good eyes,” her supervisor said, leaning over and peering up under the vanity with a flashlight. After a minute she nodded. “Take some pictures just like it is, and then take it out of there. Be careful not to rip the bag.”
Three minutes later, the supervisor walked into the kitchen carrying a blue plastic bag.
“That’s it?” Ron asked.
“This is it.”
“What do you think?”
“White powder. Granular. Looks like coke to me. I’ll field test it and have you some results in a few minutes.”
Three minutes later, she walked over with a small vial of blue liquid. “The Scott test comes back positive for cocaine. We’ll take it to the lab and confirm, but I’m pretty sure you’re looking at maybe a half pound of reasonably high-grade cocaine.”
“A half pound?” I said. “Wow. What’s that worth—about five grand?”
Ron looked at the package. “Fifteen, twenty grand a pound, makes this probably eight or ten thousand or so.”
“Ten thousand bucks. That’s a lot. I didn’t think that Joshua Bannister and Judie were moving that kind of weight.”
“Yet here it is,” Ron said.
I nodded. “Here it is.”
Toni looked at the bag. “I wonder how Judie Lawton ends up with ten thousand dollars’ worth of that stuff?”
I looked at the bag, then at her. “I don’t know, but it looks like we found what our murderer was looking for.”
“Hope it was worth it,” Ron said. “Looks like the woman died hiding it.”
There was nothing more for Toni and me to do at the scene, so not long afterward, Yoshi drove us back to SPD headquarters where my Jeep was still parked. Ron called us at home just after dinner. I put him on the speaker so that Toni could hear.
“I think we may have hit pay dirt,” he said.
“How’s that?”
He explained that the CSI analysis had confirmed that the drug in the blue plastic bag was definitely cocaine—and with a relatively high 60 percent purity at that. In addition, they’d found a 250-gram box of lidocaine powder plus a set of digital scales in
the hall closet. Lidocaine powder is an anesthetic often used by drug dealers as an agent to dilute their cocaine. In other words, the dealer buys an ounce of reasonably high-grade coke, adds an ounce of lidocaine, mixes well, and then, voilà! They turn around and sell it as two ounces of coke. Most of the coke I’ve ever seen on the street tested somewhere around 15 percent purity because of all the times various dealers had “stepped on it” through the distribution process.
“So with coke of that amount and purity—that and all that lidocaine, no doubt somebody was running a commercial enterprise,” I said. “This was well beyond personal use.”
“Oh, yeah. And who do we know who’s got a known connection to the drug world?”
“Josh Bannister.”
“Give the man a prize. And whose prints did the CSI unit find all over the apartment?”
“Josh Bannister?”
“Right again.”
“Wait a second,” Toni said. “Bannister and Judie Lawton were a couple. At least we think they were. It stands to reason that Bannister’s fingerprints would be all over the apartment.”
“True enough. But except for Bannister and Judie Lawton herself, we didn’t find any other prints. And another thing: the ME says Judie Lawton’s probably been dead between thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”
“Puts it Monday or Tuesday,” I said.
“Right. And Josh Bannister—”
“Bails out on Tuesday,” Toni said slowly, realizing the implication. “He goes on a surprise vacation to parts unknown.”
“Exactly. And now he’s disappeared—nowhere to be found.”
“Sounds pretty suspicious,” Toni said, “but geez. Killing his girlfriend? And doing it this way? I don’t get it.”
“People kill each other all the time for a lot less than ten grand,” Ron said. “Husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, it doesn’t matter. People get pissed at each other and do some nasty, brutal things. Maybe they had some kind of falling out. Maybe she was trying to rip him off, and he got wind of it. He wanted the drugs back, but she stuck to her story and claimed ignorance.”
“So what,” Toni said, “he tortured her? With a damn cigarette?”
The line was quiet a second, then Ron said, “Well, somebody surely did. And Bannister’s looking pretty good to me.”
“Or,” I said, “maybe whoever supplied the coke is after both of them. They caught up with Judie, and they’re still looking for Bannister. He knows this, so he’s making himself scarce.”
“That could be too, I suppose,” Ron said. He looked at me and smiled. “Except for one little thing.”
“What?”
“The ME’s office had a look at the rope they peeled from around Judie’s neck. One of them got a little suspicious and they compared it against the pictures of the rope pattern on Sophie’s neck. Guess what?”
“Don’t tell me—” I started to say.
“Bingo. The patterns match. The ME thinks they’re the same.”
“Holy shit!”
“Holy shit is right. They’re trying to match up the fibers they recovered off Sophie’s body—that way they can tell for sure.”
I leaned back. “We might be looking at the same killer? For both girls?”
“Very possible.”
I looked over at Toni. “Son of a bitch.”
We thought about this for a second, then Toni said, “Who’d want to kill both girls—three months apart?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” I said. “The indication is that it’s drug related. Some sort of a rip-off.”
“Yeah, but who’s ripping off whom?” Yoshi asked. “And where’s Bannister fit in?”
“He was either the victim of the rip-off, and thus the potential murderer,” I said, “or he was a co-conspirator along with the girls, and thus the next potential victim.”
“Either scenario neatly explaining the fact that he’s suddenly nowhere to be found,” Ron said.
I nodded. “Exactly.”
“And both have lots of unanswered questions,” Ron said, and I nodded.
Suddenly, Toni looked up. “I just thought of something. Not to be an alarmist, but does this mean that Nicki Thoms could be in some kind of danger? I mean, think about it. Her sister is dead. Now, her sister’s friend is dead. We don’t really know what’s going on, but it seems like it might have something to do with drugs, right? Is there something about this group of vanishing friends that’s causing someone—Bannister maybe—to feel the need to see them all dead? And if that’s the case, is Nicki next?”
Oh shit. I hadn’t thought of that.
“Well,” Ron said, “I’d be lying if I knew the answer to that question with any certainty. Knowing Nicki like we do, who’s to say where she was or what she saw.”
I started thinking fast. “Do you need her around now? For your investigation?”
“Why? You got a sudden urge to stash her away somewhere?”
“Yeah. We’d better get her out of here until we get this thing solved.”
He thought for a moment, then he nodded. “Go ahead. Better safe than sorry. Keep me posted, though.”
“Okay. Meanwhile, it sounds like we need to find Josh Bannister, doesn’t it?”
“Great minds think alike,” Ron said. “Just before we called, Yoshi issued a BOLO for Bannister to all the jurisdictions up here. If anyone spots him, we’re going to bring him in for questions. Meanwhile, though, first thing tomorrow morning, we want to drive up to Monroe and talk to Bannister’s brother. You still up for it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
“Good. We’ll pick you up at your office at nine.”
There was no answer on Nicki’s cell phone, so we decided to jump in the Jeep and head for her condo, just in case. We called her aunt and uncle on the way on the off chance that Nicki might have been there, but she wasn’t. I gave Cecilia explicit instructions on what I needed her to do and for once, she didn’t argue.
“She’s at some club or another,” Toni said as we sped south. “Probably the Genesis.”
“Wonderful,” I said. Going back to the Genesis was not high on my list of fun things to do. “If it’s all the same to you, I think we’ll try the condo first.” I’d jumped on Highway 99 by our apartment on Lake Union, but I was going to have to get off again at Western Avenue only a mile down the road. The freeway actually went right past Nicki’s condo at the Millennium Towers but, unfortunately, the next off-ramp after Western Avenue was all the way on the other side of the stadiums. We’d have to take the streets.
The closer we got to Nicki’s place, the more worried I became even though I couldn’t exactly place my finger on why. I couldn’t think of any reason why Josh Bannister would target Nicki. Then again, Sophie and Judie Lawton were definitely dead and that didn’t make any sense, either. Worse, of the two sisters, Nicki was the one who, by her own admission, was involved with drugs, not Sophie. If anyone was likely to be in danger because of a drug deal, it should have been Nicki.
Ten thrilling minutes later, we wheeled into the circular drive at the Millennium Towers. Ron had made the call while we were on the way, and an SPD patrol car was already there to meet us. We parked behind them under a sign that read No Parking and hustled on into the lobby.
“You two, again?”
I turned and saw none other than Officer R. Bennett standing by the security counter.
“Officer Bennett,” I said, reaching out and shaking his hand. “We’re back.”
He smiled and shook his head. “Yes, you are.” He turned and nodded to the beefy security guard who manned the front desk. The man walked around the desk as we all walked toward the elevators. “Keith here’s going to take us upstairs. If there’s no answer, we’re authorized to have him open the unit up with his master key so that we can go inside and check it out.”
I nodded. “Good. Let’s go.” I turned to Keith as we started walking. “How long have you been on duty?”
“About an
hour,” he said.
“Nobody’s gone up to Nicki Thom’s apartment since you’ve been here?”
He shook his head. “Nah, not since I came on at four. It’s been real quiet.”
I nodded. We boarded the elevator, and I fidgeted the whole way up. I glanced over at Toni. She was studying me, a look of concern in her eyes. I bit my lower lip, smiled, and nodded my head, trying to act reassuring. I’m sure I didn’t fool Toni.
We knew from our earlier visit that there were eight units on Nicki’s floor—four to the north of the elevator lobby, four to the south. Nicki’s unit was on the north side at the far northwest corner of the lobby. We walked over and listened at the front door. There was no sound—nothing. I rang the bell and knocked. Then we waited again, but still there was no answer.
I looked at Keith. “Open it up.”
He nodded and swiped his access card. A small LED flashed green, and I opened the door. All four of us stepped into the foyer.
“Seattle Police!” Officer Bennett called out. There was no response. We stepped farther inside. The lights were on in the living room, but the room was empty. A samba was playing quietly on the stereo. I looked around. Two empty wineglasses sat on the table next to a nearly empty bottle.
We took a couple of steps into the living room when suddenly, I heard a scream come from the other side of the condo—from the direction of the bedrooms.
“Oh, shit!” I reached for my sidearm and drew it to low ready as I sprinted down the hall. Toni, Officer Bennett, and Keith raced to stay close behind. Visions of Nicki Thoms with a rope around her neck flashed through my mind.
I rounded the corner of the hall and heard another scream come from beyond the closed doors of the master bedroom. Just as I was about to enter, Toni yelled, “Danny! Wait!” but it was too late. I was already moving full speed and my momentum caused me to crash through the doors just as I flipped the handle. I burst into the bedroom, gun leveled, with the others right behind.
Lucas Santos sprang to his feet on the edge of the bed, bare-assed and quite clearly cocked and ready for action. He weaved back and forth, his footing unsteady either as a result of the surprise or maybe because of the wine. His eyes were wide open, alarmed. Beneath him, an equally naked Nicki Thoms apparently took a second longer to figure out what all the commotion in her hallway had been about. Seeing us suddenly appear in her bedroom with weapons drawn at such a “delicate” time, she screamed again—this time out of surprise—and leapt to her feet herself, yanking the sheet with her as she did with such force that it upended poor Lucas and caused him to stumble forward and trip over the footboard. He crashed to the floor in a naked heap. I looked down as he lay there, dazed, and I noticed he had a huge tattoo of a jaguar on his bare ass to match the one on his arm that he’d shown us. They both appeared to be looking up at us, growling. Upside down.
Mona Lisa Eyes (Danny Logan Mystery #4) Page 16