Kostas had been released on bail; Martine called ahead to confirm that she was at home, and they drove over to Henderson. Once Martine had explained that they were trying to clear her name, Kostas was happy to see them. She invited them back to the kitchen and cleared a space at the table, which was littered with a laptop, textbooks, and reams of highlighted notes.
“Sorry about the mess,” she said, as she shoved everything to one side. “I’m trying to finish my bachelor’s.”
She poured three coffees, and they settled at the table. Levi could hear Mason playing with her friend Julie in the living room.
“You really think I’m innocent?” she asked.
“We do,” said Levi. “The DA’s office isn’t convinced, though. You were at the crime scene just before Hensley died, and the same drug that killed him was found hidden in your house.”
“I had no idea that was there! I’ve never used Rohypnol, either on myself or someone else. Just thinking about how easily Mason could have gotten to it under the sink . . .” She shuddered.
“Do you have any thoughts about who the Rohypnol could have belonged to, then?” Martine said, notepad at the ready.
“I’ve been considering it.” Kostas tapped her fingers against her mug. “Mason’s father—Travis—we were on-again, off-again for years until a few months ago. He never officially lived with us, but he would crash here when he was in-between places.”
“What’s Travis’s last name?”
“Merrow. He’s the kind of guy who hides what a piece of shit he is behind good looks and charm. I fell for his act over and over again. Every time he promised it would be different, I believed him.” She gazed into her coffee, self-disgust plain on her face. “I’m such an idiot.”
Guiding her back on track, Levi said, “You said ‘until a few months ago.’ You ended things with him?”
She nodded. “He got angry with Mason and shook him. He’d never been violent before, not toward either of us, but once a guy crosses that line, he’ll be willing to cross it again. I told him not to come around here anymore. He hasn’t been back since—hasn’t even tried to see his son.” Glancing toward the living room, she muttered, “I guess he was never thrilled about being a father in the first place.”
“Is there a specific reason you suspect him?”
Her eyes flicked once more toward the open doorway through which Mason’s squeals of laughter could be heard. “He’s a drug dealer,” she said, lowering her voice. “Small-time, nothing major, but he’d have access to Rohypnol, and he’s exactly the kind of asshole who’d hide it in his girlfriend’s house. I don’t know if he forgot it was there, or he just never had a chance to come back for it, but it has to be his.”
“What about Julie?” Martine said. “She has complete access to your house, doesn’t she?”
“Julie?” Kostas’s eyebrows shot up. “No way. I mean, I get what you’re saying, but there’s no reason for her to have Rohypnol. She doesn’t do drugs herself, and—well, she works for Sinful Secrets too. She’d have just as much to lose as me if she hurt a client. More, even, with her garbage boyfriend leeching off her all the time.”
Martine’s gaze sharpened. “Boyfriend?”
“Kyle Gilmore. He’s the same breed as Travis—they’re friends, actually. Not really dangerous, just . . . a user, you know? Shady and manipulative. I’ve tried convincing Julie to dump him a hundred times, but you can’t make people see the truth until they’re ready for it.”
It was time to address the main purpose of their visit. “Ms. Kostas,” Levi said, “is there anyone in your life who might actively wish you harm?”
“Wish me harm? I don’t know what you . . .” She trailed off, looking back and forth between them, and comprehension dawned in her eyes as she connected the dots. “You think someone might have killed Dr. Hensley and hidden the Rohypnol here just to frame me for murder?”
“It’s one of a number of possibilities we’re considering.” He knew it sounded far-fetched, but they had to at least rule out the possibility.
Waving a dismissive hand, Kostas said, “No. Definitely not. Travis is the only person I have any real problems with, and even he wouldn’t go that far. Besides, to be frank, he’s not smart enough to pull something like that off.”
They continued that line of questioning for a few minutes; many people were quick to deny they had enemies, only to have second thoughts upon closer scrutiny. Kostas, however, remained adamant in her conviction that she didn’t know anybody who both hated her enough to frame her for murder and was intelligent enough to do so.
After asking her to call if she remembered anything else that might be helpful, Levi and Martine headed back to the substation.
“I think she’s right,” Martine said, as she turned onto the Lake Mead Parkway. “Her shithead ex left that Rohypnol in her house, and she wins the Worst Timing Ever award.”
Levi agreed. It had always been more likely that Hensley was the primary target, anyway. “We’ll have to actually prove that to get Rashid off her back. Lawyers don’t like coincidences.”
“Neither do I. It’s still suspicious as hell. But we’ll get Merrow in for questioning and let him speak for himself.”
When they arrived at the substation, they were greeted by a uniformed officer with the news that Dr. Clarissa Northridge was waiting to speak to one of them in Interview B. Levi thanked the officer and turned to Martine.
“You go ahead,” she said. “I’m gonna do some background on Travis Merrow. Julie and her boyfriend too, just to be thorough.”
With a nod, Levi broke off down a side hallway rather than continue with her to the bullpen. The woman waiting for him in the interview room looked a decade younger than he knew her to be, tanned, fit, and impeccably made-up. She stood at his entrance and gave him a polite smile.
Something about the way she moved struck Levi as so familiar that he paused on the threshold, taken aback. He was sure he’d never seen her before; he would remember a woman this attractive and self-assured.
“Dr. Northridge, a pleasure to meet you,” he said, dismissing the odd feeling and shaking her hand. “I’m Detective Levi Abrams; we spoke on the phone yesterday.”
“The pleasure’s all mine, Detective. I’m sorry I couldn’t come earlier. I had a surgery yesterday which couldn’t be rescheduled.”
He gestured for her to sit, and they passed several minutes with small talk while he expressed his condolences and explained the details of when and how the coroner’s office would release her husband’s body. He knew it wasn’t fair for him to judge someone else’s expression of grief; everyone mourned differently, and Northridge had already had a couple of days to process her husband’s death. But he couldn’t help comparing her demeanor to that of Drs. Kapoor and Warner, noting that both of Hensley’s colleagues had been far more distraught than his wife seemed to be.
“I understand that you have a suspect in custody?” she said eventually.
“Well, she’s been released on bail. The truth is, though, that we’ve been reconsidering our initial theory regarding the circumstances of your husband’s death.”
“Oh?”
Levi watched her closely. “Yes. The preliminary evaluation of the scene suggested an accidental overdose. But Dr. Hensley’s test results indicate that the overdose was almost certainly intentional. He was murdered, deliberately.”
Northridge sat back, her face paling and her mouth falling open. It was the most emotion he’d seen her display so far. “What?”
“The woman currently charged with his death—the woman he spent that night with—had no discernible motive to kill him on purpose, and in fact she had a lot to lose. Our working theory right now is that someone else killed him for their own personal reasons and set her up to take the fall.”
“Christ,” she muttered, pressing a shaking hand to her forehead. She took a deep, slow breath, then lowered her hand and said, “Who?”
“That’s something I’d like to d
iscuss with you. Is there anyone you can think of who would have wanted Dr. Hensley dead?”
Her throat bobbed harshly as she swallowed. She glanced away, wetting her lips, and was silent for a few long moments. “That’s a difficult question to answer about your own husband.”
“I understand,” Levi said, “and I’m sorry to put you through this. But it does need to be asked.”
She met his gaze straight on again. “Stephen was . . . an abrasive man. Impatient, demanding, occasionally cruel. Very challenging to live and work with. I don’t know that anyone had a reason to murder him, but he was far from beloved.”
Interesting. “We’d like to take a closer look at his life, see if we can work up a few suspects. I’ll be getting a warrant for his text messages from his telecommunications provider, as well as for any email accounts he may have had.”
“Oh, you don’t need to do that. Or I suppose you might still need a warrant to read his emails, but you don’t need to go through the providers—I know all of Stephen’s usernames and passwords. I’ll write them down for you.”
“That would be very helpful. Thank you.” Levi hesitated before asking the next question; it was even more awkward to broach this subject with Northridge than it had been with Kapoor and Warner. “It does seem that whoever killed Dr. Hensley knew him well enough to expect that he would have had an escort in his room that night. There’s no other way they could have timed his death so well to coordinate with her visit.”
With a bitter laugh, she said, “Anyone who’d even met him in passing could have known about that. Stephen never made much of a secret of his taste for prostitutes.”
Levi wasn’t sure how to respond to that, especially because his first thought was—
“I realize that sounds like motive for me to kill him,” said Northridge.
“Being over two thousand miles away is a pretty solid alibi.”
She smiled. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you, Detective. I’m planning to attend the rest of the palliative care conference to support Anika. You may want to ask her if Stephen had any seriously bad blood with anyone in their field—research can be a petty, backbiting cesspool, and he didn’t often discuss his work with me.”
He thanked her for her time, got her contact information for where she was staying in the city, and showed her out of the substation. Then he returned to the bullpen and filled in Martine.
“We’ve got a real short window of time here,” she said once he finished. “If Hensley’s killer is attending the conference, they’ll be gone in a few days. We need to get down there and re-interview everyone.”
In the immediate aftermath of Hensley’s death, they’d questioned the colleagues he’d spent time with the night before, but the red herring of Kostas’s involvement meant they hadn’t pursued that angle as aggressively as they would have otherwise. Now they’d need to do it all over again, pushing harder and broadening the suspect pool if necessary.
“What about Merrow and company?” Levi asked. “Anything interesting?”
“Merrow’s got a hell of a rap sheet, but it’s all petty crimes and drugs, nothing violent. Gilmore has a similar history. Julie is clean.”
They decided to divide their efforts—Levi would get warrants for Hensley’s communications and start putting together a list of people to interview while Martine stayed on the Kostas angle. In the early afternoon, Levi remembered that he still had to help Dominic pick up his truck. He dialed Dominic’s cell phone without looking away from his computer screen.
The call went to voicemail. Had Dominic ignored it, or was he just busy? Only one way to find out.
Levi wrapped up what he was working on before tracking the GPS in his own car. The last address it had registered was a parking lot Downtown, near the gym Dominic belonged to. He was just working out, then, and had probably stashed his cell in a locker.
A small bit of tension Levi hadn’t realized he was holding dissipated. The idea that Dominic might have purposely ignored his call had bothered him more than he cared to admit.
“I’m going out for lunch,” he said to Martine.
“Yeah? You having Italian?”
“You’re hilarious.” He bumped his hip against her shoulder as he walked past, and she laughed.
He asked an officer heading Downtown to drop him off on the way. Twenty minutes later, he walked through the door of Rolando’s, hoping Dominic hadn’t already left.
He’d never been here before. It was shabby but clean, a functional, utilitarian space with no frills, quite unlike the fitness center he used in his apartment complex. Rock music pulsed through the speakers at a low volume, and even from the front door, he could hear the impact sounds of sparring.
A young woman was sitting at the reception desk, her tank top displaying an impressive set of shoulders and biceps. She barely glanced up from her magazine at his approach.
“I’m not a member,” he said. “I’m just looking for someone.”
“No problem.” She looked him up and down, then dismissed him entirely. He guessed his business suit and lack of a gym bag made it clear he wasn’t trying to score a free workout.
Levi wandered through the gym until he found Dominic in an area with mats on the floor and a few heavy bags against one wall. Dominic was wearing basketball shorts and a shirt with the sleeves ripped off, the latter of which was so drenched in sweat that it was plastered to his torso. He had on a pair of boxing gloves and was working one of the bags like it had insulted his mother.
Pausing by the far wall, Levi watched him for a couple of minutes. Dominic’s stance, his footwork, his combinations—all of it screamed classically trained boxer. He never threw the same strike to the same area on the bag twice in a row, never wasted a punch, and stayed in constant motion, evading the counterattacks of an imaginary opponent. The heavy bag shuddered and bounced under the brutal assault; a person without similar training wouldn’t last ten seconds against an onslaught like this.
Levi was no stranger to taking his stress out on the bag, and he could see from the tense lines of Dominic’s body that he was still upset about last night. Yet his concern was quickly eclipsed by his admiration for Dominic’s technique, for his remarkable speed and the insane raw power in every blow. Then that soon turned into appreciation for the way Dominic’s gleaming muscles bunched and released, the shifting of his massive shoulders, the sight of his rock-hard ass in those clingy shorts—
Realizing that his trousers were becoming uncomfortably tight, Levi cleared his throat and started forward, crossing the mats so he came at Dominic from the side. The last thing he wanted was to catch Dominic by surprise in this kind of mood.
Dominic let up on the bag and turned around, his chest heaving with his heavy breaths. Surprise flitted across his face and was followed by an immediate smile. “Hey. How’d you find me?” Before Levi could respond, he said, “GPS in your car. Of course.”
“I hope you don’t mind,” Levi said, only now aware of how creepy his actions might seem.
Dominic shrugged. “It’s your car.” He faced the bag again and loosed a jab-cross-lead hook combination so vigorous that Levi winced.
“How long have you been at this?”
“Half an hour, maybe?”
“Is it helping?” Levi asked quietly.
Dominic’s response was a jab-cross-hook-cross, the last punch robust enough to send the bag swinging clear out of reach.
“I won’t make you talk about this if you don’t want to,” Levi said, “but I don’t know if it’s the best idea for us to just forget what happened.”
“Oh, there’s no chance of that.” Dominic’s humorless laugh was quite unlike him. “There’s no way for me to ever forget how fucking weak I am.”
“It’s not a weakness, Dominic, it’s an illness—”
“That’s not what it feels like sometimes.”
He unleashed another flurry of jabs and crosses. Levi stood there in silence, at a loss for what he should do. When
he and Dominic had started dating, he’d read every scholarly resource on compulsive gambling he could get his hands on. He knew it was similar in many ways to addictions to drugs and alcohol, and that recovery was far more complex than a simple question of inner strength or willpower. But while Levi could empathize with Dominic’s distress, he’d never be in a position to truly understand what he was going through.
“You told me once that there’s a part of you that’s always angry, no matter how well things are going for you otherwise.” Dominic swung at the bag again, halfheartedly this time. “That you carry that little kernel of rage inside you every second of every day.”
Levi bowed his head. He’d only confessed that to Dominic because he’d been drunk at the time, though he hadn’t regretted it afterward.
“For me, that constant nagging voice in the back of my head, that emotion that has its claws in me all the time—it’s not anger. It’s fear. There’s a dangerous part of me I can’t control. I wake up every morning afraid that this will be the day I slip up again and ruin my life. I live with my own worst enemy inside my head, and I’m never able to set that aside completely.”
This was the most Levi had ever heard Dominic speak about his addiction. Moving closer, he said, “Last night, when I offered to physically stop you if you tried to gamble . . . Did you mean that, or were you just panicking?”
Dominic caught the heavy bag to halt its movement. “I meant it. Did you?”
“Yes. Though I’m not sure it’s the healthiest coping mechanism we could come up with.”
“That’s up to us to decide. Nothing you could do to me would be worse than what I could do to myself. I trust you to stop me if I’m in trouble, and I’m giving you my consent to do exactly that. I don’t care what anyone else thinks about it.”
An idea for how to help Dominic purge some of these anxieties occurred to Levi then. “The thing is, we don’t know for sure that I could stop you,” he said, his voice slow and thoughtful.
Dominic frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I’m a well-trained fighter, maybe better than you, but our size difference isn’t inconsequential. There’s a possibility that I wouldn’t be able to beat you even if I gave it my best effort.” Levi moved into Dominic’s personal space, crowding him. He had to tilt his head back to meet Dominic’s eyes, but he wasn’t intimidated. “So we should find out. Just to be safe.”
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