by Beverly Bird
He fished through the file and pushed them at her. “They were all over the house. No surprise there. It’s his house.”
“Now it is,” she agreed grimly, then she was gone again.
When she returned the second and last time, she brought two cold soft drinks from the machine in the hall. His was the standard, sugar-laden variety. Hers was diet. Gunner raised a brow, leaned back and put his feet up on their desk. He decided that he was going to enjoy hearing this explanation.
“So how come I get the calorie-packed one? Trying to fatten me up for the slaughter?”
“You don’t strike me as the type who thinks his body’s a temple to be preserved,” she muttered.
“So you think I’m flabby?”
“Of course not! You’re—” She broke off, flushing. He hooked his hands behind his head and waited for her to go on, his T-shirt stretching tautly over his incredible chest and torso. There was nothing there that could even remotely suggest flab.
No, she thought, there was no way she was going to point that out.
“Actually,” Gunner said after a moment, “I’m not.”
“What?”
“The type who treats my body like a temple.” He took a deep swig from his can. “I just kind of use it the way God meant it to be used, and enjoy the hell out of it while I’m about it.”
“I–oh.” She wasn’t going to touch that one, either, Tessa decided. “So what did you find out through more outmoded, conventional channels?”
“Nothing.”
Her heart thumped, though she wasn’t surprised.
“Christian Benami doesn’t live in the state of Pennsylvania, that’s for sure,” Gunner declared. “No way, nohow.”
“It’s an alias,” Tessa said. She sat on the corner of their desk this time.
“Oh, yeah,” Gunner agreed. “Somewhere out there, he’s got a social security number, all right—”
“And he probably registered for Selective Service—”
“And he votes and he drives, but he sure as hell doesn’t do it as Christian Benami.”
“They were married in Paris,” she mused. “I guess he wouldn’t have had to have shown proof of identity there.”
“Must not have,” he agreed. “At least not of the same sort that we do. He doesn’t seem to have any fake ID as Benami, not in this country, anyway.”
Tessa rubbed a headache behind her eyes. Gunner scrubbed a hand over his unshaven jaw.
“I can’t decide if it’s sloppy or brilliant,” she admitted. “He’s hiding something. He was somebody.”
“Somebody who probably vanished off the face of the earth as far as his old friends and associates were concerned,” Gunner agreed. “I’ll go with brilliant. He didn’t take a chance on resurrecting himself as someone else, at least not record-wise.”
“But why?” She thought about it. “Witness Protection?”
Gunner snorted.
“Well, that’s always got to be considered when somebody just disappears,” she said indignantly. It was a thorn in the sides of police departments everywhere. The Feds didn’t even let local authorities in on those particular proceedings. It resulted in miscellaneous missing persons cases all over the country that would never be closed, where the cops were as much in the dark as the bad guys.
“Princess, we don’t got a missing person, we got a dead person,” Gunner said pointedly, and Tessa almost smiled.
She sighed and drank from her own can. “Well, I gave Igor Benami’s prints. If Benami’s being investigated for anything else, anywhere else, we’ll hear about it.”
Gunner grimaced. “Maybe. Sooner or later.”
That was another of Igor’s drawbacks. He could tell them if Benami’s prints matched any others in the state of Pennsylvania. He could check them against convicted criminals elsewhere, but if Benami was merely being investigated somewhere else, if his file was still open, then it would take a strong stroke of luck for Igor to do them any good. Some other police department would have to notice the query she’d put in with Benami’s prints. They would have to be currently investigating Benami through Igor to realize that Philadelphia had their man. Without even an accurate name or social security number to go on, it was something of a long shot.
Still, stranger things had happened in police work, Tessa knew.
“He’s our man, Gunner,” she said quietly.
“You won’t get an argument from me now.” Tessa watched his gaze go longingly to Mel’s trash can again. Then he yanked open the center drawer of their desk. “Didn’t I see you put Life Savers or some sissy thing in here?”
Tessa smiled. “In the back, tough guy.”
He flashed her a look, one brow not quite up, one corner of his mouth not quite smiling. He found them and popped one into his mouth. “You know, I’ve got to warn you. This could get ugly. No cigarettes, no charm. You’ll be lucky to get civility. I’m going to be a bear.”
“I’ll pick up a whip on my way home.”
“Brings some interesting images to mind.”
Tessa closed her eyes against a rush of embarrassment. Damn him.
“Gunner, look,” she began, thinking she had to get these lines down, had to let him know there were lines. But then his chuckle came again, warm, rough...like callused hands on her skin.
“You got a hell of a blush there, Princess. Pretty as a spring day.”
She heard his heels thump as he brought his feet down and she looked at him again, knowing she probably shouldn’t, and if she had been a nun and she had been wearing socks, they would have melted clear off her feet when he grinned at her.
“We need to keep this...impersonal,” she managed to say, her voice strained. “Professional. We have to, Gunner, or I’m not going to be able to work with you.”
He thought about asking her why. Maybe it was as simple as the sheer enjoyment of rattling her high-brow sensibilities now and again, but he thought “impersonal” could get pretty damn frustrating after a while.
“Sure,” he said easily, not meaning it for a minute. He rubbed his jaw again and went on as though they’d never gotten sidetracked. “What I’m thinking is this. The man exists, but Christian Benami isn’t his name. So we’ll let Igor try to find out what his name is, but that could take forever, so we’ll pay a little visit to Harvey Baum and get the good judge to give us a compliance order in the meantime.”
“For a blood type.” Tessa groaned. Judge Baum was iffy under the best of circumstances. He had a reputation for being lenient on criminals. The inside word was that he could be bought, but no one had ever been able to prove it.
“Maybe we ought to try skipping around Baum entirely,” she suggested. “Could we go directly to Benami and ask him to give us some blood?”
Gunner made an incredulous sound. “As in, ‘Right over here, sir, would you kindly step into this gas chamber’?”
Tessa stiffened at his sarcasm even as she knew he was right.
“I’ve got this nagging, rotten feeling that Benami’s going to slide right through our hands like a snake,” he murmured. “He’s already disappeared once, from somewhere. If we go to see him, we’d be tipping him off that we’re looking into him.”
“Well-spoken for a man who didn’t even think Benami was guilty as of yesterday,” Tessa said pointedly.
“Oh, I thought it. I just wanted you to be damn sure of why you thought it. Trying to convince me sure put your ducks in a row, didn’t it?”
Tessa shrugged. It had, she thought, and she hadn’t thought about Matt too much at all.
That bothered her.
“Still mad?” he asked. He gave her that crooked grin again and she wondered how anyone, anywhere, could ever stay angry with this man.
“No. Just mildly miffed. It would have been worse if I’d had to buy you that beer.”
Gunner nodded, opened the desk drawer again, and peeled several Life Savers off the roll this time. He thrust the whole handful into his mouth.
“Come on, let’s g
o see Benami and give it a shot. So what if we tip him off? Maybe it’ll shake him up, make him make a mistake. Besides, I feel like getting mean with somebody, and you’re too sweet and cute.”
Tessa felt her heart hitch. “Impersonal, Gunner. We’ve got to keep this relationship impersonal.”
He gave her a long, measuring look that made everything inside her roll over again. “We can try.”
“Park here,” Tessa said suddenly. They crept around Logan Circle through heavy traffic, trying to move back toward center city. Philadelphia’s one-way streets were a maze that could daunt even the cabbies who worked them. “In the Four Seasons garage,” she directed. “I want to try something.”
Gunner shot a look at her. “Do you have any idea what that’s going to cost?” No, he thought, it had never even occurred to her. “No need to stick a pea under your mattress.”
But when he reached it, he turned into the garage. The department would reimburse him.
“Four blocks,” she said as they made their way back to the sidewalk, glancing at her watch.
He realized what she was getting at. “Closer to five,” he corrected.
“Okay.” They both stopped and drew in their breaths.
“On your mark, get set, go,” said Tessa.
They turned south.
Gunner appreciated the fact that she didn’t run, though they hadn’t discussed it. Benami couldn’t have made the trip at a jog in evening clothes, not without attracting a great deal of attention. He might have taken a cab, but if he had, they would find out about it. And if he had calmly taxied his way to the Four Seasons only once, then he had probably killed Daphne before he even got there. The account given by over one hundred witnesses suggested that that was probably what had happened, if he had killed her at all.
But Tessa seemed to be thinking that Benami had been in and out of that party, Gunner realized. It still didn’t preclude a cab or two, but as he watched her face, he knew she was thinking about that, and that he was following her mind with a fair bit of rapport.
His eyes were still on her, his gaze angled across at her, when they reached the first intersection. He felt rather than saw a body approach him from the curb. After six years in the department, three of them in Homicide, the hairs on his nape stirred instinctively.
Then he saw that the approaching body belonged to a girl of Haitian, or maybe Dominican descent. She was barely seventeen. She held a wilted flower out to him.
“For you, handsome man.”
Gunner saw a basket stuffed with more drooping flowers behind her. “Well, that’s nice, honey. Good merchandising, too.”
“Gunner!” Tessa cried out from behind him. He looked back to see her sort of jogging in place. “We’re timing this,” she reminded him impatiently.
He reached for his wallet, giving the girl a bill.
“Thank you, sir, thank you,” she gushed.
Gunner started moving again. Then he stopped once more.
“I don’t believe this!” Tessa cried.
This time he passed the flower on to an elderly woman pushing a walker along ahead of her. “For you, beautiful lady,” he said. The woman reared back, looked suspiciously at the flower, then she smiled slowly.
Gunner jogged on again.
“At least you could have been original.” Tessa panted, catching up with him a second time.
“Doesn’t matter. Made her day.”
Actually, Tessa thought, it had probably made both women’s days. She found herself smiling. He might be arrogant, but he certainly had a way about him.
In spite of herself, she thought again of how he had deliberately kept her off balance all of yesterday. And half of today. Talk about a seesaw, she thought. One of these hours she was going to have to decide how she felt about being paired with John Gunner, whether she was alarmed by it or was enjoying it.
They had reached the Benami town house. They stopped, and Tessa got irritated all over again. For all the smoking he had undoubtedly done until this very morning, she was the one who was winded.
They both looked at their watches at the same time.
“Eight minutes and roughly thirty-six seconds,” Gunner said.
“So say seven minutes, maybe seven and a half, if Benami didn’t stop to flirt. Twice. With one woman old enough to be his grandmother, and another young enough to be his daughter.”
Gunner shot a brow up and laughed. “Flirt? Princess, that wasn’t flirting. When you see it, you’ll know it.”
Her belly rolled again.
She lowered her voice, looking back over her shoulder at Christian’s home. “I’ve got a hunch,” she said quietly.
“I gathered as much.”
“I’m just wondering if he didn’t try to kill Daphne before he went to the party, but she mounted a pretty significant defense. So maybe he managed to drug her and tie her, made his appearance at the hotel, slipped out, went back, killed her after she was groggy, then returned to the Ball. Maybe nobody even noticed he was gone.”
“How many people were at this bash?”
“Over two hundred and fifty. If he circulated consistently the whole time he was there, he could have pulled it off. That’s quite a crowd. If someone wasn’t talking to him, they would just assume he was chatting with someone else.”
“And you’ve got firsthand experience with these shindigs.”
Tessa hesitated, then she nodded. Gunner didn’t sound judgmental, and he didn’t choose that particular moment to call her “Princess” again.
“If you’re right, somebody ought to have noticed him missing,” he said.
“I hope so.”
“We only have statements from a hundred or so of the two-fifty.”
“And nobody’s taken statements from the help yet. And they’ve got eyes in the backs of their heads.”
“Okay, we’ll move onto them tomorrow.” He hesitated. “In the meantime, why not just take a cab? Why do you think he didn’t?” He had his own theories, and wanted to see if they’d match hers.
“He would have, if he’d only needed to make the one trip. More than one, and he was risking too much. For sure we’d raise a brow if we found out he’d been taking taxies back and forth all night. And we can trace that sort of thing. It’s a lot harder to trace a five-block stroll in either direction.”
“Yeah,” Gunner said. “So let’s go mess with him a little.”
Benami was hostile. It wasn’t particularly obvious at first, more like something tainted and sour sifting through the first cracks in his carefully polished veneer.
“Coffee?” he offered as he allowed them into the foyer. “Or maybe...I don’t know what else I have around here. It’s been...difficult.”
My foot, Tessa thought instantly. She caught Gunner’s eye and knew they were both hearing the man’s words again. What else I have around here. Not we, but I. And Daphne hadn’t even been dead for ninety-six hours yet.
“Coffee would be fine,” Tessa said softly, settling into the old, tried-and-true, good-cop routine. She sat gently on the corner of a settee in the parlor that Benami rushed them into.
Gunner paced.
No, she thought, watching him, her pulse quickening in spite of herself. He didn’t pace exactly. He... prowled. He made his way around the room while Benami went to get the coffee. Once he stopped beside a low, cherry-wood table and picked up a figurine sitting atop it.
“Dresden,” Tessa murmured.
“Yeah?” He shot her a look and put it back. “I guess it didn’t come free with a ten dollar purchase.”
Tessa felt her mouth curling into a smile again, then Benami came back into the room with two mugs and a coffee pot. Yes, Tessa thought, the veneer was cracking.
“I’m not clear on what you want with me,” Benami said, pouring. He smoothed a hand over his blond hair as he sat. It was styled to lay back from his forehead, short and neat. He was a handsome man, almost too pretty, Tessa thought. He had Adonis looks, though he seemed soft. He de
finitely wasn’t as rough or as muscular and appealing as Gunner.
She got off that line of thinking fast.
“I already told you how I found her,” Benami said.
“You found her hanging,” Gunner said coldly. “Suicide.”
Benami didn’t quite flinch. Then he flinched too much.
“That’s right.”
“Wrong,” Gunner snapped.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your wife was murdered, Mr. Benami. She didn’t kick that chair away all by herself.”
Tessa thought that the man’s sudden pallor was more or less genuine.
“I don’t-” he began.
“Understand? Sure you do,” Gunner said shortly. “It wasn’t her idea. She wasn’t despairing, despondent, depressed, and she didn’t take her own life.”
“Christian,” Tessa said softly. “We need a sample of your blood. We need to get to the bottom of this.”
“My blood?” He looked dumbfounded. “Why?”
“Because whoever urged your wife up to that chandelier left a little piece of himself behind,” Gunner said, and there was no hint of the man who had given the old lady the flower. “Interesting, huh? Care to push your sleeves up a little, chum?”
“Am I a suspect?” Benami nearly shouted.
“You’re a spouse, so you’re a suspect,” Gunner answered coldly.
“We’d just like to rule you out,” Tessa said quickly. “You’d be amazed at how often family members turn out to be responsible for a victim’s murder. It’s standard procedure for us to start looking at the people closest to Daphne first. Then we’ll work backward from there, as we gradually rule people out.”
“I see,” Benami said curtly. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m still reeling from the...from knowing that... she didn’t—”
“You’ll give us the blood?” Gunner interrupted impatiently.
Benami’s face hardened. “I will not.”
“Why?” Gunner began moving in on the man, closing the distance between them. “Hiding something?”
His face was hard now, chiseled, his eyes like flecks of gray stone, Tessa realized. Benami had seated himself in the chair closest to the hearth. As Gunner drew closer, he shot to his feet.