9 More Killer Thrillers

by Russell Blake

  Her heart started to flutter in her chest, like a trapped bird. She bent to retrieve the envelope, then carried it as if it were glass and gently placed it in the center of her desk. Where it had now been sitting for forty minutes. Waiting for her to do something.

  It’s marked ‘personal and confidential.’ Mr. Prescott will be here soon. Just disregard it.

  She repeated the three sentences in an effort to slow her heart and quell her imagination. It wasn’t working.

  Caroline turned her attention to her computer monitor and busied herself with completing an expense report. Her right hand, unbidden, returned to her earring. It was no use. She wheeled her chair back to the center of her desk and stared down at the envelope.

  The door opened at eighty-thirty, and Mr. Prescott strode into the room.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Masters,” he said, raising his attaché case in greeting.

  “Good morning,” she said, as she snatched the envelope from her desk and hurried around to hand it to him. “This was on the floor when I arrived. Someone must have slid it under the door.”

  They had never discussed the first envelope, but she could tell from the way his face turned gray that he recognized that this one was its twin.

  He took the envelope from her slowly, as if he really didn’t want to, but only said, “Very good. Thank you.”

  He went into his office and shut the door behind him.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Cinco rubbed his mouth and stared at the envelope. He didn’t want to open it. He had to, though. He cracked his knuckles and wished he’d gone to design school instead of law school. Then, he steeled himself and slid the edge of his letter opener under the seal.

  He turned the envelope upside-down and shook out a five-by-seven photograph. It landed face-down on his standing desk. He flipped it over with the tip of the letter opener.

  Ellen, Clarissa, and Martine smiled up at him in their party gowns. Ellen and Clarissa’s grins were partially obscured by red Xs. “TWO DOWN” was written across the bottom of the picture.

  Cinco closed his eyes and willed himself not to vomit. He took several breaths. When the nausea subsided, he pressed a button on his phone and buzzed Caroline.

  “Mrs. Masters,” he said, working to keep his voice even, “call down and tell Clarissa Costopolous to come up to see me. If she’s not in yet, leave a message for her to come up as soon as she arrives.”

  “Right away, Mr. Prescott,” she assured him in a voice that betrayed nothing.

  He released the button and stared out the window. Despite her calm tone, he was pretty sure his secretary knew as well as he did that Clarissa wouldn’t be coming to work today.

  Cinco wasn’t sure how long he stood like that, looking out the window without seeing the city skyline that unfolded in front of him. He thought about calling Greta. But he didn’t know what help his wife could offer at the moment. Besides, what would he say? Darling, someone’s serially killing the female partners at the firm; what should I do? He shook his head at himself. No, don’t bring anyone else into this ... mess.

  He was about to buzz Caroline again to tell her to round up the Management Committee, when she raced through the door with a stricken expression.

  “Clarissa’s in the parking garage. She’s ... dead.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Cinco, flanked by the four other members of the Management Committee, stepped off the elevator and scanned the parking garage’s third floor, where a shopper returning to her car with an armful of bags from the clothing boutique in the building had found Clarissa’s body.

  Cinco spotted the sobbing shopper sitting on the trunk of a black-and-white police cruiser with a blanket thrown over her shoulders and a sympathetic female patrol officer rubbing the woman’s arm. He headed in that direction.

  As he neared, he nodded to Samantha Davis, the firm’s chief security officer, who was standing with an older African-American man in a navy suit. They were huddled close to Clarissa’s Lexus.

  “Mr. Prescott,” Sam said, as they approached, “this is homicide detective Burton Gilbert. Detective Gilbert, Charles Prescott, V. He’s the head of the firm.”

  The detective slipped a small notepad and pen into his breast pocket and extended a hand.

  “Mr. Prescott,” he said in a deep, gravelly voice.

  “Detective,” Cinco said.

  He waved a hand behind him. “These men are my senior advisors.”

  Detective Gilbert nodded to the cluster of anxious faces over Cinco’s shoulder. “I’ll need to get names and contact information here from you gentlemen, but first Ms. Davis and I can walk you through what we know.”

  Sam smoothed back her wavy silver hair and looked down at her own small notepad.

  “Okay, at oh-nine-ten, building security got a call that a female was screaming on the third floor of the garage.”

  She pointed to the uniformed officer and the shopper, and Cinco noticed for the first time the building’s rent-a-cop standing alongside the patrol car.

  The building provided security for its tenants, but Cinco had not found it particularly impressive. In fact, it appeared to be principally decorative. After a Christmas season in which sixteen firm-issued laptops had walked out of the building, four secretaries’ pocketbooks had been stolen from their desks, and innumerable young associates had complained of missing electronic devices that Cinco had never heard of nor cared about, he’d hired Sam Davis.

  Sam was a former FBI agent and a member of his wife’s book club. She had retired from the Bureau and moved to Pittsburgh when her husband had been offered a position as the chief financial officer at some technology company in the Strip District. She was well credentialed, bored senseless, and didn’t need the money. Cinco had made her a low-ball offer and she’d taken it.

  Her eyes were shining now, and Cinco could see she was hopped up on the excitement that had been in short supply as the chief security officer of a staid law firm.

  She gestured at the green Buick LaCrosse parked to the left of Clarissa’s car and continued, “Mrs. Woolson, the woman who found the body, had hit some VIP early-morning sale at Creations Boutique. She was coming around to the passenger side of her car here to put her packages on the front seat—”

  Porter interrupted her, asking “Why not in the trunk? Or the back seat?”

  Cinco turned to frown at him. “What difference does it make?”

  Sam shook her head and said, “No, it’s a good question. She has some kind of long-haired dogs and the backseat is full of dog hair. Their crates are in the trunk because she dropped them off at the groomer this morning. So, she walked around to open the front passenger side door and noticed the blood.”

  She stepped in front of Cinco and pointed with her pen to the front driver’s side window of Clarissa’s car. Five sets of eyes followed her hand.

  Red blood splattered the driver’s side window in a spray pattern that reminded Cinco of spin art.

  When he was a child, his father had insisted the entire family attend the firm’s annual Kennywood picnic. Even then, Cinco had found the amusement park to be sticky, dirty, and inexplicable. He couldn’t fathom why people would wait in line to be scared, jerked around on a rickety wooden roller coaster, or spun in circles until they were queasy.

  He had, however, loved the spin art booth. You paid your money and chose your colors. Then you would squeeze the paint from plastic condiment bottles onto your canvas, while it spun around like a record album.

  The firm still held an annual Kennywood picnic, and Cinco still went to it each year. It had been at least ten years since he’d last looked for the spin art booth. At the time, the high school student manning the recording studio, where the talentless and hapless recorded abysmal covers of popular songs, had looked at him blankly.

  He stared at the window. Clarissa’s vibrant blood and clotty gray matter clung to it and obscured his view, but he could see her body slumped across the center console.

  T
he detective said, “I took a look inside when I got here, but I can’t let you do so. We need to wait for the coroner and the forensics team to get here and do their thing. Can’t risk disturbing the scene. But the doors were unlocked. She appears to have been beaten with a blunt object. My guess is a claw hammer.”

  Marco spoke up. “You can tell that by looking at her?”

  Sam swallowed a laugh, and Detective Gilbert twisted his mouth into a smile.

  “No,” he said, “there’s a blood-covered claw hammer on the floor of the passenger side, so I have deduced as much.”

  Cinco watched as Marco reddened.

  Then he turned back to the homicide detective and said, “The firm will cooperate with your investigation, of course, limited only by our obligations to our clients to preserve their confidentiality. Let Ms. Davis know if you need anything.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Detective Gilbert promised.

  Cinco nodded his goodbyes and turned to head back toward the elevators, stepping over the yellow crime scene tape. The others trailed behind him, whispering. He stifled a sigh. He saw more meetings in his future.

  CHAPTER 20

  Sasha, Naya, Larry, and Greg squeezed around the small round conference table in Sasha’s office. A takeout container of coffee and pastries from the coffee shop below sat, untouched, in the center of the table.

  Greg squirmed under the weight of the unimpressed stares he faced. He’d been there for twenty minutes and, so far, he’d done a lot of tap dancing instead of answering Sasha’s questions. Naya rapped her pen against the table and bit her lip.

  Sasha wondered if Naya would continue to hold her peace in the face of Greg’s apparent refusal to help himself. She hadn’t asked Naya to join her practice because of Naya’s diplomacy: she was outspoken, and her instincts about people were sound. If Greg continued to feed them a line, Naya would eventually lose her patience.

  “Let’s try this again,” Sasha said to Greg, holding up the picture of him with the earliest date. It showed him at a poker table at 10:30 a.m. on the third Tuesday in June. “Do you remember how you came to be at the casino instead of at work this day?”

  Greg exhaled through his nose. “I told you, I don’t know. I guess I just got the idea to stop by on my way to work. I drive right by the North Shore, you know.”

  “Okay, sure, but why that day?” Sasha probed.

  “I. Don’t. Know.” Greg cut off each word, making his irritation clear.

  Finally, Naya made hers clear, too.

  “Listen, Mr. Lang,” she began, pushing back from the table, “we’re trying to help you. Do you think someone who knew your gambling would set off your wife just happened to be at the casino, with a camera, on the same Tuesday morning that you got an urge to pull off the exit from 279 instead of taking your sorry ass to work?”

  Greg stared at her, slack-jawed, then said, “I guess I never thought about it.”

  “You never thought about it,” Sasha repeated.

  She arched a brow and looked at Larry, who shrugged, like he’d heard it all and didn’t consider this to be outside the realm of possibility.

  Greg went on, haltingly, “I mean, I guess, if I had thought about it, I might have wondered if she was having me followed, maybe?”

  “Was she?” Sasha asked.

  “She said no. I thought we were on pretty solid ground, until she found out about the gambling. We did a bike trip through the French countryside last spring. We were getting along fine—no, better than fine. So, I don’t think she had any reason to be suspicious.” He spread his hands wide and said, “But I don’t know.”

  Naya shook her head but said nothing.

  “It’s true. We were in love once, you know,” Greg insisted. “And, it’s not like we’d ever had a big falling out. It’s just that life, work—her work—got in the way, buried us. But in the Loire Valley, we spent our days riding through rolling hills dotted with heather and sunflowers turning their faces to the sun and our nights drinking wine under the stars in the courtyards of ancient chateaus. There was nothing in the way. Just us. It gave us a chance to uncover what had been there all along. I don’t care if you believe me or not, things were the best they’d been in years,” Greg finished, choking back tears and staring down at the table.

  “Let’s get back to that morning in June,” Larry suggested in a neutral voice.

  Larry had asked Sasha if he could sit in on the meeting to get a sense of Greg’s personality and demeanor, but he planned to play a behind-the-scenes role. Sasha couldn’t wait to hear what Larry thought of their client: Greg had been agitated and short-tempered ever since he’d arrived ten minutes late for their nine o’clock meeting. Now he’d finally shown a flash of humanity.

  “Okay,” Greg said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “Fine.”

  “Try to remember why you chose that particular day to go to the casino.”

  Greg rolled his eyes to make sure they understood how put upon he felt and repeated, “Fine.”

  He fell silent for a moment, searching his memory—or at least pretending to do so. Then, he said, “My comp was about to expire.”

  “Your comp?”

  He sighed. “Yes. Around Memorial Day, I guess it was, I got an introductory certificate in the mail, inviting me to try out the table games at The Rivers. There was a coupon I could exchange for fifty dollars in chips, but it expired at the end of June.”

  “Hold on,” Naya interrupted. “Aren’t you a recovering gambling addict?”

  Anger flashed across Greg’s face. “No. Look, I got in a jam with some guys on sport betting ages ago. Before Ellen and I were even married. It was stupid, and they were ... unsavory people. Ellen helped me out. My going to Gamblers Anonymous was her requirement. I wasn’t then—and I’m not now—addicted to gambling.”

  Naya opened her mouth to respond, but Sasha beat her to it.

  “Nonetheless, you had given up gambling completely, correct?”

  Greg answered right away. “Yeah. I hadn’t set foot in a casino or placed a bet of any kind in fourteen years. Until that day. And, you know, to be clear, I wasn’t gambling. I was playing poker. It’s a game of skill.”

  From the way he said it, at once defensive and aggressive, Sasha knew he’d tried that argument on Ellen. She imagined Ellen hadn’t found it any more persuasive than she did.

  “Let’s leave that aside for the moment. Do you believe the marketing department of a casino randomly sent a certificate for chips to someone who could be considered a recovering gambler? They’re pretty heavily regulated; I don’t think they can just send out that sort of thing unsolicited.”

  Greg reddened. “The brochure had a cover letter that claimed it was sent in response to my inquiry, but I swear, I didn’t sign up for anything. Besides, I was in France most of May, biking seventy-five miles a day. How could I have? I figured it was a mistake, but, it was fifty dollars. I didn’t see the harm. I’d cash it in, play a little bit of poker, and then head to work.”

  Sasha could see in both Larry’s and Naya’s eyes that they thought the same thing she did: Greg Lang was, quite possibly, the perfect patsy.

  The phone rang; its electronic beep cut off Greg’s efforts at self-justification.

  Naya stepped over to Sasha’s desk and picked it up.

  “The Law Offices of Sasha McCandless.”

  After a pause, Naya continued, “I’m sorry, Ms. McCandless is in a client meeting. May I take a message?”

  Naya started to scribble a note on the pad beside the phone, then she stopped.

  “Please hold, and I’ll see if she can be interrupted,” she said, pressing the hold button.

  Sasha gave her a quizzical look. She couldn’t stop and take a call in the middle of this.

  Naya held out the receiver toward Sasha and said, “It’s the crime beat reporter for the Post-Gazette. He got your name from Greg’s former counsel. He wants to know if you have any comment.”

  “On what?”
Sasha asked.

  “On the fact that Clarissa Costopolous was found dead in her car in the P & T garage this morning,” Naya said, her face unreadable.

  Sasha blinked and processed the news. Then she said, “Okay, have him hold.” She felt light-headed.

  Sasha and Larry huddled together to craft a sound bite for the reporter. After she’d provided the quote and gotten the reporter’s contact information, Sasha turned to Greg, who had been silent since Naya had broken the news of Clarissa’s murder.

  “So, I guess this is helpful news for our defense,” she said, ignoring the self-loathing that came with those words.

  Greg, his head down, mumbled something at the table.

  “I’m sorry,” Sasha said, “I didn’t catch that.”

  He raised his head and repeated, “I said, I have to go.”

  “Why?”

  He cleared his throat and hesitated, then said, “Because Nick Costopolous is asleep in my guest room. I need to break the news to him that his wife is dead.”

  Sasha didn’t want to—knew she shouldn’t—but heard herself ask, “Why is Nick at your house?”

  Greg looked her straight in the eye and said, “Last night, Clarissa had divorce papers served on him while he was at his club. He tried to call her but she didn’t answer her phone. When he left the club to go home, his key didn’t fit in the lock. Apparently, that sneaky little bitch had gotten the locks changed.”

  “So, how’d he end up at your house?” Naya asked.

  “We’re friends. I mean, the girls were friends, so we sort of just ended up pals. Me, Nick, Tanner Landry.”

  “Nick called you?”

  Greg nodded. “Right. He was crying and slurring. He’d been drinking. I told him to call a cab and come over. He didn’t. That big idiot drove his truck, but he came over and passed out on my couch. Around two a.m., I woke him up and set him up in the guest room. When I left this morning, I could hear him snoring in there. Anyway, I have to go. He’s going to lose it when he hears about this.”