Hart strolled into the home office. “I see no signs of a man or boyfriend or anything like that.”
Stretch came into the room a moment later. “I might have something on that. We need to go see two ladies.”
The two ladies were Gwen’s coworkers, Leslie and Connie. Twenty minutes later, Hart, Stretch and Linc were sitting in a back office at the library with them.
“Leslie,” Stretch started, “I want you to talk about what you mentioned to me on the phone a bit ago.”
“You mean the part where Gwen had a boyfriend?”
“Yes, you and Connie thought she had a man in her life recently?”
“Do you think he might have killed her?” Connie asked.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Linc answered. “So tell me about this man.”
“Well, we didn’t even think of it yesterday,” Leslie stated. “I mean, it was a while ago that this guy was around.”
“What is a while ago?” Hart asked.
“Two months, maybe,” Connie answered. “Maybe six weeks.”
“It was a bit of a blip on the radar,” Leslie added. “Men, now that was something Gwen always struggled with.”
“Oh yes, that’s true,” Connie agreed.
“Explain that to me,” Linc asked while Hart and Stretch took notes.
“Well,” Connie started, “Gwen wanted to have someone, a boyfriend. Unfortunately, what always seemed to happen is that if a man did show interest, she would completely suffocate the guy instead of letting it happen a little more naturally.”
“That’s so true,” Leslie added, jumping in. “But this time she seemed to be letting it happen. She wasn’t obsessing on it. She was waiting for him to call instead of forcing the situation. Everything seemed to be going okay.”
“Then what happened?” Linc asked.
“He stopped calling,” Leslie stated.
“It was like he up and disappeared,” Connie added.
“Why?”
“We don’t know. It really disappointed Gwen at the time. She liked the guy.”
“What was his name?”
Leslie looked to Connie. “What was it, Bob?”
“Ben, I think,” Connie answered. “Ben.”
“Last name?”
They both shook their heads.
“Did either of you meet him?” Coolidge asked.
“Connie, you did, didn’t you?”
“It was just by happenstance.”
“What do you mean?” Stretch asked.
“My husband and I were at the Smithsonian, Renwick Gallery, and we saw her and this man as they were walking the exhibits. She loved to go there,” Connie explained.
“You know, I remember you talking about that,” Leslie supplemented. “It wasn’t long after that the man stopped calling.”
“And did you meet this Ben?” Coolidge asked.
“I don’t know about meeting him,” Connie replied. “I gave Gwen a wave and I remember saying something like, ‘Is that the guy?’”
“And she said yes?” Stretch asked.
“Yes, and she had a big smile.”
“How about the man? What did he look like?”
“Oh gosh, I can’t really recall,” Connie said. “I mean, he was medium height and did have longer blondish hair. Beyond that, I don’t really remember.”
“You said blondish hair?” Stretch asked. “You’re sure?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Connie answered, “and the hair was a little longer.”
“Do you remember the date that happened?” Linc asked.
Connie reached inside her purse for her cell phone. She started swiping through screens until she found it. “It was a Saturday, that much I remember. I recall it because then Earl and I went to dinner and my Earl—” She smiled and shook her head. “Well, he’s not big on going out. He likes staying in as he’s a bit of a homebody. It was Saturday … February 22nd.”
Coolidge looked to Stretch and Hart. “We need to go to the Smithsonian, boys.”
An hour later Coolidge and his detectives were at the Renwick Gallery, a place that neither Hart nor Stretch had ever been to.
“What about you, Lincoln?” Hart asked. “Have you ever been here?”
“Twice, in fact. The first time was with my wife many years ago. The other time was a few years ago with my daughter on a school field trip. It’s an interesting place.”
On the way over, Linc called Mac who put Coolidge with Galloway. Two FBI crime scene techs joined them at the gallery. The detectives and techs were immediately led to the security office and the computer that housed the security surveillance system. The clock was ticking and they needed to get through surveillance video in a hurry. Galloway had also gotten into Gwen’s financial records.
“It’s amazing how quickly the Bureau can access this shit,” Stretch bitched in admiration. “This shit would take us a day, if not days,” Hart added.
“It usually should for us as well,” the tech answered. “This case is a priority, straight from the director. That has a tendency to make things move much faster.” Then he said to the security officer for the gallery, “We have our person of interest making a purchase at 3:03 P.M. on February 22nd. Do you have a camera focusing on the cash register area?”
“We do.”
It took a few minutes to find the day, and then the footage for the register, but then they rolled the video.
“There is our victim,” Stretch pointed. “That is Gwen Waxe.”
“And the guy with her…he’s staying in the background, or at least trying to,” Hart mentioned.
“But not far enough,” Coolidge replied. “If it’s our guy, this is yet another look.” The man was sporting a small beard off the bottom of his chin, lightly shaded glasses and a black leather newsboy cap. That was different, but to Linc, the nose looked right, as did the general shape of the man’s body.
“He looks like one of those sixties kind of guys,” Stretch stated. “They wear the black, have the little beards. What do they call them?”
“Beatniks,” Linc answered. “I better call Mac.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“It must absolutely kill you knowing how close you were to catching me.”
The conference call was quick. It included Coolidge, Wire and Galloway.
“Let’s go with it, Linc,” Mac stated and then turned to Galloway. “Don, put it out now. All the cables, the networks, the local stations, the Internet, everything. Let’s get it out. We’re running out of time.”
“I’m on it. Where are you on your end?”
“I’m working on it,” Mac replied with the enthusiasm that suggested he was nowhere.
That’s because that was exactly where he was. Nowhere.
Mac spent hours in the townhouse and he had come up dry. He peered through the curtains of the front picture window. The sun was setting and 9:00 P.M. was just an hour away.
As the clock ticked down, he was starting to wonder if Dara was right. The clue was here but was it even possible to find it? Was it only possible to see it after you knew what it was?
He immediately understood the clue at Lisa White’s when he first heard Audrey Ruston’s name. The two movie prints were in half of the crime scene pictures. They stared at Mac for hours while he locked himself in Lisa White’s townhouse. It was just he couldn’t make that connection. He wasn’t able to make that intuitive leap to put it together.
He pushed himself up off the floor, stretched and even yawned. He was exhausted. The days were getting to him. His ability to endure the long hours of a high-intensity case had always seen him through but he was starting to wonder if he could keep going like this.
Maybe that was part of Rubens’ strategy in the game. It was like in football: a strong running team could wear down the defense if they kept giving the ball to the star running back and they kept pounding the defense. In the first and second quarters, the defense could hold. But in the third quarter and then in the f
ourth the defense would wear down and ultimately break and the running back would get loose for the long touchdown run. This is what it felt like now. Rubens was wearing him down with the constant pressure, the clock and the stress.
“That’s how he wins,” Mac mumbled and he immediately became angry. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” he scolded, admonishing himself. “There is still time.”
He needed to snap awake, so he went to the bathroom, turned on the cold water and closed the drain, letting the sink fill. Then he went to the kitchen. Luckily in the freezer was a tray of ice cubes, which he took back to the bathroom. He cracked the cubes out of the tray and dumped them into the pooling water and then shut the faucet off. Mac held his breath and dunked his face into the ice-cold water and held it there. After what seemed like thirty seconds, he raised his face out of the water and took in some air and then did it again. The water was invigorating and he leaned back down and splashed some more on his face, then ran some of the cold water through his short blond hair, trying to reactivate it as well. He leaned forward on the sink and looked in the mirror. The water was revitalizing but he still looked tired. The circles under his eyes were prominent, and despite the water he’d run through his scalp, his hair looked lifeless.
“You look ten years older, McRyan,” he said quietly to the mirror as he looked beyond his face in the reflection to the shelf on the wall behind him, tilted his head, looked closer and muttered, “Huh.”
He turned around and looked at the framed picture on the small white shelf, which had a row of small knobs underneath to hang towels and a robe. The picture was taken in the living room, a room he’d spent the last several hours in but something in the photo was different. In the background was a headshot picture of Eleanor Roosevelt mounted on the wall opposite of the couch. “That picture isn’t there now,” he muttered.
It had been moved.
Mac, with the bathroom picture in hand, purposefully walked back into the living room and went to where the picture of Eleanor Roosevelt was mounted on the wall in the picture in the bathroom. The lighting was dim so he flipped on the overhead light. With more illumination, he saw what he was looking for. Where the picture of Eleanor Roosevelt had previously been hung there was a slight fade mark around the outside of the replacement picture.
“It doesn’t cover the fade mark,” he murmured quietly as he ran his fingers over the fade line. Upon further reflection, in a now different context, the replacement picture was wrong for the spot on the wall, he thought. For someone who was so fastidious about her house and how it looked, it was not obviously wrong, just not quite right.
“So where are you now, Eleanor?” Mac asked, looking around the living room. Eleanor had been moved to the wall to his left. Mac moved to the picture and examined it and then reached behind for the wire and lifted it off its nail. Behind the picture was the nail the picture of Eleanor hung on as well as another nail sitting two inches below. “The nail for a smaller picture.”
So when did it move? Mac wondered. Did you move it, you clever son-of-a-bitch?
“This arrangement isn’t right,” Mac muttered, standing back away from the picture, his arms folded. “These pictures just don’t go together.”
Mac took the Lisa White crime scene photos out of his backpack. He focused on the pictures with the movie posters, Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the wall they were mounted on.
With his attention focused on the arrangement, it too took on a different look to him. “This doesn’t look right, these two together,” he mumbled quietly.
It was harder to tell at Lisa White’s because there was just so much displayed. At first blush, it didn’t look like she had any rhyme or reason to how she hung the mass of pictures on the walls but if you looked a little closer, there was something of a … pattern. She organized pictures by having large pictures, painting or framed movie posters surrounded by smaller pictures. It gave off the look of a collage, yet there was a distinct pattern of organization on the other walls of the house. The pictures he peered through and his own memory confirmed it. Yet, despite that seeming organization, there were two large movie prints positioned together on the wall that were the clue for the name of Audrey Ruston.
Did Rubens move them?
He reached for his cell phone.
“Dara, you need to go to Lisa White’s right now.”
“Lisa White’s?”
“Yes.”
“To do what?”
“I need you to check the two movie prints that gave us the name Audrey Ruston.”
“Check for what?”
“Nail holes behind the prints.”
• • •
Eleanor was perfect in every way for him.
The only flaw was where she lived.
He preferred houses or townhouses for the privacy they tended to provide. That was an issue with Eleanor. She lived in a turn-of-the-century four-story building that was once apartments and was now converted to condos. And while there wasn’t security physically onsite, there were surveillance cameras in the main lobby and the main back entrance, or so he’d learned in researching the building.
So this would be tricky.
Knowing that, a dig was made into the architectural history of the building and the area surrounding it. That had revealed an interesting part of the property’s past.
All of that swirled through his mind as he walked up the front walk to the building, his backpack slung over his shoulder, two bottles of wine along with other necessary items inside.
Promptly at 8:00 P.M., he hit the buzzer for Eleanor’s condo unit, number 304. The door immediately buzzed and eschewing the steps, he took the elevator up to the third floor, went to unit 304 and knocked.
The door opened immediately.
“Hi, Tom,” she said happily.
“Hello, Eleanor,” Rubens replied as he took her hands and leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, breathing in her perfume. As he stepped back he took in her appearance. It was an interesting selection, a brown Burberry dress with tiers of suede and he noticed the music playing in the background, Adele, and he recalled having seen a picture of the singer wearing that very kind of dress.
“Please come in.”
He stepped inside her condo. Quickly he scanned the area to confirm his recollection of it. It was a nice, open space, with a living room that opened into a dining area. A singular wall divided the kitchen from the living room. Overall, it would provide him with plenty of room to work with later. And then there was one other thing he noticed: her tabby cat lurking near the entry into the kitchen, staring him down for a moment before heading down the back hallway toward the bedroom.
“What’s in the backpack?” Eleanor asked, drawing him back to her.
“Wine, of course,” he replied. “A nice Pinot Noir and a smooth Cab. What tickles your fancy?”
“Pinot Noir would be great.”
“An excellent choice, my dear. Would I find an opener and glasses in the kitchen?”
“Yes, let me show you.”
In the small kitchen, Eleanor retrieved two long-stemmed wine glasses and a corkscrew and seal cutter. “Please go make yourself comfortable on the couch,” Rubens suggested. “I’ll take care of this.”
• • •
“Mac, I think you’re right. The movie posters were moved,” Wire reported eagerly over the speaker on his cell phone. “There are a bunch of nail holes behind the Sabrina print.”
“Where did it come from?”
“If I had to guess, he moved it from the hallway leading from the front door back to the kitchen area. There is a space of pictures that don’t necessarily fit but based on my quick measurements, they look like they would have fit where the Sabrina poster now rests. What are you looking at?”
“A picture of Eleanor Roosevelt,” Mac answered. “It was moved at some point. It used to be to the right of the wall that had the three mirrors with pictures of Amelia Earhart and Rosa Parks, making for a nice little arra
ngement of famous women. So why move it?”
“If he did,” Wire blurted.
“He moved it,” Mac replied. “He moved it. I can feel it. The question is why move it here? Why move Eleanor here?” He stepped back from the wall to see what the picture could tie with. There was nothing close to the right of the picture. To the left was a painting of a bald eagle and then a watercolor painting of the sun rising over the horizon. “Left to right I have a painting of the sun and horizon, then a picture of a bald eagle in flight and then Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“That doesn’t sound like anything,” Wire stated after a moment’s thought.
“Yeah, if he’s giving me a name, Eleanor should be first, not … last. It’s like he’s dyslexic, unless …” Mac wheeled around to look at the other wall, the mirrored wall.
Wire caught the hesitation in his voice, “What, Mac? What do you see?”
“The opposite wall, it has the three mirrors on it,” he replied. In the first mirror was the reflection of the picture of Eleanor Roosevelt. To the right is the reflection of the bald eagle in flight and then in the third mirror is the reflection of the painting of the sun coming over the horizon.
“I wonder,” he murmured as he went to the picture of the eagle and then the sun. Behind the watercolor of the sun, there were two empty nail holes. He rubbed his index finger over the holes and the sheet rock was puckered enough that it seemed like the nails were recently removed. Of course, maybe he was feeling and seeing things he wanted to see rather than what was actually reality. He next checked to the left under the picture of the eagle and there were no stray nail holes. It most likely hadn’t been moved. As he stepped back away to assess the arrangement, he could understand it. It was the biggest piece and was hung at the proper height and centered properly on the wall so it seemed that it had been hung there all along. So if he was right, the Eleanor Roosevelt picture and the sun watercolor were new to this location. “Dara, this is the arrangement. It’s in the reflection of the mirrors.”
“What is it, Mac?”
“Eleanor Roosevelt, a picture of a bald eagle in flight and then the watercolor of the sun coming up over the horizon.”
Next Girl On The List - A serial killer thriller (McRyan Mystery Series Book) Page 20