An Angel in Stone

by Peggy Nicholson

  He got his MS in geology, then went back to work for the same company. They sent him to Saudi Arabia, then Kurat. For five years he gives them their money’s worth—he set some kind of record for finding wildcat wells. Then the next thing you know, he’s gone into business for himself, partnering with the nephew-in-law of the emir of Kurat. Nobody can figure out how he swung an introduction to the royal family, much less an exec-level buy-in.”

  Across the street, a lamp blinked on in Lia’s apartment. Raine glanced at her watch. Nearly eight minutes to climb all those stairs. She couldn’t see 6A’s entrance door from her vantage point, but this must be the living room. Strictly student decor. The floor lamp stood beside a desk that was piled high with books. On the opposite side of the room, a sagging couch faced a TV set. Lia flitted past the window, then vanished. A light went on in the next window to the left, but Raine couldn’t look in from this angle. A bedroom or bathroom? “Go back to the home for delinquents a minute. What was he in for?”

  “Beats me. Juvenile records are sealed. Sometimes they’re even erased, if you can obtain a pardon. Maybe if I fly up there…”

  “Yeah, right,” Raine teased. Trey would seize any excuse to fly. He owned a home-built ultralight, a glider, plus a WWII-vintage Cessna. “Maybe you should focus on getting me off to Borneo first?”

  “You’re reserved already, on a direct flight, three days from now, New York to Singapore,” Trey assured her. “And I’m working on connections from there to Kalimantan. There’s nothing direct to Pontianak City.”

  Two expeditious steps ahead of her as usual. “And a visa?”

  “Working on it. If there isn’t time to get it legal, anything’s obtainable over there with a bribe. You’re up to date on your tropical shots, of course. Tomorrow morning let’s plan your field kit.”

  “Oh-ho!” Raine interrupted, peering down the street. “Now here’s a development. Here comes Kincade, dressed to kill, and he’s carrying…yep…I’d say he’s brought the champagne.” She glared at the long paper bag tucked under the elbow of his conservative black dinner suit. “Damn the man! If this means he’s already sewn up the deal and now they’re celebrating—!”

  “Just as likely it means he’s trying to soften her up,” Trey consoled her, while she watched Cade vanish beyond the foyer. “Look, would it make any sense to send Ash in to negotiate with the kid, if the chemistry’s wrong between you two?”

  “Might work,” Raine muttered glumly. “He’s nearer her age than Kincade, and he’s certainly prettier.” Though Cade seemed by far the sexier. But then how could a sister judge? “If Ash could take time off and get here pronto…”

  But if her older brother outmaneuvered or outcharmed Kincade for the tooth, then it wouldn’t be her kill. And the way Ashaway All was structured, that mattered. The top moneymaker in the company each year commanded the most funds the following, to finance the expedition of his or her choice. “Let me think about it.

  “But for now…I’d better start paying attention,” she added as Lia passed the window, apparently hurrying to answer a knock at her door. Cade must have taken those stairs two at a time. “Talk t’you, Trey.” She tucked her phone in a pocket…as Lia flew backward into view, arms flailing, hair flying. The girl’s hip hit the corner of the desk—she clawed at the floor lamp and it toppled with her. The lightbulb flared and blew out.

  “Jeez!” Raine pressed her forehead to the glass as somebody followed the girl in a rush. Black clothes and big in the dusky room—Kincade, it had to be! “You bastard! Leave her alone!”

  As he swooped down on the girl, he vanished from sight. Then, limp as a broken doll, Lia was hoisted to her feet. Her body blocked Raine’s view of her attacker—all but those big hands gripping the girl’s naked arms—shaking her.

  Calling 911 would take too long. By the time the cops arrived—Raine spun, grabbed the brass banister, and took the first flight in two bounds. Go! Move! She wheeled around the landing, grabbed the rail and leaped again. Hang on, Lia, I’m coming!

  Another flight down: images cascading past in an adrenaline rush. Red-brown stains on a step; a broken window lit this landing; was this the third floor or still the fourth? And—oh God!—was that somebody climbing to meet her? “Coming through!” Raine yelled, as she hit the next landing, wheeled around it—

  To slam head-on into a bearded man with a bag of groceries. “Ooof! Sorry!” Cans rolled down the steps; a bottle smashed. “Excuse me! Emergency!” She ducked under his elbow, grabbed the rail again—a hand as big and rough as a pineapple clamped on her wrist. “Can’t…stop!” she panted, whirling back to face him.

  “Oh, yeah? Then who’s going to pay for all—”

  “I will! But later!”

  “Yeah, right, babe. Let’s see some money now.”

  “Le’go!” Her fingers found the nerve just above his funny bone. He roared and released her—then swung a backhand that would have decked her if it landed square. She swerved her head and it raked her cheekbone.

  That would hurt later, and plenty, but for now—Raine let the blow spin her the way she was going. She leaped, missed a can of tomatoes by an inch—kept on descending. His threats echoed down the stairwell behind her.

  Bursting out through the front doors, she vaulted the steps to the sidewalk, dodged between a row of empty garbage cans, staggered out into the street. Gulping for air, she looked up at Lia’s window.

  Its upper sash shivered as something dark pressed against it from within. A pane shattered. “No!” Throwing her hands up to shield her face, Raine shied out from under—and stumbled backward over a can. Her feet flew up, her head cracked against the curb.

  Flat on her back, she stared dazedly up. Beyond the dark rooftops, the sky was infinitely clear, a heart-piercing shade of lilac.

  Glass tinkled and chimed on the pavement, then…

  Whump!

  She’d never heard the sound before, but there was no mistaking it. Raine’s fingers crept toward each other…wove together…squeezed till they ached. A gull wheeled overhead, its wings flaming red-gold with the setting sun—it sheered away in a wide lovely turn and soared off toward the sea. Oh, Lia, I’m sorry!

  Raine rolled wearily to hands and knees. No hurry now. Somebody was screaming and pointing as she hung out a window of the next building down. The silly fool would fall herself, if she wasn’t careful. Onlookers came running to look, made gagging sounds, then scuttled away. Not the kind of neighborhood where people stayed to chat with the cops. Raine stumbled to her feet and limped over. No way could Lia have survived that drop, but still…

  She crouched beside the girl—less blood than she would have thought. Raine put two fingers to the pulse point in her neck.

  Nothing… Not a beat, not a flicker of hope. Just Lia’s unblinking eyes, staring blindly at forever. All that ambition and pride and drive and desire just…stopped. Poor little blue-handed dreamer. Raine hadn’t liked her, yet she’d had to admire her. The kid had been a fighter.

  And the man she’d fought? As the thought rammed home, Raine spun and looked up.

  To lock eyes with Kincade. Six lethal stories above, Lia’s killer leaned out the open window, gazing bleakly down. “You bastard!” Raine whispered, her hands clenched to fists.

  Echoing through the concrete canyons, a siren whooped louder and louder.

  Sometime around midnight, the police finished with Raine. She signed the typed transcript of her statement, then dragged herself to her feet. “There. May I go now?”

  Tipped back in his desk chair, Detective Henderson clasped his stubby hands behind his stubby neck. “Long as you’re sure you’ve got nothing else to tell me. You’re absolutely certain you didn’t take something offa the body?”

  “I told you. I checked her pulse—that’s all.” He’d grilled her on this point till she was ready to scream. What were they looking for?

  “If you say so. But if you happen to think of anything else…Something you forgot or left out or w
ant to change your mind about—”

  “There’s nothing else. That’s what I saw and how I saw it. Now when do you think you’ll make an arrest? It’s an open-and-shut case, isn’t it?” When he gave her a smirk and a patronizing shrug, she scowled and turned away. “G’night, Detective.” She headed for the door to the corridor, half expecting him to object.

  Instead he ambled behind to yell at a uniform who’d just emerged from the bathroom. “Jekyll. Lady here needs a ride.”

  She glanced back. “No, thanks. I’ll catch a cab.”

  Henderson snorted. “After midnight? You want to get mugged, do it on your own time. And not on my turf. Take her home, Jekyll.”

  Too tired to argue, Raine stalked out the front doors of the station, with Jekyll tagging at her heels. Several patrol cars were parked illegally along the curb. Behind the last of these stretched half a block of black limo.

  With a tall, too-familiar figure lounging against its glossy flank.

  “You!” Raine stopped short. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you.” In the harsh glare of a streetlight, Kincade’s face looked like a rough stretch of the Badlands. Shadows hooded his deep-set eyes; still they seemed to glow in their sockets like a hunting cat’s.

  She spun so fast that Jekyll retreated two steps. “Why isn’t this man in jail? For murder!”

  “Because I didn’t do it.” Cade opened the limo’s back door. “Let’s go.”

  “I mean it! He pushes a girl out a window and you let him walk?”

  “Umm, you’ll have t’ask Henderson,” mumbled the young officer, not meeting her eyes. “I just do what he tells me.” He jerked a thumb at a squad car. “So if you’d like that ride…”

  “I’ll save you the trouble. She’s headed my way.” Cade gestured at the limo’s interior. “Raine, if you want an explanation, get in.”

  “Like I’m going anywhere with you!” She glanced back at Jekyll. “I’ll take that ride, but hang on a minute. And keep an eye on me, will you?” She stalked to the rear of the limo, and as she’d expected, Kincade followed.

  She swung to confront him. “If you’ve anything you want to say to me, then say it now.” With a witness. Lia’s neck had been snapped before she was tossed out the window, Raine had heard one detective tell another. Her gaze swerved to his big hands—she flinched as one of them rose toward her throat.

  He touched her chin. “Where’d you get that?” Cade scowled at the bruise blossoming on her cheekbone. “Somebody hit you?”

  How could they have not arrested him? He certainly looked murderous enough at the moment. “It’s nothing.” Compared with what he’d done to Lia? “So why didn’t they throw you in jail? Fancy lawyer?”

  Cade crossed his arms and shrugged. “Only a fool talks to the cops without one.”

  “Money talks and bullshit walks—or rides home in a limo. Why did you do it? Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to buy the damned thing?”

  “When I got to her door it was locked,” Cade said heavily. “I could hear her screaming. Might have been curses, could have been pleading, who knows? It wasn’t English. And I heard a man laugh. Things were falling and smashing, clearly a fight going on. So I broke the door in.” He rubbed his left bicep reflectively. “That took a while. It wasn’t hollow core, and the locks were…well, what you’d want for this neighborhood. By the time I got through it, she was…gone.”

  He was smooth, she’d give him that, but Raine didn’t buy it. “And Lia’s mysterious attacker?”

  “Went out the kitchen window, which overlooks the fire escape on the side of the building. Screen was kicked out. Curtains still flapping.”

  “How convenient! And original! The Soddit defense—some other dude musta dunnit.” It would have taken Cade less than a minute to set that scene. “Well, thanks for nothing.” She started past him, then jolted to a halt as he caught her wrist.

  “Look, it’s late. If you’re afraid to ride with me, take my limo and I’ll catch a cab.”

  “Afraid!” With his fingers encircling her bones—overlapping them with inches to spare—she had a sudden, body-deep awareness of the contrast in their sizes. It sent a shock wave pulsing down her veins. With one twist he could shatter her wrist as easily as he’d snapped Lia’s neck. “It’s a question of taste.”

  “Have it your way.” He gave a rueful grimace and released her. “But before you go, Raine, one question.”

  “What?” she growled, backing away toward Jekyll.

  “When you searched her body, did you find her watch?”

  Chapter 10

  “Eight!” Raine exhaled as she lifted the weights sideways to shoulder height, then held them for a count of five. She inhaled as she lowered the ten-pound dumbbells in triple-slow motion. Sweat darkened the midline of her T-shirt, beaded on her brow. “Nine!”

  Balancing her workout with his own version of feline Zen, Otto sat on the counter that divided living room from galley kitchen. Eyes half-closed in ecstasy, the tom was eating one of the yellow roses Raine had found outside her door last night, with a thank-you card from Trenton.

  The football player had sent white and pink and salmon roses, as well—she’d lost count around fifty dozen. Raine had given all but this arrangement to Otto’s parents, James and Eric, one floor below. “Ten-and-you’re-going-to-be-sick,” she warned the cat, who naturally ignored her.

  Her cell phone rang as she started her eleventh rep. She growled and walked across to it with weights on high, brought them down, then answered, “Raine Ashaway. Hang on a sec. Twelve!” she said through her teeth, which completed her final set. “Yes?”

  “Me,” Trey announced. “I finally caught up with MacPherson.”

  Trey had a friend of a friend in the NYPD; Raine had expected no less. “What I mainly want to know is why they won’t arrest Kincade?” she said, moving the remains of her bouquet to a cat-proof shelf.

  “Well, for starters, their only witness said she never saw the killer’s face.”

  “I didn’t, but given the timing, who else could it have been?”

  “You told them that he climbed six flights of stairs in maybe three minutes.”

  “We were talking, remember? I wasn’t paying precise attention.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “I guess I said it seemed sort of fast.” But with the shape Kincade was in, he could have run six flights of stairs without breaking a sweat. “But I did tell ’em that Lia’s attacker was wearing black, the same color as Kincade’s suit.”

  “Last time I passed through the city, nine out of ten New Yorkers wore black. Place looks like a standing-room-only funeral.”

  “When was that?” she asked quickly. Trey steadfastly refused to say where he went on his vacations.

  “A while back,” he drawled with the barest hint of a smile in his voice.

  She rolled her eyes—then bent straight over, forehead to knees, stretching her hamstrings. “Still, if not Kincade, who else could they suspect?”

  “They like her roommate, Ravi Singh. Seems they picked up Lia’s other roomie, an Ivan Bogdanovich, who works nightshift at Bellevue Hospital. He wandered home to change to his uniform round about 9:00 p.m. and they grabbed him. He claims he ran across Singh in the corner bar at roughly seven-thirty.”

  According to Bogdanovich, Singh was crazy in love with Lia, but his affections were unrequited. The girl traded on his hopes without mercy. Yesterday Lia had taunted Ravi, telling him she had a date with a man who needed no green card—a rich and handsome American. “Bogdanovich says Ravi was stinking drunk when he met him. He figures, and the cops figure, that Ravi offed the girl, then went out the kitchen window and down the fire escape, when Kincade knocked at the door. They figure his binge last night was murderer’s remorse.”

  “What does Singh say?”

  “He’d left the bar by the time they hit it. Two uniforms staked out the apartment overnight, but he never showed. Which makes him look guiltier.”

  “Or
he’s guilty of nothing but bad taste in women. Lia snubbed him, so he drowned his hurt feelings in booze, then passed out somewhere and slept it off. They’ve got no more on him than on Kincade—less, since I can place Kincade at the scene of the crime. And Kincade had motivation—he wanted Lia’s tooth.”

  “’Fraid from the cops’ point of view, a jealous boyfriend seems a more likely killer than a millionaire. A millionaire whose thousand-dollar-per-hour defense lawyer is breathing down their necks.”

  “That’s so unfair. And if it was jealousy that killed Lia, then why would Singh steal the tooth? How do they explain that it’s missing?”

  “They don’t seem to be too worried about that. My guess is they’re having a problem wrapping their minds around a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth in the middle of their nice, normal case of domestic violence. If they do believe it really exists, then they’re thinking you’ve got no proof that she kept it in that apartment. Maybe she hid it at NYU, where she went to school? Or how about a safety deposit box?”

  “Or how ’bout Cade—Kincade—removed it?” Raine snapped, whipping upright. “He wanted it, he went for it, and—hey!—now it’s gone.”

  “And he stashed it where? If Kincade can pocket a ten-inch dino tooth without a bag or a bulge, I want to meet his tailor.”

  It took Raine a moment to wrap her mind around the concept of Trey in a suit instead of his usual T-shirt and faded jeans, then she said, “That’s easy. After he killed her, Kincade found the tooth and its box. He hid it someplace in the apartment, planning to collect it later, then he strolled downstairs just as the cops arrived.”

  “If there’s one thing the police know how to do, it’s how to search. And I understand they looked, so you can scratch that idea.”

  Raine wasn’t so sure; Cade wasn’t some burnt-out druggie hiding his stash in the freezer. The man had brains and imagination. Given a few minutes, he might have devised an unassailable cache. “Or-r-r, he took it with him, out of Lia’s apartment,” she said, thinking aloud. “He walked down a flight or two, knocked on somebody’s door, handed whoever answered the box, and wrote him or her a check for ten thousand dollars. He promised this person that if he’d meet Kincade tomorrow—i.e. this morning—somewhere, say at the arch in Washington Square, and bring the box with him—”