1 Through a Glass, Deadly

by Sarah Atwell

  “Ms. Dowell?” Detective Sanchez prodded politely.

  “What? Oh, right, disturbance. Um.” I looked around. Everything looked pretty much as I had left it, on first glance. But . . . when I looked more closely, I realized that a lot of the pieces on the shelves had been overturned. Not smashed, just upended. That was odd. “Looks like somebody moved some of the glass pieces—they’re not where they were.”

  Sanchez looked around at the forest of varied glass objects on the shelves, and I could see him shrug his shoulders mentally. I couldn’t blame him. It would have made sense if there had been a struggle and the pieces had been hurled to the floor, but to rearrange them? In the dark, in a hurry? With a roasting body nearby? Not logical. He gestured toward one of the forensic crew. “Get fingerprints, will you?”

  Then, abruptly, attention shifted to the back door, where yet another officer was holding a struggling woman by the arm.

  I stepped quickly past Sanchez. “Allison? What are you doing here?” I glared at the officer holding her arm, but he didn’t let go.

  Her answer came in half sobs. “I came back for my bike—there was a call on my phone when I got back—I have to take the early shift at the restaurant tomorrow, and I needed to get the bike so I could get there in time. I was going to call you in the morning. . . .” Her sentences tumbled out and ran together, but her eyes were glued to the body on the floor.

  Sanchez spoke sharply to the officer hanging on to Allison’s arm. “You can let her go, Orvis. Why’d you grab her?”

  “She was sneaking around in the alley, in back.”

  I protested quickly, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Officer. She left her bike here earlier tonight when we had dinner, and I drove her home. She was probably just trying to be quiet, so she wouldn’t disturb me.” I moved to Allison’s side—she’d been spooked enough before this, and I shuddered to think what impact a murder investigation would have on her frayed nerves. “Come on, Allison—you don’t have to look at this.”

  I took her arm and tried to pull her away, but she was staring at the body and didn’t budge. I wondered if she was having some sort of meltdown. She was even whiter than she had been at Elena’s earlier, which I would have said was impossible.

  Then she spoke. “Who is that man?” Her voice came out as an eerie whisper.

  “We don’t know yet. I just found him a little while ago. Come on, Allison, you don’t have to look at it.”

  “I do.” Strangely, she was calmer than before. “I think it’s my husband.”

  That shut everyone up for a moment. “Why do you think that, ma’am?” Sanchez asked finally.

  She looked slowly up at his face. “May I see him?”

  Sanchez stepped between her and the corpse. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. His face has been . . . damaged.” I admired his tact. “Is there anything else that might identify him?”

  “He’d be wearing a wedding ring.” Her flat voice was beginning to get on my nerves.

  Sanchez looked at one of the officers, who didn’t look happy. When I looked at the body, I realized the hands were burnt too, although not as badly as the head. Oblivious, Allison went on, “It’s a gold claddagh, and inside there’s an inscription, A.M. to J.F.”

  Sanchez nodded, and the officer pulled on a pair of latex gloves. With a grimace he bent down and picked up what remained of the left hand. Still kneeling, he looked back at Sanchez and nodded again. “Can you get it off?” Sanchez asked.

  The officer bent to his task, and the ring came off with surprising ease. Or maybe it wasn’t surprising, given how little was left of the fingers. I racked my brain, trying to remember the melting point of gold—way back in art school I had taken a jewelry-making class, and I thought it was somewhere around 2,000 degrees. So if the gold hadn’t melted, the hand hadn’t been in the furnace for very long. Had the killer or killers tried to obliterate the man’s fingerprints? I was beginning to feel sick again. The kneeling officer looked inside the ring, then back at Sanchez and nodded.

  Sanchez turned to Allison. “Who is he?”

  “John Francis Flannery. Jack.”

  Then she gave me a triumphant smile—and crumpled to a heap on the floor.

  Chapter 4

  thermal shock: a temperature differentiation within a piece of glass which causes it to check, crack, or possibly explode (Edward T. Schmid, Beginning Glassblowing)

  It was a good thing Detective Sanchez had fast reflexes, because he grabbed her before her head hit the floor. But then he found himself with an armload of inert woman and no idea what to do with her, so he laid her down gingerly. I moved quickly across the room, swatting away another officer’s restraining hand, and knelt by Allison. She was already coming around, blinking uncertainly.

  “Allison, don’t try to move.”

  She shook her head and struggled feebly. “What happened? Oh, dear, I’m sorry—I must have . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it—it must have been a shock, seeing . . . Jack like that.”

  Her recollection came swiftly, and I watched for signs of tears. There were none. “Ah. It was. I haven’t seen him in, oh, must be two years now—until tonight.”

  “You mean earlier?” I wasn’t sure the police clustered around us needed to know all the details, so I tried to be cryptic.

  Allison was alert enough to get my drift. “That’s right.”

  Detective Sanchez was getting impatient. “Are you all right, ma’am? Do you think you can stand?”

  Allison gathered herself up and struggled to her feet, Sanchez’s hand on her arm. She laughed shakily. “I’m fine, I think. I don’t mean to be a bother.”

  There was an awkward pause, and I could almost see Sanchez running through his checklist. Allison was not harmed: move to square two. Allison knew the dead man: must interrogate her. When he spoke, he confirmed my guess. “If you need to see a doctor, we can have one meet us at the station.”

  Allison seemed to shrink into herself. “Station?” she whispered.

  “Yes, ma’am. We’ll need to get your story about what happened here tonight, since you know the, uh, victim.”

  “But I don’t know anything. . . .” Allison shot a panicky glance at me.

  “Detective Sanchez, are you arresting this woman?” I demanded.

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. But we’ll need to get a statement from her.”

  “Isn’t tomorrow time enough? And why can’t you do it here?”

  Sanchez gave me an enigmatic look. “This is a murder investigation, ma’am. It’s best we deal with it quickly, and we have better facilities at the station. And I’m sure you’ll want us to clear the crime scene here?”

  Damn. I had forgotten about that. I tried to remember what I had scheduled for tomorrow. “Will that take long?”

  “That depends. It will take our crime-scene crew some time to go over the premises. It could take a day or two.”

  Great. “I did mention that I have students tramping through here all the time? And that they handle everything?” I didn’t envy them having to take fingerprints from every shiny surface in the room—there were plenty. And I wasn’t even sure if the furnace would take fingerprints. And—damn again—would they want me to shut it down? But given what had happened, whatever glass remained in the crucible inside would no doubt be contaminated. I knew I wouldn’t want to use it. I sighed. “Do you want me to shut down the furnace, Officer?”

  Detective Sanchez pondered that for a moment. He had to see that no one could find any evidence in or on the furnace if it was going full blast. Finally he said, “Can you do that without touching anything else?”

  “Sure.” I walked over to the furnace, carefully avoiding the body on the floor, and pointed. “I just need to turn this. Okay?” He nodded, and I shut it down. “But it’s going to take quite a while to cool, you know.”

  “How long?”

  “Several hours, before your people can actually touch it.”

  He nodded again.
“I’ll tell the guys. Or, no, wait.” He turned to Mendoza and Johnson, who were still hovering. “You two, wait here while the ME and the crime team do their stuff, and I’ll escort Mrs. . . .” He turned to Allison. “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  Allison hesitated, which made me wonder just how many names she had—and why. “Allison McBride.”

  Sanchez’s expression tightened. “I thought you said the victim’s name was Flannery.”

  Allison nodded. “It is. Was. But McBride was my maiden name, and I’ve taken it back.”

  “Ah.” Sanchez scribbled a note in his pocket notebook. “Well, Ms. McBride, let’s go to the station and get this over with.”

  Allison’s look of pure panic spurred me into action. “I’ll come with you, Allison,” I volunteered.

  “Are you a relative? Or a lawyer?” Sanchez’s stare was not encouraging.

  “No, Detective, I’m a friend.” I didn’t think that was too much of an exaggeration. “But obviously I have a stake in what’s happened here.”

  “Then you should stay here in case the forensic team needs something.”

  We glared at each other for a few seconds. Damn him, he was right—I couldn’t exactly walk away from my shop and let the police trample through everything. But I couldn’t abandon Allison to the cold interrogation of strangers—she looked so fragile, and she’d just seen the body of a man she had been married to. Unfortunately I had to listen to my head rather than my heart. “I’ll hang around as long as they do, but after that I’m coming to the station. Allison, you don’t have to talk to them unless you want to. They aren’t charging you with anything. Are you?”

  “Not at this time, ma’am. We just need to get her statement. You don’t need to involve yourself.”

  “Detective, I am already involved. This is my shop, and Allison is my friend. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Any further argument from Detective Sanchez was cut short by the arrival of the medical examiner at the back door. Sanchez exchanged some inaudible words with him then pointed toward me. When he approached, I launched into my explanation once again, and by the time I looked up, Sanchez had disappeared with Allison. With renewed focus, I carefully explained for the third time exactly how the furnace worked and how we made glass in the studio. The technicians weren’t happy when they realized they had to wait while the crime scene cooled, and that wasn’t going to happen fast. The ME poked and prodded the corpse, and I caught the flash of a camera as I deliberately avoided looking at what remained of Mr. Flannery. Instead I walked around the perimeter, checking to see if anything else had been tampered with. The annealer was still cooling on schedule—surely no one would want to look inside? The student pieces arrayed on the shelves were jumbled but unharmed. My tools were all exactly where I’d left them. The only thing out of place was Jack Flannery, and I felt a sense of relief when the ME finally zipped him into a bag, hoisted him onto a gurney, and shuffled him out the back door.

  I checked my watch. Nearly an hour had passed since Sanchez had spirited Allison off to the clink. And Gloria and Fred had been cooped up in the shop, whining—my subconscious mind had registered their frustration while I dealt with police and a corpse. It was close to three o’clock in the morning, and I had some decisions to make.

  I surveyed the crowd scrabbling around my studio. Mendoza and Johnson were still there, trying to look busy but failing. I walked over to them. “Hey, guys, are you going to stick around?”

  “We’re observing the investigation, ma’am.”

  And doing a grand job of it, I thought. “Can I trust you to keep an eye on the place? I really need to go over to the police station. I promise I won’t be long.”

  They exchanged wary glances. I tried to smile appealingly, which was not easy at this time of night. Maybe I’d have to settle for motherly. Finally Officer Johnson said, “Looks like we’ll be here a couple more hours, ma’am.”

  I took that as a “yes.” “Thanks, guys. And I’m going to take the dogs along with me, all right? I don’t think they have much to say about what they saw.” A feeble joke, but the best I could do under the circumstances. Before they could change their minds, I went through the door into the shop—blessedly untouched and serene. Fred and Gloria bounded around my ankles, commenting vigorously on what they had seen—or rather, heard and smelled, since they were too short to observe all the activity. “Come on, babies—I’ll give you a quick walk, and then we have to go rescue Allison.”

  As I hunted down leashes and struggled to get out the front door without tripping over an excited dog, I wondered just why I had chosen that word. Did Allison need rescuing? From the first time I had seen her, I had sensed that she was hiding something, but I had no clue what. Still, I couldn’t see her involved in anything illegal or violent. And she was a stranger in town, and I knew what that felt like. She was alone at the police station, surrounded by large men (well, mostly) who suspected her of who knows what, and I was going to be there to see that she got a fair hearing. And to find out just what the heck was going on. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Allison’s husband had shown up in my furnace just a few days after I had met Allison. But what was he doing in Tucson? For that matter, what was she?

  I gave the dogs a quick run around the block, mostly to burn off their excess energy. I had little to spare. But even they were distracted, stopping to sniff but losing interest quickly. Finally I gave up and returned to my car in the alley behind the studio. I loaded the dogs in and drove through the silent night streets to the police station.

  I knew the way well. Not because I have a long criminal record, but because I knew one of the policemen who worked there. Very well. But I hadn’t seen him since I’d broken off with him two—no, three—years earlier. Still, it couldn’t hurt to have a friend in high places. At least, I thought he was still a friend. I hoped.

  At the station I parked in the near-empty visitors’ lot, and the dogs hopped out, eager to explore. I untangled their leashes and headed for the main entrance, hoping that it would be a slow night. Inside, the desk sergeant was no one I recognized, and he looked with clear disapproval at the dogs.

  I smiled. “Can you tell me where to find Allison McBride, please?”

  Was it my imagination, or did his expression change just slightly at the mention of her name? He hesitated for a moment, then picked up the phone. But he turned away from me when he spoke, so I couldn’t hear what he said. Whatever it was, it didn’t take long. He swivelled his chair back in my direction and said curtly, “Wait here.” Then he turned his attention back to a stack of papers on his desk.

  I felt a tiny prickle of alarm. What was going on? I was too keyed up to sit meekly and wait, so the dogs and I explored the perimeter of the waiting area, once, twice. Fred and Gloria were happy: There must be any number of new and interesting smells here. I was less happy as the waiting time dragged on and my anxiety grew. Surely the desk sergeant could have given me a simple answer? Or told me I couldn’t see her and to come back some other time?

  My ruminations were interrupted by a hand on my upper arm. I flinched and spun rapidly, but even as I did, my mind processed the meaning of the hand: had to be someone I knew, because who else would lay hands on a woman—guarded by two ferocious dogs!—in a police station? And who did I know in a police station? And why weren’t the dogs gnawing on his ankles? By the time I had pivoted 180 degrees, I knew enough to look up to meet the sky blue eyes of the chief of police, Matthew Lundgren. “Matt,” I said with what I thought was admirable restraint.

  “Em.” Matt nodded in return. “You’re looking for Allison McBride?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Why are you involved in this?”

  Instead of answering, he released my arm and said, “Come with me.”

  I followed. So did the dogs, since Matt hadn’t said they couldn’t. I wondered just what it would take to bring the chief of police to the station in the middle of the night to deal with a dead body and Allison McBride. Or
was it because I was involved? But that seemed unlikely, since we hadn’t been an item for a couple of years. Besides, I wasn’t under suspicion of anything, as far as I knew. Allison was the one in custody, or whatever they wanted to call it.

  Matt led me to a small interrogation room down a hallway and closed the door after us. “Sit.” He gestured toward a chair. Matt didn’t waste words. I sat.

  He sat opposite me. “How are you, Em?”

  “I’m fine, Matt, except for the corpse in my studio.”

  “John Flannery.”

  “So I’m told.” I could be cryptic too. What did he want with me?

  “How well do you know Allison McBride?”

  “I’ve known her about three days. If you’re asking if she could have killed John Flannery, I’d say, no way.”

  “Based on three days’ acquaintance?”

  Was he mocking me? “Have you seen the woman? Can you imagine her wrestling with a guy and stuffing him into a furnace and holding him there until he was dead? Come on, Matt—what’s going on here?”

  He sat back and sighed. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. When we checked out John Flannery in the system, all sorts of flags popped up. And then I get this call from the FBI, a guy named Warren Price. Says to sit tight and wait for him to show up.”

  I tried to process that information and came up blank. “Why on earth is the FBI involved?”

  “I have no idea, and Agent Price declined to share that information.” Matt’s elaborate language signaled that he was annoyed.

  “Did you tell him about Allison?”

  He almost smiled. “No, he didn’t give me the opportunity.”

  I laid my hands on the table squarely. “Matt, do you honestly believe that Allison killed her husband?”

  “No, I don’t. But she knows something that she’s not telling.”

  “Is she in custody?”

  He shook his head. “No. We just wanted to talk to her.”

  I stood up abruptly. “Matt, the poor woman’s just found the charred body of her husband, and all but passed out. It’s the middle of the night, and you’ve stuck her in a room somewhere to stew, not knowing what you think or suspect. And you’re just going to throw her to this FBI goon when he shows up? What’re you thinking? I want to see her—now!”