by Sharon Pape
Table of Contents
Introduction
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Introductions seem to be in order...
Even as Rory was jumping up from the couch, she was taking aim at the man in the chair. In spite of her trembling hands, she managed to keep him firmly in her sights. How could the shadowy product of her imagination actually exist in the harsh glare of the lamp? The bogeyman was never in the closet when you finally built up the courage to look. And the monster was never really under the bed, even if you were sure you could hear it breathing. So why hadn’t this shadow simply evaporated in the light, leaving her to laugh at her own foolishness? But there he was in her crosshairs, and what made it even worse, he seemed perfectly relaxed and comfortable in spite of her obvious advantage over him. In fact, she thought she detected a bit of a smile on his lips as if he were just fine with the way things were going.
Rory felt anger quickly overtaking shock. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded, her voice strong and steady even though her insides were quivering.
“Ezekiel Drummond,” he said, in a drawl that was a mixture of southern and something else she couldn’t immediately place. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”
“A police artist matches wits with the ghost of an Old West marshal as they work together to solve a double homicide, but it’s the chemistry between this modern woman and crusty cowboy that will draw readers in to Sketch Me If You Can. A spirited debut!”
—Cleo Coyle, national bestselling author of the Haunted Bookshop Mysteries
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
SKETCH ME IF YOU CAN
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / August 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Sharon Pape.
All rights reserved.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-18901-6
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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For Jason and Lauren,
children of my heart and soul,
this child of my mind.
Acknowledgments
A loving thank-you to my family for their help brainstorming plot issues.
Special thanks go to Vivian Sanzeri, dearest of friends. Your advice is always invaluable, your instincts always dead-on.
I’d also like to thank Suffolk County Detective John S. Majoribanks (Ret.) for kindly fielding my questions.
Any inaccuracies in the depiction of police procedure should be attributed solely to the author.
Prologue
It was over in less than three minutes. The intruders went about their work with the spare efficiency of professionals. The taller man held the flashlight at exactly the right angle while his shorter companion applied the cloth steeped in chloroform to the victim’s nose and mouth. He held it there just long enough to prevent the man from awakening and resisting their ministrations. Then he placed the cloth in a zippered plastic bag and withdrew a hypodermic needle. The taller man refocused the flashlight, synchronizing it to his partner’s needs as if they worked with one mind. No high-wire act was more practiced, more seamless in its performance.
To ensure that the puncture mark would be virtually undetectable, the shorter man dispensed the contents of the needle into the underside of the victim’s tongue. Then he placed all the evidence of their visit back into the small duffel bag on the floor between them. The taller man turned off the flashlight and picked up the duffel.
As the two drew back from the bed, the clock radio on the nightstand crashed to the floor, startling them. After a hurried discussion they decided that one of them must have stepped on the wire, pulling the radio down. They continued on to the bedroom door where they planned to watch the results of their handiwork. But as they waited for the next act to unfold, the security alarm started wailing. Both men had the same thought—the system had not been engaged when they’d picked the lock and entered the premises. Of course, it didn’t matter how the alarm had become activated. All that mattered was that they would have to leave before seeing the grand finale.
They were already making their way down the stairs when their victim bolted upright in bed. His breathing was shallow and labored, his eyes wide with terror. He clutched at his chest with one hand and with the other grabbed frantically for the telephone on the nightstand. He managed to punch in 911 before losing consciousness. In the darkness of the room, he never saw the darker shape standing at the foot of the bed.
Chapter 1
It was six o’clock by the time Rory finished with the elderly couple who’d come into Suffolk C
ounty Police Headquarters to report the theft of the woman’s purse. Rory should have been able to produce a reason-purse. Rory should have been able to produce a reasonable likeness of the thief in fifteen minutes, tops. Unfortunately, though, they weren’t able to agree on any of the details, from the length of the man’s hair, to the shape of his eyes, to the pattern of his shirt and endlessly on down to the type of shoes he was wearing. By the time she’d ushered them out the door, almost two hours had passed.
She made a few final adjustments to the sketch and dropped it off with Detective Leah Russell, who agreed to distribute it in-house and fax it to the other precincts. Then Rory dug her purse out of the deep lower drawer of her desk and grabbed her linen blazer off the back of her chair. On her way out, she took a minute to stop in the ladies’ room and freshen up for her meeting with Lou Friedlander, Mac’s attorney.
When she checked her image in the mirror, she was grateful that her hairdresser had talked her into going short so that her auburn hair framed her face and required little effort to maintain. There was no need to fix her makeup since she didn’t wear any. The hazel eyes that peered back at her were wide and canted up ever so slightly at the outer edges, a narrow, black line ringing the irises like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. At twenty-eight the only distinguishing mark on her face was the single dimple that notched into one side of her mouth when she smiled. The asymmetry gave her a disarmingly unfinished look, as if she’d been snatched away a moment too soon from the gifted artist who had created her. In Rory’s opinion, it just made her smile appear lopsided.
She splashed some cold water onto her cheeks, blotted it off with a piece of paper towel from the dispenser and headed for the door. If rush-hour traffic wasn’t too bad on the Long Island Expressway and no eighteen-wheelers had jackknifed from going seventy miles an hour two feet from the car ahead of them, she might still make the six thirty appointment.
The one benefit of having spent the last two hours trying to wrest a description from the elderly couple was that Rory hadn’t been able to dwell on the reason why she was going to see the attorney. Her uncle Mac’s death a week ago had been so sudden that even now it didn’t seem entirely real. One moment life was clicking along at its normal, often tedious pace, and the next, without any warning, the world dropped out of its orbit and started freefalling through space. How could a heart just stop? Shouldn’t there be a pain, an ache, a skipped beat necessitating tests, worried phone calls between family members, conferences with specialists, anxious decisions about the best course of action to take? Shouldn’t there be time for prayers? Time to say good-bye? A heart pumps for fifty-two years as reliably as the sun rises and sets, and then one day it just stops?
Uncle Mac had been so much more than her father’s brother and her favorite uncle. He’d been her friend, her mentor, her ice skating buddy, her sand-castle-building engineer, her partner in crime who would come to babysit and take her out to have a banana split at ten o’clock at night. He’d always seemed so much younger than her parents, although there were only five years between him and her dad. Somehow he lived bigger, acted younger.
Once, after she and Mac had been busted returning home too late from one of their ice cream forays, her parents banned him from babysitting for a month. Mac had suffered his punishment with quiet equanimity, promising Rory that he’d plan a special day for their reunion. But for six-year-old Rory, it was the longest month of her life.
Lost in her memories, Rory missed the entrance into the parking lot of the brick colonial building on Commack Road. Surprised to find herself there already, she made a quick U-turn at the next light and backtracked. As she pulled into a parking spot, the digital clock on the dashboard of the Honda indicated that she had two minutes to spare.
She locked the car and drew in a deep breath to steady herself as she marched into the building. Her stomach was clenched with the kind of tension that reminded her of trips to the dentist when she was a child. She’d already postponed this meeting twice, pleading first a migraine and then job-related issues. Friedlander had rescheduled without complaint, simply reiterating that he needed only fifteen minutes of her time. He had no idea just how much she was dreading those fifteen minutes.
She found Jacobs, Milo and Friedlander listed in the directory in the lobby and took the elevator up to the second floor of the three-story building. At forty-eight, Lou Friedlander was the youngest of the three partners in the small firm, which was not to say that he was young by Rory’s standards.
When she entered the office suite, there was no one at the reception desk. She was about to show herself down the carpeted hallway to the left in search of Friedlander when a man emerged from one of the half dozen doors that marked its length. He was short and stocky with a manicured mustache and goatee that Rory figured was an attempt to compensate for his receding hairline. He had his suit jacket on, but his shirt collar was open with no tie, a concession to either the warm weather or the lateness of the hour. Not that the informality bothered Rory, who considered most of society’s rules outdated and often as ridiculous as the pillory and stockades. It was just an observation, a noting of details. She supposed it was the artist in her that subconsciously processed every angle and nuance, every hue and shadow.
When she’d been struggling to select her college major, Mac had pointed out that her attention to detail would serve her well if she chose to follow in his footsteps as a private detective. But while Mac’s work intrigued Rory, she’d wanted to incorporate art into her career. She’d finally settled on a major in criminology, with a minor in portrait art. For the first few years after college she’d been happy enough working as a sketch artist for the Suffolk County Police Department, but lately she was finding it harder and harder to muster up the enthusiasm to crawl out of bed in the morning.
“Lou Freidlander,” the man said, extending his hand as he came up to her. “You must be Aurora McCain. I would have known you anywhere.” His voice was appropriately solemn, but his lips curved up in a small, sympathetic smile within the framework of his beard. “I’m so very sorry for your loss.” His hand squeezed hers for emphasis before he let it go.
She nodded her thanks. “Please call me Rory.”
“Yes, of course,” Friedlander said as he ushered her into his office. “I should have remembered that.”
A large oak desk was the centerpiece of the office, its surface awash in paper, a computer monitor rising out of the chaos like a lighthouse rising above a stormy sea. There was a contoured, leather chair behind the desk and two smaller chairs in front of it. A credenza, also in oak, ran the length of the window, and several wooden filing cabinets occupied the far side of the room.
“Please, have a seat,” he said. “Can I get you some coffee? I can make it iced if you like.”
“No thanks, I’m fine,” Rory said, sitting on the edge of the closest chair. The last thing she wanted was to prolong her time there.
“If you change your mind, it’ll only take a minute.”
She forced a smile, wondering if her desperation to leave was that clearly written on her face.
“We’ve actually met before, you know,” Friedlander said as he took his seat behind the desk. “At a housewarming Mac had years ago when he bought his first house, that little Cape Cod. You couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at the time. Of course, I don’t expect that you’d remember me. I was just another grownup in a house full of them. But even back then you made it clear to everyone that you hated being called Aurora.”
Rory had refused to answer to “Aurora” by the time she was enrolled in nursery school. “Rory” suited her just fine. That, and of course “L’il Mac,” which her parents had dubbed her because she was always trying to emulate her uncle whom they’d long referred to as “Big Mac.” Not only was he three inches taller than his brother, but he also had a serious addiction to fast food, the greasier the better.
“In fact,” Friedlander was saying, “looking at you now,
I can still see that fiery little redhead with the freckled nose pocketing a handful of cookies after her mom said she couldn’t have anymore.”
“I actually remember that party.” Rory felt her face relax into a smile at the memory. “Those peanut butter chocolate chip cookies were my favorite. That’s why Uncle Mac ordered them.”
“He was crazy about you,” Friedlander said with a little sigh. “I’m sure you know that he thought of you more like a daughter than a niece.”
Her smile faded. “It was mutual,” she murmured. She looked down at her watch. She didn’t need to be anywhere else, but she needed to leave this office before she dissolved into a sobbing mess.
Friedlander noted her discomfort. “I’m sorry,” he said in his back-to-business voice. “I know I promised to have you out of here in fifteen minutes and I will.”
Rory nodded her thanks, not trusting herself to speak around the knot still lodged in her throat.
The attorney sifted through the piles of documents on his desk until he found the one he was looking for. He pulled it out, creating a small avalanche in the process. “As I told you over the phone, Mac’s will is very simple. He didn’t leave a huge estate, but what he had he left to you. He also named you executor. Are your folks likely to contest it?”
“No, no, they’re just pleased for me.”
“Good. Mac was sure that it wouldn’t be a problem, but I had to ask. You understand. There’s really no need for me to read the will to you. This is a copy that you can have for your records.” He leaned across the desk to hand Rory the two pages that constituted Mac’s “Last Will and Testament.” The words were formal and final, devoid of emotion. Rory wasn’t sure what she had expected. Maybe something more colorful and Mac-like: “Laugh, love, enjoy life. Hope this helps.”