by Blake Banner
He nodded a few times, and just for a second his mask slipped and he looked worried. “In case it’s something the Bureau does needs to have a look at.”
I thought about it for a moment, then shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. If we are leveling with each other, the case is baffling, and we have considered a number of possibilities that are pretty ‘out there’, but for now I don’t think this is anything that need concern the Bureau.”
He nodded. “OK, but if you do come across anything that might, for example, affect national security, please contact me or Agent Brown directly.” He slid a card across the desk to Dehan, and Brown pulled a card from his wallet and handed it to me. “Any time of the night or day,” he said. “Be sure to call us.”
I glanced at Dehan, then nodded at Smith and Brown. “We’ll do that. Thanks for answering our questions.”
We stood, shook hands, and left.
Out on Broadway, we were assaulted by the heat and the avalanche of traffic and people and noise that flows eternally among those canyons of steel. We started walking toward the car and Dehan pulled out her cell and said, “That wasn’t their office and those weren’t their names.”
“I know.”
She went on talking as she dialed with her thumb. “They just wanted to find out if we’d found anything, and fob us off. They must think we’re stupid.”
I nodded.
She put the phone to her ear. “Yeah, get me the number for NBC Personnel…” She glanced at me. “Thirty Rock, Sensei.”
By the time we got there, we had the name of the producer of the show that Jane was working on, and she was happy to grant us ten quick minutes if we could get there right away. I wondered if ten quick minutes passed faster than ten slow minutes, but before I could give it much thought, we had arrived.
We found Elizabeth Anderson in a large, messy room, through a double door that had a plastic plaque on it that read Night of the Stalker. She was at the head of a table with seven writers sitting around it shouting ideas at each other. They went silent and turned to stare at us as we stepped in. We held up our badges. I said, “Elizabeth Anderson?”
She stood and pointed at a door over on one side. “Come into my office.” As we approached, she turned back to the table. “Gerry, run with the mass suicide idea. But is it a priest or priestess? Gimme ten.”
She pushed through the office door and we went in after her. She planted her ass on the edge of her desk and crossed her arms. She didn’t invite us to sit. “I’m on the clock. What can I do for you?”
I gave her my deadest expression, counted slowly to three, and said, “We’re on a homicide investigation. The clock can wait. Jane Harrison works with you?”
“Yeah. She’s in production. Is she in trouble?”
“What is the nature of her work, exactly?”
She sighed. “It’s technical. It’s hard to explain exactly.”
Dehan said, “In general terms that a dumb cop would understand.”
“She works with technicians, mainly IT guys, integrating special effects sequences into the main narrative of the story.”
I frowned. “So she’s in special effects?”
She shook her head. “No, no, it’s not like that anymore. Special effects are almost entirely computer-generated these days. What she does is work with the team that creates the special effects, and she then makes sure those sequences work in the overall context of the story.”
Dehan grunted. “But to do that she would need some kind of understanding of how special effects work.”
“Sure. And she has that. She’s been in the business for twenty years, and she started out in special effects before they became exclusively CGI.”
“And that would have been mainly horror, sci-fi…”
“Yeah, that kind of thing.”
“How come she’s not in today?”
“She phoned in sick.”
I frowned. “Does she do that often?”
“No. Never. It must be bad, she didn’t call in herself, got her friend to call.”
“What friend?”
Now she looked irritated. “What am I? Her mom? How should I know what friend? A friend. I guess she has friends!”
“Did you take the call?”
“Yeah, I took it. But I don’t know her friends. We work together.”
“Man or a woman?”
“A woman! Are we done now? Do I need to sack her or not?”
I shook my head. “You don’t need to sack her. Thanks for your help, and good luck with the mass suicide. I hope it works out for you.“
“Yeah, funny, man. Thanks.”
We rode the elevator down in silence and stepped out onto the Plaza. Dehan drew breath, but I held up my hand. People jostled past us. “The immediate, obvious thing is that either Jane killed Danny using the skills she learned working in special effects or Paul killed him using the techniques that he had gleaned from talking to his fiancée. They both had motive and opportunity, and possibly the means—at least in theory.”
She scowled at me. “That’s what I was going to say. Also, remember that Danny’s dad told us he had the impression Danny might be getting serious about somebody? If that somebody was Jane, it gives Paul an even more powerful motive. They argue in the car and Jane comes out with it. ‘I’ve been seeing him regularly for the last two weeks!’ You can imagine the scenario.”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and we started to stroll back toward the car. I chewed my lip. “I can and I can’t,” I said, unhelpfully. “I can also see a scenario where Danny and Jane have been getting serious and Danny tells her it has to stop because he feels bad about his ‘bro’ Paul. And I can also see a scenario where Jane comes on to him and he tells her he is getting serious about some woman we know nothing about.”
“True.”
“A woman who somehow reminds him of Dana Scully, a committed ufologist, a bit mysterious…”
We had reached the car and I walked around to the driver’s side and leaned on the roof. She leaned on the opposite side and smiled at me. It was a nice smile.
“We are missing something, Carmen. It’s driving me nuts. It’s buzzing around in my head. Something Paul said.” I opened the door. “Let’s go and see how ill Jane really is and why she took the day off work. Maybe it will come to me on the way.”
She climbed in after me and the doors slammed like two gunshots in the Plaza. She gave me an odd look. “You don’t believe she’s ill?”
I shook my head. “And I want to know who phoned for her.”
She frowned. “You think she’s done a runner?”
“Maybe. Let’s find out.”
FIFTEEN
As we cruised up Madison Avenue it dawned on me that we had never been to Jane’s house. I frowned and looked at Dehan. She had her elbow out the window and her hair all over her face. Two of me frowned back at me from her shades.
“Where does she live?”
“Castle Hill Avenue, across the creek from Donald Kirkpatrick.”
I narrowed my eyes, trying to visualize it. “Across the creek? To the east?”
She smiled. “Only way to get across that creek is by going east, Sensei.”
And then it began to dawn on me. My mind reached back, recalling what Paul had said. Dehan was watching me.
“What is it?”
“Paul. He said…” I chewed my lip, reaching for the words, trying to grasp them and hold them. “He said he drove Jane home…”
She nodded. “Yeah. He was a gentleman. He drove her there so…”
“No, no. How did he phrase it? He said…” I looked at her a moment, then at the long stream of traffic ahead. “He said it was the longest drive of his life…”
“Yeah, you’re right. I noticed that and I thought it was odd. Donald’s house to Jane’s is maybe a mile and a half.”
“But then he said something else. ”
She pushed her sunglasses up on her head, like a medieval visor, closed her eyes a
nd rested her head back, speaking like an android. “He laid it on the line for her. He told her she was a shallow, selfish bitch who used him and discarded him with no consideration for his feelings. Then he said she was willing to destroy him without pity, or compassion, just so she could have her little game with Danny. Then he told her to get out of his life.”
I nodded. “That’s right, then she got out of the car and he said she had the gall to run into the house crying. Then…” I looked at her and raised a finger. “Dehan, then you asked him what he did next and he said, verbatim, and I quote, ‘I continued on my way and went home…’ It could be a trivial detail, Dehan, but I think…”
I went quiet, running through the possibilities in my mind, seeing the sequence of events. Dehan watched me a while, shrugged and spread her hands. “What, for crying out loud?”
“They weren’t at Don’s house.”
“What are you talking about?”
“God!” I thumped the steering wheel. “I have been so stupid! Of course they weren’t at Don’s house!”
Dehan was shaking her head. “You lost me, Stone. Clue me in.”
“Wait!” I began to accelerate. After a moment, I said, “Paul told us he has always lived in the same neighborhood. All of them! They have all always lived in the same damned place. Paul lives at the western end of Seeward Avenue, near the top of Soundview Park, north and west of Don’s house. Jane lives in the opposite direction, south and west of Don, but only a half hour’s walk away. So why would Paul say, A, it was the longest drive of his life, and B, that he ‘continued on his way’? This, this is what has been bugging me. Something else he said: He said they packed up the camp and went back to Don’s place, and then, over breakfast, um…” I snapped my fingers, trying to remember. “‘…even over breakfast, all her conversation was for Danny. She was making comments about his van, kind of teasing him…’”
We were speeding over the bridge. She was shaking her head. “OK, it’s odd… but, so what? What does it mean?”
I looked at her. “They packed up the camp, on Macomb Mountain, then they had breakfast at Don’s? That’s got to be two hundred or two hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies. That has to be four or five hours’ drive.” I shook my head. “How could I be so stupid?”
“So…” She frowned. “So they have a cabin up there…?”
I nodded. “Yeah, they have a cabin up there.”
She was silent for ten minutes, staring through the windshield. Finally, she said, “This is important…?”
I nodded again and slowed to come off the Bruckner Boulevard. “If I am right, it blows the whole damned thing open.”
She pulled her shades over her eyes as I accelerated down Castle Hill toward the creek. The tires complained as I braked outside her house, spun the wheel, and pulled into her drive, blocking her garage door. As we climbed out, Dehan made a grimace at me. “Sensei, I confess, I don’t know what’s going on.”
I shook my head. “Later.”
I hammered on the door and rang the bell. There was silence inside the house. I tried to peer through the window, but the drapes were drawn. I turned to Dehan. “I’m going to cover the front. Take the path, have a look ’round the back. See if the kitchen door is open.”
She disappeared down the concrete path and I called Jane’s telephone, tried the bell again, hammered some more on the door. Nothing. After a couple of minutes, Dehan reappeared, shaking her head. “Kitchen door is locked, all the drapes are drawn. You want to tell me what’s on your mind?”
I chewed my lip at her. “We need to get inside.”
A woman’s voice called to us from the road.
“Can I help you?”
She was in her forties, in expensive jeans and a silk blouse. She had her shades on her head and her keys in her hand. Two doors up, I could see her SUV in a driveway with the trunk open. There were bags of shopping in the trunk and in the doorway.
“Are you a friend of Jane Harrison’s?”
She smiled, but it was more courteous than friendly. “Who are you?”
I showed her my badge. “I’m Detective John Stone. This is my partner, Detective Dehan. We urgently need to talk to Jane. Do you know where she is?”
She looked surprised.
Before she could answer I said, “Was it you who phoned her in sick at work?”
“I haven’t seen Jane since yesterday evening. She has a pretty chaotic schedule sometimes. I saw she was home and I came over. We had coffee and talked. She seemed fine.” She hesitated a moment. “She did say she’d been invited to some kind of reunion, but she wasn’t going to go.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind an alarm bell went off. “This could be very important, Ms…”
“Garrido, Olga Garrido.”
“What kind of reunion? Where? Anything you can remember…”
She looked distressed. “Oh, gosh! Um… She said it was old friends she hadn’t seen for a long time. She didn’t seem keen, said they were a bit weird. An old boyfriend. But it was like midweek and she had work, so she wasn’t going to go. I have a morning job. I’ve just got in…”
“OK, thank you, Ms. Garrido. Go back to your house.”
“Is she OK?”
“We’ll take care of this.”
She went back toward her SUV, glancing at us over her shoulder. I took my Swiss Army knife from my pocket and selected the small screwdriver, then examined the lock to see if it had been picked. It hadn’t, so I photographed it, then rammed the screwdriver in the keyhole, fiddled around for a bit till the lock gave, and eased open the door. I looked back at Dehan. She had her weapon in her hands. I called out, “Jane! This is Detectives Stone and Dehan!”
There was only the oppressive silence. I gestured with my head at the living room and moved toward the kitchen-diner at the back. As I inched my way in, I heard the living room door creak behind me. Soft light filtered through the drapes over the sink. The big, silver fridge was humming softly. There were no dirty plates, no pots or pans on the cooker. The dishwasher was open a few inches. It was empty. The pine table in the middle of the floor was clean. Apparently no dinner had been eaten, and no breakfast.
“Stone.”
I turned. Dehan was in the doorway, staring at me. Her skin looked gray. I felt a sudden, terrible sadness.
She said, “She’s in the living room. Brace yourself.” She pulled her cell from her pocket and dialed. “Yeah, Detective Dehan, we need a crime scene team and the ME. There’s been a homicide…”
It was shocking, in the most literal sense of the word. I stood in the doorway, looking at what was left of her, of a human being I had sat and spoken to, and for a moment the room seemed to rock. There was a ghastly unreality to the scene, and the smell was nauseating. It wasn’t the smell of decay, it was the overpowering iron stench of blood. There was a lot of blood.
From what I could see, there was a savage wound to her belly, which was where most of the blood seemed to have come from. Then, post mortem, her head had been severed in what looked like a clean cut. There was very little bleeding from that wound. It was impossible to see anything else.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned. Dehan was looking at me, she was wearing blue latex gloves, and held out a pair for me. I took them and pulled them on. “We’d better not go in there till the crime scene team have done their stuff.” I pulled the door closed. “The kitchen seems largely undisturbed.”
We climbed the stairs and made our way through the bedrooms and the bathroom. The only notable thing was that her bed seemed not to have been slept in. I leaned on the doorjamb while Dehan crossed the room and looked out the window at the street below. “The TV wasn’t on,” she said. “Unless the killer did the washing up, she didn’t have time to cook between Olga Garrido leaving after coffee and her killer arriving. That’s a pretty small window of opportunity.” She turned to face me. “Are you ever going to tell me what’s on your mind?”
I nodded. “Don’t forget she was
phoned in sick this morning.”
“Somebody who didn’t want her absence to raise suspicion.”
“Two gets you twenty it was the same person who invited her to the reunion. My guess is she was killed either late last night or early this morning. We need to know who invited her—and how. Was it by phone or by email, or post? I’m willing to bet this morning she either got a call asking if she was going, or somebody turned up at the door. The lock was not forced. She let them in. There was no sign of a struggle. The killing was swift and unexpected. She was standing in the living room, facing the door. She took whoever it was in there to talk, and was attacked suddenly, out of the blue, with a very sharp blade. The head was severed post mortem, once she was on the floor. It had hardly rolled at all.”
Dehan was nodding as I was talking. “You’re right. Last night there would have been people arriving back from work. In the morning, everybody is either delivering their kids to school or gone to work. If it was me, I’d call to make sure she was at home, if she was, ask her to stay. We need to talk, whatever, any excuse.” Far off, the sound of sirens stained the bright afternoon with blood. She said, “Motive?”
“Silencing a witness.”
She nodded. “Yeah. She sure as hell wasn’t shot with a ray gun.”
I turned and took the stairs three at a time as the patrol cars rolled up. The CSI team, the ME, and the ambulance were close behind them. I hailed the sergeant and she came toward me as I was talking.
“I am especially interested in whether the neighbors saw anybody visiting with the victim this morning or yesterday evening. You’ll probably find it was this morning. Make, model, and license plates of the car: Call my cell the minute you have them. Any of them.”
“You got it, Detective.”
I collared the ME as he was moving toward the door. “Frank, I have to go. I need to know what weapon was used. Best guess, estimate, intuition. I need to know half an hour ago. Call me or Dehan when you have formed an opinion.”