Coached to Death

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Coached to Death Page 19

by Victoria Laurie


  It was Shepherd’s turn to look hurt. After chewing on the inside of his cheek for a minute, he said, “That’s probably fair.”

  I crossed my arms. I felt a tiny bit bad for having said that, but I wasn’t about to apologize. The man was insufferable.

  “My ex-wife used to tell me I was the reason we never got invited to parties in this town. And I’m pretty sure that’s why she left me. I think she got tired of being lonely.”

  I sighed as my anger dissipated. Damn him. Why’d he have to play the pathetic divorcé card? “My ex-husband blamed me for the divorce too. He said that I worked too much.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. But now that I’ve had time to think about it, I don’t agree with him that that’s why we split. I think that we split up because we stopped connecting. We stopped being friends. We didn’t so much fall out of love with each other as we fell out of like.”

  “Huh,” Shepherd said. “Yeah. I know exactly what you’re saying.”

  “It doesn’t mean that your ex didn’t have a point, though. You should try to be nicer. It might get you further in life.”

  “Homicide detectives aren’t supposed to be nice, Catherine. We’re supposed to get results.”

  “Why are those two things mutually exclusive?”

  “Because people lie.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t lie?”

  “Nope. Not if I can avoid it.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m serious. Go ahead, ask me something. Anything. I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “Was that your drone the other day?”

  I smiled. “No. It wasn’t.” And that was the truth.

  Shepherd narrowed his eyes. “Whose drone was it?”

  “A friend’s,” I admitted. No way was I going to tell him it was Gilley’s, and without that part of the confession, I doubted he could arrest anyone.

  “Okay,” he said, and I was surprised that he was willing to leave it at that. “Now can we talk about what you saw today?”

  “You mean when Kuznetsov came running out of the church?”

  “Yes.”

  I told him everything I could think of about the encounter while he took notes. At the end of my speech, he looked over his notepad and said, “You say that you thought she recognized you. How would she know you?”

  “From the party. She opened the door when I got to Heather’s and made me walk around to the back to bring in the punch.”

  “Did you talk to her at the party?”

  “No. Not really. She simply asked me if I’d followed the recipe for the punch, and I said I had, and she asked me if the punch had alcohol in it, and I told her no, and then she taste-tested it to be sure, which I found incredibly insulting, and after that she instructed me to carry the punch out to the party. I never spoke to her again after that.”

  “Why was she so worried about the punch being spiked?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe because it was just about the only refreshment available for the guests who don’t drink. Like your sister; she had some punch and can vouch for me.”

  Shepherd seemed taken aback. “Sunny?”

  “Yes. She asked about the punch too—it being spiked, I mean—and because I’d made it with Gilley’s help, I knew it was safe for her to drink.”

  “Got it. I’ll follow up with her just to close the loop. Now, let’s go back to the church; did you see anyone else come out of the church with Ms. Kuznetsov?”

  “Well, not with Ms. Kuznetsov, but after her a woman did come out.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get her name?”

  “No, but I did talk to her.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I asked her if she’d seen the woman who’d run out of church ahead of her, and she claimed that she hadn’t. Her mother is having surgery or something, so she was inside praying.”

  “Who let her into the church?”

  “Um, I think she was there for the sermon at eleven.”

  “What sermon at eleven?”

  “The sermon that Father Stephan gave,” I said.

  “You mean the dead priest?”

  My jaw dropped. “What? No! Father Stephan came back from his lunch, and he alerted you to the body, Detective.”

  “No, that was Father John. Father Stephan was at the church and alive up until about eleven a.m., we think.”

  “That can’t be right,” I insisted. “The woman who came out of the church, she said that she saw Father Stephan leave for lunch.”

  “He never left for lunch, Catherine. He never left the confessional.”

  I shook my head, trying to sort it all out. “Maybe she was mistaken then,” I said. “Maybe she saw Father John and thought he was Father Stephan.”

  “No,” Shepherd said again. “Father John was coming back from his mother’s house, where he’d spent the night. He hadn’t been at the church since yesterday, and he was going there to relieve Father Stephan.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to talk to the woman then to get a clear answer.”

  “But you don’t know who she is, right?”

  “I’ve no clue.”

  “And we’re supposed to get in touch with her how?”

  “With her fashion sense, it shouldn’t be hard. The woman stood out like a sore thumb.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that she was dressed in the most god-awful retro outfit. It practically screamed ‘Notice me!’ And anyone who wears something like that to church probably dresses like that all the time. I’m sure if you tell Father John you’re looking for a woman who dresses like she’s stepped out of the sixties, he’ll be able to tell you exactly who she . . . Detective? What’s wrong?”

  While I’d been speaking, Shepherd’s face had noticeably paled. “Catherine, I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to be as detailed as you can be with your answer, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “What did this woman look like, exactly. And by exactly, I mean, I want you to close your eyes, picture her face, and tell me what you see.”

  “You want me to . . . what?”

  “Please,” he said. His tone was a touch sharp, and I got goose bumps at the sudden shift of his energy. “I need the details of her person, not what she was wearing.”

  Closing my eyes, I called up the image that I had for her. “She had brown hair.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know; it was pulled back and up in this beehive chignon.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Think Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

  “Got it. What else?”

  “Well, she had . . . ,” I paused. What else could I recall? My mind easily remembered the hair, the sunglasses, the beads at her neck, the dress and the shoes, but as for the details of her face . . . I couldn’t seem to pull them up in my mind’s eye.

  As I continued to struggle with a description, Shepherd tried to help me out. “Was she white?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pale? Or darker-toned skin?”

  “Kind of in between,” I said, but I wasn’t sure. How could I not be sure?

  “What color were her eyes?”

  “She was wearing sunglasses. Jackie O’s. They were big frames.”

  “Okay, can you describe her nose? Her mouth? Her chin?”

  “Um . . .” I bit my lip. Those details weren’t clear to me anymore because all I could see in my mind were the iconic things she’d been wearing.

  “You can’t picture them, can you?” Shepherd said.

  I opened my eyes. “No. Every time I try to fill in what she looked like, I keep picturing only what she was wearing. But how did you know?”

  “Because she’s an assassin.”

  I laughed. I truly thought he was kidding.

  “I’m not joking,” he said, and I quickly fell silent again. “She’s an assass
in, Catherine, and honestly, I’m surprised you’re alive.”

  It was my turn to grow pale. “Are you serious?”

  “Yep. This woman has hit this area three times. The first person we suspect she murdered was Tony Holland, Heather’s husband. The witness who found the body said he saw a woman walking away from the bridge, wearing a blue and white dress with white go-go boots and big sunglasses. He said he noticed her because of how loudly she was dressed, but when he sat with a sketch artist, he couldn’t remember any of the details of her face, and when I asked him how tall she was and what her build was all he could say was ‘average.’”

  “But how do you know this woman is an assassin?” I asked. “I mean, couldn’t it just be a case of her being at the wrong place at the wrong time? Isn’t it more likely that Ms. Kuznetsov killed the priest?”

  Shepherd scratched at his chin, where a five-o’clock shadow had formed. “A year ago, a prominent realtor was murdered during an open house she was hosting here in town. A couple, who were on their way inside for the open house passed a woman leaving the scene, wearing those Jackie O’s—on a rainy day—and they also described her as wearing a bright neon-green raincoat with an orange scarf and a yellow dress topped off with white go-go boots.

  “Just like you and my other witness, they also didn’t remember anything significant about the woman’s facial characteristics other than that she had light brown hair. Or maybe dark blond. They weren’t sure.”

  I put a hand to my throat. The same woman clad in vividly memorable attire at all three murders wasn’t a coincidence.

  The detective nodded. “Anyway, we know she was the killer because the realtor had sent a text to her business partner only four minutes earlier. So, she was alive just a few minutes before the couple arrived on the scene and saw the assassin leaving.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said, but what truly struck me was how haunted Shepherd seemed to be by the story he was telling. Maybe that’s why I asked him, “Did you know the realtor?”

  His gaze focused intently on me. “Yes.”

  “A friend?” I prodded.

  “No,” he said. “She stopped being my friend when we divorced.”

  I gasped. “Your ex-wife?”

  He nodded.

  “Why would anyone want to kill your ex-wife?”

  “That’s the question I’ve been asking myself for the past year, Catherine. And one I still haven’t found an answer to.”

  “And you’re convinced that this retro-clad woman is some kind of professional assassin?”

  “I am.”

  “But I thought assassins were supposed to blend in, be inconspicuous, not draw attention to themselves.”

  “See, that’s the brilliance of this woman’s m.o. She dresses so loudly that you can’t help but notice her, except that all you’re taking in are the things she’s wearing, not anything about her face.”

  “Ohmigod, that’s absolutely genius.”

  “It is. It’s the perfect disguise.”

  “And she probably doesn’t dress like that all the time, so there’d be no way to spot her at the grocery store.”

  “Exactly.”

  A chill went up my spine when I realized how physically close I’d come to a professional killer. “Do you think she lives here?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Do we know why she killed the priest?”

  “No. But I have my suspicions.”

  “Care to share?”

  He inhaled a deep breath, and I had the feeling he was weighing the pros and cons of discussing the case with a civilian, but finally he said, “I think Father Stephan was hiding Ms. Kuznetsov. I think the church was giving her sanctuary, and I think this woman knew she was hiding somewhere in the church, tried to get Father Stephan to tell her where she was, and when he wouldn’t tell her, she killed him.

  “I also think that, when you saw Kuznetsov running out of the church, she was literally running for her life.”

  “So you don’t suspect that she killed Heather?”

  “I don’t know what to think about that,” Shepherd confessed.

  “Like I told you, Heather Holland was given some sort of toxin. Her organs showed signs of shutting down—she was in renal failure and her lungs were full of fluid. The M.E. has concluded that she suffocated from the buildup of fluid in her lungs. And, whatever happened to her, it was quick. According to every witness I’ve spoken to, she was perfectly healthy at the party, but four hours later her system was in total shutdown. So, whatever the toxin was, it spread through her fast.”

  “And you suspect Ms. Kuznetsov because it was likely someone close to Heather who offered her the toxin, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But anyone at the party could’ve offered her something.”

  “True, but no one else at the party became sick or died, and the M.E. thinks that whatever she ingested caused an immediate shutdown of her system. He thinks that anything she’d had at the party would’ve been noticeable. She would’ve collapsed within minutes, possibly even moments.”

  “So she died immediately after ingesting the toxin?”

  “That’s the weird part,” Shepherd said. “The M.E. thinks she died about twenty minutes or so after ingesting the toxin. That’s how long it would’ve taken her internal organs to shut down and her lungs to fill with fluid.”

  “Twenty minutes? So why didn’t she dial nine-one-one if she knew she was in distress?”

  “Either she couldn’t, because the effects of the toxin completely overwhelmed her and she was too weak or too out of it to call for help, or someone waited there to prevent her from reaching for the phone.”

  “That’s pretty twisted.”

  “In general, most murders get pretty twisted.”

  “So why hit her over the head with my punch bowl after she was dead?”

  “That’s a piece of the puzzle we don’t have an answer to.”

  “Among all the other pieces you don’t have answers to.”

  “Yep.”

  “Hmm,” I said, thinking about how tangled Heather’s murder seemed. “Could it have been to frame me?”

  “Sure,” Shepherd said. “It could also have been to make sure that Heather was dead. Or an attempt to cover up the use of the toxin. Or to make it more difficult for us to collect forensic evidence. Pick a theory. One’s as good as the others.”

  “But why would this assassin be after Heather?” I asked. “Or your ex-wife?”

  Shepherd’s shoulders dropped a little. He looked weary and, for the first time, vulnerable. “One of my sources in the city said that Heather wasn’t making all of her payments to someone big.”

  “Someone big?”

  “In the organization.”

  “In the organization?”

  “In the organized crime organization.”

  “Heather was involved in organized crime?” That shocked me. Sunny had hinted that Heather’s husband had those kinds of connections, but I hadn’t thought they would’ve extended to Heather.

  “We don’t know for sure, but we suspect that she could have been. Her husband was being investigated by the FBI at the time of his . . . death, and there was some good evidence that he was laundering money for one of the larger Chechen mafia groups in New York.”

  “So you think Heather took over for her husband?”

  “I do.”

  “But you have no proof.”

  “I don’t. And except for the appearance of this mysterious woman at all three crime scenes, I don’t have any solid links to all three victims.”

  “Do you suspect your ex-wife was involved in organized crime?”

  Shepherd shook his head. “No. That would’ve been a leap for Lenny. She just wasn’t the type to get caught up in that.”

  “Did she know Heather?”

  “Everybody knew Heather,” Shepherd said. “But to my knowledge, the two didn’t mingle. Heather stuck to her affluent circles, and she would’ve considered m
y ex-wife part of the working class and, as such, beneath her notice. The irony is that, in any other zip code, Lenny would’ve been part of the upper class. She did very well for herself as a realtor, but by East Hampton standards, what she made was probably paltry.”

  “So why did this assassin murder her?”

  “Wish I knew,” Shepherd said softly. I could see in that moment that he was a man haunted by the murder of his ex-wife. And the fact that he hadn’t been able to solve her murder made it clear why he was working so hard to solve Heather and her husband’s cases. The three were seemingly linked, but how?

  The whole thing was making my head spin, and I had a moment where I considered calling my sister and asking for her intuitive insight when Gilley’s voice rang out from the bedroom.

  “Eureka!” he shouted.

  Shepherd and I both turned toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms.

  “Who’s the grand wizard? Huh? Who’s your daddy? Huh? Me!”

  Gilley appeared from the hallway holding his laptop and wearing an excited grin. The moment he realized Shepherd was still in the house, however, he came up short.

  Gil and I locked wide eyes, and I shook my head subtly. It was obvious that he’d been successful hacking into Heather’s iCloud account—which was a crime. Perhaps even a federal crime.

  “What’s going on?” Shepherd asked curiously.

  Gilley’s big eyes rolled toward Shepherd.

  Then back to me.

  I shook my head again.

  Gilley opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out, and for a long, panicky minute, I could sense he was about to blurt out something that could’ve implicated us.

  “Mr. Gillespie?” Shepherd asked again, a hint of suspicion in his voice. “Care to share what all the excitement is about?”

  “Um . . .” Gilley said, his voice cracking. “I . . . I . . .”

  “You, you . . . ?” Shepherd said.

  “I just saved fifteen percent on my car insurance!”

  My eyes widened. A long moment of silence followed Gilley’s declaration; it lasted until I lifted my watch and exclaimed, “Oh my goodness, would you look at the time? Detective, I’m so sorry to have kept you so long. I didn’t realize how late it was getting, and I have an important call to a client I simply must get to.”

 

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