Ethan’s gaze slid downward to the short black skirt that had
ridden up to reveal a pair of class A legs ending in bare feet.
“Yo, Delancey,” Dixon said and waved a hand across his field of
vision. Ethan blinked and turned his head.
“What?”
“Ah, you’re back to earth,” Dixon said. “Have you talked to the
medical examiner yet?”
Ethan shook his head.
“Your choice. The M.E. or the injured victim with the killer
legs that go on forever?”
“Legs. No question,” Ethan muttered.
Dixon winked at Ethan as he headed toward the man bending over
the senator’s body.
“What’s her name?” Ethan asked Farrantino as he squinted at the
scribbled words on the officer’s statement. He was going to have to ask that the
officers receive penmanship lessons.
“Let’s see. Montgomery. Elaine,” Farrantino answered.
Montgomery.
His gaze snapped back
to the witness just as the EMT finished with the bandage and she raised her
head. He took in her features for the first time. Could her name be a
coincidence? With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he thought about
the late, infamous lobbyist Elliott Montgomery, comparing his memory of
Montgomery’s narrow features and dark blue eyes to Elaine Montgomery’s face. It
didn’t take much imagination to see the resemblance. The slender nose, full
mouth and high cheekbones looked a lot better on her than they had on him,
though.
So, Senator Darby Sills’s personal assistant was the daughter
of the ruthless lobbyist for the Port of New Orleans unions. Ethan frowned. Was
this case about to get even uglier? “Looks like the EMTs are done with her. What
about the crime scene techs?”
Farrantino glanced toward the two young men in CSI jackets.
“It’s probably going to be another five minutes or so before they can get to
her.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll see how far I can get.” He stepped up to
her with a small spiral notepad in his hand. “I’m Detective Ethan Delancey. I
hope you feel up to talking for a bit, because I need to ask you a few
questions. You are—?”
“I’m—Elaine Montgomery. Laney.”
“Okay, Ms. Montgomery. Can you tell me what happened here?
Briefly?”
She had closed her eyes and was touching the area around the
bandage the EMTs had applied with her fingertips. “What?”
“What happened?” he repeated.
“A man shot Senator Sills and when I walked in, he sh-shot
me.”
“Did you see the man shoot the senator?”
Her face seemed to crumple a bit. “No.”
“Where was Senator Sills? Was he still alive?” Ethan had barely
gotten the question out when Farrantino gestured to him.
He excused himself and walked over to the officer, who handed
him a cell phone. “Sills’s,” she said. “You might be interested in some of his
recent calls.”
Ethan checked the phone’s incoming call log. “‘Senator Myron
Stamps,’” he read. Then a little farther down, “‘The U.S. federal
minimum-security prison at Oakdale, Louisiana.’” He looked up at Farrantino.
“That’s where Congressman Gavin Whitley is. Here.” He handed the phone back to
her. “Take this and retrieve all the calls and times and the texts as well as
voice mails.”
“How far back?” Farrantino asked.
“Far as it goes,” Ethan said. “Get me the list. We might want
to talk with all of them. And set up an interview with Whitley and Stamps
this
morning. I want to find out why they were calling
Sills.”
“Are you thinking this has something to do with Kate Chalmet’s
son’s kidnapping?”
Ethan thought about his brother Travis, who’d come home to New
Orleans eight months before, to find out that he had a son and that the
four-year-old had been kidnapped. “Could be. Whitley claimed that it was Sills’s
money that paid for the kidnapper.”
“I remember,” Farrantino said, then nodded toward Elaine
Montgomery. “The crime scene techs are ready for her.”
“What do the EMTs say?” he asked.
“They want her checked out at the E.R. just in case. They think
the wound is superficial, but they want a CT scan to rule out internal
bleeding.”
“Okay. As soon as I’m done here, I’m going by the E.R. to see
if I can get in a few more questions. Otherwise it’s going to be hours before I
can finish with Whitley and Stamps and talk to her again.”
As Farrantino gave him a nod and headed toward Laney
Montgomery, Ethan’s partner returned to his side. “Okay,” Dixon said. “We’ve got
a preliminary time of death. The M.E. said he’s been dead two, maybe three hours
at the most.”
“Great. The hotel’s been cordoned off and everyone is being
questioned. Thankfully there are no conventions or weddings scheduled for today.
The only event is—or was—the longshoremen’s breakfast, where the senator was
scheduled to speak.”
“Yeah. Still, I doubt our murderer has been hanging around for
hours waiting to see if we can pick him out of a crowd,” Dixon said wryly.
“Farrantino is bringing in Myron Stamps for questioning, and
arranging with the warden at Oakdale to question Gavin Whitley,” Ethan said.
“Both of them called Sills within the last couple of days. I want to know
exactly where Stamps is now and where he was all evening. And I’m going to get
every single phone call and every visitor Whitley has had since he went inside.”
He didn’t have to tell Dixon why he wanted to talk to them.
Dixon nodded. “It must have really rankled to be under
indictment like Whitley or facing certain loss in the next election like Stamps,
and know that Sills came out of the kidnapping scandal smelling like a rose. I’d
be surprised if both of them hadn’t wanted to kill Sills. But do you think
Whitley could have arranged this from prison?”
“No. I don’t think he has the connections or the cojones to set
up something like that at all, much less handle it from prison. But we’d better
check it out.” The two of them stepped aside as the body of Senator Darby Sills
was rolled out the door.
“Okay,” Ethan said. “I’m going by the hospital to talk with
Elaine Montgomery, because I’m probably going to be tied up all morning with
those two.”
“You know we’ve got to bring Travis in.”
Ethan grimaced. He sure as hell didn’t want to make his older
brother come in for questioning, especially after everything Travis had been
through in the past months. He’d like to give Travis and Kate and their son,
Max, time to recover and heal from Travis’s months as a hostage and Max’s
kidnapping ordeal. They needed time to get used to being together, to being a
family.
“I know,” Ethan said dejectedly. “I’m sure I’ll be hearing from
the D.A. within the next hour or two, making sure I’ve questioned him as a
person of interest in Sills’s death, despite the fact that there was no evidence
connecting Sills with the kidnapping. I’ll call him in a little while.” He
looked at his watch. “He’ll be up and out on a run by six. Maybe I can be done
with him before Farrantino gets Whitley and Stamps set up.”
* * *
W
HEN
E
THAN
GOT
to the emergency room
and flashed his badge in order to get in to see Laney Montgomery, he found her
lying on a gurney in cubicle three with a bandage on her temple, looking
miserable. As he peered in, he saw her wipe her eyes with her fingertips. He
stepped in through the curtain. “Hi,” he said. “How’s your head?”
“Who are you?” she said, sniffling.
“I’m Detective Ethan Delancey. I talked with you for a few
minutes at the crime scene.”
“Oh, right.” She lifted her hand to touch the edges of the
bandage. “I’m sorry. This has just been so—” Her voice cracked and her face
crumpled. She covered her mouth with her hand.
“Hey,” Ethan said, glancing behind him at the closed curtain.
He didn’t want the nurses to think he’d made her cry, and he sure didn’t want
her to get so upset that she couldn’t talk. He stepped closer to the bed.
“You’ve been through a lot. But everything’s going to be okay.”
“No it’s not.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Senator Sills is
dead. I had just left him, not five minutes before. I should have—”
Ethan waited, but she bit her lip and didn’t continue. “Should
have what?” he asked.
She spread her hands helplessly. “I don’t know. Been there?
Done something?” Her voice was rising in pitch.
He laid his hand on her arm and squeezed reassuringly, then
realized what he’d done and snatched it away. “You couldn’t have done anything.
Not against a gun. If you’d tried, you’d probably be dead now, too.
“What we have to do now is try to catch the person who killed
him and bring him to justice.”
Laney cut her eyes over to him. “You can catch him, can’t you?”
she said, as if she were saying
you can leap tall buildings
and stop a bullet with your hand, can’t you?
He felt as though he were letting her down just by being human.
He smiled at her. “I’m going to do my best,” he said. “But to do that, I need to
ask you some questions. Do you think you can answer them for me?”
She stared into his eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Yes I can.”
“Great,” he said, reaching out and patting her hand. “You said
you’d just left the senator. Where did you go?”
“I went to my room. I was staying in the second bedroom of the
penthouse suite. When I went back into the sitting room to check on the senator
after I heard the pop, he wasn’t sitting in the desk chair. Before I could look
for him, I saw the man dressed in black. He spotted me, he lifted his gun and I
dived to the floor.”
“Was the senator dead or alive at that point?”
She shook her head despairingly. “I don’t know. I wasn’t able
to get to him until the elevator came and the shooter ran out.” Her eyes
glittered with tears and her hand kept darting up to her temple and stopping a
fraction of an inch above the bandage. “Do you think he was lying there alive?
Do you think if I’d gotten to him earlier—?”
“You can’t worry about that. You were in danger. If you’d tried
to get to him, the man could’ve gotten off a better shot. You could be dead,
too. Plus, as good as the technology is, there’s no way to pinpoint the second
when he died. So let’s take it one step at a time. You came in. The figure in
black saw you, shot at you. You dived to the floor. How far away was he?”
“I don’t know. Ten feet or so?” She closed her eyes. “Why are
you asking me all these questions? I told the first officer all this and he
wrote it down.”
“Why do you think the shooter missed you?”
She frowned. “He didn’t miss.”
“He barely grazed your temple.”
Laney peered at him sidelong. “Maybe he didn’t expect me to
drop to the floor.”
He gave her a little smile. “Did he fire a second time?”
“No, but then you know that. You’ve got your CSI people and
you’ve got the gun, don’t you? And all the bullets are in the wall or the
floor?”
“That’s right. But he could have fired into a sofa or a pillow
or something. So you only heard two—”
The nurse came in, followed by an older man dressed in blue
scrubs.
“All right, Ms. Montgomery,” the nurse said. “We’re going to
take you to get a CT scan. It won’t take long, but the doctor wants to be sure
you don’t have an injury inside your brain that could cause bleeding.”
“After they finish, I can go home, right?” Laney directed the
question to Ethan. Her blue eyes pleaded with him.
“No. I’m afraid not,” Ethan said. “One of the officers will
take you to the police station as soon as the hospital releases you.” He caught
himself before he asked her if there was someone she’d like to call. That was a
reflexive statement he used with witnesses all the time.
He hadn’t been here ten minutes and he’d made a serious
mistake. He’d been way too nice to her—way too sympathetic. He needed to start
asking the tough questions. Because he didn’t know what had happened in that
suite yet. For the moment, Elaine Montgomery was playing three roles in this
murder case—witness, victim and possible suspect.
* * *
M
ORE
THAN
FOUR
hours later, Ethan
looked through a two-way mirror at Laney Montgomery. She looked sad and
miserable and bored. He couldn’t blame her. He’d left her at the E.R. at around
six o’clock, which meant she’d been here at the police station, waiting for him,
for four hours. Her face and neck still weren’t completely clean of blood, and a
small dark spot on the bandage told him the graze on her temple was still
bleeding a little. He had the EMT’s report and he’d just printed out the E.R.
doctor’s assessment of her and the results of the CT scan. Her injury was minor.
It was going to be painful for a few days, but there was no internal bleeding or
damage.
As if she’d read his thoughts, she lifted her gaze to the
mirror and glared at him. Or that’s the impression he had. It felt as though she
was staring right into his eyes, although he knew she couldn’t see him through
the two-way mirror. She knew he was there, though. He could see it in her
suspicious gaze. He glanced away as if they’d held each other’s gazes too
long.
She closed her eyes and rubbed her temple gingerly, just below
the edge of the bandage. Her expression changed to a wince. She looked at her
fingernails, then began picking at one with a thumbnail. Even from this far
away, Ethan could see the tiny leftover stains from the fingerprint ink.
He ran a hand over his face, feeling the day’s growth of beard.
He’d been running ever since he’d gotten the call at four o’clock this morning.
By the time he’d gotten back to the station from the hotel, Travis was there,
waiting to be interviewed. Then he’d taken a few minutes to review the reports
from the crime scene unit, the first officer on the scene and the medical
examiner, before spending almost an hour bringing Commander Jeff Wharton up to
speed. He and Dixon had just finished questioning Myron Stamps and Gavin
Whitley, a process that had taken over two hours, not a pleasant experience.
Stamps had shown up with his lawyer. The phone call with Whitley had been a
three-way, involving his attorney. Ethan’s jaw ached from gritting his teeth
while nearly every question he or Dixon asked was parried by their shysters.