Kansas City Cover-Up (7 page)

“One and the same. Mara knew he wasn’t right in the head, and shut down her feelings long before she got divorced. There was never any jealousy there. No strong emotion of any kind. The only thing she feels a passion for is this paper.” Olivia set her coffee on the edge of the desk and started typing on her phone again. “You’re not putting her down as a suspect, are you? Mara doesn’t have it in her to kill anybody.”

“But she’d have the money to hire someone to do it for her.”

He pushed to his feet. “Olivia—”

“Fine. I’ll move her to the bottom of my list.”

“This isn’t about jealousy.” Gabe poked the desktop with each and every point. “We should be talking to Leland Asher. Or even Adrian McCoy and his people. We should find out if there was any recent contact between the three of them.”

“
We
aren’t going to do anything.” Olivia lowered her phone, moving a step closer with every reply. “I’m the cop. I contact persons of interest and ask the questions.”

“I’m a part of this investigation.”

“You’re going caveman on me again.”

“Cave...” Gabe scrubbed his palm over his face and looked away, swearing at the apt description he’d given himself last night. But he wasn’t about to back down from what he knew was right. He tapped his finger against his temple and settled back into his chair. “You need what I have in here to solve the case.”

“Then how about a little information from that head of yours? Do you still have the story Dani was writing? Copies of her notes? Those would be more helpful than arguing with you.”

Gabe clicked the mouse to bring icons back on his computer screen. “Dani kept her stories on a flash drive that she carried on her key chain. Had it with her all the time. I never saw what was on it.” Olivia searched her phone again, while he brought up the different files of research he’d put together. “She made a few notes on her desk calendar—dates, times, code names—that I scanned. She called the source she was meeting with—”

“The source you believe to be Ron Kober?”

“Yes. She called him BB. Big Break. As in big break on the story she was writing—”

“Or the big break in her career.” She held up her phone, although he couldn’t read the text. “There was no flash drive collected as evidence. And her keys were still in the car at the scene. Do you still have it?”

“No. That proves somebody took it.” Adrenaline rushed through Gabe’s blood the same way it did when he broke a story. “You find out who has that flash drive and you’ll have your killer.”

“All it means is that we haven’t found it yet. I texted a couple of detectives I work with who are at the impound lot to tear her car apart and see if she hid a flash drive somewhere that the crime scene techs never discovered.” Olivia moved in beside him, reading the screen over his shoulder. “It also means I have to rely on you to tell me what was on that flash drive.”

One step forward and two steps back. Gabe tempered his hope at finally getting through to KCPD with a good dose of cynicism. “Over the years, I’ve recreated as much of what I could remember from the notes Dani kept.”

“But you don’t have any of the actual notes or the article she was writing?”

“When we argued that night, she downloaded all the files I’d read onto her flash drive and deleted them from her laptop.”

Gabe felt Olivia’s hand on the back of his chair. “Do you still have the laptop? Our tech guys can recover all kinds of data, sometimes even from corrupted files.”

“She took it with her. Accused me of spying on her, not believing in her. Said she wasn’t going to be treated like a rookie reporter anymore.”

When the detective didn’t immediately berate him for not having actual admissible evidence to share, he sought out her reflection on the monitor beside him. “That’s a lot of guilt to carry with you, isn’t it?” He watched her force the wistfulness from her expression before she patted his shoulder. “I’m sure the two of you would have made up, maybe even traded a laugh or a kiss, if she’d come back home that night.”

Gabe reached up to capture her hand. The eyes weren’t the only mystery he had yet to solve about this woman. “Sounds as though you know about that kind of guilt. What happened?”

But the quiet moment of a shared understanding didn’t last. “What I know is that cold cases rely on plenty of circumstantial evidence to make a conviction. But so far all I have are bad guys with alibis, a missing flash drive and a lot of hearsay from you. A few tangible facts wouldn’t hurt.”

“So you get to ask questions, but I don’t?”

Apparently not. Olivia pulled away with a determined huff and moved around the room, inspecting his office. Allowing his curiosity to simmer, he went back to pulling up files on the computer. “Did you know I was Thomas Watson’s daughter when we met yesterday?” she asked. “Is that why you requested Jim and me from the Cold Case Squad?”

Gabe glanced up to find her oddly fascinated with a Missouri Press Corps certificate framed on the wall. “Not at first. I called Chief Taylor and made the request when I heard about Kober’s murder. I didn’t know he’d be sending you.”

“Do you want someone else running this investigation?”

“Will you solve it?” he challenged. “Will you find Dani’s killer?”

Her shoulders stiffened and her chin came up before she turned. Her eyes, all green and gold now, locked onto his as she came back to sit on the edge of the desk beside him, facing him. “Yes.”

As much as her confidence intrigued him, six years was a long time to wait for the action and satisfaction he’d yet to see. “Do we bet money on this now, or what?”

“No bets. Just a promise that I’m going to do my job.” His sarcasm hadn’t fazed her a bit. She was dead serious, expecting him to take her at her word. “My father would have eventually solved the case, too, if he hadn’t been injured and forced to retire. It always troubled him—haunted him, even—that he never found Dani’s killer.”

“Not as much as it has haunted me.” But there was more regret than sneer in his tone. If he hadn’t been such a self-righteous jerk back then, warning Dani she was going to crash and burn with her story—that she was playing way out of her league—she might still be alive. If only he’d done more than preach at her that night. If only he’d stopped her. Gone with her. Done anything besides let her go off and confront a killer alone. He needed to change the subject. “How did your father get injured?”

“High-speed car chase. His partner lost control of the car and they ran off the road.” Finally, a question she would answer for him—although, interestingly, the question hadn’t been about her. “They were both lucky they survived the wreck, but at the time, Dad was more worried about whether or not the perp got away.”

“Did he?”

“No. He got caught in the accident, too. He’s serving his sentence in Jefferson City.” She moved some papers and brushed the dust off a trophy on top of the filing cabinets. “Dad and Al solved a lot of cases together, but neither one could return to regular duty after that. Dad works as a consultant for a security company now, but he hated having to retire from KCPD with an unsolved case.”

“Dani’s.”

Olivia nodded.

“Is that why you’re doing this? To avenge your father? To complete his service record?”

“Maybe a little.” She traced the plastic lid on her coffee before picking up the cup and finishing it off. “I’m doing this because solving crimes is the job I’m trained to do. The job I swore an oath to do to the best of my ability. I know you don’t have any appreciation for cops, Gabe. But I do. I take a lot of pride in protecting Kansas City, a lot of pride in being a detective. I do it because Dani and her family—and you—deserve justice.”

He tilted his gaze to hers in a hard stare, assessing her sincerity and ability to make good on her words. “This isn’t merely a personal quest for me, either. I’m just as committed to finding the truth as you are. It’s what a good reporter does.”

Refusing to look away from the challenge in his eyes, she returned to his desk. “So, if we’re done trading philosophies, I’d like to get back to work. I have a feeling the only way I’m going to earn your respect, and redeem your opinion of my father and the rest of the department, is to show you how we get the job done.”

Gabe stood to face her. “My beef with KCPD doesn’t include you, Olivia.”

She tipped her chin to keep their gazes locked. “You disrespect the department, you disrespect me.”

“Fair enough. Prove me wrong about KCPD.”

She inched a step closer. “Prove me wrong about reporters.”

The beginnings of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth and Gabe nodded. Despite the glimpses of some secret vulnerability, he hadn’t run up against anyone in the department who was tougher than this lady right here. Maybe she was already halfway toward earning that respect.

He pulled out his chair for her to sit. “You can read what I’ve pieced together from Dani’s report, along with the snippets I retrieved from her calendar and notebook. Then you’ll know what I know.”

Shaking her head, she pulled up the first file. “I’ll know what you
suspect,
” she corrected. “I’m still going to need witness corroboration or some other kind of proof before I can make an arrest.”

“Are you and I ever going to agree on anything, Detective?”

She picked up her empty cup and held it out to him. “I like coffee. Do you?”

Gabe gave in to the urge to laugh before snatching her cup and heading for the door. “Keep reading. I’ll go get us another cup.”

Chapter Six

Olivia shifted her Explorer into Park and killed the engine before looking past Gabe to assess the rusting, swaybacked shell of Morton & Sons Tile Works.

Despite the puffy white clouds in the late-afternoon sky overhead, there wasn’t anything cheery about this derelict block of condemned buildings. The pediment above the front doors with 1903 carved into it was one of the few bits of the brick-and-mortar facade not crumbling away from the rusting iron and chewed-up timber structure underneath. Olivia could smell the river on the other side of the warehouse, smell the faint stink of garbage or something else rotten that she wasn’t in real favor of identifying. Boarded-up windows that had been used for target practice, and a building code warning sticker beside the front doors completed the feeling of death and decay about the old storage facility. “I don’t much like the look of this place in the daylight. I can’t imagine your fiancée coming to this part of town in the middle of the night.”

Gabe drummed his fingers against the top of the rolled-down window—the only outward indication that being on the same street, in front of the same abandoned warehouse where Danielle Reese’s body had been found, bothered him. “This is a hell of a lonely place to die. I wonder how many times Dani came here to meet her informant before I realized what she was doing and warned her it was too dangerous. The only people who come to this neighborhood are gangbangers, druggies and the homeless. Any reputable businesses have closed or moved to a better location. If Leland Asher or one of his men found her here...” He shook his head and turned back to Olivia. “Even if there was someone around to see what happened, this isn’t a neighborhood where people like to talk to the police.”

Olivia agreed. The only witness statements had come from the men who’d checked out the abandoned car and found Dani’s body on their way to work the next morning. There wasn’t anybody around that she could see, although it was hard to shake the feeling that there were eyes on them right now.

Glancing around at the broken windows and shadowed doorways across the street from the warehouse, she half expected to see two glowing, Halloween-like eyes staring back at her. But there was no one, of course. Nothing but some bits of trash and clouds of dust blowing along the empty street. Just a few blocks away, similar historic structures had been saved and remodeled to become a shopping district, apartments and restaurants. But there was no kind of care or redemption like that here. “I’m sure this is hard for you. I’d be happy to take you to a restaurant or coffee shop to wait until I’m done here.”

Gabe’s blue eyes stopped their scan of the neighborhood. “I’m not leaving you in this place by yourself. The last woman I knew who came here—”

“I’m not Dani. I’ve been trained for working in a questionable environment, and I’m certain I’m carrying more weapons than she did. Besides, I’m not here to roust out any witnesses or trap a suspect. All I’m doing is walking through an old crime scene, trying to visualize what happened that night. I’m not worried.” Even though the prickle of awareness at the nape of her neck tried to tell her otherwise.

“All Dani had was a can of pepper spray. She shouldn’t have come to this place alone. I should have protected her.”

“You tried. You offered her your experience and wisdom and she ignored it. Maybe she thought she had something to prove.”

“To whom?”

“To you.” Gabe’s blue eyes darkened like cobalt and fixed on her. Olivia didn’t shy away from her point. Could he really not see the similarities here? “You seem to bring that out in people. You demand a high standard of excellence. Do the job now. Do it right. No mistakes allowed. If someone wants the mighty Gabe Knight’s approval, then he or she has to go above and beyond normal expectations.”

His drumming fingers stilled and tightened into a fist. “Am I really such a bastard?”

Pinching her thumb and forefinger together in the air between them, Olivia winked. “Little bit.”

A low-pitched laugh rumbled through his chest, softening the hard lines of his face and alleviating some of the tension between them. “I’ll try to work on that.”

The rare gift of his laughter made her smile. “No, you won’t.”

“Probably not.” The laughter ended on a resolute sigh as Gabe pushed open the car door and climbed out. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

Olivia grabbed the manila envelope from the seat behind her and got out of the Explorer. She made a sweep of their surroundings, still looking for those hidden eyes, before crossing the street and joining him on the sidewalk in front of the old Tile Works building. “Would you feel better if I called for backup?”

“Tremendously,” he admitted in that sardonic grinching of his. “But we’re here, and I don’t want to be any longer than we have to.” He, too, seemed to be scanning the area for any signs of life besides them. “What exactly are you looking for?”

She opened the envelope to pull out the pictures from six years ago, along with her father’s crime scene report, making a point to keep the most graphic photos at the bottom of the pile where Gabe wouldn’t see his fiancée’s body or the pool of blood beneath it. “I want to re-create what we know about the crime. Visualizing what went down here may give us a clearer direction with our investigation. If we understand the how, then the why and the who might become more apparent.”

Gabe held the envelope while Olivia lined up the images with their current surroundings. “Not much has changed except for the crime scene tape.” Looking over her shoulder, he pointed to the rusted hinges on the front doors. “Other than that new padlock, it looks as though this place hasn’t been disturbed in six years.”

Olivia nodded, matching the double iron doors of the warehouse entrance with the background of the photo. He was right. There was no padlock back then. “Dani’s car was parked against the curb here, and she was found on the sidewalk beside it, hidden from view from the street. There weren’t any signs of a struggle inside the car, and no blood there, so she was already outside when she was shot. Probably talking to her informant, BB, someone she expected to see, someone she trusted enough to get out to talk to in this neighborhood in the middle of the night.”

Gabe looked up and down the street. “There are plenty of places where her assailant could have hidden. Parked in a car in that alley. Up in one of those office buildings or warehouses across the street. He probably waited until her contact had left and ambushed her.”

“If this was a carjacking, she’d have gotten out on the driver’s side. I’m ruling that out.” Olivia switched photos and knelt down where Dani Reese’s body had lain, wondering why the woman would be trying to get into the passenger side of her car—or if there was some other reason why that door, instead of the driver’s side, was open. She touched the spots on her back and chest where Dani had been shot. Once in the back when the shooter had surprised her, or she was running away. Once in the chest when he’d caught up to her. That shot had brought her down. “Even at night, she probably saw her shooter.” Sinking back onto her haunches, Olivia looked up from the sidewalk where Dani had fallen, imagining a blank face where the killer would have stood over her. “With the small caliber of bullets that were used, he’d have to be fairly close.”

When she touched her fingers to her face to note the kill shot, Gabe grabbed her hand, pulling it away. “Don’t do that. Please.”

With little more than a flare of his nostrils to reveal the emotions that must be reeling inside him at this reenactment, Olivia switched her grip to squeeze his hand as she stood. “Sorry. Do you want to wait in the car?”

“Nope. Too far away.” Gabe’s grip tightened around hers before releasing her. “I want answers. But I’m not going to lose anyone else trying to find them. Understood?”

She reached up, obeying an impulse before really thinking it through, and brushed her fingertips along the firm line of his jaw. “I’ll make it as quick as I can,” she promised.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m a crusty old bastard, remember? Just keep working. I’ll be fine.” He turned his face, tickling her fingers with a brush of soft stubble before pressing a quick kiss to her palm. “What’s next?”

Little frissons of warmth tingled through the sensitive nerve-endings on her hand and she pulled away. It was just a thank-you kiss, an appreciation for the comfort she’d offered. It didn’t mean anything more than that. There was no bond forming here.

With her brain misfiring on hormones and compassion, Olivia pulled up the next picture and forced herself to think about the murder. She looked at the picture in her hand, then down at the sidewalk where a few sturdy weeds were already turning green between the cracks.

There was one other difference in these photographs.

A different sort of electricity fired through her veins. She took two steps, three, four, away from the spot where Dani had died. Time and the elements had washed them away, but in the picture there were two tiny sprays of cast-off blood droplets, each one no bigger than a broccoli floret. Too small and too far away from the body to have come from the gunshots.

“Olivia?”

A six-year-old incident was starting to fall into place.

She went back to the curb where Dani’s car had been parked and walked through what she was pretty certain had occurred that night. “Dani didn’t open the passenger-side door that night. The killer did.”

Gabe followed her path. “Why?”

She mimicked reaching inside the car. “To check the glove compartment. He was searching for something.”

“The flash drive.”

“Or proof of death. Sometimes with a hit, the killer has to bring the victim’s ID to whoever hired him to prove the job is done.” Gabe backed away when she turned and looked down at her feet, imagining Danielle Reese and a growing pool of blood there. “Our guy wasn’t an experienced killer. He didn’t want to touch the body if he didn’t have to. That’s why he shot her in the back first—from a distance. But he couldn’t find what he needed in the car, so he went through her purse.” She pulled out the previous photo. Dani’s bag had a long strap that she wore across her body, from one shoulder to the opposite hip. Olivia knelt down, imagining how a man, anxious to get away as quickly as possible, would have gotten into the purse that was anchored beneath his victim. “He couldn’t have pulled Dani’s purse off her shoulder unless he moved her. That may have given him the idea to make it look like a robbery, if that wasn’t his instruction in the first place.”

She pretended to tug at the purse on the ground and rifle through the contents. Then she removed imaginary jewelry and stood. She stepped over the space where Dani had lain and walked toward the errant blood drops. Holding up her hand, Olivia looked at fingers that would have been wet with blood. “The report said this was Dani’s blood, but she wasn’t shot over here.” She made the movements of flicking her hand. Twice. “He got blood on him, and it was freaking him out.” Olivia lifted her gaze to the iron doors. “She didn’t go into that warehouse. He did.”

Gabe pointed to one of the photos he still held. “There was no padlock on the door six years ago.” Olivia nodded and hurried back to her car. Gabe jogged behind her. “What are we doing?”

“Going inside that warehouse.” She opened the back and put the photos inside before pulling the toolbox her father insisted she carry to the rear bumper. Between the clank of the tools shifting in the metal box and the drumbeat of anticipation pounding in her ears at the potential new lead on the case, Olivia hadn’t been as alert to her surroundings as she should have been. But in the next moment of silence, she detected a low humming noise—like the sound of a car or machine engine idling in the distance. Olivia turned her head to the nearby cross street. “Do you hear that?”

“The traffic?” Gabe had turned to scan the abandoned buildings up and down the street the moment she did. Olivia tuned in to the stop-and-go sounds of vehicles in a residential area just a few blocks to the south. “There still may be some sump pumps working in the area since we’re so close to the water.”

“No, it’s...” With a cooling breeze stirring up the hint of an evening rain shower, she was also more aware of the whoosh of the Missouri River current on the north side of the buildings as the water slapped against rocks on the shore and the pylons of old loading docks. She couldn’t hear the sound of the engine at all, anymore. Maybe she’d imagined it. Or maybe, as Gabe had suggested, the sound had simply moved on with the flow of traffic. “It’s nothing.”

Time to scrap that fanciful flight of imagination. The watching eyes hadn’t been there, either. She must still be a little off her game since that night when Marcus’s infidelity made her question whether or not she could trust her own judgment. But she wasn’t about to let Gabe Knight see any hint of incompetence while she was on the job.

With a renewed sense of focus, Olivia handed Gabe a pry bar and pulled out a flashlight for herself. “Here, caveman. Make yourself useful.”

“Really?” he mocked, dutifully taking the pry bar and closing the hatch for her. “Is that going to be a thing?”

“Well, there are other names I could call you,” she teased right back. Joining in his low-pitched laughter, Olivia locked the Explorer and crossed the street to the iron doors of the Tile Works.

The steel padlock didn’t immediately budge for Gabe, but with an extra oomph of muscle and a screeching surrender, the rusted bolts holding the hasp in place snapped in two. Olivia pulled at the outer door, but ended up having to put her shoulder into it and accept Gabe’s help there, as well. The iron door itself was heavy, the hinges were rusty, and with the slight caving of the exterior wall, the tendency for it to swing shut again made it feel like pushing a dead car up a hill.

“I bet that hasn’t been opened in six years.” Olivia brushed the grime and dust off her hands and jacket before stepping inside the cavernous interior and turning on her flashlight. The sudden beam of light chased a band of small rodents and big bugs back into the shadows. “I love what they’ve done with the place.”

“Wait. Unless you’re going to arrest me for vandalism?” Olivia shook her head as Gabe pried off a piece of the framing from the inside of the door. It snapped off easily, indicating the wood was dry and rotten. “I don’t think I’d lean against anything,” Gabe warned, wedging the one-by-one between the door and the frame to prop it open. “I doubt it would hold up.” Then he stood beside her, pulling back the front of his tweed jacket and propping his hands on his hips, heedless of the transfer of dirt and rust to his jeans. “Talk about a needle in a haystack. How do we find something the size of my little finger in here?”