A Clean Kill (5 page)

She saw two reporters talking earnestly into video cams outside the yellow police lines that roped off the sidewalk. They were on opposite sides of the street, and their mouths were moving before they even had a story. She crossed the street, praying for a reprieve.

"Captain Sanchez," she told the sandy-haired officer at the door. He glanced down at April's ID. LT. APRIL WOO SANCHEZ.

"Yes, ma'am. He's waiting for you in the kitchen, first left."

"Thanks."

She went in and started mapping the place immediately. An old habit. The place was an elegant brick house, four windows wide across the front. The foyer was all marble with a circular staircase hugging the wall around it, except in the middle where it made a bridge into the sleek modern living room behind it. The living room was decorated in shimmering silver and black. And behind that, all the way through, the back wall was a bank of French doors that opened on a garden. A blond girl wearing jeans and a sweatshirt leaned against a huge grand piano, talking with a detective April immediately recognized from Mike's description of the CO of his bureau. The detective was called Sergeant Ed Minnow, and everyone called him Fish. As directed, she turned left at the first door and went in. Oops.

A surprised Chief Avise broke off a conversation to stare at her.
What the hell are you doing here?

She shook her head. He'd given her an assignment less than an hour ago and didn't expect to see her again so soon. But news of homicide traveled fast, and April had a long history of serving on homicide task forces outside her own precinct. He shouldn't be surprised that Mike would call her in for a look-see.

As he turned away, she was distracted by the splendor of the kitchen. The place had more stainless steel appliances and sinks than she'd ever seen outside a restaurant kitchen. Three sinks, three dishwashers, a huge restaurant stove, a wine refrigerator, two other refrigerators—wow. Pots, pans, and bunches of dried herbs hung from beams in the ceiling. What kind of private home was this? A large glass dining table was surrounded by modern tub chairs. And there was a high chair. She stared at the high chair with dismay. Children always changed the story.

And then she was aware of Chief Avise moving purposefully in her direction and braced herself for a chewing out.

"She's with me." Mike said, cutting him off before the tirade began.

Saved by the cavalry. Her lips curved in a tiny smile. She couldn't help being impressed by her . husband in uniform. No longer the swaggering detective with the flashy mustache and slicked-back hair who'd worn cowboy boots and cologne stronger than any tart's perfume, Mike Sanchez had cleaned up amazingly well. His black hair was short now, his mustache clipped, his aftershave subtle. He'd always been a handsome man, but in uniform he ruled. Next to him, the chief of detectives with his large belly and wrinkled brown suit looked downright sloppy and peevish.

"Don't push, Mike," the chief threatened, making it clear that April was his detective, not Mike's, so he was the one who decided where she worked.

"You want a quick resolution to a homicide, you know where to go," Mike replied. He smiled at his gorgeous wife, and she knew he was appreciating her new short haircut and stylish spring suit. She was a willowy five feet five, had delicate features in a classic oval face. Mike's smile told her that she was caught in the political web again, and she knew why.

The last two murders in this precinct had been solved by Mike and detectives under his old command at the Homicide Task Force. Now that he was no longer in the Detective Bureau, he couldn't call on Homicide Task Force detectives without messing up protocol. If he didn't trust the detectives in' his own precinct to get the job done, he couldn't disrespect them by bringing in his old people. Furthermore he couldn't take on the task himself. Precinct captains did not investigate homicides. They were supposed to walk in, look around, and walk out just like the other brass.

Good going, Mike—just call in the little woman to take care of things.
April kept a straight face and let the former boss and his underling figure it out. Mike and Chief Avise were pack leaders with the same goal but different teams and agendas. One of them had to back down. Finally the chief shrugged. "Fine, let her take a look. Then she goes home." He moved away.

That's how it was done. Although it didn't appear as if the chief had given in, Mike clearly thought she was in on the case. "Sorry,
querida,"
he mumbled.

"Who's the victim?" she asked, getting to the point.

"Madeleine Wilson, wife of Wayne Wilson. Remember him?"

Oh, God. Suddenly it all clicked. That explained the kitchen and Mike calling her. "Oh, that's
terrible.
Where is she?" April felt bad for Wayne Wilson. He was such a nice guy and had a great young family. And, it was going to be a big circus.

"We better go this way."

Mike opened a door that led into an exceptionally neat garage, where no fancy car was parked at the moment. Right away April noticed the little blue bicycle and the even smaller tricycle up against the back wall. Two expensive mountain bikes hung on a hook above them. Leaning against the far wall was an assortment of skis in various sizes. Oh, God, these were rich people. Really rich people who had a house in the middle of Manhattan with a garage all its own, and they skied down mountains. She hated this already. Not that rich made any difference to her at all. Any family with little kids mattered. But it always bothered her that money never saved anybody. It never really helped, and surprisingly often money made things worse.

Holding her breath, April followed him into a gym that looked new. The floor was polished wood, a light color. Exercise machines filled the space. She didn't recognize some of them. Pilates was the brand on the side. She looked up. This room was obviously an addition. The ceiling was made of slanted glass. Billows of white linen, like upside-down umbrellas, shielded the room from the sun and people looking in from the windows in the apartments above.

"She's in there." Mike stopped short at the door to the shower and moved aside.

April looked in, and her eyes flickered as she adjusted to a horrific scene. Even after years of experience, she never expected to see a mutilated person in a serene setting, a rich setting like this. Or indeed any setting at all. Violent death was always a surprise, but the remains of Madeleine Wilson were particularly shocking. April had seen her photo in the social columns of the newspapers, in an oil painting on the wall in the living room. She knew the woman had been beautiful and those were the images she held in her mind. Mrs. Wilson had been the American ideal, tall, blond, well built. The machines in the gym indicated that she cared about her body.

That was what made it so difficult to look at her now. Naked and sitting on the teak bench of her shower, Madeleine Wilson was as spooky a ghost as April had ever seen. Her long hair was plastered on her neck and shoulders, darker than in her photos and soaking wet. Her skin looked waxy and gray, and was just beginning to pucker. One of her eyes was open, the other a pulpy mess. A gash had opened her forehead, and there were stab wounds all over her chest. It wasn't clear whether she had been sexually assaulted or not. The ME would have to determine that.

And there was more. The perpetrator hadn't just run amok and then split. He'd handled the body. From the number of wounds, it didn't seem likely that the victim had died sitting up. The killer must have picked her up, arranged her on the bench, and then turned on the shower to wash all the blood down the drain. The lack of blood was the eeriest thing. Not a drop was visible in the shower, on the victim's body, or on the floor of the gym. Mrs. Wilson had defense wounds on her arms and face and hands, even on her feet. She'd fought for her life. April guessed she might have kicked at the knife, but all traces of the fight had been washed away. The bathroom floor was clean. The sink was clean. The blond wood floor in the gym seemed unmarked. Crime Scene was going to have a lot of work to do. They'd have to take the place apart, open up the drains, to find anything.

She swallowed and turned away. "She was attacked in the shower and arranged that way after she was dead, right?"

Mike nodded. "Looks that way."

"Was the floor dry when you got here?"

"Yes."

"What about towels? Someone must have mopped up."

"
Querida
, we just started," Mike said.

"Did you find the murder weapons?" She went on as if he hadn't spoken.

"Weapons?"

"Looks like more than one size wound to me," April murmured. She couldn't see the woman's back but didn't want to get any closer. The CSU team would scream if she touched anything. They were going to scream anyway. A lot of people had been in here.

"Maybe, maybe not."

April squinted at the eye and the chest wounds. One wound seemed bigger than the others. There wasn't that much damage to the face, if you didn't count the forehead and eye. It looked as if a thinner blade had done that damage. Maybe a boning knife or an ice pick. Certainly not a butcher knifee. April's father was a chef. Her first important gift had been a cleaver. She knew her knives.

"I'm guessing two," she said.

"Perpetrators?" Mike looked surprised.

"No, knives. What have you got on the knives?"

"Nothing yet. We're checking with the nanny to see if any are missing from the kitchen."

"Is she the young woman in the living room?"

Mike nodded a third time.

"Who found the body?"

"She did. The nanny. Name's Remy Banks."

The girl in the living room might be the killer. Was she big enough to attack a larger woman, then move the body? April wondered about that, then told herself not to jump to conclusions. Everybody at a crime scene looked guilty. She backed out into the area, studying the floor. Not a footprint, not a gum wrapper. Nothing. Except a purple iris lying on the table. April's glance swept over it out to the garden, where other irises were growing in a patch. Someone had come in here from the garden. Maybe the victim, maybe someone else.

"Where's the husband?" she asked.'

"He's on his way."

"From where?"

"One of his restaurants. I don't know which one. He has an alibi. He was with a chef."

April didn't respond to that. She knew chefs were notorious for saying anything that came to their heads. Her father and his cronies could lie like rugs. "Mike, I don't want to start anything I can't finish," she said slowly.

"Look, just help me out for an hour or so. Talk to the nanny and check back with me, okay. I won't embroil you, I promise."

April shook her head. They both knew that wasn't the way it worked. "Okay, I'll talk with the nanny," she said.

Six

R
emy Banks was still shaking. She'd seen plenty of dead people and dead animals in her time, especially in her childhood in Wyoming. Gruesome things. Cattle and dogs that had their intestines ripped out by wolves. Once she'd seen a video of a grizzly bear mauling a human being. The whole thing had been caught on tape. A stupid tourist had thought he could chase a huge bear away from his campsite with some pot-banging, and then a few potshots from his rifle. The bear retaliated by trying to eat him. It seemed there was always someone around to photograph a freak thing like that. She'd seen the video back home, but the bear mauling could now be found on the Internet. A cautionary tale.

Remy had also seen kids who'd frozen to death. When she was a teenager, two ten-year-olds had broken through thin ice on the river in late winter and gotten stuck. A freak thing. She went through her list of accidental deaths. In summer people used to die by drowning even in the shallows, on raft trips, probably still did. Queer things happened. Out West there were a lot of unnatural ways to meet one's maker. Everybody had guns. Remy was used to guns. Every year there'd be shootings, accidental and otherwise. And then, there were the kitchen accidents. When she'd worked as a line cook in a steak house in Salt Lake City, she'd seen really bad cuts, bad burns. Bleeding into the hamburgers on the grill, a line cook would just keep on getting those orders out, or lose his job. But Maddy's face . . . the place where her eye should have been . . . Remy couldn't stop shaking.

"You gonna be okay now?" The detective called Minnow who'd been questioning her closed his notebook.

Remy stared at him. Anybody could see she was not okay. He looked like an actor on one of the cop shows, somebody's idea of a cop. He had a round face and pasty skin, a bulging stomach. If she'd been in a better mood, she would have ana" lyzed his diet by how he looked. She thought of things like that. How people ate. He was clearly way past forty, which was the same to her as being a hundred.

"Roomy?" He missed a lot of things, couldn't even say her name right.

"Fine. I'm fine." Remy's head bobbed up and down. She could tell that sergeant didn't believe a word she said. She turned toward the garden, toward the gym where Maddy—where the body— still was. She wondered where Wayne was. Poor Wayne was going to freak out. But she was freaking out, too. Neither of them deserved this. The boys didn't deserve it. No one did. She didn't want to tell the police that she was having a relationship with her boss. They wouldn't understand how it really was. Jo Ellen had already chewed her out for what she called "alienating" Wayne's affections. She told Remy to keep quiet about what occurred in the privacy of her clients' homes. Shit, how could she be private about this?