A Clean Kill (9 page)

In the forty minutes before the first building collapsed, she'd seen the faces of desperate people as they broke the windows to jump out eighty, ninety, a hundred floors above the street. Whipet knew the building well, and it drove him nuts thinking of the dozens of people trapped on the stairs leading to the roof—locked inside where he could not get to them. His unit had been warned off by the FD and by his PD bosses. They didn't want those choppers to burst into flame, trying to save people they felt couldn't be saved. But Steve had believed that he could have rescued some people. While he'd been in the air; he'd shot a bunch of photos. He had his opinions about what he could have done if they'd been allowed to land on the roof.

Afterward, he'd come down to earth to work the site and deferred his retirement for months. Even after he was out, he returned there from time to time. And he still believed that more could have been done. Both he and Eloise continued to have nightmares about it, and the relationship ended. Two years ago Steve bailed for good. He retired from the Department and went somewhere far away with the wife he always said he'd never much liked. He and Eloise didn't keep in touch anymore.

After a fruitless search in her drawer for the missing pens, Eloise finally gave up looking. Hagedorn was still offering the one from his pocket, so she took it. "Thanks."

"What does she want?" he asked about the Woo conversation.

"Oh, she wants us to investigate the Peret case, find out where he went, how he got in, who served him booze. And of course where he got the blow."

"This doesn't sound like our kind of case. Are we going after the clubs?" Charlie said excitedly.

"Not clear." Eloise didn't know what else to answer.

"It sounds pretty clear to me. Lieutenant Woo went downtown this morning. The chief has her on something." He rubbed his hands together. "This is great. We've been too easy on these creeps. The plastic trail should make a good start. We could shut them down."

"Right," she said quickly. She was new to the job. She had no idea what he was talking about. Did precinct units do club raids?

"Also his cell phone. His incoming and outgoing calls might place him inside one of the clubs, or more than one. We could get lucky there." Hagedorn was already on it.

"Check," she said. "You work on the credit cards, and I'll see what we can do about that phone."

Charlie returned to his computer, and Gelo tapped her fingers on the pen, wondering when Woo might get back to the shop and tell her what was going on.

Eleven

C
ome on, little girl. Make it easy on yourself.

These are your knives, aren't they?"

Remy shook her head. The detective with the crappy diet was now calling her "little girl." She hated this guy. She'd already told him they weren't her knives.

"They belong to the kitchen," she said wearily.

"Cam-onnn." His New York accent was an assault from which there was no retreat. "Cam-onnn, answer the question. Are they all here, or are there more?"

"I ... don't . . . know," she said very slowly. "This is Wayne's kitchen. I don't keep track of everything he brings home."

And that was another thing that was upsetting her. Why wasn't Wayne here? Why wasn't
he
answering these questions? A pile of plastic bags covered the long kitchen counter. Each one had a knife in it. There were seven cleavers of varying sizes, ten butcher knives. Six carving knives of different lengths, some of them very long. More than a dozen paring knives, with and without serrated edges. They were his knives, so why did she have to answer for them? Frankly Remy was shocked by how many there were. She'd known there were a lot of knives in the house. It was certainly clear that Wayne was a fanatic about them. He had his own sets, one at home and one in his car, that he wouldn't let anyone else use. In addition to those, manufacturers sent him new knives to test out in hopes of getting an endorsement. Sometimes he brought these home, too. Altogether it turned out to be a big number to account for.

She made a disgusted noise. Until today the knives had always been beautiful tools to her. Just that morning after she'd washed up the breakfast dishes, the stainless steel blades had been shiny and the handles as dry as she'd left them the night before. She liked things clean. Since then, all the knives had been removed from the various drawers and locations where they were kept. They'd been labeled and bagged, and she knew they were headed for a laboratory somewhere to determine who had touched them and if there were traces of Maddy's blood on any of them. They all had Remy's fingerprints on them—that was a given.

"I told you I was in here the whole time. No one would have been able to come in and put them back," she said irritably.

Sergeant Minnow cleared his throat. "What did you say your duties are, little girl?"

"I told you a dozen times. I'm the cook." Remy wasn't changing that story.

"I thought you were the babysitter."

"I look after the kids sometimes, but that doesn't make me a babysitter."

"You took them to school this morning."

"Yes."

"Did you do that to be with Mr. Wilson?"

"Please." She made an impatient gesture.

"I asked you a question."

"I went with him because he asked me to," she said sharply.

"Do you do everything Mr. Wilson asks?" Minnow said this with a straight face and a suggestive tone.

Remy didn't see it corning. She didn't see a lot of what he said coming. She closed her eyes.

"Would you do anything he asked you?" he repeated.

She scratched the side of her nose. "No," she replied.

"Oh, what wouldn't you do?"

"He wouldn't ask—" she started to speak, then shut her mouth. She didn't want to say any more about what Wayne wouldn't ask. He'd asked her to make up with Maddy and to keep quiet about their relationship. She didn't want to talk about him.

"Okay, little girl, play it your own way. But we're going to find out everything anyway. We're going to rip this thing wide open, so you might as well come clean."

She didn't say anything.

He softened his voice. "So you're the cook and you don't know how many knives are in your kitchen. Cam-onnn. You expect me to believe that?"

Finally Remy spoke. "Look, this is a kitchen for a bigger staff. There are duplicates of everything. Wayne brings knives and other equipment home to test. We got a lot of stuff here." She shrugged.

He wanted to talk about knives. She could talk about knives.

"Well, look at them carefully."

She looked at the awesome array. "I've never seen some of these," she murmured truthfully.

"Which ones?"

She sat back, putting distance between them. She didn't want to poke at the blades inside their little plastic cases. She wished she could shut down against this whole stupid barrage. Her body ached to close in around itself and seal off the trauma. Her eyelids drooped. "Give me a break," she muttered.

"A nice lady died here in a very shitty way. She fought hard for her life. Nobody gave her a break." The detective started cracking his knuckles loudly. He sounded mad enough to start breaking hers.

"I found her. I wish I hadn't. But I don't know anything else." Remy held back her tears.

She'd been dog-tired a thousand times in her life. Fatigue was an old enemy. Anybody who'd ever manned a grill or a fry station during peak hours in a popular restaurant knew the dangers of fatigue. People got hurt when their attention wandered. Every line cook had to fight it, and everyone had his own way to cope. Cocaine, alcohol, amphetamines were the commonest combatants. Or coffee. Diet Coke, Cigarettes. They were all addicted to something. Remy's thing was Coke, the liquid kind. Since the cops started taking turns with her hours ago, she'd swallowed down almost a case of Diet Cokes. But the caffeine hadn't helped her. She didn't feel a kick, a buzz, anything. The questions kept coming, and she didn't want to give' in just because she was tired. She knew Wayne hadn't done it, and didn't think Derek could have, so who else was there?

"How about these?" he demanded.

White lights flashed in her eyes as Minnow pushed the plastic bags aside and added six more to the collection on the marble counter. These, Remy knew, were hers. Her precious knives, which she'd bought before she met Wayne, had cost over a hundred dollars each. They'd been removed from their newspaper wrapping, and like the others, they'd been bagged and labeled. The sight of her beloved tools, hostage to a murder investigation, was more than a little frightening. She had a sinking feeling that she wouldn't be seeing them again anytime soon. "They're mine," she admitted miserably.

Behind her, the wall phone kept ringing. She'd been told not to pick it up, but she wished someone would. Her head was spinning with all the noise and activity in the house. It made her so nervous how police were working the house, packing things up in boxes and taking them out. She didn't know what they were taking. They kept moving her around so she couldn't see what they were doing and took turns talking to her. Sometimes there were two of them, sometimes one. The Chinese woman who'd been nice to her earlier was gone. Several men in civilian clothes looked as if they didn't have anything to do. They stood around talking on their cell phones. Nobody asked her the right questions.

"What were they doing in your knapsack?" The annoying detective forced her to pay attention to him.

What were her own knives doing in her own knapsack? What a dumb question. Remy drew in her breath. "I had a class," she said.

"Oh yeah, what kind of class?"

"I
told
you I go to cooking school. We use our own knives there."

"You carry them back and forth?"

She nodded.

"What class did you have?"

She took another breath. "Butchering."

He let out a nervous giggle as if it were some kind of sick joke. "No kidding. What kind?' '

"All kinds. I could butcher a cow if I had to. A pig, a lamb. A chef has to know the cuts of meat." She knew her cuts.

"You know what I think? I think you know a lot more about this murder than you're letting on, little girl."

"I know a lot about food," she said miserably. She glanced at the wall clock, wondering who was going to pick up the children. "Can I go now?"

He shook his head. She sighed and asked for another Diet Coke.

Twelve

B
y the time April emerged from the Wilson house, the number of Department vehicles had diminished and the number of eager reporters had grown. It took her a few seconds to locate Woody in the crowd. He was buried in a clot of bystanders across the street, talking with a pretty, dark-haired girl in charge of a heavily laden stroller. The stroller was stuffed with a wild-haired toddler eating raisins out of a plastic bag, a plastic tricycle, and a net sack filled with sand toys. April hurried toward them.

Questions barraged her from all sides as she dodged through the crowd of reporters.

"Do you have any leads on the killer?"

"Is Mr. Wilson a suspect?"

"Was the house broken into?"

April didn't let anyone catch her eye. It wasn't her case, and she wanted to avoid attention.

"I'm not the go-to person here. Try DCPI," was all she said.

"They never say anything," someone grumbled.

"April, what are you doing over here?" A female voice screamed over all the others.

April grimaced and turned her head away. It was someone she knew. Lily Eng, a Chinese TV reporter who'd done a story on her last year, was elbowing through the crowd. "Out of the way, she's my sister," she cried. "April, April."

Woody raised his head at the sound of her name and quickly ended his conversation with the young woman.

April couldn't avoid her. She paused in the street just long enough for Lily to charge. Lily's hair was longer than April's, cut in a shag. But they were both about the same size with delicate oval faces, almond eyes, and bee-stung lips. They were also wearing the same purple pantsuit and did indeed look like sisters.

"Hey, cutie, nice suit," April said, walking quickly to the car.

Lily grabbed her arm to slow her down. "Can you give me some background on the case?"

"No."

"Nothing confidential," she wheedled. "Please. Just background. I won't quote you."

April shook her head. "I don't know a thing about it, sis."

"Fine, I get it. I'll call you later. Hi—Woody Baum, right?" Lily's voice turned to honey.

"Hi, yourself," he said, dead meat for the second time that day. He was an easy mark.

"Woody!" April barked.

He jumped to open the passenger door, shut her safely in, then ran around to the driver's side.