“There is no cat.”
“I could have sworn Bernadette said she’d gotten a cat. I have a key.” She held it up for him to see. “We seem to be on the same wavelength this morning.”
“I stopped to see if Cal was here.”
“He’s not. Did you check his office?”
“He didn’t go in. He told his assistant he had a client emergency. He doesn’t answer his cell phone.”
“Is T.J. with you?”
“No.”
Rook’s mood was difficult to read. Mackenzie glanced around the study, which was dominated by Bernadette’s surprisingly simple desk. She had an ergonomically correct chair and glass-front bookcases that ran along an entire wall. Law texts and art history picture books were shoved in among paperback Regency romances she read for relaxation, and bird books, hiking books.
Several photo albums were scattered on the floor in front of one of the bookcases. Mackenzie squatted down and opened one to pictures of Bernadette and Harris at the lake.
“Those were taken awhile ago,” Rook said, standing over Mackenzie.
She looked up at him. “You FBI types must get more training in being stealthy.”
“It’s not that difficult when someone’s preoccupied.”
“I remember this visit,” she said, pointing to the pictures. “It was the summer between my junior and senior years in college. I had a part-time internship at a local museum and a job cleaning rooms at one of the inns in town. Bernadette had my parents and me over for dinner, and I remember how fascinated I was listening to her and Harris talk. He’s a smart man.”
“Judge Peacham must have been devastated when he let it all get away from him.”
“She was.” Mackenzie shut the album and rose, feeling the stiffness of the healing cut in her side. So many questions would be answered by now if she’d been able to hang on to her attacker. “She worried he’d commit suicide in the beginning. I was here once when he called her. It was right after the scandal broke. I was in graduate school – I was down here for research, Harris was drunk, angry at himself at having been exposed. He couldn’t see that he’d done anything wrong, legally or ethically. Beanie convinced him to tell her where he was.”
“Where?”
“A rooming house. It was some kind of secret hideout for him. He’d go there and indulge his dark side, I guess. I went with Beanie to collect him. She dropped him off at his house in Georgetown and gave him an ultimatum – never again.”
Rook glanced down at the shut album. “Did she keep that promise?”
“As far as I know.” Mackenzie stepped past him, but turned as she reached the door. “Would you like to check out the rooming house? I hadn’t thought of it until now. I don’t know if Harris still uses it.”
“Can you find it?”
“I think so. If I can’t, I can call Beanie. She’ll remember where it is.”
Rook considered a moment. Outside, Bernadette’s tall shade trees swayed in the wind, and rain lashed the windows. Finally, he said, “We’ll take my car.”
Mackenzie nodded. “All right.” As she started out of the study, she smiled back at him. “Try not to let the cat out when we leave.”
She thought he might have cracked a smile, but she wasn’t sure, which, she realized, was part of the fun of being around him. But she couldn’t think in those terms right now. She had to focus on the job at hand.
“He took the place for a month.” The superintendent, a wiry, middle-aged man with sparse tufts of close-cropped hair, had led Rook and Mackenzie to an ell off the rundown building. “That’s the most he ever takes it for. He comes and goes. He don’t call himself Harris Mayer, though. Harry Morrison. Pays in cash.”
Rook stood on the sidewalk behind the super. The rain had stopped, but thunder still rumbled in the distance. “When did you see him last?”
“A week ago. Maybe more.” He stuck the key in the door, shook his head. “Hear that? Air-conditioning. He keeps it going full blast. His choice – he pays the bills.” He unlocked the door, pushed it open, then jumped back. “Oh. My goodness, my goodness.”
Rook drew his weapon and saw that Mackenzie had done the same. He instructed the superintendent to move back onto the sidewalk and gave the door a kick to open it wider.
The worn wood floor of a small entry was splattered with dried blood. It was plainly blood. Careful of where he stepped, Rook entered the studio, immediately recognizing a smell that air-conditioning couldn’t suppress.
He glanced at Mackenzie, right behind him. “Mac, this isn’t going to be good. You’ve never -”
“I’m okay, Rook.”
“You know Harris.”
A tightness around her eyes betrayed her emotion, but she gave a curt nod. “So do you. Let’s just do this.”
They moved into the adjoining room, the furnishings threadbare and cheap but serviceable. Ancient air conditioners in a front window and a window in the kitchenette clunked and groaned.
“There,” Mackenzie said, nodding to the floor in front of a shut door. “More blood.”
She stood to the side, and Rook pushed open the door.
The smell was worse. There was blood everywhere.
Harris Mayer was sprawled in the old bathtub, his body partially covered with a flowered shower curtain that had been ripped from the rod.
“Knife wounds,” Mackenzie said from the doorway.
Rook looked back at her. “They’re not self-inflicted. He’s been here awhile. Days, not hours.” He shook his head and grimaced. “Hell.”
She didn’t respond, just spun around without a word and bolted. Rook didn’t follow her and he couldn’t do anything for Harris. Whatever his flaws he hadn’t deserved this. Rook returned to the main room and checked the rear exit next to the kitchenette, but it was secure. He got out his cell phone and made the calls he needed to. The D.C. police. His superiors. T. J. Kowalski.
T.J. was to the point. “Mackenzie led you to him?”
“Just get here.”
“On my way.”
When Rook returned to the street, Mackenzie was talking to the superintendent. Her skin was grayish, but she was rallying after the shock of finding Harris. Already, he could hear a siren. Cruisers would arrive first, with D.C. detectives not far behind. Harris’s murder fell under their jurisdiction.
Rook stood close to Mackenzie. “Anyone you need to call?”
She nodded. He still had his phone out and handed it to her. Her hands shook slightly. “I got sick to my stomach,” she said as she dialed. “Bet I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been on antibiotics.” She cleared her throat. “Chief? Yeah, it’s me. It’s not a good scene here.” She’d called him on the way to the rooming house and now gave him the facts of what she and Rook had found. She spoke crisply, without emotion. But when she disconnected, she tilted her head back and exhaled at the sky. “I should have thought of this place sooner.”
A fresh breeze stirred, the storm quickly blowing out the heat and humidity – the stink of exhaust fumes, garbage and dog excrement. That no one had smelled the body in the studio wasn’t a huge surprise. And if someone had and not reported it? Again, no big surprise.
“I didn’t know,” the superintendent said, repeating his mantra about minding his own business.
“Did you see anyone with Mr. Mayer?” Rook asked.
“No, sir. I mind my own business.”
The first cruiser stopped in front of the building, with T.J. right behind it, his grim expression underlining the stark reality of the scene in the seedy studio. Rook had quickly adjusted his thinking. J. Harris Mayer, his would-be informant, wasn’t hiding at the beach. He was dead.
Twenty-Six
Bernadette wasn’t surprised to find Gus’s truck in her driveway when she arrived at the lake. The weather had delayed her, and it would be like him to make sure she got home alive. As she got out of her car, she could feel the stiffness from the long drive in her lower back, her right hip.