Parker wondered why the killer would have risked smashing the Cadillac’s windows if all he had wanted was to steal the money in the safe.
Was it an act of punitive rage? A former client, or a family member of a client who hadn’t beaten the rap, and blamed Lowell? Had the motive for the murder been revenge and the money a bonus? Or had the killer been after something he hadn’t found in the office? If that was the case, this murder was a much more complicated affair. Besides the money in his safe, what could a guy like Lenny Lowell have that would be worth killing for?
Parker unsealed the crime-scene tape and let himself in the back door of the office. The smell of stale cigarette smoke clung to the fake wood paneling, and had been absorbed into the acoustic-tile ceiling, dyeing it an oily yellow. The carpet was flat and utilitarian, and a color chosen to camouflage dirt.
There was a bathroom on the left. The criminalists had gone over it, dusting for prints, plucking hairs out of the sink drain, but they had found no trace of blood. If the killer had gotten Lenny Lowell’s blood on him, he’d been smart enough not to try to clean himself up here.
Lowell’s office was next. A decent-size space now awash in paper, and fingerprint dust residue, and bits of tape marking evidence locations on the rug. The lawyer’s blood had soaked into the carpet in a barely discernible stain (another selling point for the manufacturers: hides large bloodstains!). Drawers had been pulled out of file cabinets, out of the desk.
“You’re disturbing a crime scene,” Parker said.
Abby Lowell, sitting behind her father’s desk, startled and gasped, and banged her knee trying to stand up and back away.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God, you scared me!” she scolded, her splayed hand pressed to her chest as if to keep her heart from leaping out.
“I have to ask what you’re doing here, Ms. Lowell,” Parker said, taking a seat across the desk from her. The arm of the chair was speckled with blood. “We seal crime scenes for a reason.”
“And do you make funeral arrangements?” she asked, gathering her composure around her again like the cashmere sweater she wore. “Do you know where my father kept his life insurance policy? Will you call the company for me? And what about his will? I’m sure he has one, but I have no idea where it is. I don’t know if he wanted to be buried or cremated. Can you help with that, Detective Parker?”
Parker shook his head. “No, I can’t. But if you had called me, I would have met you here and helped you look. I would have known what you touched and what you moved. I would have known if you had taken something other than your father’s will or his life insurance policy.”
“Are you accusing me of something?” she asked, sitting a little taller, arching one dark, elegant brow.
“No. I’m just saying. That’s how a crime scene works, Ms. Lowell. I can’t care that the victim was your father. It can’t matter to me if you think you have a right to come into this office. My job is very clear to me. The second your father ceased to breathe, he became my responsibility. I became his protector.”
“Too bad for my father you weren’t here to protect him from being killed. And by ‘you’ I don’t mean you personally, I mean the LAPD.”
“We can’t predict when and where a crime is about to happen,” Parker said. “If that were the case, I’d be out of a job. And frankly, you would be ahead of us in expectation of being able to protect your father. You knew his habits, you knew his friends, you probably knew his enemies. Maybe you knew he was into something that could have gotten him killed.”
She looked incredulous. “Are you now saying it’s my fault some thug broke into my father’s office and killed him? You’re incredible. How insensitive can you be?”
“You wouldn’t want to find out,” Parker said. He took his hat off and crossed his legs, settling in. “You didn’t seem all that sensitive yourself last night, if you don’t mind me saying, which you probably do. You walk into a room, your father is posing for the big chalk outline. You seemed more upset that your dinner plans had been disturbed.”
“Why? Because I didn’t fall down weeping? Because I didn’t become hysterical?” she asked. “I’m not the hysterical type, Detective. And I do my crying in private. You don’t know anything about my relationship with my father.”
“Fill me in, why don’t you? Were you and your father close?”
“In our own way.”
“What way was that?”
She sighed, looked away, looked back. The relationship, like most relationships, was more complicated than she wanted to attempt to articulate—or more complicated than she expected him to understand.
“We were friends. Lenny wasn’t much of a father. He wasn’t around. He cheated on my mother. He drank too much. His idea of quality time with me when I was a child was to drag me along with him to the racetrack or to a bookie bar, where he would promptly forget I existed. My parents divorced when I was nine years old.”
“Why didn’t you hate him?”
“Because he was the only father I had. And because, for all his faults, Lenny wasn’t a bad guy. He just couldn’t live up to expectations.”
Restless under scrutiny, she got out of her father’s chair and started a slow pace back and forth in front of his bookcases, arms crossed, eyes scanning the few things that hadn’t been knocked from the shelves in the ransacking. She was model gorgeous in the sapphire sweater and matching skirt, a pair of very nice black boots on her feet. “I was angry with him for a long time after he left. Mostly because I was stuck with my mother.”
“But you forgave him?”
“We sort of found each other when I started college. Suddenly I was an adult. We could have a conversation. I wanted to become an attorney. He took an interest in me.”
“You became friends,” Parker said. “Which is why you call him Lenny instead of Dad.”
She looked away again, not wanting him to see her have an emotional reaction to her memories of her father. But it was there—a thin sheen of tears in the dark eyes, a tightening along the jawline. That was some kind of steely control, Parker thought.
He supposed maybe that was what a little girl learned to do while her father was busy handicapping the sixth race at Santa Anita. And what a little girl did when she was caught between warring parents, what she did when her father left, what she did when he reappeared in her life. She maintained control. She suppressed reactions. She could survive any challenge if she didn’t let anything penetrate her armor.
“Did you know your father’s friends?” Parker asked quietly. “His enemies? Whether or not he was into something dangerous?”
She seemed to laugh a little to herself. Some private joke she had no interest in sharing with him.
“Lenny was always looking for an angle. Maybe he finally found one. I don’t know. If he was involved in something . . . I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. We talked about my classes. We talked about him wanting me to work with him after I pass the bar. We went to the racetrack.”
Her voice strained on the last sentence. Her relationship with her father had gone full circle, only this time around they were pals and he gave her the attention she had craved as a child. Craved so badly she had gone into her father’s profession to please him—consciously or not.
Parker said nothing for a moment, letting his gaze move without focus over the stuff on the desk. Abby Lowell continued her slow pace. She wanted out, he supposed. Not even innocent people wanted to be around cops. He had no way of knowing how innocent she was or wasn’t.
“You’re in charge of making the funeral arrangements?” he asked. “Does he have any other family?”