The second the door closed behind him, Regan turned back to her desk. She was determined to clear her e-mails as quickly as possible. She’d finished thirty without interruption, took a break to answer phone calls and eat lunch, and then went back to her task.
The next e-mail was from Henry. Whenever he received anything he thought Regan would be interested in, he forwarded it to her computer. The subject line was blank, and when she scrolled down, there was just an attachment, but no typed message from Henry. That was a bit peculiar. She assumed he’d been in a hurry.
She clicked on the paper clip icon and waited.
Henry walked into her office just as the picture appeared on the screen.
“Your phone wasn’t in your car. I looked under the seats, between them… hey, Regan, what’s the matter. Are you sick?”
“Oh, my God…” She was so repulsed by what she was looking at she couldn’t go on.
Henry ran around the desk. He stopped short when he saw the screen. In front of him was a picture of a dead man, hanging by a thick rope from a beam in a basement somewhere, his face grotesquely swollen. His eyes were wide open, and his flabby skin was a chalky gray.
“Gross,” Henry whispered. “What kind of pervert would send…”
“The e-mail came from you,” she said.
“No way would I send anything like this.”
She nodded. “Someone must have gotten hold of our private e-mail addresses.”
Henry pointed to the screen. “It’s not real,” he said. “Someone’s just playing a sick joke on you. Get rid of it,” he added as he reached for the delete key.
She pushed his hand away. “I know this man.”
“What?”
“I know him.”
“People can do a lot of things with a photo and a computer,” he said.
“So he might not really be dead?”
“Maybe not,” he said. “I think we ought to call the police and let them figure it out.”
She pointed to the screen. “He is the police.”
Chapter Seventeen
Alec headed over to the Hamilton Hotel to talk to Regan Madison, the nutcase who had called the office and asked to speak to Detective Benjamin Sweeney. When told by the operator that Sweeney wasn’t available, she’d asked if that was a permanent or a temporary situation. And that’s when Detective John Wincott and Detective Alec Buchanan got involved.
The operator had told him that either the woman who’d called or her assistant would meet Alec in front of the elevators on the south side of the lobby. He spotted a young man dressed in khaki pants and a navy Hue blazer shifting from foot to foot in the elevator alcove and headed toward him. He looked like a bodyguard, maybe even a former linebacker with the Bears, or some other pro football team, but when Alec got closer to him, he saw how very young he was. Hell, he was just a teenager.
“Detective Buchanan?”
“That’s right.”
The young man stepped forward and thrust out his hand as he introduced himself. “My name’s Henry Portman, and I’m Regan’s… I mean, I’m Regan Madison’s assistant.”
The kid was nervous. Alec didn’t make any attempt to put him at ease. “So where’s…” he began, and then stopped. He’d almost called Henry’s employer a nutcase. Not too diplomatic, he decided. “Where’s Mrs. Madison?” he began again.
“Oh, she’s Miss Madison,” he corrected. “She isn’t married. I thought she might get engaged a while back, but it didn’t work out, and I was real happy about that.” He grinned and added, “I guess that isn’t important, is it?”
“Probably not,” Alec said. “So tell me. Why were you happy she didn’t get engaged?” He thought maybe Henry had a crush on his employer and wondered if he’d admit it.
“The guy was only after her money.”
“She has lots of money?”
Henry realized he was speaking out of school. “You’ll have to ask her about that. She’s waiting for us in her office on the third floor. She’s making sure no one touches her computer. If you’ll accompany me-”
“She’s guarding her computer?”
“Yes, sir.”
Henry was wearing a key on a long silver chain. As soon as they’d stepped inside the brass-plated elevator, he inserted the key into a lock and pushed the button for the third floor.
“All the offices are on three,” he explained. “And no one can get off on that floor without a key. It’s for security purposes. There’s a lot of expensive equipment up there.”
Alec filed the information away. At six foot three inches, he stood shoulder to shoulder with the kid, but he felt dwarfed by him. Alec had the muscles in his shoulders and upper arms, but Henry had about fifty pounds on him. Still, Alec felt he could take him down if he had to.
Something was making Henry nervous.
“How old are you?” Alec asked.
“Nineteen.”
“You still in high school?”
“No, sir. I go to Loyola here in Chicago.”
“Loyola doesn’t have a football team.” He spoke the thought out loud.
Henry smiled. “I get asked what position I play and for what team all the time. A big African-American man with a twenty-inch neck. People make assumptions, like I’m a football player or sometimes even a rapper. My sheet’s clean now, by the way.”
Ah, there it was. Alec didn’t smile, but he came close. “Yeah?” he said as the elevator doors opened on the third floor.
“You’ll probably find out anyway,” Henry blurted. He stepped off the elevator and turned to face Alec. “Even though my file is sealed, you’ll figure out a way to read it like they do on those cop shows, so I’ll save you the trouble and just tell you. I had a couple of problems when I was a kid, and I spent some time in juvie. I was hanging with the wrong people. That’s not an excuse. Just fact.”
“Okay,” he said. “So how come you’re so nervous?”
“You,” he stammered. “Well, not exactly you. Cops make me nervous. That’s not so unusual. They make my friend Kevin nervous too. And he doesn’t have a record.”
“Your boss called us,” he reminded Henry. “So stop sweating it.”
Henry smiled. They had stopped and were now standing in the hallway. “Our offices are down that corridor and around the corner.”
Alec took his time following. He paused at each office door along the way to look inside. When Henry realized what he was doing, he backtracked.
“That office belongs to Regan’s brother Spencer. He’s rarely here, though.”
“That one?” Alec asked nodding toward the office on the opposite side of the corridor.
“That one belongs to Walker.”
Alec made the connection. “Walker Madison, the race car driver?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
They continued on, turned the corner, and then Alec stopped again in front of another suite.
“That one’s Aiden’s office. He’s the oldest brother. There’s four in all. Three boys and one girl.”
The hall was as luxurious as the lobby. There were fresh flowers in beautiful vases on each table along the corridor. The carpet was a deep red, the walls a white damask.
“Tell me about your boss.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What’s she like to work for?”
“Oh, she’s great.”
“How did you get this job?”
“A teacher in my high school had me fill out some forms for an intern program here at the hotel, working with computers. I thought it was a joke because I didn’t know much of anything about computers back then, didn’t even know how to do e-mail. We had computers in my high school, but they didn’t work half the time. Anyway, Miss Madison chose me and had me working day and night all summer long. I even slept at the hotel while I trained, until she found me a family that had an extra bedroom and didn’t mind having an extra kid around. I’ve worked here ever since.”