My hands shook as I lifted the hinged top of the window seat and grabbed the metal gun box. It was light. Empty.
I opened the closet doors, looked under the bed, saw no one, no shells, no nothing. I stepped into jeans, pulled on a T-shirt, then walked from window to window to door, checking locks, staring up at skylights looking for broken panes.
And I backtracked through my mind.
I was certain the front door had been locked when I came home. And now I was sure that every other entry point was secure.
That could only mean that someone had entered my house with an electronic gate key and biometric access-someone who knew me. Colleen had been my assistant and my lover for a year before we’d broken up. I hadn’t deleted her codes.
Colleen wasn’t the only one with access to my house, but maybe I wouldn’t have to guess who had killed her.
My house was watched by the best surveillance system ever made. There were cameras posted on all sides, over the doorways, sweeping the highway, and taking in 180 degrees of beachfront beyond my deck.
I opened the cabinet doors on the entertainment unit in the living room and flipped the switch turning on the six video monitors stacked in two columns of three. All six screens lit up-and all six screens were blank. I stabbed the buttons on the remote control again and again before I realized the hard drive was gone. Only a detached cord remained.
I grabbed the phone by the sofa and called Justine’s direct line at the office. It was almost seven. Would she still be there?
She answered on the first ring.
“Jack, you hungry after all?”
“Justine. Something bad has happened.”
My voice cracked as I forced myself to say it.
“It’s Colleen. She’s dead. Some bastard killed her.”
CHAPTER 3
I opened the front door and Justine swept in like a soft breeze. She was a first-class psychologist, a profiler, smart-hell, brilliant. Thank God she was here.
She put her hand on my cheek, searched my eyes, said, “Jack. Where is she?”
I pointed to the bedroom. Justine went in and I followed her, standing numb in the doorway as she walked to the bed. She moaned, “Oh, no,” and clasped her hands under her chin.
Even as I stood witness to this heartbreaking tableau, Colleen was still alive in my mind.
I pictured her in the little house she had rented in Los Feliz, a love nest you could almost hold in cupped hands. I thought about her twitching her hips in skimpy lingerie, big fuzzy slippers on her feet, sprinkling her thick brogue with her granny’s auld Irish sayings: “There’ll be caps on the green and no one to fetch ’em.”
“What does that mean, Molloy?” I’d asked her.
“Trouble.”
And now here she was on my bed. Well beyond trouble.
Justine was pale when she came back to me. She put her arms around me and held me. “I’m so sorry, Jack. So very sorry.”
I held her tight-and then, abruptly, Justine jerked away. She pinned me with her dark eyes and said, “Why is your hair wet?”
“My hair?”
“Did you take a shower?”
“Yes, I did. When I came home, I went straight to the bathroom. I was trying to wake myself up.”
“Well, this is no dream, Jack. This is as real as real can be. When you showered, had you seen Colleen?”
“I had no idea she was here.”
“You hadn’t told her to come over?”
“No, Justine, I didn’t. No.”
The doorbell rang again.
CHAPTER 4
The arrival of Dr. Sci and Mo-bot improved the odds of figuring out what had happened in my house by 200 percent.
Dr. Sci, real name Seymour Kloppenberg, was Private’s chief forensic scientist. He had a long string of degrees behind his name, starting with a PhD in physics from MIT when he was nineteen-and that was only ten years ago.
Mo-bot was Maureen Roth, a fifty-something computer geek and jack-of-all-tech. She specialized in computer crime and was also Private’s resident mom.
Mo had brought her camera and her wisdom. Sci had his scene kit packed with evidence-collection equipment of the cutting-edge kind.
We went to my room and the four of us stood around Colleen’s dead body as night turned the windows black.
We had all loved Colleen. Every one of us.
“We don’t have much time,” Justine said, breaking the silence, at work now as an investigator on a homicide. “Jack, I have to ask you, did you have anything to do with this? Because if you did, we can make it all disappear.”
“I found Colleen like this when I got home,” I said.
“Okay. Just the same,” said Justine, “every passing minute makes you more and more the guy who did it. You’ve got to call it in, Jack. So let’s go over everything, fast and carefully. Start from the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”
As Mo and Sci snapped on latex gloves, Justine turned on a digital recorder and motioned to me to start talking. I told her that after I got off the plane, Aldo had met me at British Airways arrivals, 5:30 sharp.
I told her about showering, then finding Colleen’s body. I said that my gun was missing as well as the hard drive from my security system.
I said again that I had no idea why Colleen was here or why she’d been killed. “I didn’t do it, Justine.”
“I know that, Jack.”
We both knew that when the cops got here, I would be suspect number one, and although I had cop friends, I couldn’t rely on any of them to find Colleen’s killer when I was so darned handy.
I had been intimately involved with the deceased.
There was no forced entry into my house.
The victim was on my bed.
It was what law enforcement liked to call an open-and-shut case. Open and shut on me.
CHAPTER 5
If you’re not the cops on official business, processing an active crime scene is a felony. It’s not just contaminating evidence and destroying the prosecution’s ability to bring the accused to trial, it’s accessory to the crime.
If we were caught working the scene, I would lose my license, and all four of us could go to jail.
That said, if there was ever a time to break the law, this was it.
Mo said, “Jack, please get out of the frame.”
I stepped into the hallway and Mo’s Nikon flashed.
She took shots from every angle, wide, close-up, extreme close-ups of the wounds in Colleen’s chest.
Sci took Colleen’s and my fingerprints with an electronic reader while Mo-bot ran a latent-print reader over hard surfaces in the room. No fingerprint powder required.
Justine asked, “When did you last see Colleen alive?”
I told her that I’d had lunch with her last Wednesday, before I left for the airport.
“Just lunch?”
“Yes. We just had lunch.”
A shadow crossed Justine’s eyes, like clouds rolling in before a thunderstorm. She didn’t believe me. And I didn’t have the energy to persuade her. I was overtired, scared, heartsick, and nauseated. I wanted to wake up. Find myself still on the plane.
Sci was talking to Mo. He took scrapings from under Colleen’s nails, and Mo sealed the bags. When Sci lifted Colleen’s skirt, swab in hand, I turned away.
I talked to Justine, told her where Colleen and I had eaten lunch on Wednesday, that Colleen had been in good spirits.
“She said she had a boyfriend in Dublin. She said she was falling in love.”
I had a new thought. I spun around and shouted, “Anyone see her purse?”
“No purse, Jack.”
“She was brought here,” I said to Justine. “Someone had her gate key.”
Justine said, “Good thought. Any reason or anyone you can think of who could have done this?”
“Someone hated her. Or hated me. Or hated us both.”
Justine nodded. “Sci? Mo? We have to get out of here. Will you be all right, Jack?”