And now I’d lied. Not just omitted or overlooked. But outright lied.
“Come on,” I said, reaching for my door and receiving a growl for me to wait while Damon scrambled out of his. I sat there, as he made his way around the hood of the truck and grasped my door handle, and wondered just how much worse this day was going to get.
We needed to be in the banquet, questioning and observing our suspects. I had my orders. I had to make this happen. And if it was tied into Carole Michaels then all the better. But as Damon helped me from the vehicle, an intense but concerned look in his eyes when they met mine, I knew I hadn’t fooled him. And I knew it was me who had been a fool.
I couldn’t tell him. Not yet. Not here.
But I would.
You can deny anything to anyone, Sport. But you can’t deny the truth to yourself.
I felt wretched as we made our way to the Town Hall. I felt duplicitous and evil. Using Damon for my own needs as we moved through the arched entranceway to the neo-Baroque styled building, the clock tower casting a shadow over our path. As we moved out of the sunlight and under the arched ceilings of the hall, and made our way towards the ‘Auckland City Supports the EMS’ event, I wondered what that made me.
A cop just doing her job? Or a heartless woman playing with the trust of a good man. He deserved to know about his sister. To know my suspicions, which were just that. Suspicions. But my gut knew. So I did too. My silent caller had been his sister, which meant as of midday today she’d been alive.
I looked up at Damon as he handed over the invitation to someone on the door. He’d want to know. I’d want to know if I was in his position.
And then we were through the door, entering a large room with sweeping, curved ceilings and stone arches and deep set eaves, moulded and decorated in ornate plasterwork. Deep red velvet curtains trailed along the floor, shutting off windows, but they could just as easily be hiding secret pockets. Liaison appropriate settings out of sight, but not completely out of earshot. It reminded me of the Irreverent Inferno cavern. The opulence and grandeur, pared back by cream stucco and an echoing stud height.
My eyes scanned the tables, a series of round white cloths surrounded by ten gilt framed chairs. Third course was underway. Cutlery scraping, crystal glasses clinking, conversation a low hum to the string quartet sitting under a spotlight on a far away stage. The dresses were bright. Pale was not in this season. But the men all matched. Dinner suits and black bow ties, no lounge suits or business suits here.
Small arrangements of white flowers topped the centre of each table, their perfume mixing on the air with more artificial ones. Laughter, polite and raucous, the odd black humour joke announcing just what sort of clientele was in attendance here.
I spotted the Marcrofts first, sitting at a table together with other businessmen and their wives at a guess. Someone at that table would be from an Emergency Service. No point putting all the wallets in one place and all the beggars in another. The goal would be to impress and hopefully when the gentlemen and their wives left they’d be a little lighter in the pocket.
I wondered who we’d be seated with, but the Marcrofts’ table was full, which ruled them out. My father I found next, as we were guided through the room to our table. His eyes met mine, a small smattering of surprise there, then vanished. He didn’t raise a glass in greeting. He didn’t even smile. The conversation at the table drew his attention before we’d taken another step.
Our guide came to stop at a table with two empty chairs. Luck seemed to be in our favour.
I took my seat, answered greetings from those around the table, while Damon apologised for our late arrival. And then turned and smiled at David Gordon. His returning expression was not as welcoming. I could hardly blame him, but understanding was all the empathy he’d get.
“Mr and Mrs Gordon, how lovely to see you here,” I said, accepting a glass of wine from the waiter.
“Detective Keen,” Mr Gordon replied. “And is this another partner?”
The man liked to take control of the conversation. Just like he took control of his wife behind closed doors?
“This is HEAT Chief Investigator Damon Michaels,” I announced. “Damon this is David Gordon and his wife, Gloria.”
I smiled at Mrs Gordon, who offered a plastic smile in return. There was no warmth there. But no chill either. It just was. She took a large gulp from her wine, the only indication she was uncomfortable.
“HEAT?” Gordon asked. “Now there’s a worthwhile occupation.”
And so went the next few minutes. David Gordon steered the conversation around to topics appropriate for a gala event, and avoided all other extraneous subject matter. Not that I tried to pull the rug out from under his feet. I let him go for it, secure in his control of the situation, while I watched Mrs Gordon drink more and more wine until I was sure she was quite tipsy.
“How are you, Mrs Gordon?” I said, leaning over the table and lowering my voice. David Gordon paused in his recitation of fire regulations for large department stores, but Damon pounced, drawing him back in.
“I..I’m fine. Thank you,” Mrs Gordon replied, sipping from the second glass of wine I’d seen her with since we’d arrived. I was betting she’d had at least one more before we’d got here, though.
“I’m so sorry about the other day, Mrs Gordon,” I said, taking a bite from the rather disappointingly small meal in front of me. When had I last eaten?
“The other day?”
“When I was at your house.”
David Gordon stopped talking mid-sentence and turned angry blue eyes to meet mine.
“Now, come, come, Detective,” he announced, in a voice loud enough to carry. “We’re not here to discuss work.”
Damon laughed. Several others around the table, and from nearby ones as well, joined in.
“I’m afraid, David,” Damon exclaimed good naturedly, “that you may well have attended the wrong event. If not the Emergency Services then what shall we discuss? Politics? Gambling?”
All levity left Gordon’s face, making me realise he’d been at least attempting to keep things light until then.
“Perhaps politics would be better,” he said pointedly, voice level and somehow still a command. “Such as the politics of public service appointments. Your position, I believe, is one such appointment, is it not?”
Gordon was quick to rile. But utterly controlled when it transpired. Could he have strangled Samantha Hayes out of necessity? Yes, I think he could. Which meant he was definitely a possibility for my new theory, but how was he involved with HEAT?
The arsonist was targeting HEAT property, targeting Damon, I believed. David Gordon was an unknown in that scenario. Unknown to either Damon or HEAT.
“Have you seen HEAT in action before, Mr Gordon?” I asked pleasantly, swiping up a last mouthful from my barely touched plate before it was swept away.
“I’m aware of what they do.”
“Have you had reason to use them?” I pressed. “They’re very good, you know.”
“I have not used them, no,” he said, voice hardening.
“Would you?” I queried.
“What do you mean?”
“Would you call in HEAT if, say, you had a fire related crime at Bainbridge’s to solve?”
“It’s the law, isn’t it?” a gentleman across the way said as Gordon held my gaze with a determined one of his own. “HEAT are automatically called in when fire is involved.”
“We’re advised, but we need either permission from the Police to enter,” Damon said as Gordon and I had a mini staring match. His wife just looked into her near empty glass of wine longingly. “Or if the owner of the premises believes fire is involved, but the Police have not yet confirmed it, permission from them.”
“You can go above the Police?” someone else asked.
Damon looked toward me and smiled. I knew that smile, it was laced with debauched things. “When required.”
Mrs Gordon snorted into her wine.
She was listening and she had a sense of humour.
“Or beneath them,” Damon added, causing a stir amongst the well dressed guests, clearly following Mrs Gordon’s lead. “One in particular, anyway,” he muttered, but several of the men heard.
It shattered the moment. Took the sting out of the frozen air. Gordon relaxed, visibly. His hand even went to his wife’s on the table, lacing his fingers with hers. She looked up at him, clearly besotted. He pulled her fingers to his lips and kissed them, then looked directly at me.
“How well did you know Malcolm Francis Warren, Mr Gordon?”
The question was a direct hit, but not for the reason I’d intended. Confusion briefly filled his eyes, then was immediately replaced with recognition. Which was quickly followed by annoyance. I’d caught him off guard with the police-type query, then he’d placed the name, realising that Malcolm Warren worked for Bainbridge’s. And then, if my guess was right, he was put-out that I had trumped whatever game he’d been about to play.
He was like a book, too easy to read when off-kilter. But the moment he clamped those emotions down he became invisible.
The man who answered was a mystery to me.
“Works at my store. But you already know that.”
He turned to his wife and lifted his free hand up and cupped her face. The kiss was at once tender and also possessive and inappropriate for the setting. David Gordon liked to take control.
I dropped my line of questioning, if Gordon had anything to do with the assault, I’d not discover it here. And my gut was telling me he’d have behaved differently if he was in any way guilty. That brief moment of clarity he’d allowed me with his initial unchecked emotional response was enough for now.
The conversation continued, but Gordon barely said a word, his eyes holding mine, as the hand, holding his wife’s, slipped under the table.
I wasn’t sure about this man. He was definitely controlling, in command. But that could have been how a CEO of a prominent department store behaved. He didn’t like being questioned. He had issues with the Police. His record was clean. No priors. No history to speak of. An exemplary business career with a stellar resume. He was at the pinnacle of his professional life.
And privately? He’d been married for seven years. First marriage at the age of forty-one. Before then, I had a sneaky suspicion, he’d been sowing his wild oats.
Mrs Gordon shifted. Just slightly, but enough for me to notice it coincided with Gordon’s creased brow. He didn’t stop looking at me and I started to feel a little uncomfortable, but staring down a suspect had never made me so before.
I couldn’t place it. Where this feeling of disquiet came from. The man himself was nondescript in appearance, and his mannerisms seemed all too practised to induce raw fear. But there was something about him that made me uneasy. It’s hard to recognise evil. It’s hard to see it in the fine lines of a well made suit, in the brush of expensively cut greying hair. In the pale blue eyes that challenged, and it was then that I began to realise what was setting me on edge.
His challenge was sexual in nature. Not because he’d been questioned about a dead employee, or the assault of another, and had to sit through a public event with one of the detectives who’d invaded his home. His challenge was personal. A man to a woman. Heedless of my professional position or the man who sat at my side and had just publicly made a claim.
Maybe that was it. Damon’s slip-up of before. He’d shown his cards. Declared his possession. Albeit in a joke that meant no harm.
I’m a cop. I’m used to it. Blatant shows of testosterone mixed in with the job’s heightened emotional strain. But David Gordon was an executive, a businessman who always wore suits and spoke in hushed tones behind boardroom doors. He wasn’t used to such displays. It incited something in him.
Add in my question about Malcolm Francis Warren and his path was set.
He ruled his empire. He ruled at home.
And when sitting across from a woman who had invaded both without caution, questioned him in public without heed, and having had what appeared a challenge thrown down at his feet, he reacted. He slipped into a role that I had only glimpsed in Damon, that I had only ever read about before.
Mrs Gordon’s lips parted, her free hand tightened around her glass. The conversation at the table continued, dessert was delivered and consumed, and all the while David Gordon held my gaze with a question in his eyes, as he held the hand of his wife under the table. Out of sight, but not the picture.
I smiled.
He smiled.
And in the middle of the beautiful old Town Hall building, in the centre of the elaborately decorated Great Hall, surrounded by exquisitely dressed dinner companions, Mrs Gordon shuddered. Her whole body spasming; a minute movement contained through training and nothing else.
As her chest rose and fell swiftly, her eyes darted around the table, the room, anywhere but at the man at her side, and landed on mine. And she knew. She knew I’d seen it. Watched it. Was aware of what exactly had happened three feet across a table from where I sat.
Her eyes were just as challenging as her husband’s, but for entirely different reasons.
This woman was a submissive, to no one but this controlling man.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Guilty by process of elimination.”
Did that make him a murderer? Did that make him good for the assault in Boardman Lane? Had David Gordon abducted Carole Michaels and even now kept her somewhere locked up as a sex slave?
And what the hell did he have to do with HEAT?
He acted as though he didn’t even know or care about Damon, only in so much as Damon’s claim on me had raised the hackles on his neck.
The man was a controlling sexual exhibitionist, which definitely placed him on the list for killing Samantha Hayes. But any connection to the HEAT arsonist was a bust. I just couldn’t connect the dots.
And the longer I sat opposite the man, who seemed to have relaxed into the dinner conversation without a ruffle in his evil cape, the harder it was not to demand answers. Answers that would get me nowhere and could escalate his crimes if he did do any of this.
I just didn’t know, and I couldn’t spend anymore time on him. I had the Marcrofts to corner and my father to check in with. Gordon was going to have to stay on the maybe pile, and I just had to hope I ruled out the other three. Guilty by process of elimination. It was something that Carl would say.
Or Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes their imagined voices in my head overlapped.
“There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” I said, leaning over to Damon and talking just loud enough for Gordon to hear. I felt dirty sitting here at the same table as him and his wife. But my chosen target for distraction would no doubt make me feel small. I wasn’t sure which was going to be better.
But for now I’d had enough of David Gordon, that was for damn sure.
“Great,” Damon replied, a little too eagerly. I blinked at him as he rose from his seat and clasped my hand in his. “Nice meeting you all,” he offered and practically dragged me away from the scene of what may not have been a crime exactly; it would be hard to prove, both the Gordons would deny it. And if it was a crime, it was only a misdemeanour.
Just my innocence the victim of the day.
And it appeared Damon’s.
“Bloody hell,” he whispered in my ear. “That man is a sexual deviant.”
“Deviant,” I repeated, thinking that choice of word was bang on.
“Both of them, because she enjoyed it as much as he did.”
“Were we the only ones who noticed?” I asked, astounded he’d been able to pay attention and still maintain a conversation with another couple at the table.
“Not by a long shot. Maybe not the women, but the men were well aware of Gloria Gordon climaxing just across the table from them, you can be sure.”
“That’s disgusting,” I commented.
“Different strokes, Lara. The world is made up of many differe
nt sexual preferences, but that does not make him our man.”
“Makes him a good target for it,” I argued, keeping my voice quiet as we wended our way through the throng of diners towards my father’s table.
“I don’t think so. Was that the act of a man trying to avoid police attention?”
“Or was he trying to scare me off.”
Damon barked out a laugh, making several women we passed look up and smile appreciatively. “Love, he was offering you an invitation. Should you have excused yourself and gone to the bathroom right afterwards, he would have followed. To hell with me. To hell with his wife. It was for you that act was performed.”
“Bullshit,” I grumbled, receiving a few looks that were not appreciation. “He was challenging me. Telling me the fight was on.”
“Oh, it was a challenge, all right. One you beautifully ignored. Ignorant to its delivery or not, you shot him down. By inviting me to leave with you from the table.”
“What?” I squeaked, embarrassingly.
He pulled me behind one of those velvet curtains, sealing us away mere feet from the chattering, laughing, midday drinking guests at the Town Hall.
“Damon,” I began. We didn’t have time for this.
“Shh,” he said, wrapping his arms around me and leaning in to offer a chaste kiss. “Just a few minutes to send the right signal to Gordon.”
“The right signal?”
“That you’re mine and he better start fishing elsewhere.”
“Neanderthal,” I muttered.
His laugh was a low rumble emanating from his chest. I lifted my hand and rested it there, feeling his happiness through the fine weave of his dinner suit.
“He was too involved in the game to be thinking of anything other than bedding you,” Damon whispered. The words not exactly intimate, but the setting certainly was. “I sincerely doubt that man can think past his next conquest, his next moment of controlling splendour, to be able to commit murder or assault.”
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