by Parker, Ava
She poured hot water over the Earl Grey and brought the tray to the coffee table. “Have a seat,” she said, pointing to the worn leather easy chair, and took a seat on that side of the sofa. “It needs a few minutes to steep.”
“Are you holding up okay?”
She shrugged. “I guess. The hardest part is feeling useless. I want to take the next five steps that will lead me to my sister, but I don’t know what those steps are. She doesn’t have an angry boyfriend. No one noticed a stalker – which doesn’t actually rule one out. Her restaurant may or may not have been losing money, and that could provoke the thief to harm her. Or, it could be a stranger abduction, or something worse,” her voice faltered, “and, how do I even begin to find her if it was random?”
Ben leaned over and wrapped his big hand around hers, giving it a squeeze. “That’s a lot of maybes. We can keep asking about strange admirers. If there was one, and he turned into a stalker, someone must have noticed. It may just be a matter of asking the right person. We can also start looking at her bank accounts and see if there are any indications of financial problems. If we find one, I can give you a hundred reasons it might incite violence. Money is the root of a lot of crimes in this world. As for the random stranger, have you considered posting signs around Gigi’s and on this block? Someone may have seen her get into a car or cab outside of the restaurant, or if she went home that night and left again, someone may have seen her downstairs on the street. It might not lead us straight back to Maddy, but those are a few steps in the right direction.”
Clara was overwhelmed with gratitude. Ben had arrived with a plan and she was going to follow it. She watched Bea sidle up to him, cautiously smelling his suede shoes and then his jeans before she jumped into his lap. “Hello, kitty.” He scratched her chin lovingly and Bea purred like a lawn mower.
“I’ll get Maddy’s laptop.” Clara was already thinking of the picture she would put on the flyer. She got the computer and sat back on the sofa, immediately opening a word document and messing around with font sizes until she got a really big one. She typed, Have You Seen Me?, then searched through Maddy’s Facebook photos until she found the picture she wanted and copy-pasted it onto the document, followed by her own cell phone number. “Here,” she said and handed the heavy black laptop to Ben, who set it on the arm of the aging leather chair to avoid disturbing the cat in his lap. Clara had chosen a head and shoulders shot of Maddy at an outdoor restaurant. She was smiling and her eyes were sparkling in the sunshine, her thick brown hair falling in waves just past her shoulders. She wore a blue T-shirt the same color as her eyes and there was a soft, happy smile on her face.
“I was there when this picture was taken.”
Clara was surprised. “Who took it?”
“Jack, when they were still dating. I met them for lunch at one of the hotel restaurants on the wharf. I thought they were made for each other, but what do I know?”
“She looks very happy.”
“I thought she was. I think Jack thought so too.”
“She ended the relationship?”
“That’s the impression I had, but neither of them talked to me about it. Jack was pretty disappointed and Maddy didn’t seem quite as bummed out about it, but it’s hard to tell with her.”
“Tell me about it. She’s my sister and I struggle. I didn’t even know she was seriously dating anyone.” She thought for a few seconds. “Are you sure Jack wasn’t obsessing?”
“Yep. He’s not the type. And I know Jack. He’s not just my business partner; he’s one of my best friends. Plus, when I told him what was going on he was really upset, and said he’d call the cops right away. I gave him Detective Carlisle’s number.”
“Doesn’t rule him out.”
He looked at her and set the laptop down on the coffee table, irritating Bea who jumped out of his lap with a loud meow. Clara poured tea and met Ben’s gaze, raising her eyebrows. “No,” he said finally, “it doesn’t rule him out for you, or the police, but it does for me. Fair enough?” He gave her a sexy wink.
She smiled coyly and nodded. “Fair enough. Milk?”
“No thanks. The flyer looks great. Does Maddy have a printer here?”
“Over there” – she pointed to the desk – “underneath.”
They drank their tea and printed fifty copies, and then Clara decided to print fifty more. “Just in case.” They couldn’t find a stapler but Ben said he had one in his toolbox, so they put their jackets on, leaving Bea dozing on the coffee table suspiciously close to the little pot of milk.
Clara walked with Ben a block down Pine Street toward the water and followed him through the security door of his building and down to the basement. “Tools are in my storage unit,” he explained. They walked down a wide hallway with numbered doors on either side until they got to 1001, which he opened with a key.
“This is the tidiest storage room I’ve ever seen.” It was big enough for light work on the wooden worktable. A large Craftsman toolbox sat atop the table and heavy steel hooks bolted underneath held various power tools. She noted two Bosch drills, one of them cordless and – there it was – a manual chrome staple gun. Fingering a handheld jigsaw, she felt a little smile play over her lips. “I have the same saw in my workshop.” She sighed. “At home, when I’m worried or stressed or sad, I just go to my workshop and start filing away at a piece of furniture I’ve been charged to restore – someone’s damaged family heirloom or new-found treasure – removing chipped wood, adding freshly carved pieces, until it’s whole again. And somehow, during that process, all of my troubles melt away. My direction becomes clear, the puzzle is solved, my fears abate and I become whole again.” She turned to look at him. “This. Right now. My sister’s disappearance is bigger than the sum total of all the problems I have dealt with in my entire life. Ever.” She laughed incredulously. “And I can’t run to my shop!”
Ben laughed with her. “You are more than welcome to share mine, Clara.” Smiling as they gazed at one another, the poignancy of the moment took hold and with it, a comfortable intimacy.
Clara broke the spell when she turned to investigate the rest of the storage room. Apart from the tools and work table there were a few boxes and four metal folding chairs, a stack of hardcover books, two industrial floor fans, a lamp and a system of shelves on casters stacked with boxes of varying sizes.
Ben hefted the staple gun in his hand, found an extra box of staples and a roll of masking tape on one of the shelves, smiled and said, “Let’s go.”
Back on the street they headed for Gigi’s and began stapling and taping signs to telephone poles, signposts and anything else they could find. Along the way, Ben asked about her workshop in Boston. “I just restore furniture,” she said diffidently. “It’s not nearly as meaningful as I led you to believe just now.”
“It’s clearly a passion.” Clara assented with a shy smile. “Do you work mainly on antiques?”
“Mainly. I also do quite a few Mid-Century and Danish Modern pieces. Mostly I work for collectors, people who’ve inherited collections and plan to sell, but sometimes I stumble on a project of my own.” She put up another sign. “It’s all in the details. A lot of people would find the work tedious, but I love it.” Clara seemed to warm to the subject and the distraction did her good. She smiled a little when she explained, “It’s not just stripping and sanding and varnishing, though that’s a lot of it. Sometimes hardware is missing and I have to find a replacement piece. It’s like detective work: hunting down a particular period, or style or design. Then I have to develop a patina to match the original hardware. Other times, if a piece of furniture has been damaged, I may have to replace some of the wood itself. That means carving and matching the wood exactly.” She hung another flyer. “I’m earning a reputation and starting to work on pieces from across the country.”
“Maddy told me that Sotheby’s re
commends you to their clients.”
Clara laughed, delighted and a little embarrassed. “Occasionally, yes. I can’t believe she told you that. She must really want you to like me.”
Charmed by her obvious pleasure that Maddy had been bragging about her, Ben smiled at Clara. “Well, there’s no need to convince me. I’m already a little smitten.” The flush in her cheeks when he said it made him smile even more.
When they reached Gigi’s, Clara went in and handed the hostess, whom she didn’t recognize, a few of the flyers, asking her to post one in each of the restrooms. “Just ask Gemma,” she said when the woman looked skeptically at the picture of Maddy.
Ben was papering the side of a newspaper stand when she came back out. “Which way do you reckon Maddy would have walked home?”
“Quickest way is straight up to Second Avenue and then over to Pine.” They walked in silence up the steep hill, hanging flyers every ten feet or so until they were back on Maddy’s block. Cars whizzed by along the busy street and Clara looked despondent.
“If she hailed a taxi from here, what are the chances anyone noticed?” she asked.
Ben gave her a reassuring pat on the back and continued posting Maddy’s pictures.
Brightening a little when the idea struck her, she said, “Maybe we could bring her picture around to the city cab companies.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Ben. “We can also ask them about pick-ups around here on Monday night.”
They stood for a moment, each watching the steady stream of downtown traffic. Neither noticed the approach of the grubby young drifter until he started talking. Holding a flyer he had clearly just torn down and in a cracked voice that was a little too loud, the young man said, “I saw her. I saw this lady.”
Chapter Ten
Judy Carlisle had just gotten home, just knocked on her teenaged daughter’s door to say hello and receive the standard grunt in reply, just checked in on her son, blissfully prepubescent and setting the kitchen table for dinner, just wrapped her arms around her husband, stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stovetop, just begun to relax her weary shoulders, when her phone rang. It was Kincaid. It was work. Judy’s husband, now with his arms wrapped around her, read the caller ID over her shoulder, gave her a squeeze and said, “I’ll save you a plate.”
She answered, “Tell me you’re fishing for an invitation to dinner, Jerry.” They had decided to break for dinner and head back to Dovetail afterward to talk to the manager and the bartender, maybe some of the waitstaff.
“No such luck.” Carlisle rolled her eyes. “I just got a call from homicide. They’ve got a body we might be interested in.”
“Shit.”
“Mom swore!” said her son, never missing anything.
“So what, bratkin?” replied her blasé teenage daughter.
Carlisle left the kitchen. “Why are we interested?”
“It’s the floor manager from Dovetail. Susan Burns.”
“She’s dead?”
“Bludgeoned to death in her own apartment. The neighbor found her.”
“Any chance he did it?”
“She. Doesn’t look like it.”
They met outside of Susan’s apartment building – hard to miss with two cop cars outside, plus the medical examiner’s and crime scene tech’s vans. They badged the uniforms and made their way through the building’s entrance. It was a nice place, relatively new, with the Space Needle standing tall in the near distance, but it didn’t have much personality. Brick and mortar with oversized windows, white trim, and unremarkable landscaping.
“Second floor,” said Kincaid when they stepped into the elevator.
Carlisle pushed the button. “What the fuck is going on here, Jerry?”
He just shook his head. “Could be a coincidence.”
“It’s not a coincidence.”
“Nope,” he agreed. There was another uniform in the hallway outside of Susan’s apartment and Kincaid pulled his badge. “I spoke to Detective Iverson.”
“I’ll get him,” said the fresh-faced uniform, and Carlisle saw him take a deep breath before he turned and entered the apartment.
Less than a minute later, Homicide Detective Don Iverson stepped into the hallway. “We got a mess in there, Kincaid.” He introduced himself to Carlisle and went on, “So, after we identified the girl, someone at the station told me you two had a missing person from the same restaurant where the victim works. Any chance you already know who did this? Any persons of interest in your case that might also want to kill the hostess?”
“Floor manager,” Kincaid corrected, but the distinction didn’t seem to register to Iverson. “We got no one. Plenty of possibilities, and if we had motive we could at least narrow down the list, but we don’t.”
“I was afraid of that,” he replied. “Take a look?”
Carlisle and Kincaid followed the detective into the apartment, through a small foyer and into an open living room/dining room and kitchen. The place had been trashed. Books torn from the shelves, pieces of pottery and glass littering the kitchen floor, broken picture frames scattered around, sofa cushions thrown across the room. From the other side of the kitchen island Carlisle could see the body crumpled on the floor next to a glass and stainless steel coffee table. A crime scene tech snapped pictures, while another dusted for fingerprints and the ME stood by the body.
“Neighbor found her,” said Iverson without preamble. “She passed by on the way to her apartment and noticed the front door was ajar, knocked, called out, walked in and found this,” he said, pointing to the disaster in the living room.
“We were going to talk to her tonight,” said Carlisle as she pulled latex gloves from a dispenser box left on the kitchen island. Kincaid did the same and picked up a broken-framed photograph from the floor.
“You hadn’t interviewed her yet?” asked Iverson.
“Nope.” Kincaid passed the photo to his partner.
Carlisle studied it, trying to reconcile the image of a tall, busty redhead, a flirtatious glint in her eyes, with the bloodied figure on the floor. “Plan was to talk to her tonight at the restaurant where she works.” She sighed. “Too late now.”
“What do you think of the apartment toss?” asked Iverson.
“Looks staged to me,” said Carlisle.
“Me too. We knocked on doors. So far no one heard anything unusual. I figure the guy who did this was done throwing plates around before the nine-to-five crowd came home. The building’s full of young, single professionals, Miss Burns included. There are shards of glass from the frames on top of the body. Cookbook on her ankle.” Iverson pointed at Susan’s bare leg where a hardcover cookbook of Provençal cuisine lay open, obscuring her right ankle. “She was already dead on the floor when he ransacked the place.”
“Looking for something, maybe?” asked Kincaid.
“Nah, whoever did this took everything that wasn’t already touching the floor and threw it around. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Her computer is still here; her bed and closet contents are now covering the bedroom floor, but the guy didn’t even go through her drawers.”
“Ransack for show,” mused Carlisle, “trying to mask a murder as a robbery. How did she get caught up in this?”
It was a rhetorical question and nobody answered. Susan Burns was five feet ten inches according to the driver’s license Iverson had just handed to Carlisle, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her now. She was facing down, her arms curled around her head, her knees pulled up to her chest and her lower legs splayed to one side. It looked like she had been trying to protect herself from the blows, crouching on the floor while she was being beaten until she lost consciousness and her body collapsed underneath her.
“Ready?” It was the medical examiner. With the help of a crime scene tech they
rolled Susan away from the coffee table until she was flat on her back. Susan’s once-flawless porcelain skin was turning an ugly shade of mottled blue, her eyes clouded over. “Lividity shows she’s probably been face down since shortly after her death.” He pushed her shirt aside and inserted a thermometer under her rib cage. “Liver temperature has dropped a few degrees. She’s not in full rigor.” He took her hand and gently shook the arm. “More than three, less than six. I’d say about four hours since the time of death, but don’t quote me till I get her to the morgue.”
All three detectives simultaneously checked their watches. “Two or three this afternoon,” said Kincaid.
As the ME and crime scene techs got the body onto a gurney and prepared to take it out to the medical examiner’s van, Iverson turned back to the two Missing Persons detectives. “What’s the story with your missing person?”
“Madeline Gardner. Co-owner and head chef of Dovetail. Last seen Monday night around eight-forty-five. Last confirmed communication was a text sent from her phone around nine-thirty.” Kincaid had gotten access to Madeline’s phone records after Ben left the station that evening and confirmed his story that she had received a text message during dinner. The problem was, she had received several and without the phone itself, they had no way of knowing which one had sent her running out of the restaurant while her ice cream melted at the table. “Reported missing by her business partner on Wednesday evening. No signs of struggle in her apartment. No known enemies, no current boyfriends.”
“Shit,” said Iverson, “any past boyfriends?”
“Maybe. We got a guy she dated in the fall, but there’s no indication that he’s a psychopath. Plus, he’s cooperating fully. Called us at the station when he heard she was missing.”
“Could be he’s trying to seem innocent.”
“Could be,” said Kincaid. “Lot of could-bes in this case. Could be money troubles at the restaurant, could be a stalker ex-boyfriend, could be a stalker customer, could be a total stranger. Madeline just disappeared one night and no one can think why or how or what for, because everyone is sure she has no enemies, incites no animosity in anyone, that everyone loves her and her restaurant is a thriving success.”
