Perish

by Lisa Black

  “Don’t let him in,” Jack said.

  “Who is it?” Riley asked.

  The officer nodded toward Maggie and the corpse. “Says he’s her boyfriend.”

  Riley grinned. “Enter suspect number one.” The two detectives left without another word. The first uniformed cop developed a pained look, belying a preference to be where the action was instead of babysitting a quiet, still body.

  Maggie had no desire to move, despite her tiring thighs. She sumo-walked along the inner edge of the dais without crossing the area next to the lower half of the body. She inspected each piece of white stone, marbled through with various mineral colors. The sun appeared somewhere outside, turning the windows aglow, and she used the too bright light to her advantage, tilting her head to see any variation in the tile’s surface. Aside from one tiny smear about twenty inches from the body she could not see the slightest trace of blood.

  So the killer had either murdered Joanna Moorehouse while tilting his feet in the air and then somehow stood up without putting his toes in the muck, or he had—what? Flown? Dangled from the ceiling? Not possible. Balanced on one foot while he removed his shoes, then carefully set down stockinged feet outside the stained perimeter in order to tiptoe off in his socks? Possible.

  That eliminated Riley, at least. He’d never have the balance to pull that off.

  Nor could she picture Jack having that kind of flexibility. She realized that with a sense of relief that surprised her. She’d only been joking to herself about Riley, but now saw that suspecting Jack of every murder that took place in Cleveland city limits might be a default position for her.

  Focus.

  She used her fingerprint kit to brush black powder on the tile floor between the body and bottom of the dais, including the steps. Bits and pieces of smears, but nothing that even suggested a shoe, much less a size or type. All it did was dirty the perfect marble.

  This had been a bloodbath. The killer had been up close and personal and had to have gotten a great deal of the red liquid on himself. If he had worn something absorbent he might not have dripped, but anyone who had ever had so much as a minor kitchen accident knows that blood tends to fly into unexpected areas, and wiping with pants or shirt could not get every trace. He’d have to leave a smear on a doorknob or a jamb or a windowsill. Or a floor tile.

  So where did he go?

  She stepped off the dais and went to find out.

  Chapter 2

  The uniformed cop remained with the body and Maggie avoided the faint voices she heard from the front of the house. Dealing with grieving and/or suspicious loved ones was so not her job, and she might break up a flow or a campaign of pressure if she popped into view and interrupted them. If the guy broke down and confessed, she’d hear about it soon enough.

  Instead she passed through each room, subjecting each door and window to a methodical examination for smears of dried red color. But the pewter-colored window latches and the doorknobs that gleamed as if they were real gold (and they might be, Maggie thought) and the chrome faucets and raised porcelain bowls of those two ground-floor bathrooms the patrol officer envied so much did not show the slightest hint of having come into contact with those bloodied fingers.

  She photographed each one of these surfaces, because surely a defense attorney would someday ask her if she had really looked at them all.

  She used black powder to process every doorknob and light switch for latent prints left in the usual body oils and sweat, without finding a single useable one. This didn’t surprise her—those areas should be obvious places for an intruder to touch, but always proved stubbornly resistant to retaining decent prints. Even those flat, wide types of light switches almost always gave her nothing.

  Maggie had moved through all the rooms in the rear half of the house, though she couldn’t have given any of them a name—parlor, conservatory, sunroom, library? They lacked furniture or much décor to speak of, remaining generic. A large area connected to the kitchen via a door was probably a dining room, but without a table and chairs, Maggie couldn’t tell. Perhaps Joanna Moorehouse had been in the process of moving in. Or moving out. It certainly made the rooms easier to photograph. Maggie went into people’s homes nearly every day and had seen the gamut. Homes that were clean but cluttered, ones that were strictly tidy but layered in grime. The most obsessively clean had belonged to illegal immigrants involved in stolen credit card trafficking and one of the filthiest to a sweet little family of four. And overall, when it came to décor there was definitely no accounting for taste.

  Perhaps Joanna Moorehouse simply didn’t care to entertain and had no interest in furnishing rooms she wouldn’t use, because the home office … that room she very definitely furnished. Maggie had only seen a quarter of the living space so far but would have bet that this is where the victim spent all her time.

  Two walls were built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, filled as high as Joanna Moorehouse could have reached with file folders, business textbooks, and heavy reference tomes on real estate law, mortgage financing regulations, and corporate accounting. One wall had the gorgeous high windows in keeping with the rest of the architecture, and next to the door on the fourth wall ran a wide credenza with cardboard file boxes obscuring its mahogany finish. In the center sat a massive desk of glossy dark wood, the surface scattered with legal pads, pen cups, and a mug of coffee, its milk curdled. Another laptop sat closed.

  The tidiness found in the rest of the house did not apply here. Papers overlapped each other from haphazard piles. There were no framed photos, but there was an empty phone-charging station and a stress relief squeezie shaped like a house with a logo for Sterling Financial. The desk blotter showed a calendar, which Joanna hadn’t used for this pedestrian purpose but as a doodle pad with stars, loops, and stick figures of horses in black ink. Maggie looked but didn’t touch. If this had been an apparent suicide or a probable heart attack, she would have opened drawers and closets to look for relevant medications or recent notes and journals. But in a brutal homicide like this, searching was the detectives’ job.

  Still, she thought, no truly personal items. No snapshots with friends or family. No greeting cards or knickknacks, a souvenir from Aruba, or a plastic tchotchke from an office party. No book of matches from a local bar. Again, it appeared that Joanna had been moving in or moving out. Or she really had no social life.

  From the papers scattered on the desk it became clear that Joanna Moorehouse worked at a company called Sterling Financial, which had something to do with mortgage loans. Copies of online articles referred to the current rates of mortgage-backed securities. Stock reports showed the value of Sterling shares. A statement from the Banco Nacional de Panama showed an account in the name of Joanna Moorehouse, her address a PO box in Cleveland, numbers, interest rate, deposits, balance—.

  Maggie blinked.

  Her brain wasn’t accustomed to seeing that many zeros. She mentally added commas where they needed to be and determined that Joanna’s personal account held $686,472,791. And 48 cents.

  Not pesos. Dollars.

  That explained the house.

  Or rather, it had held over $600,000,000. An entry farther down the statement casually noted a disbursement of $350,000,000 and some odd change to Ergo Insurance.

  Okay, well, Maggie told herself, surely this was the corporate’s account. A large financial firm might easily have that value. Wall Street dealt in billions every day. Just because Joanna worked there didn’t mean it had anything to do with her murder. Robbers and corporate raiders didn’t usually eviscerate their targets, not when a decent .38 could do the job much more quickly without the need for calisthenics to avoid leaving a blood trail to the front door.

  Still, as a motive it ranked third after love and anger. Over half a billion dollars …

  Maggie snapped a picture of the statement. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

  *

  Jack followed Riley and the uniformed officer to the front porch—though
porch seemed much too plebian a word to describe the sweeping teak decking and tall pillars of the front of Joanna Moorehouse’s mansion, with delicate ironwork seating and trellised plant life with blooms drooping in the heat. Veranda, perhaps, or a gallery.

  Except that this was Cleveland, and people here didn’t have verandas. They had porches. Even in multi-million-dollar estates on the shores of a Great Lake. Porches.

  A young man stood on the structure. He seemed completely at home in this setting in a tailored gray suit of material that even at ten feet seemed both soft and rich, a snow white dress shirt with no tie and unscuffed shoes. Silky black locks had the exact GQ tussle and his face had been trimmed to give him a ghost of a five o’clock shadow, just enough to keep him from prettiness. The expression on his face combined equal parts rattled, worried, and impatient.

  “What’s going on?” he said immediately. “Where the hell is Joanna?”

  “Who’re you?” Riley asked.

  The uniformed officer had filled them in with the basics—Jeremy Mearan, worked with Joanna at Sterling Financial; they would date (“sounds more like friends with benefits,” the cop had confided); Joanna hadn’t shown up for work this morning and wasn’t answering her phone so he had driven from their office downtown to see why not.

  But Riley had him go through it again. Nothing changed, and Mearan only grew more anxious to find out what a bunch of cops were doing at his girlfriend’s house.

  Riley didn’t enlighten him yet. “When did you last speak to her?”

  The guy thought for a brief moment. “At the office last night. We were working with the regulator…. She left about nine-thirty, I think.”

  “Left the office? You didn’t have a date, see her later?”

  “No. Why don’t you ask her?”

  Riley glanced at the complicated furniture. “Let’s sit.”

  Mearan glanced at the filigreed iron seat, exposed to the elements, and doubtless thought of his expensive suit pants. “I’d rather not. Can’t we go inside?”

  “No.” At this point this young man remained the only suspect to appear in the drama thus far, and police everywhere had learned a few things from the JonBenét Ramsey case. No one would be entering the crime scene, aka house.

  “Then I’d rather stand. What are you doing here? Where is Joanna?”

  “Nine-thirty—is that normal hours for you both to be working, or was something going on?”

  He snorted. “Nothing is normal in this line of work. But yeah, we’re working on a merger, and … other things. Where—”

  “How long have you been dating?”

  More cautiously: “Coupla months.”

  “How long have you known her? Does she have family in the area?”

  A year, and no. She never mentioned family. She had bought this house six months ago. She’d been with Sterling Financial since its inception, five years prior.

  “And she isn’t ‘with’ it,” Mearan clarified. “She owns it. She founded it. She is Sterling Financial.”

  Jack digested this.

  “So you were dating the boss,” Riley said.

  “Yeah. So? What is going on? Is she even here? Who called you guys?”

  Riley said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Joanna Moorehouse is dead.”

  Silence. Jeremy Mearan heard this, absorbed it, mulled it over. Then he said, “Well, that seems a bit extreme.”

  As shocked reactions to news of death went, this was a new one for Jack. “Beg pardon?”

  Mearan said, as if speaking to himself, “I wouldn’t have figured her for the type. To give up so easily. She never gave up anything easily. Not in the gym, not in bed, certainly not in the market.”

  Jack and Riley exchanged a look. Riley said, “Can you tell us what had been going on in her life?”

  “I mean, she probably wouldn’t have gone to jail.”

  Riley could be the soul of patience when he wanted to, and relaxed his voice into soothing, paternal confessor mode. “Can you tell us about it?”

  “We’re working on a merger with DJ Bryan, but the regulators are making a fuss and now Bryan might back out and their quant is such a tool. It’s”—he shook his head—“it’s complicated.”

  “Try,” Riley encouraged.

  Jack, meanwhile, observed the guy. He seemed genuinely discombobulated, unless he had missed his calling and should have been picking up Oscars along the red carpet. He also seemed to have a lot to tell them and couldn’t figure out where to begin. Or didn’t want to.

  “Well … what do you know about mortgage-backed securities?”

  “Squat,” Jack said.

  Riley would never admit to ignorance. “Give us the short version.”

  “Okay. Sterling is a mortgage originator. We take those loans that we’ve made and securitize them into CDOs—collateralized debt obligations—which are sold to investors. That’s standard. But everyone is still freaky about the subprime market so the Fed chick is picky about the capital requirements and the Bryan guy is using her to choke a better price out of us—”

  Riley interrupted. “I said the short version.”

  Mearan raised one eyebrow. “That is the short version. To get the long version we’d have to go back to SIVs, Glass-Steagall, and the change in securitization.”

  Riley lost the paternal voice. “Where does jail come in?”

  “It doesn’t. I mean, it won’t. The regulator is rattling our cage to justify her GS-12 salary and the merger will go through. It’s all posturing, at this point. That’s all it ever is.”

  “Why would Joanna Moorehouse be concerned about going to jail? What for?”

  Mearan was almost visibly squirming now. “Um … she wouldn’t. Really. At worst we’d get a fine. That’s what always happens. I mean even if—she wouldn’t. That’s why I can’t believe … she didn’t even seem worried about it. But then Joanna never worries… .”

  His voice trailed off, and Jack and Riley exchanged another glance. Then Riley spoke.

  “You seem to think Joanna might have committed suicide.”

  A pause. “She didn’t? Then—but she’s dead? What happened? An accident?”

  “No. Ms. Moorehouse’s death is clearly a homicide.”

  This flat out stunned Mearan. So much so that he staggered over and dropped onto the wrought iron chair, expensive pants be damned. And Jack mentally scratched him off the suspect list. Even A-listers couldn’t pull this scene off.

  Riley slid over a companionable chair, apparently relieved to take a load off without giving a damn about his pants. “You’re going to need to tell us everything you possibly can about Ms. Moorehouse. Take your time and think it through.”

  The man sucked in a deep breath, then coughed on either emotion or spring pollen. “No matter what anyone says,” he began, haltingly, “she wasn’t a terrible person.”

  Chapter 3

  Maggie had photographed everything she could in the office and gotten tired of waiting for the cops to catch up with her. She moved upstairs and repeated her process, taking overall photos of the mostly empty rooms and examining every window latch and balcony door and bathroom fixture for a telltale smear of red. She didn’t find one. Their killer wasn’t a second-story man, though the second story wouldn’t require an aerialist to reach in some spots with decorative overhangs, balconies, and porticos. The master bedroom had a terrace of sorts, wide enough to hold a breakfast set and a pot with a dead azalea. From that and the stiffness of the door lock, Maggie didn’t think the victim had stepped out there for quite some time. The rear of the house looked out on Lake Erie, of course, but from a corner window she could see the distant edge of the lawn of the next mansion, its drapes drawn in each oversized window. Joanna Moorehouse had lived in isolation, hermetically sealed into her own little dollhouse. Had that been by design or accident?

  The victim’s bedroom didn’t appear to hold any more secrets than the first floor had. Plenty of gorgeous clothes, a few diamond rings
tossed casually into the jewelry box, but still no personal photos, letters, or knickknacks save for a blue porcelain bunny about six inches high. It sat on a shelf, alone, perfectly centered, between a basket of lip colors and another of nail polish. Finally, Maggie thought, something sentimental. It had a number of chips and one ear had been repaired with glue more than once and a childish hand had rubbed nearly all the pink paint off its little triangle nose—definitely not some historic artwork bought as an investment. Maggie felt almost absurdly pleased at this show of humanity and snapped a picture of it, which would no doubt mystify attorneys at some future date. “Why did you take this photo of the victim’s knickknack, Specialist Gardiner?” “Because it serves as a link to Joanna Moorehouse’s past, her childhood dreams and goals, and might give us direction as to how those dreams translated into the life that ended in murder. Besides, it was cute.”

  The bathroom held enough cosmetics to stock a Sephora and little else. No drugs, legal or otherwise, beyond the standard analgesics; feminine necessities; and a box of condoms—plain ones that would get the job done with a minimum of fuss. Maggie began to suspect that Joanna Moorehouse appreciated efficiency.

  Maggie returned downstairs, photographed the remaining rooms there, checked on the body and its guard to see if the Medical Examiner’s office staff had arrived (they hadn’t), and finished in the kitchen, where she found an unexpected occupant.

  A middle-aged woman with dark brown skin and a polyester smock decorated with kittens sat at the table, knocking back a slug of what smelled like Jack Daniel’s.

  “Hello,” Maggie said.

  The woman didn’t look surprised to see Maggie. She had obviously stopped being surprised by anything else that could happen that day. “Pretty perfect.”

  “I—beg your pardon?”

  “Pretty Perfect Cleaning Services. We don’t leave until it’s perfect. Or in this case until Mr. Po-Po says I can.”

  Ah. The cleaning lady who had found the body … and then apparently helped herself to Ms. Moorehouse’s liquor cabinet. Maggie couldn’t blame her. Anyone would need a stiff one after that sight. Joanna wouldn’t miss it anyway.