Perish

by Lisa Black

“Why?”

  “Because I’ve got something you want.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Evidence.” She spoke with the cocky brassiness characteristic of her, but this didn’t seem to be a brazening-it-out effort like her lace handkerchief and dry tears. She seemed genuine, which both worried and intrigued Jack. He hoped they had damn well gotten anything worth collecting at their last visit because Jessica had no doubt been over the house with the finest of fine-tooth combs, touching, moving, and altering every single inch of it.

  “Evidence of what?” Riley was saying.

  “That’s your job to determine. I only know it’s important.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Can I stay here? Can you make it okay with the probate court or whoever that I stay here until it’s all legally settled?”

  Riley rubbed his forehead and turned in a slow circle before saying, “Let me get this straight. You have a piece of evidence and you’re holding it for ransom?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How about we arrest you for obstruction?”

  “Obstruction of what?”

  “Evidence.”

  “And what is this evidence?” She smiled. “I know something about arresting people. You have to have a warrant. And in this warrant you’d have to explain exactly what it is I’m obstructing you from. And you can’t because you don’t know.”

  “I think I’d have to write that down to make sense of it,” Riley said. But he saw it, and so did Jack. She knew something but they couldn’t prove she knew it because they only had her word for it. She might be bluffing, but if so they could always throw her out later. And there wasn’t any hard-and-fast mandate regulating when to turn over keys to the next of kin.

  It was a measure of how much this case sucked that Jack and Riley didn’t even look at each other before they said, in near unison, “Okay.”

  Jessica smiled. “I knew you’d see it my way.”

  Riley dangled the house keys from one finger. “So let’s see this evidence.”

  Jessica didn’t move, merely swung her head from side to side as if stretching her neck muscles. “It was sitting in plain sight all the time. But you guys looked right past it.”

  The cops said nothing.

  “Not your fault. You kind of have to know the story or you won’t understand it.” She got to her feet and slowly wandered around the edge of the table. “When Joanna and I were kids, we didn’t have much. But one year, right after Easter, our mom got a halfway decent job at a department store. It didn’t last—somehow her jobs never did. But they had half off Easter merchandise so she bought us both piggy banks. Only they weren’t piggies.” She halted her meandering gait and brushed aside a Burger King bag to pick up a blue porcelain rabbit from the counter. Jack remembered seeing it in Joanna’s bedroom, an incongruously unsophisticated item for that house, a cheap, inexpertly painted item that only a small child could love. “Mine was pink. Bunny banks—the Easter theme, you know?”

  She rotated the porcelain object in one hand to show the coin slot at the back of the head and the rubber stopper in the hole at the bottom, which one was supposed to remove to get the money out.

  “I picked that up,” Jack said. “It was empty.”

  “It didn’t have any coins in it,” Jessica corrected. “As I was saying, we didn’t have much, so we used our bunnies to hold what we did have. Pictures we’d cut out of magazines. Letters we’d write to ourselves about what life would be like when we grew up. Sure as hell never imagined this, though.” She waved a hand at the ceiling. “When we got older they held cigarettes and notes from our boyfriends. So, you see, you needed me to come here. Because I understood the significance of this little blue blob.”

  “Are you telling us that there’s something in there?” Riley asked.

  “That,” she said, pulling the rubber stopper off the bottom, drawing out both her words and the drama, “is what I’m telling you.”

  Jack found himself holding his breath to watch this bleached trailer park resident pull a wad of something white from the violated bottom of a chipped porcelain rodent, and berated himself for doing so.

  Jessica stepped to the kitchen table and spread out the tissue that had been in the rabbit. Nestled inside the tissue sat a black SD media card, its gold teeth grinning up at them.

  “What is that? What’s on it?” Riley asked of her. Media cards were usually popped out of cameras and a card reader was used to transfer the photos to one’s computer, but increasingly they could be used as tiny USB drives holding everything from videos to documents.

  “I have no idea,” she confessed cheerily. “I don’t have a camera and apparently neither did Jo, and you took her laptop so I had no way to view it. But I can tell you one thing: If she kept it there, it was important. Like, really important. The most important thing she had.”

  “Because of the bunny,” Jack said.

  “Because,” she assured them solemnly, “of the bunny.”

  Riley handed her the house keys.

  Chapter 24

  “So you told her she could stay?” the captain demanded.

  Riley said, “Who’s going to complain? As far as we’ve been able to determine, aside from one ‘work flunky with benefits, ’ there is no one else in this woman’s life. The victim paid cash, so even if sister trashes the place, there’s no bank to lose money on it. And her theory about the importance of this SD card makes sense.”

  “Because you found it in a bunny.”

  “Exactly.”

  Jack slipped the card into the reader tethered to his computer. “Though how it could be more important than an account with over six hundred million dollars in it, I don’t get. And she left the statement about that sitting in open view on her desk.”

  “Okay, let’s find out what’s more important than six hundred million dollars,” the captain said. He only knew of the story because he had been wandering through the unit upon their return and happened to ask where the investigation had taken them.

  “Love?” Riley suggested.

  “You are such a softy.” The captain laughed. “We’re going to have to start calling you Care Bear or something.”

  Riley scowled at the prospect. “I’m guessing what the victim may have thought important. Love was the only thing she didn’t have, and supposedly you can’t buy it.”

  “I beg to differ. We have a whole unit that deals with people selling it.”

  Jack ignored them both and clicked his mouse a few times. A video began to play.

  “That’s Joanna’s office,” Riley said, after peering at the screen.

  “Are those walls clear?” the captain asked.

  Joanna sat at her desk beneath the high-resolution though slightly fish-eyed camera lens, which must have been perched on one of her bookcase shelves. They had searched her office but of course hadn’t pulled down every financial tome and reference book on the higher shelves, and one of them must have housed the camera. Its view covered nearly all of her office space and reached a short way into the center pit, where the brokers and managers usually sat. As they watched Joanna brushed a wave of black hair over one shoulder and shoved two manila folders out of the way with a quiet swish of sound.

  “Girlfriend bugged her own office,” Riley breathed.

  Jack asked of no one, “When did she film this? When is that place ever empty? Those brokers gave me the impression they never sleep.”

  “Like sharks,” Riley agreed. “In more ways than one.”

  On the screen, Joanna looked up from her laptop as her office door swung open. Pierce Bowman came in and sat across from her without a greeting. He leaned back, crossed one ankle over the opposite knee, and said, “So, what do you have?”

  Joanna leaned her arms on her desk, one hand draped over the other. She sounded utterly calm, her voice low and unaccented. Jack listened to the dead woman speak, Joanna Moorehouse sounding exactly as he had expected—cool, steady, focused, and comple
tely unemotional.

  “I have ten million for you, to be transferred to any account of your choosing. Once the sale is finalized, the other ten million will be yours.”

  Bowman hardly jumped at the offer. In fact, he scoffed, “Twenty? I made that in bonuses last year.”

  “But you won’t this year. You’ve been slacking, spending too much time on the golf course while the young lions took your market share. It’s understandable—you’re ready for retirement. So am I.”

  “You mean I won’t make a bonus after Bryan figures out what a ton of crap Sterling is.”

  Joanna didn’t bite. “There’s nothing wrong with Sterling. But I’m not willing to risk another run like Lehman and Bear suffered—”

  “It’ll happen once your default rate comes to light. This new Fed girl isn’t going to sleep at the wheel like the last guy they sent.”

  “There won’t be a run if Sterling is under the Bryan umbrella. That will be enough to reassure investors.”

  Bowman hesitated, then spoke clearly: “You’ll have to step down as CEO. One of our own guys will run it.”

  “I know.” She spoke without regret, and that seemed to confuse Bowman. Jack figured in Bowman’s experience people didn’t give up power that easily. But then Bowman didn’t know about Joanna’s Panamanian nest egg.

  On the screen, Bowman studied her, determined to make her squirm a bit before he agreed to the deal. “You won’t admit it, will you? You still won’t admit that you ran the company into the ground, and now you’re going to pawn off the empty husk, grab the payoff, and disappear.”

  “As are you,” she pointed out. “Let’s face it, we’re both biting the hand that fed us. Now, do you want the twenty million or not?”

  He hesitated, still waiting for that squirm. It didn’t come. Joanna met his gaze with her own steady one. He could walk away, tell his employer not to touch Sterling with a cattle prod, and still have his very lucrative position. Twenty million seemed to be pocket change in his world. But Joanna had summed him up—growing older and tired of the financial brawling that came with the territory. Ready to get out and give his own higher-ups one last finger while he did so.

  “Okay,” he said.

  She did not waste even a second on gloating or an I-told-you-so smirk. “Do you have your account numbers?”

  Silently he pulled a small piece of paper out of a breast pocket and slid it across the desk to her. She tapped the sequence into her laptop and, a moment later, said, “First ten million is in. You can confirm at your leisure. Would you like an e-mail confirmation?” She asked this with a smile that made Jack see why she had young bucks like Fourtner and Mearan locking horns for her attention. Joanna Moorehouse had been exciting, enticing, mysterious, and flat-out hot. She wasn’t classically beautiful in life, her nose too prominent, cheekbones not very high, sharp chin. It was her inner stillness, her complete mastery over her own mind and body that captivated.

  “Very funny,” Bowman said, and pulled out his cell phone. Apparently he used an online app to check his balances in whatever offshore account he had given her. He nodded in satisfaction, stood up, and walked to the door. There he half turned as if trying to think of a zinger for an exit line, couldn’t, gave up, and left. Joanna watched him go.

  She kept smiling, only for herself now, and lounged back in her chair, rocking a little. She didn’t get long to enjoy the afterglow since her door opened again and Jeremy Mearan walked in. He flopped into the chair that Bowman had evacuated and asked, “So we’re a go?”

  “The sale is assured. He could still screw us, but I don’t think he will. I truly don’t,” she emphasized, enjoying her private joke.

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Mearan grumbled. Apparently he didn’t know about the camera any more than he had known about Joanna’s slush fund. “Tyra better not find out about this.”

  “She won’t.”

  “Are you going to take her with us to New York?”

  Joanna shook her head. “She’d never leave here. She has family.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.” He also slumped back in his chair; the hour must have been very late indeed. “What about you? You have any family?”

  “Not a soul,” Joanna stated, without a trace of regret. “I’m all alone.”

  “That’s not true.” Jeremy Mearan stood and slid off his suit coat. Then he moved around to her side of the desk, unbuttoning his shirt and sliding his belt out of its loops. “You have me.”

  Joanna didn’t bother answering. Perhaps she preferred to keep her lies to a minimum. But she swiveled her chair to face him, leaving her back to the camera.

  The three cops watched Mearan’s passionate but somewhat clumsy seduction and Joanna’s vague response for another few seconds until Jack hit the Stop icon. He said, “So she recorded this to be able to keep Bowman in line in case he tried to take her payment and then back out. But if she intended to take her money and run, why did she care what happened to Sterling?”

  Riley said, “It was her baby, in every sense of the word. The company seemed to be the only thing in the world she cared about. She wanted it to have a good home. Besides, if she ran off we might, or DJ Bryan might, look closely enough to find the missing funds. If she simply resigns with a fare-thee-well, the business only looks forward and not back.”

  “We’d better watch the rest of this video,” the captain said. “There might be more, um, admissions made.”

  Jack said, “What if Bowman came back from his HQ and said it’s no good, New York knows about the default rate and they’re not going to buy at any price. She either wants her money back or tells him to try harder because she has him on video accepting a bribe to screw over his own employer.”

  “So he kills her to get the tape? SD card, whatever?” Riley said.

  But that didn’t make sense either. “If he had, he would have torn that house apart to search for it, and we would have known. Unless he was really, really good and left the place looking as if it hadn’t been touched.”

  “Nobody’s that good.”

  “Then the place hadn’t been touched. No one killed her and then searched for that card.”

  “Besides,” Riley added, “if he’d have found that statement from her Panama account, I bet he’d figure out a way to get the money from it. I think all you need is the account number. If he were willing to screw his bosses for twenty million, I can’t imagine what he’d do for six hundred million.”

  “Two-fifty,” Jack reminded him. “After the disbursement to Ergo.”

  “Still, ten times more than her offer.”

  “We need to start the video back up. Maybe there are, uh, more people involved,” the captain suggested.

  “Without a damn time stamp we have no idea when she recorded this,” Jack said. “It could have been the night of her murder. It could have been a month before.”

  Riley said, “A lot could happen during a gap. Somehow Tyra got involved, or at least someone thought she was involved.”

  “Why would anyone assume that, though? Joanna’s hardly going to tell her lawyer she committed bribery.”

  “Tyra could have stumbled on half a dozen red flags. In addition to this bribery there’s fraud—keeping the default rate under wraps—and Joanna’s nest egg. People have been killed over much less.”

  Jack said, “What we do know is that Mearan knew. And he’s still alive.”

  “Grab your coat and hat,” Riley said. “Time to have another talk with the lad.”

  “I could watch the rest of this video for you,” the captain offered. “See if they say anything else that implicates, um—”

  Jack knew, as every working stiff knows, to throw your boss a bone as often as possible. “Would you, Cap? That would be a big help.”

  “No problem,” the captain said with an expansive wave, and settled himself at Jack’s desk. The two detectives headed for the elevator.

  As the doors closed, Riley said, “You might want to disinfect your chair
when we get back.”

  Jack said, “Ew.”

  Chapter 25

  Maggie entered the courtroom, not at all happy about being in that place and at that time. She had been taking another look at Joanna’s fingernail scrapings, as blood-caked as they were, and trying to send the bloody fingerprint from under her body to the FBI database—doable but complicated. Unlike forensic units on television she couldn’t just hit a button and search the warehouse of ten-print cards the bureau had accumulated for the past century. It required online forms and protocols and queuing. Plus, she had Rick and his Phoenix trip on her mind, with nightmares of Rick strolling past a unit photo and catching sight of Jack in the back row. Rick declaring, “Hey, I know that guy, he’s at our department now.” The Phoenix cop saying, “Oh yeah, that’s so-and-so.” Rick saying “No it’s not, it’s Jack Renner.” “No, his name is Bill” or Jerry or Oswald or whatever he’d been going by then … maybe even his real name. She hoped it wasn’t Oswald.

  “Raise your right hand,” the court reporter said loudly, startling Maggie out of her reverie. She’d nearly walked by the woman without stopping. She swore herself in, her healing arm under cover of her suit jacket, and then stepped up onto the dais with the witness chair.

  Plus, she hadn’t had nearly enough time to prepare for whatever Graham’s attorney decided to throw at her. Maggie had worked with fingerprints long enough to feel completely comfortable with her conclusions, but she couldn’t keep up with every study, research project, and court decision regarding fingerprint science. And she found it very difficult to explain in words what was essentially a picture.

  Gerald Graham sat at the defense table, staring at her as before. She told herself that she was part of the process of putting him in jail for the rest of his natural life, so one could hardly fault him for taking an interest in the proceedings. That his stare seemed abnormally intense and his smile downright creepy changed nothing. She straightened her back. And even though she truly believed Anna had been the target, she tried to telegraph: Shoot at me, will you?

  His attorney came out swinging with a tricky, and entirely reasonable, question. “Ms. Gardiner, how do you know when a fingerprint matches another fingerprint?”