by Bird, Peggy
“Think you’d be okay with this more often, maybe even regularly?”
She hesitated a moment then said in a soft voice, “Yeah, I think I would.”
In that admission, he heard the first sign that she might be ready to talk about some of his plans for their future.
• • •
The plan was moving but not fast enough. The money hadn’t panned out yet. Turned out, getting into the bitch’s house wasn’t easy, between the security system, the dog, and the fucking cop who was almost living there. By convincing that idiot Kane he’d be better off letting the lawyers work it out, he’d slowed down one half of the operation while he kept trying to get around the complications.
Lucky he had this bolthole. No one knew he kipped here except the owner, a guy he met last year who was still away. The place was a pile of shit, hardly any furniture, bad plumbing, no electricity. But using this place got him out from under the supervision of the people who were keeping track of him. He needed to get away sometimes, so he didn’t get squirrely.
The whole thing was making him crazy. All he heard was how important patience and persistence were. Fuck that. He was running out of both. One last try to get in the house and he’d force the issue with phase two. He’d make her pay for the murder she’d gotten away with. And when they locked her up, he’d be able to find what he was looking for and leave town. This waiting was getting on his nerves.
Chapter Seven
“Where’ve you been?” Eubie Kane asked. He was standing outside the door of the now closed and darkened Bullseye Resource Center, shivering in the fall rain. Next to him was a hand truck piled with plastic tubs. “Why’d you keep me waiting so long?”
“I couldn’t do anything until Robin went across the way to set up for her class,” the man holding open the door said.
“Yeah, her class. She’s a second-rate teacher. I’d do better.” Kane wheeled his hand truck toward the classroom area. The other man closed and locked the front door.
“Whatever.” The man shrugged, bored with listening to the young artist’s complaints. “She said it would be about an hour. So that’s what you have to get that thing set up so it’ll start doing whatever it does after we leave.”
“You mean program the controller so the kiln fires my work overnight,” Kane said in a patronizing tone. The other man barely controlled his impulse to punch the artist in the mouth.
Apparently oblivious to the reaction he was causing, Kane went on. “I called Amanda St. Claire. I’m going to her studio when I’m finished here. I’ve talked to my lawyer and have a figure to give her. She’s going to freak when I tell her how much it’ll cost her to keep me from taking her to court.” He pried the lid off the top bin and unpacked pieces of art glass swathed in bubble-wrap. He carefully removed the plastic and placed the glass on the worktables in the middle of the room.
“She said she thought it would be a good idea for us to get together. I bet she thinks she can talk her way out of this.” The artist grinned at the man he thought was his buddy. “But when I’m finished with her, she’ll be sorry she took advantage of me. And once I’m recognized for what I am — an artist who inspires other artists — I’ll be able to pay you back for the money you loaned me for the lawyer.”
“Nah, that was a gift from another friend. Don’t worry. You deserve what you’re gonna get.”
Eubie rearranged the stacks of glass on the table as he talked. “I owe you a lot more than money. I’ve been struggling for years to be taken seriously. Your ideas have been inspired. First suing Amanda. Then confronting Liz. Now having the staff here awed by a kiln load of my new pieces. Finally, I’m catching a break … ”
Kane droned on and the other man zoned out, lounging on the lowest tier of the stadium seating where students usually watched artist demonstrations. Thank Christ he’d overheard Eubie bitching about artists using his ideas when he was with Robin in the coffee shop. With very little persuasion Eubie began to believe that the St. Claire bitch was one of them. Eubie was so perfect for the plan it was almost scary.
He watched Kane finish unwrapping the last of fifteen pieces of glass with minimal designs on each one. “Whadda you call your work, Eubie?” he asked. “I forget.”
“The old work you saw was weather moods. The new work is seasonal moods.” He held up a stack of fired eight-inch squares. “You can see how different it is.”
The man on the steps couldn’t but what the hell.
“This one is the first of the series.” Eubie spread out a clear glass square with a tan foreground, a square with white hills and a third piece with a faint shadow of a mountain. “It’s called ‘Winter on the Mountain.’ Then I have ‘Fall in the Gorge’ and ‘Summer in the … ’ ”
“Can I do anything to help you get this done?” he interrupted.
“Sure, you can clean the pieces. I have cleaning solution and towels here.”
“Doesn’t Bullseye have something? Why waste your money when we can waste theirs?”
Eubie grinned and retrieved a white towel with thin red stripes and a spray bottle from under a nearby worktable. The man took the supplies and squirted the contents of the spray bottle on a piece of glass, paying more attention to the young artist than to his task.
“So, all you have to do is punch in those numbers and the kiln does the rest of the work?”
“Yes,” Eubie answered, “once I’ve entered the firing schedule, all those numbers as you call it, all I have to do is hit the ‘start’ button and the kiln takes it from there.”
When the man was sure Kane had returned his attention to the kiln, he noiselessly put the piece of glass back on the workbench, pulled a pair of latex gloves from his jeans, put them on, and eased a small handgun out of a jacket pocket.
Kane was just finishing double-checking the firing schedule when the man grabbed him around the throat. Eubie made a gagging sound and dropped the paper he’d been holding as he struggled to relieve the pressure on his neck. But the slender artist was no match for a man who had worked out religiously in a prison exercise yard and in his apartment in preparation for this moment.
“Relax, Eubie. I’m about to make you more famous than you could get with that shit you call art. And we’ll make that little bitch pay, like you want, like we both want.”
Holding the young artist with his right arm he hit him in the head with the gun then pushed him to the floor. He shot the stunned Kane in the head. After watching the artist bleed out what was left of his life onto the cement floor, the man dropped the gun next to the body and began to look around to see what he needed to tidy up. He saw Eubie’s glass. What the fuck, he thought, might as well finish it. Give Eubie one last chance at glory. If he got it done quickly, he could get across to where Robin was before she came to him.
But after he transferred Kane’s work into the kiln in the order he thought it went, there was space left. He looked around to see if he’d missed more work. “Fucking idiot,” he muttered, “I give him his shot at using this thing and he doesn’t even fill it.” Although there was no more of Kane’s work, on another table sat four stacks of glass with a note on top that said, “Fire for Amanda St. Claire.”
“Sweet,” he said under his breath and filled the rest of the space in the large kiln with a few pieces of Amanda’s work. “The two of them together will be a nice touch.”
When he’d finished, he made two quick phone calls. As he was about to close and start the kiln, the door from the delivery area opened.
“Hey, sweet cheeks, I finished early so let’s blow this Popsicle stand and get dinner.” Robin Jordan stopped, looked at the open kiln. “What the hell is going on in here? Why’re you messing around with the big kiln?” She walked toward her boyfriend, saw Eubie Kane’s body on the floor and stopped. Her eyes widened, she took a deep, sharp breath, the expression on her face moving f
rom curiosity to horror. “What happened here?” She looked up at him. “That wasn’t a backfire noise I heard a while ago, was it?”
He reached for her. “I’m sorry about this, Robin, but it looks like there isn’t any other way. Waste of a good fuck, too.”
She backed away from him, made a break for the retail area. He chased her, snagged her arm, and stopped her.
“Let me go, goddamn it. What are you doing?” she yelled, scratching at his face. He recoiled, which gave her a second chance to run. But he was faster. Grabbing her, his hand clamped over her mouth, he dragged her toward the classroom.
She kicked and bit; his grip loosened enough for her to come at him again with her nails. He put his hands up to protect his face so all she was able to do was snag one of the latex gloves, ripping it and scratching his hand. He backed up, knocking over a display of frit, sending the jars of granulated glass rolling in all directions. He stumbled on one and cursed.
Robin grabbed a wooden box packed with a couple dozen five-by-ten inch samples of glass and swung it at him. He deflected the blow and knocked the box out of her hand, tearing the second glove on the rough wooden crate and cutting his hand. The contents crashed to the floor, shards of glass scattering in all directions.
Finally he got his arms around her torso, overpowered her, and smashed her head against a pedestal. Stunned, she was barely struggling as he dragged her back into the classroom. He hit her again before dumping her face down on top of Eubie Kane’s body. Grabbing the blood-streaked towel next to Kane’s body, he used it to pick up the handgun. He dispatched Robin in the same way he had the young artist.
Satisfied she was dead, he dropped the gun beside the two bodies and stripped off what was left of the gloves. He closed the lid to the kiln, hit the button Kane had indicated, and doused the one light they had turned on. In the dark, he edged his way toward the front door, the gloves and towel in his hand.
Before he got there he heard someone rattling the front door from outside. A familiar face peered in through the glass. Still in shadow, he paused. As soon as the woman disappeared, he started again toward the door.
But the sound of men’s voices coming from the ramp leading to the warehouse and factory stopped him. Reversing directions, he retreated to the classroom. For what seemed like forever but was probably only five or six minutes, he waited by the door to the delivery area, listening to what was happening in the other part of the building.
Two men had come up from the factory. Using a flashlight to rake dark corners, they moved toward the front door. Then one of them stumbled on a jar of frit and they both crunched across the broken glass. They turned on overhead lights, cursed, and called nine-one-one.
The man in the classroom waited until he was sure they were absorbed in reporting the incident before he noiselessly opened the door and left the building by way of the delivery entrance. The woman who’d banged at the front was standing on the sidewalk when he got outside, backlit from a powerful security light at the business across the street. Hoping to frighten her away, he pointed at her, as if he had a gun. She ran.
When he thought she had driven off, he went to his car and left. It hadn’t gone exactly the way he’d planned it, but it was done. There was only one more thing and he’d be finished for the evening.
• • •
Sam Richardson and his new partner Danny Hartmann caught the case. They were to meet at the Bullseye Resource Center where two bodies had just been found by night staff. It would be their first homicide working together.
When he walked in to the place he’d only heard about from Amanda, Sam’s attention was not immediately drawn, as it usually was, to the yellow crime scene tape. Instead what he saw was Amanda’s studio on steroids.
Glass was everywhere — stacked, stored, shelved, and smashed. Along the south wall were slots of plywood housing sheets of glass in more colors than he knew existed. Each slot was topped with a small, backlit sample of the color, giving that side of the room a border of jewel-like intensity. Hundreds of jars of frit were stacked in bookcase-type shelves. Bricks of glass sat on low display tables, finished objects on pedestals. The shattered pieces on the floor and the police officers combing through them brought him back to why he was there.
Over the next few hours he and his partner interviewed the owners and the security guards who had called nine-one-one. They talked with the crime scene technicians and cops going over the two areas in a grid search trying to find anything that looked like evidence.
By the time the ME took the bodies for autopsy, Sam and his partner knew what little anyone was sure of: First, the security system had been disarmed a few minutes before 8:30 pm using Robin Jordan’s code. Jordan, an employee in the company’s Research and Education Department, was one of the victims. Second, materials had been set out for a class Jordan was scheduled to teach in the morning in a classroom across the delivery entrance from the murder scene. Those preparations were, everyone assumed, why she had been there. Third, something had happened after she set it up to cause a hell of a fight in the retail store and result in two dead bodies.
That’s where the facts ended and the questions began. There were no signs of forced entry any place in the rest of the complex. Nothing seemed missing. Since Robin Jordan had disarmed the security system and was one of the victims, did the killer make her open the building? But if the killer had forced her to open the building, why hadn’t she hit the silent alarm? And if she let the killer in, why did she just go about setting up her classroom? Did she know her killer? Her car wasn’t there. How had she gotten to Bullseye?
And why was Eubie Kane there? A van registered to him was parked out front and a hand-truck with his name on it stacked with empty plastic bins was near where the bodies had been found. Was he there with Jordan? Had he brought her there? Was one the target and the other just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place? If so, which was which? And why did anyone want to kill either of them?
More questions than answers. As usual.
Chapter Eight
Early next morning Sam returned to southeast Portland to familiarize himself with the neighborhood around Bullseye. Walking the block, he saw the retail store/classroom facility was only a small portion of the operation. The factory, where the glass was made, took up most of the space.
Although the retail store was closed while the police continued their investigation, the owners showed up early, too, to be on hand to answer more questions for the police, their employees and to cancel classes for the day. They brought coffee and scones and made space available on the second floor overlooking the murder site so Sam and his partner could continue their interviews.
The detectives asked each person about any possible problems Eubie Kane and Robin Jordan had recently had. Little they heard about the young instructor helped. She was single with no local family, loved her job, and was a good teacher and a skilled artist. She seemed to have no enemies.
Only two interesting pieces of information surfaced. The first was that recently she’d been wearing an expensive-looking gold bracelet. Sam had seen it on her body, another sign, he thought, that the motive for the murders was not robbery. One of her colleagues thought it was a gift from her new boyfriend — the second piece of information. Robin had been secretive about him, not wanting to jinx the budding relationship, she said. The only thing the woman who reported it knew was Robin had met him at a nearby coffee shop about two or three months before.
Eubie Kane was quite a different story. If he didn’t have enemies, he didn’t have many friends either. Described by more than one person as petulant and over-sensitive, his only connection with Robin Jordan seemed to be that he’d been in a couple of her classes. Robin’s friends laughed at the idea he might be her new boyfriend, saying he wasn’t her type and he certainly couldn’t afford that gold bracelet.
Since a good portion of the sta
ff working the retail store had been witness to it, both detectives heard versions of Kane’s confrontation with Amanda St. Claire. Most of it tracked what Amanda had told Sam weeks before — for no reason anyone could figure out, Kane had threatened to sue her for stealing his ideas.
Last, they heard about Kane having a run-in with a gallery owner. Everyone assumed it was the owner of one of the two galleries where he showed his work: The Fairchild Gallery in Portland or He Sells Seashells, at the coast.
Leaving his partner to finish up the interviews, Sam returned to Central Precinct where he found waiting for him the list of what had been in Eubie Kane’s pockets and Robin Jordan’s purse. The only thing interesting was from Kane’s pocket — a piece of paper torn in two on which the words “Not only no but hell no” were written. The message was on the back of a piece of brown paper on which there was part of a shipping label. Sam called the gallery on the label but got voice mail. He left a message asking for a return call.
A report on the fingerprints on the weapon found with the bodies, which was also on his desk, was more problematic.
Sam knocked on the open door to Christopher Angel’s office. The lieutenant in charge of the homicide detectives in Central Precinct was on the phone but signaled Sam in and waved him to a chair while he wrapped up the conversation.
A fifty-six-year-old, tall, slim man with dark hair shot through with the white he swore came from parenting five daughters rather than his work, Angel had been in his job for four years. His solve rate was impressive, the press loved him, and the Chief relied on his impeccable instincts about both homicide and public relations. His detectives had a nickname for him — L.T. The casual use of the initials was less about their recognition of his rank than a sign of their regard for him.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said as he hung up. That was the Chief passing along a message from the mayor. Mr. Mayor wants Kane/Jordan cleared quickly so it doesn’t, and I’m quoting here, ‘give the business community the impression that it’s not safe to operate in Portland.’ The fact that two people are dead apparently didn’t enter into their conversation.” He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, his disgusted look indicating exactly what he thought about the interchange. “What’ve you got for me?”
