Frosted Shadow - A Toni Diamond Mystery

by Nancy Warren

  The first officers confirmed Toni’s identity as the person who’d called in the death, and then did pretty much what she had done. They checked Nicole’s pulse and confirmed she was dead.

  “I’ll call the street sergeant,” the first cop said to the second. They’d introduced themselves but she couldn’t remember their names. Her head felt fuzzy.

  The second officer walked up to Toni. “We need to secure the area. You’ll have to wait outside.”

  She nodded.

  “But stay close. Somebody will want to interview you.”

  “Of course.”

  She sat in an area of comfy chairs near the elevators. She was aware of activity in and around the bathroom but she’d lost interest. She wrapped her arms around herself. The air conditioning seemed to be on overdrive and she was shivering.

  A little while later, four more uniforms headed off, all in different directions of the hotel, presumably looking for a guy with blood all over him and a guilty expression on his face. She hoped they found the killer fast.

  Nobody seemed too bothered about Toni, so she stayed out of the way and waited. The same white-haired coroner who’d taken away the first murder victim walked past. The thought flitted through her mind that he was having a busy week.

  For once it didn’t even occur to her to make use of the extra minutes by pulling some activity out of her bag. Instead she sat there and let her mind wander. Unfortunately, her mind didn’t want to go anywhere happy. It insisted on revisiting that last time she and Nicole had been together when they’d both uttered words they were bound to regret.

  While she waited, a tall, gray haired man whose eyelids drooped with fatigue came toward her carrying a tray. He wore a gray suit with a rectangular gold name badge that all the hotel staff wore.

  “Excuse me. I’m Armand Santiago, the hotel manager,” he said to her. “I am devastated that you should have suffered such a shock. I’ve brought you some hot tea.”

  “Thank you.”

  He set the tray down. “I can’t believe such a thing has happened.” He didn’t add again, but the word rattled in the silence. His voice was smooth and soothing, as she supposed the manager of a large hotel’s would be, but he couldn’t keep the worry out of his tone. Two murders in a week could not be good for business.

  She was surprised at how badly her hands were still shaking as she reached for the pot.

  Without any indication that he’d noticed her distress, Armand Santiago said, “May I?” and reached for the pot.

  She nodded gratefully.

  “Cream and sugar? Or lemon?”

  “Lemon. Thank you.” He poured a stream of some kind of scented tea into her cup. She didn’t care what it was or whether it contained caffeine. Somehow, she didn’t think she’d sleep much tonight. Using silver tongs he expertly popped a wedge of fresh lemon into her cup and handed it to her.

  She sipped the hot tea and wrapped her hands around the white china, letting the warmth seep into her.

  “Is there anything else I can get you?”

  “No. Thank you. The tea is wonderful.”

  He nodded. “I’ll be in my office if you need me for anything. Then, with a worried glance at the bathroom, he walked briskly away.

  As the person who had discovered the body Toni knew someone was going to want to talk to her sometime.

  She was right both in that somebody would want to talk to her and in her guess as to who it would be. Luke and his partner appeared together. Detective Henderson had had his cut re-buzzed she noted since she’d last seen him. Luke touched her arm and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “You okay?”

  She nodded. It was a lie, of course, but she didn’t think freaking out was going to help anybody.

  When she turned her head she saw that the CSI people were back. She wondered how much useful forensic evidence a person could find in a public washroom. No doubt somebody attending the mystery readers’ conference would know.

  She was getting tired. It was after one in the morning and the adrenaline that had kept her going was ebbing.

  Two pairs of eyes stared at her. Warm, deep brown and cool glacier blue/gray.

  “Toni, we’d like you to come down to the station with us.”

  She was so startled she sipped too much tea and burned her tongue. “The station?”

  “We’d like to ask you some questions and tape the interview.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  She took a last sip of her tea and set the cup down. They didn’t talk on the way down to the lobby level. She glanced at the car park elevator. “Should I take my own car?”

  Luke shook his head. “We’ll give you a ride back.”

  “Okay.”

  There were a number of police vehicles out front, lights flashing. She saw a TV news van already unloading equipment and was happy to be hustled to an unobtrusive, unmarked dark blue Taurus. She got into the back. Henderson drove.

  When they arrived at police headquarters, which was situated in Corvallis City Hall, she got out of the car, wishing she’d chosen something less spicy for dinner than the chicken enchilada platter. Her stomach felt jumpy.

  They led her inside and up an elevator to the fourth floor. A uniformed guy behind a glass wall nodded to Luke. “Hey, Sarge.”

  They led her to a door marked Interview Room.

  “The camera and microphone activates automatically when I open the door,” he informed her.

  She nodded. “Ready.”

  The room was around eight feet square, with no furniture but a rectangular table and four chairs and two wall-mounted cameras. Luke and his partner indicated where she should sit – facing the cameras, while they seated themselves across from her.

  The sounds of chairs scraping linoleum and the quiet thump of her bag as she set it down were the only sounds she could hear.

  Luke sent her a reassuring smile. Then glanced at his watch. “It’s 1:17 a.m. August 1. I’m Detective Sergeant Luke Marciano. With me is Detective Sergeant Frank Henderson and Ms. Toni Diamond, regarding the incidents that took place earlier today.”

  Once more he looked at her. “Tell me about your evening?”

  Such an innocuous question, the kind her mother might ask her after a date with a new man. No, more neutral in tone. More the way she’d ask her own daughter how she’d spent the evening, careful to let no sense of wild curiosity sneak into her tone. The trouble with a secretive child was that they so easily shut down completely in the information department. Tiffany kept all her sharing and chattering for Facebook and texting her friends.

  And now Tiff was going to have to deal with the fact that her mother was involved in another murder.

  “My evening. Let’s see.” Her mind felt strangely blank. Recalling her evening was like trying to dredge up the details of her summer holiday and now she couldn’t even remember where she’d gone. Or trying to remember who won all the categories of last year’s Oscars. She had been rehearsing the story of How She Discovered Nicole Dead in the Bathroom and now it seemed they wanted something else from her. Or at least, a prequel.

  But she took one look at his serious face and knew that recalling all the details she could was more important than who won best supporting actress last year.

  And then it all came back.

  “I was with my Lady Bianca sales team. We all had dinner together at a Mexican restaurant in the Old Town.”

  He nodded. Was there a glimmer of relief in his gaze? God she hoped so. She paused but no one said anything. She’d sort of expected a Q&A but it seemed they just wanted her to ramble.

  “Um. Let me think. We met in the lobby of the Weymouth Hotel at seven. We didn’t leave until 7:12 or so because Charlene Throckmorton was late, as usual.” She suddenly realized that no one in the police department knew or cared about Charlene Throckmorton. She needed to get a grip.

  “We got to the restaurant, Amigos, around 7:30. We were finished by around ten and we walked back to the hotel together.”

&nbs
p; Of course, as she started talking the evening flashed by in pictures and she was able to report, reasonably accurately, how she’d spent her time tonight. “Nicole Freedman, another National Sales Director and her group ate at a pizza and pasta place across the street.”

  Luke’s brows rose in silent question. Henderson’s gaze remained steady on her face. “The main lobby, by the marble horse, is the usual meeting place for groups. I saw Nicole there. We left the hotel around the same time and walked to dinner, so I saw where her group ended up.”

  She went through the evening as well as she could remember, right up to the time she’d found Nicole.

  She stopped and swallowed. It felt like she’d been talking a long time, hearing no other voice but her own. “And then I called 9-1-1.”

  “Can you remember everyone Nicole Freedman ate dinner with?”

  “Of course. It was her team.” Her head jerked up. “None of them would do…that.”

  “We only want to talk to them,” he said soothingly.

  “Did you know her well?” Henderson asked, speaking for the first time.

  “We’ve both been with Lady Bianca for more around fifteen years. I would call her a business acquaintance.”

  “Did she have any enemies?”

  She heard again the echo of raised voices this afternoon. Her own and Nicole’s.

  Toni sighed. “As far as I know, only me.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  We understood Her by her sight; her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought That one might almost say her body thought. —John Donne

  “You probably want to be careful saying things like that to a cop,” Luke said.

  She shook her head in a sort of manic fashion so her loose curls slapped her cheeks. “I’m not being cute. Believe me. You’ll find out soon enough. Ask about her enemies and you’ll hear about the big fight Nicole and I had earlier today.”

  “What kind of fight?”

  “Well, not a fistfight, obviously. It was more of an old fashioned shouting match. I said some things I shouldn’t have.”

  “Like what?”

  “I didn’t threaten to kill her or anything. I didn’t like the woman but I would never…”

  “What was this fight about?”

  She blew out a breath with enough force she could have extinguished a centenarian’s birthday cake. “It all seems so ridiculous now. Nicole is – was -- in direct competition with me for a prestigious sales-volume based award. I didn’t like her methods. I thought she was pressuring her associates to buy more stock than they needed or could afford. She thought I was trying to sabotage her.” She thought back to the awful scene earlier that day. “We both said some things we shouldn’t have. It wasn’t one of my prouder moments.”

  She felt her brows squeeze together in a frown, thought screw Botox, and let herself wrinkle. “There’s one more thing. She accused me of sending her threatening notes.”

  “What kind of notes?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t send them. At the time I thought she made them up, but now...”

  “Email? Handwritten?”

  “Email. She told Orin Shellenbach about them, too. He might know more.”

  Detective Henderson nodded. Frank. She hadn’t known his name was Frank. “The 9-1-1 call came in just before midnight. What were you doing between ten and midnight?”

  She noticed she was picking at her nail polish. It was a disgusting habit, one she’d willed herself out of when she began selling Lady Bianca and really taking care of her appearance. But now she couldn’t seem to stop herself. A flake of pink polish and a lone diamond sparkle flicked from her nail and landed on her lemon-colored skirt.

  “I came back to the hotel after dinner and Orin Shellenbach was waiting for me. He’s the VP of –”

  “We know who he is.”

  They must have talked to him after the first woman was murdered. She gulped. “He took me across the street to Starbucks for a meeting.”

  “Kind of late to have a business meeting.”

  “He’d heard about the fight. He wasn’t exactly thrilled. Read me a bit of a lecture.” She had almost all the polish off her index finger nail. By scraping hard with her thumb nail, she lifted a ribbon of polish from her middle finger. “Some other women came in while we were talking so I got up. I really didn’t want an audience and besides, we were done.”

  “So you left the coffee shop alone?”

  “Yes. Then I went for a walk. I needed to cool down.”

  “Did anyone see you on this walk?”

  Henderson was speaking and his voice gave nothing away. She knew his face wouldn’t either but she wasn’t looking up anytime soon. She had eight more nails to denude. “I don’t think so. I was preoccupied, though, so I wasn’t paying much attention. I got back around 11:45, I guess -- maybe closer to midnight -- and I’d drunk all this iced tea. I wasn’t going to make it to my room so I detoured into the washroom.”

  She swallowed. “And she was dead.”

  She felt panic bouncing around in her chest like a manic pinball. “She wasn’t stiff like you read about. Rigor mortis.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I told you already. I felt for a pulse in her neck.” She mimed taking her own and felt her carotid artery smack her fingers so hard and fast she could have tap danced to the beat. “Her skin was cool, but not cold.”

  She gulped. “Also, I did a really stupid thing.”

  “What?” he asked, sounding anything but astonished by the notion of her doing a stupid thing.

  “I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought about how she took such pride in her appearance and that she would never sit sprawled like that.” Toni glanced up to find she had their full attention, and looked back down again. Another chunk of polish went flying. “I straightened her skirt and kind of pushed her knees and ankles together.”

  “You’re right,” Luke said conversationally. “You did do a really stupid thing.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Did you touch anything else?” Same conversational tone.

  “No.”

  “The knife in her chest?”

  Her head jerked up and she returned his gaze. “God, no. I can’t believe someone killed her.” Unaccountably, her voice started to wobble. It was one thing not to like a person, quite another to find them murdered.

  Especially when a cop was looking at you as though his next words might be: ‘You have the right to remain silent.’

  The two detectives glanced at each other and did some kind of silent cop speak, then Luke said, “Okay, Toni. That’s enough for now. We may want to interview you again later.”

  She nodded.

  He glanced again at his watch. “It’s 2:03 a.m. The interview concludes.”

  They all walked out of the tiny interview room together. “Come on,” Luke said. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “You sure?” Henderson asked.

  “Yeah. Get some sleep, Frank. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  They got into the Taurus again; this time she was in the passenger seat. As they drove away from City Hall, she said, “Are you able to turn it off after you see death?”

  He glanced at her then back to the road ahead. “No. You never get used to it. Some guys take a drink or two, or pop a sleeping pill. Me, I restore old trucks. Sometimes I’m out in the garage all night.” He made a wry face.

  When they arrived back at the hotel, there were still a number of police vehicles hanging around, but thankfully no media that she could spot.

  The coroner’s van was parked nearby so she knew Nicole was still up there in the bathroom. She shivered.

  “Do you want me to walk you to your door?”

  She nodded gratefully.

  “Come on.”

  They walked into the hotel and straight for the elevators and he pushed the button. The door opened immediately and they stepped inside.

  He punched the number and the doors closed. A
s the elevator rose she said, “Will you go back down there? To the washroom?”

  He nodded. “Try to think about something else,” he suggested.

  “I can’t. Do you think the two deaths are connected?” she asked.

  “It’s the same MO, same location, similar murder weapon. That would be some series of coincidences, and I don’t believe much in coincidence.”

  “But what links these two women?”

  He looked as frustrated as she sounded. “Hell if I know.”

  Her stomach clenched. “Amy Neuman had nothing to do with Lady Bianca and Nicole Freedman didn’t read mysteries. They lived miles apart. How could they be related?”

  He made a sound that under other circumstances could have been termed a laugh. “Two murders within days of each other in the same location? Both female stabbing victims? There has to be a connection.”

  She was genuinely puzzled. “But what is it?”

  “Nicole did Amy Neuman’s makeover. We start there.”

  “Actually, Stacy Krump did her makeover -- under Nicole’s supervision.”

  “Was Stacy in the room the entire time?”

  “I don’t know. Probably she would have slipped into the washroom a few times to rinse brushes and get water for certain parts of the makeover.”

  “Leaving Nicole Freedman and Amy Neuman alone.”

  “But so what?”

  He slumped against the wall of the elevator, left hand slipping inside his pants pockets. She waited and sure enough the tumbling of coins began. “We’ll check into whether they knew each other before.”

  She nodded. It was the only thing that made sense. “But then who killed them?”

  He looked at her levelly. “The only link between them is Stacy.” He looked at her keenly. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You thought of something. I saw it on your face.”

  The elevator stopped and the doors opened. “Stacy’s the person Nicole and I had the fight about. That’s all.”

  “She’s the one Nicole forced into debt?”

  They stepped out into the hallway.

  “Come on, Luke. It was five grand. Not enough to break a person’s knee caps over. Certainly not enough to kill for. Besides, all Stacy had to do was cancel the charge.”