“I might have a lethal mouth, but everything about you is lethal,” he told her. “Every time you let that hair of yours down like that, looking like some fantasy come to life, it’s all I can do to keep my hands off you. I think I’m going to make a rule that you have to keep your hair up when you’re on the job.”
She didn’t bother hiding her amusement. “And that’ll do it?”
“No, but it’ll help. What?” he asked when he saw her expression suddenly change. The amusement had fled, replaced by a look of sudden awareness.
She raised herself up so that her eyes met his. “Say that again.”
He had no idea what had set her off. “Say what again? That it’ll help?”
“No.” She sat up suddenly as the thought that had drifted through her head last night returned and started to gel. “What you said about my hair.”
“That you’re going to have to keep it up?” he asked, completely lost why she would want to hear that again. “Sierra, what are you getting at?” he asked. “Where is this going?”
Sierra scrambled to her knees. “That’s why she looked so familiar to me,” she said excitedly.
“What’s why who looked so familiar to you? Who are we talking about, Sierra?” he asked, still in the dark.
How could he not be following this? “Campbell’s daughter!” she cried.
Maybe it would be best if they started at the beginning, he decided. “What about her?”
Convinced that she was on to something, Sierra struggled to rein in her excitement. “When she answered the door, Olivia had her hair pulled back and she looked almost like some old, severe schoolmarm.”
So far, he didn’t understand why she seemed so wired. “So? She was going to work. A lot of places require that their employees keep their hair back, out of the way, on the job.”
“I know, I know. But picture her with her hair loose,” she told him.
“Okay,” he answered obligingly. He continued looking at her.
She shook her head. She could tell by his expression that he wasn’t seeing the woman the way she was. “No, really picture her. Wait—” she told him, getting out of bed quickly and hurrying into the living room.
“Not that I don’t love watching you run around naked, but what’s gotten into you?” he asked.
He heard Sierra rummaging for something in the next room. His curiosity properly aroused, he got out of bed and went into the living room.
When he walked in on her, Sierra had found what she’d been looking for. Holding her cell phone in her hand, she began scrolling through various photographs until she found the one she wanted to show him.
“There it is!” she declared. “I knew I hadn’t erased it.” Holding her phone up so that Ronan could see, she said, “Here, look at this.”
Ronan took the phone from her and looked at the photograph. He recognized it as the one Valri had enlarged for them.
Glancing up at Sierra, he said, “That’s the woman someone saw at the Shamrock that night the fifth victim was killed.”
She nodded. “Right. She was the one the bartender identified as being with the gang member before he was found in the alley. Look closer,” she urged. “Look beyond the profusion of hair. Doesn’t she remind you of someone?”
He looked again then began to shrug. “Just another pretty girl who’ll probably get old before her time—Wait a minute,” he said, taking a closer look. When he raised his eyes to Sierra’s, she was smiling at him like someone who felt she’d finally gotten her point across. “Is that—” he started to ask.
“It is.”
To make sure they were on the same page, he still asked. “Is that Darren Campbell’s daughter?”
“The same. We didn’t recognize her before. She looked so different when we questioned her. But I’m willing to bet anything you want that it’s her.”
“Okay, so she was at the same bar the victim was in. You can’t be thinking—”
She cut him short. Ronan was way too nice, she realized. “Yes, I can. Think about it,” she persisted. “She’s a physician’s assistant. That means she has surgical training. She dresses up—just a pretty girl out for a good time, right? Who’s going to suspect her? Or have their guard up around her?
“Picture this...” Sierra continued, her voice growing more enthusiastic. “She tells the victim she wants to go someplace private. The guy thinks he’s going to get lucky and the minute he turns his back on her, bang, he’s dead.”
“It makes sense,” Ronan said. “Macabre, but it still makes sense.” He had one question left. “Why cut off his hand?”
“His dominant hand,” Sierra clarified emphatically. “The hand that had a gun in it during the shoot-out that claimed her father’s life and turned her mother into a manic-depressant.”
He was convinced. “I think we need to have another talk with Olivia Campbell,” he said, already beginning to get dressed.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ronan heard his cell phone ringing just as he was looking around for his shoes. Finding the cell first, he swiped it open.
“O’Bannon,” he said as he continued looking for his shoes.
He heard Sean’s voice on the other end of the line. “Ronan, I think I found something that you and your team might be interested in taking a look at.”
After finding his shoes, he slipped them on. “Uncle Sean? Where are you?” Ronan asked. It was too early for the man to be calling from the lab, wasn’t it?
“At the lab,” Sean answered. “I came in early to see if I could catch up. Your serial killer’s been keeping my unit busy. I finally got a chance to go through the surveillance videos.”
And his uncle had obviously found something important enough to call him this early. Ronan glanced at his watch. It wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. He did a quick calculation. “I’ll be right there. Give me twenty-five minutes,” he promised.
“Twenty-five minutes?” Sean repeated. “I thought you lived farther away from the precinct than that.”
“Long story. ’Bye,” Ronan said, terminating the connection.
“What’s up?” Sierra asked, coming into the living room to join him. She was dressed and, from all appearances, ready to go.
“That was my uncle,” Ronan told her, tucking in his shirt before turning around.
“I need more of a hint than that,” she told him. “It’s not like you have only one uncle.”
“Sean, the one heading up the CSI unit. He said he finally found the time to view the surveillance videos from Officer Robertson’s murder and he thinks he might have found something.”
From the way Ronan spoke, she could tell that was going to take precedence over their previously decided course of action. “I guess that puts confronting Olivia Campbell on hold,” she surmised.
“Temporarily,” Ronan amended. “I think that avenue still bears exploring,” he agreed, finally turning to look at Sierra. “You got dressed.”
“Yes, I’ve been doing it ever since I was four. Before that, my dad had to help. You look surprised.”
“I left you naked.” And that had only been a few minutes ago.
“And now I’m dressed,” she concluded. “Interrogating a suspect naked was never my style,” she quipped. Sierra held out a travel mug filled with coffee. She had one for herself, as well. “What’s your point?”
A little dazed, Ronan took the travel mug she’d handed him. “I just didn’t know a woman could get dressed that fast,” he admitted.
She laughed, patting his face. “When are you going to learn, O’Bannon? I’m full of surprises.”
She’d get no argument from him on that. But remarkable woman or not, how had she managed to get dressed and make coffee in that short amount of time? “When did you make coffee?” he asked.
He smiled at her as they left the house, recalling what she’d looked like, searching for her cell phone a few minutes ago. “You already took care of that part for me,” he told her.
She immediately knew what he was referring to. “I can’t wait until this serial killer’s behind bars so we can get back to what’s really important,” she told him, her eyes sweeping over him significantly.
“Amen to that,” he agreed, ushering her to his car with his free hand.
* * *
“OKAY, UNCLE SEAN, we’re here,” Ronan called out as he and Sierra walked into the CSI lab.
It was between shifts and the day shift hadn’t come in yet—all except for Sean who was all the way over at the far end of the lab where the video bays were located.
Stepping forward so they could see him, Sean waved them over. “I think you might want to see this.”
He waited until they were almost there and then stepped back into the bay.
“What, no popcorn?” Ronan asked as they reached the bay. Sean had the video in question freeze-framed on the first viewing monitor.
“I think that this time, you’ll want to skip the popcorn,” Sean said and then nodded at the woman next to his nephew. “Good morning, Sierra. I see he decided to drag you out of bed to see this.”
Sierra smiled. She didn’t like lying, but she didn’t think Ronan would be comfortable with his uncle knowing they had spent the night together. “Something like that,” she told him.
“Well, I think you’re both going to think it’s worth it. Remember, we were looking for whoever killed Robertson,” he reminded them as if they might have thought he’d made a different sort of discovery. Beckoning them closer to the machine used to review the various surveillance videos, he pointed to the screen. “Here’s Robertson going into the men’s room. No one’s gone in ahead of him since the restaurant opened at eleven. I went through this video carefully to make sure no one was lying in wait for him.
“All right, here’s Robertson going in. And now here’s you and Detective Carlyle,” he continued, “walking into the men’s room fifteen minutes later. Robertson’s already dead. The only people seen coming or going in the vicinity of the men’s room are the two of you, my unit and that young woman coming out of the ladies’ room.”
She was the one he had currently frozen on the monitor.
Sierra looked at the woman intently. The young woman had bumped into her and kept walking after Sierra apologized. Intent on finding Robertson, she hadn’t paid any attention to the woman.
She did now.
“Can you zoom in on her?” she asked Sean.
“I can make her look like Big Foot’s mother if you need me to,” Sean answered, magnifying that one section of the video.
“She has her head down,” Ronan complained. “We can’t really make out her features.”
“She’s wearing her hair just like the woman that was seen with the victim at the Shamrock,” Sierra said. “Look at her. She’s about the right height, the right age,” she pointed out.
“All circumstantial,” Ronan countered. And circumstantial didn’t stand up in court, he thought.
“Yes, but she doesn’t know that,” Sierra noted, thinking maybe they could still use it to frighten a confession out of the woman.
“‘She’?” Sean repeated. He looked from his nephew to Sierra. “You have someone in mind?”
“Oh, yes,” she told Sean with enthusiasm. “We definitely have someone in mind. Can you make us a print of that?” she asked, nodding at the frozen screen he’d enlarged.
“Sure.” It was a piece of cake.
“And a copy of that section of video? If you could transfer that to my tablet—” she requested hopefully.
Sean nodded. “Consider it done.”
Ronan followed her line of thinking. “We’re going to use that to confront the suspect,” he told his uncle.
Sean nodded. “Just give me a few minutes,” he requested. “And your tablet,” he told Sierra.
“I’ll be right back,” she promised, hurrying out of the lab.
* * *
TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES later after calling Choi and Martinez about what they had found, they were back in Ronan’s car. Armed with a copy of the surveillance video that showed the woman emerging out of the ladies’ room transferred onto her tablet, plus a still of the woman, they were ready to confront Olivia Campbell.
“Think she’s back from the hospital?” he asked Sierra as he started his car.
“She said she worked the night shift, so, yes, my guess is that she’s back at home. Not to mention that I’ve double-checked the list of people who were involved in the shoot-out that killed her father and from what I can see, there’s no one left to kill. She’s eliminated everyone who was there.”
Ronan thought over what she’d just said. There was one possibility left. “Unless she’s turning her wrath on her brother for deserting their mother in her time of need.”
“She’s going to have to find him first,” Sierra pointed out. “I exhausted every search engine and I couldn’t find any trace of Hank Campbell anywhere, remember?”
It wasn’t unheard of for a person to shed their identity and get a new one. But that required planning and resources. There was a simpler reason that the late cabdriver’s son was nowhere to be found.
“Maybe that’s because he isn’t anywhere,” Ronan told her.
“What are you saying? That he’s dead?”
That was exactly what he was thinking. “Maybe Olivia got into it with him, trying to shame him into doing his part taking care of their mother. He told her he wasn’t about to sacrifice his life taking care of a zombie. She lost her temper and, I don’t know, threw something at him, or maybe even shot him. He could have been her first victim,” Ronan concluded then looked at her. “What do you think?”
Considering the kind of person they thought they were dealing with, it was entirely plausible to her. “I think you might be on to something.”
That made two of them, he thought grimly.
* * *
OLIVIA CAMPBELL APPEARED far from happy to see the two detectives on her doorstep again. As before, she kept the door slightly ajar when she opened it. But this time she kept it that way and stood with her body blocking access into her house, being, in effect, a human doorstop.
“I already talked to you two,” Olivia told them sharply.
“We have more questions,” Ronan told her.
“Well, I don’t have more answers,” Olivia snapped. “Look, I just got off the night shift and I’m really tired. Come back later. Better yet, don’t come back at all,” she told them, starting to push the door closed.
Ronan was quicker than she was and forced it open. Olivia stumbled backward. “Hey!” she protested.
“You need to talk to us, Ms. Campbell,” he informed her in a no-nonsense voice.
Olivia looked like a woman tottering on the verge of a breakdown. “If you people put half this effort into putting away those animals who killed my father instead of harassing me,” she shouted, “maybe my mother would still be a human being instead of a freaking statue.”
“Maybe you should come down to the precinct with us,” Sierra said in a low, stern voice.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Olivia cried. Turning on her heel, she flew back into the living room. They immediately followed her, not quite sure what to anticipate or what the woman was capable of in the presence of her mother.
They found Olivia pressing the remote on the hospital bed, raising the upper section. It looked as if she was trying to modify her mother’s pos
ition. Her mother still lay completely immobile. Instead of staring unblinkingly at the ceiling, she seemed to be looking straight ahead now.
Maybe she was just trying to make her mother comfortable, Sierra thought, softening a little. “Why don’t you call back the woman who watches your mother and then we’ll go—”
“No!” Olivia cried, pulling a weapon from the space that had opened up beneath the mattress and the hospital bed’s springs.
She aimed the handgun at them.
“You don’t want to do that,” Sierra told her in an incredibly calm voice, trying to get Olivia to focus on her.
“No, I don’t,” Olivia snapped, a note of hysteria reverberating in her voice. “But you two just won’t leave me alone. Why do you keep hounding me? Why couldn’t you just do your jobs? Why did you make me do it?”
In an odd sort of way, Sierra could understand the other woman’s frustration, although she couldn’t condone what she’d done afterward. “Sometimes the law winds up protecting the guilty.”
“It always protects the guilty,” Olivia retorted, shifting the barrel of her handgun from Sierra to Ronan and then back again. “You wouldn’t do the right thing. You made me do it. I’m tired,” she complained, her voice quavering. “I’m really, really tired.” Her face became a mask of hopelessness and there was a wild look in her eyes. “There’s nothing left for me.”
Sierra read between the lines. The woman was going to kill herself. “You have your mother,” she pointed out with feeling.
Mention of her mother made Olivia look even more wild-eyed. She gestured angrily at her mother with her free hand.
“Look at her! She’s not my mother, she’s a vegetable!” The desperation just seemed to grow. “The rest of my life, I’m going to have to take care of her. What kind of a life is that?” she demanded.
“We could find your brother,” Ronan suggested, ever so slowly inching his way closer to her.
Olivia laughed to herself. It was a dry, humorless laugh that was more hopeless than anything else. “You’re not going to find him. Ever,” she declared with finality—and just a little bit of pride. “Don’t you understand? I’ve evened the score but now there’s nothing left for me. Nothing,” she stressed despondently. Her hand shook as she turned the gun on herself.
Cavanaugh Standoff Page 20
