Hour Game

by David Baldacci

  The chief shook his head. “No watch and no dog collar thing going on.”

  King was staring at Sylvia. “But on the phone you said you weren’t sure it was a drug overdose.”

  “Certainly, we found indications that it was,” she said slowly.

  Williams added, “A syringe, rubber tourniquet and a needle mark on his forearm.”

  Sylvia said, “We need to run tests on any residue in the syringe to see what it was. That’ll take a few days. And I’ll run toxicology on the body fluids, but we won’t know the results of those for at least two weeks.”

  “You can’t tell from the autopsy what was shot into him?” asked Williams.

  “Yes and no. If it was heroin, for example, which is a respiratory depressant, there might be some slight heaviness or congestion in the lungs and a foamy mucus in the airway, but it would be far from conclusive. The fact is, if he died of an overdose, the autopsy alone won’t reveal what it was for certain. We have to rely on the toxicology results for that. If it was cocaine, the tox report will pick that up. If it was heroin, 6-monoacetylmorphine, a metabolite of heroin, will be found in the body. That’s pretty conclusive proof of a heroin overdose.”

  “Maybe it was a drug from your office.”

  “Possible, but if the screens find 6-monoacetylmorphine in Kyle’s blood or urine and don’t find the presence of aspirin or Tylenol, that will be proof enough that it’s not a prescription opiate narcotic in his system.”

  “Tylenol or aspirin?” asked Williams.

  “Yes, because prescription opiates are frequently combined with those medications. That’s not the case with heroin or cocaine or other street drugs.”

  “Who found him?” asked Michelle.

  “I did,” said Williams. “After you called me this morning, I decided to handle it myself. I came here with a deputy. We knocked. There was no answer. His Jeep was parked in front, so we figured he was here. We called his apartment and his cell phone, but there was no answer. We didn’t have a warrant to go in, but it was suspicious enough that I went to the super’s office and got them to open it. That’s when we found him.”

  “The core body temp and degree of rigor mortis suggest he’s been dead less than twelve hours,” opined Sylvia.

  King checked his watch. “So sometime after midnight or so?”

  “Yes.”

  “And no one saw anyone enter or leave the apartment?” asked King.

  “We’re still checking on that,” said Williams.

  “Okay, we need to find this mystery woman at the Aphrodisiac pronto,” said King.

  “I’m heading over there today,” said Williams.

  “We’d like to go with you, Todd,” said King. “Can you hold off for a couple of hours and meet us there? We’ll call you.”

  “I guess that won’t hurt.”

  “When are you going to do the post, Sylvia?” asked Michelle.

  “Right away. I’ve canceled my patients for the day.”

  “Now that Kyle is dead, can’t you get someone to help you?” said King. “They can send someone from Richmond or Roanoke.”

  “But on such short notice it won’t be right away,” said Sylvia.

  “But if he did die of an overdose, it won’t matter. You said you won’t have confirmation for a couple of weeks,” said Williams.

  “But there might be other evidence that’s slowly disappearing as we speak,” said Sylvia sharply. “The body speaks to us after death, Todd, but the longer you wait, the softer the voice becomes.”

  “Well, I’ll help you,” said Williams. “I need to attend the post anyway.” He added, “It’s becoming damn routine.”

  As they were all walking out, King stopped Sylvia. “Are you okay?”

  She looked at him with a sickened expression. “I think it’s possible Kyle committed suicide.”

  “Suicide! Why?”

  “He may have suspected I was on to his drug dealing.”

  “But killing himself, that’s a little drastic. And the guy struck me as spineless. And there was no suicide note either.”

  “Cowards kill themselves, Sean. They’re afraid to face the consequences of their actions.”

  “And, what, you’re blaming yourself?”

  “If it was suicide, I can think of no other reason than my suspicions.”

  “That’s not fair to you, Sylvia. You didn’t ask the guy to steal drugs.”

  “No, but—”

  “Before you beat yourself up over this, why don’t you do the post? As good as you are, you can’t predict what happened until you do that.”

  “But even the post won’t tell me if the overdose was accidental or intentional.”

  “The bottom line is, it was Kyle’s choice. You had no control over it. And life is full of enough legitimate guilt without us adding the guilt of others to our burden.”

  Sylvia managed a weak smile. “You’re a very wise man.”

  “I’ve had lots of practice. Primarily dealing with my own stupid mistakes.”

  “I’ll call you when I’m done with the post.”

  “I sincerely hope this is the last one you’ll have to do for a long time.”

  As he started to turn away, she said, “Last night was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

  “I can say the same.”

  As King and Michelle drove off, Michelle looked over at him. “Am I wrong, or have you and Sylvia rekindled your romance?” He shot her a glance but said nothing. “Come on, Sean, don’t feed me that line about my being your partner and not your shrink.”

  “Why not? It’s still a valid point.”

  She slumped back in her seat with a defeated expression. “Okay. Fine.”

  “What do you care anyway?”

  “I care because we’re right in the middle of a very complicated murder investigation, and we don’t need the best detective on the case and the brilliant medical examiner being distracted by a romance.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were jealous.”

  “Oh, please!”

  “I said if I didn’t know better. And don’t worry, right now everything else takes a backseat to this case.” He paused and added, “I saw you and Eddie hugging.”

  She looked at him angrily. “You were spying on us!”

  “No, I peeked in the window as I was going to the door to see if you were in there. I didn’t know you two were trying to crawl inside each other’s bodies.”

  “That’s so unfair, Sean. I was just thanking him for a painting he did of me.”

  “Oh, he painted a portrait of you? That should make his intentions quite clear.”

  “He’s unhappy.”

  “And it’s not your job to fix that unhappiness,” he retorted. “So just let it go, Michelle. The last thing you need right now is for your judgment to be clouded.”

  Michelle looked ready to argue but remained silent.

  King continued, “He’s an attractive, fun and nice guy who’s had more than his share of tragedy, and to top it off he’s caught in a miserable marriage. You wouldn’t be the first woman in history to want to help a man like that.”

  “You sound like you’ve experienced stuff like that.”

  “The world is full of stuff like that. And none of us are immune to it.”

  “Okay, okay, I get the message. So where to now?”

  “We’re going to see Roger Canney. It seems he came into a substantial sum of money right around the time of his wife’s death. Its origins are unclear.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “You haven’t heard the most interesting part. The late Mrs. Canney had a job.”

  “Really? Where?” Michelle asked.

  “Battle Enterprises. Care to guess which executive she was servicing?”

  “Bobby Battle!”

  “You win the prize.”

  CHAPTER

  60

  NO ONE ANSWERED THEIR

  knock at the Canney residence.

  �
��That’s funny,” said King. “I called ahead. He said he’d be home.”

  “At least the housekeeper should be here.”

  Michelle went over and peeked inside the garage window. “Well, there are two cars in there, a big Beemer and a Range Rover. Unless he pays his housekeeper extremely well, I don’t think they belong to her.”

  King put a hand on the front door, and it swung open. Michelle saw this and immediately took out her gun and rejoined King.

  “I swear to God,” she whispered, “if he’s in there dead with a dog collar around his neck and wearing a watch pointing to the number six, I’m going to scream for an entire week.”

  They made their way quietly inside. The front room was empty. They cleared each subsequent room before moving on to the next.

  Michelle heard the noise first, a grunting sound, appearing to come from the back of the house. They hustled there and looked around. They saw no one, but the sound repeated itself, followed this time by a clanking noise of metal on metal.

  Michelle motioned to a door at the end of the hall. King nodded, moved forward and slowly pushed it open with his foot while Michelle covered him. King peered inside, tensed and then relaxed. He opened the door and motioned for Michelle to join him.

  Canney was seated with his back to them, earphones on and doing leg presses in his nicely equipped home gym. King pounded on the door, and Canney snapped around and ripped off his headphones.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “I called this morning. You said one o’clock was fine. It’s one o’clock. Nobody answered the door and it happened to be open.”

  Canney stood and put his CD player down and toweled off. “I’m sorry. My housekeeper has the day off, and I must have lost track of time.”

  “Happens to the best of us,” said King. “We can wait if you want to clean up.”

  “No, I think we can just get down to it. I can’t imagine this will take long. Let’s sit outside. I made some lemonade.”

  They went into the large backyard, which had a lap pool, spa and a small cabana-style building as well as intricately planned landscaping.

  “Beautiful,” commented Michelle.

  “Yes, I love it back here.”

  “It all looks fairly recent,” said King. “And you haven’t lived in this house that long, have you? What, three years or so?”

  Canney stared pointedly at him as he drank his lemonade. “How did you know?”

  “Public records are just that, public. You’re retired now. From accounting?”

  “Twenty years seemed long enough to worry about other people’s money.”

  “Well, now you have plenty of your own to worry about. I guess accounting pays better than I thought.”

  “I’ve made some good investments over the years.”

  “And your late wife worked too, at Battle Enterprises. She was executive secretary to Bobby Battle, wasn’t she? In fact, she was working there when she died in that car accident?”

  “Yes. It’s not exactly a secret.”

  “I didn’t see you at Battle’s funeral.”

  “That’s because I didn’t go.”

  “You hadn’t kept in touch with the family?”

  “Just because my wife worked there doesn’t mean we were friends with them.”

  “I found a picture of your wife while I was doing my background research. She was a very beautiful woman; had even won some local beauty pageants.”

  “Megan was extraordinarily attractive, yes. Does this line of conversation have some point?”

  “The point being that I had to hunt up pictures of your wife because there are none of her in your home. Nor are there any of your son.”

  “You mean, not out in the public areas.”

  “No. When no one answered the door and we found it open, we thought there was something amiss, so we went room to room, including your bedroom; there are no photos at all of your family.”

  Canney stood, enraged. “How dare you!”

  King remained impassive. “Let me be blunt with you, Rog: you came into your money roughly three years ago, soon after your wife died, in fact. That’s when you bought this place. Before then you were an ordinary bean-counter making an ordinary income and doing okay because your wife was working too. Those sorts of people don’t suddenly retire after they lose their spouse’s income, and buy a million-dollar property.”

  “She had life insurance.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars. I checked that too.”

  “What exactly are you implying?”

  “I’m not interested in implications. I’d much prefer the truth.”

  “This interview is over. I believe you know the way out, since you’ve already searched my house.”

  King and Michelle rose. “Okay, we can do it the hard way.”

  “And you can do it with Giles Kinney, my lawyer. He’ll tear you apart.”

  King smiled. “Giles doesn’t scare me. I kick his butt on the golf course at least once a week.”

  CHAPTER

  61

  KING AND MICHELLE MET

  Todd Williams and two of his deputies at the Aphrodisiac and were soon in Lulu’s office questioning her about the occupant of the room and Kyle’s visits there. At first she denied knowing anything about it but finally admitted that she’d recently seen Kyle at the club.

  “But I don’t know who the lady is,” she said. “She doesn’t work here. I know that for a fact.”

  “What, you’re in the charity business now, letting rooms out for free to rich drug users?” said Williams sarcastically.

  “I didn’t know anything like that was going on. She paid for the room, in cash. I just thought she needed a place to stay.”

  “Was she here every night?”

  “I didn’t keep track really. Unless you’re going into one of the performance areas to see the girls or the bars, you don’t have to show ID. We have restaurants and lounges here too, and a business center. Anyone can come in and go to one of those places. We are open to the public,” she added hotly.

  King shook his head. “Come on, Lulu, are you saying that when the woman first came here, you never spoke to her? How the hell did you know what she even wanted?”

  “She left cash and a note that said she wanted that room and that room only.”

  “And you did what? You just gave it to her without question?”

  “It’s just a room, Sean! And cash is cash. It’s not like she was running some criminal business in there. She only came at night. During the day we had the room cleaned, like all the others. There was never anything there. I know it sounds a little weird, and I admit I was curious. In fact, when she first started coming, I kept an eye peeled. There was never any loud noise or stuff like that. Except for this Kyle person, no one ever visited her.”

  “Did you see her come and go?”

  “Sometimes. But she always wore a scarf, long coat and glasses.”