Mortal Crimes 2

by Various Authors

  Jay pulled the shell comb from her hair, allowing the soft strands to fall around her face. In the dim light, they undressed slowly, helping each other. Naked, they stretched out on the long sectional. He continued to move in slow motion, caressing, exploring her body—kisses long and drawn out—seeming in no hurry. She was in no hurry either. It was possible this experience would be the only one she would share with him. With only the memory of this glorious moment to last her a lifetime, she willed it to go on and on.

  For a brief instant Kasey’s mind flashed back to the night in the Jacuzzi, to Jay sitting nearby with lovemaking bites and scratches covering his shoulders. If he liked it rough, it wasn’t apparent tonight. Jay, right here and now, was the gentlest of lovers. His hands, mouth, and body caressed her like slow burning oil; and when finally he entered her, she thought she would melt with the wonder of it.

  He whispered her name over and over. And this time when Kasey reached orgasm and Jay’s name passed her lips, she smiled. The name tasted good in her mouth. The sound of it rang true in the intoxicating air of their lovemaking. A moment later, Jay’s body shuddered with his own climax. Long after their pulses slowed and their breathing became shallow again, he held onto her, continuing to kiss and caress her.

  They moved into the bedroom, talked for a while of love and sharing, then made love again at the same lingering pace. Before Kasey fell asleep, she thought of the past men in her life. Thought of Dianne and what she had said to her about attracting nothing but weak, helpless men. Losers. Jay, although still married, had said he loved her. Jay was not a weak, helpless man. Strong in character, a man in power, a man of means, he was not a loser. But would he ever be hers?

  *

  She awoke, felt the weight of an arm across her chest, and it all came rushing back to her. Jay. His suite. The cioppino. Their lovemaking. Pleasing, exciting images, every one. Her day had begun badly, only to end well.

  Her mouth and throat were dry from the cioppino, wine, and sex.

  She quietly slipped from the bed and made her way to the master bathroom. At the door she searched for the light switch and, unable to find it right away, decided to leave it off so as not to disturb Jay. She remembered the layout from the night Dianne had been attacked.

  Running her hand along the wall, then the marble sink top, she was well into the room when her bare foot stepped from the cool, dry tiles to something wet and slightly raised. It cracked under her weight. She froze. Glass?

  Afraid to go any farther, she gripped the counter for balance. The fingers of one hand slid through something wet, sticky. The other hand felt more shards of glass, also wet and sticky. Suddenly she was aware of a cloying odor in the room, a sharp metallic smell.

  In the black windowless room she somehow sensed she was not alone. Someone or something was there with her. She tried to swallow, but her throat was so very dry.

  Her fingers groped along the countertop in search of some sort of weapon. She found a large triangle of broken glass. She lifted it and sucked in her breath when a sharp edge sliced into her palm.

  “Jay,” she whispered, raising the hand that gripped the piece of glass.

  The silence answered her, closed in around her, threatened to suffocate her.

  “Jay!” This time the single word reverberated throughout the glass and tile bathroom, ringing painfully in her head.

  “Jay!”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  She heard Jay call her name. Heard him running across the room. Bright lights exploded in her eyes. She closed her eyes and turned her head away.

  “Kasey, don’t move,” Jay said the words softly.

  Kasey opened her eyes a little at a time. She saw Jay standing in the doorway, his hand reaching out toward her. On the floor in the corner she saw a pile of female clothes. She turned her head and looked in the plate-glass mirror. Jagged lightning-shaped lines came to a point in a bloody flower pattern. Blood was everywhere. Splattered across the walls and floor, pooling on the counter, in the sink, dripping down from the ceiling and across the frosted shower stall. Blood that erupted into infinity in the splintered shards that mesmerized her by its crimson brightness in the all-white room.

  She stared at herself, nude, one hand raised, clutching a bloody triangle of mirror; and beyond her own reflection, in the bathtub, Kasey saw a bare, blood-streaked arm sticking straight up against the tiles.

  She dropped the glass, heard it shatter in the basin. Without moving her feet, she twisted around, stared disbelieving at the bathtub. A naked blonde woman, puncture and slash wounds covering most of her pale body, lay sprawled in a thickening pool of blood. There was no question it was Paula Volger. No question that she was dead.

  Above the body, scrawled in blood across the tiles, were the words, YOU’RE NEXT.

  With a towel, Jay swept at the glass on the floor. He threw down the towel and walked on it to reach Kasey. He lifted her into his arms, turned, and carried her out. Blood from her hand, both hers and the dead woman’s, smeared across his chest and shoulder.

  *

  At 4:10 A.M., for the second time in less than two weeks, Det. Frank Loweman and the CSI went over Jay’s suite with a fine-tooth comb. Only this time the victim was not an occupant of the room, and she threw no tantrums.

  The victim, Paula Volger, had been dead at least seven hours. While Kasey and Jay were gorging themselves on seafood and wine, while they were making love in both the living room and bedroom, Paula’s body was only yards away, cooling, going through the stages of rigor mortis. The thought made Kasey physically sick, and she tried not to dwell on it.

  Loweman, Jay, and Kasey sat in the living room. Jay had pulled on a pair of sweats, and Kasey had put on her skirt and blouse. She hadn’t bothered with her sandals; there was little point in trying to cover up the fact that she and Jay had been together. After calling the police, Kasey, concerned for Jay’s reputation, had started to make up the bed; but Jay had taken her in his arms and stroked her hair. “Leave it,” he’d said to her. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve nothing to hide.”

  As Loweman listened to their account, he stared at the shellfish graveyard on the coffee table and every now and then his eyes flicked toward the bedroom to the unmade bed. If he was surprised, or if he disapproved, he hid it well behind a bland face. A cop’s face.

  “She probably couldn’t make much sound once her trachea had been severed,” Loweman said. “But by the vast amount of blood and the long-range splatter points, I’d say she put up a helluva fight until the end. My guess is he took her directly into the bathroom, stripped her and himself down, then killed her. Her clothes showed no signs of being violently removed.There are traces of blood inside the shower stall and I bet we find more in the area around the drain.”

  “You mean he disrobed so he wouldn’t get blood on his own clothes?” Jay asked. “Then he took the time to shower?”

  “Yeah. Appears so. Probably used your shampoo. Maybe even your deodorant and aftershave.” Loweman wrote in his notebook. “How long did he have the suite to himself?”

  “Half hour, forty-five minutes. No more,” Jay said. He turned to Kasey for confirmation.

  “That’s right. I got the call from Paula just after nine. I was on the roof for about ten minutes. Jay and I met up in the stairwell and then we came back here.”

  “Straight back?”

  “No. The garage elevators were out,” Jay said. “It took a couple of minutes to look into it, then we came up. We talked to one of the security officers on this floor for a few minutes before stopping at Kasey’s room to check for a message from Paula.”

  “Jay, were you in the suite right up to the time you went to meet Kasey?”

  “No. I was in my office.”

  “So the killer had how much time here?”

  “An hour, ninety minutes.”

  “But Paula was alive at nine,” Kasey said. “She called me.”

  “It’s hard to believe you two didn’t pass him in the corri
dor,” Loweman said.

  “After leaving here, he may have slipped into another room on this floor and waited until it was all clear,” Kasey said. “He may have been waiting in my room. I didn’t go inside, just checked for messages at the door, then came down here.”

  “Makes sense, especially if he has a master,” Loweman said, glancing at his watch. “Speaking of security, where the hell’s that elevator surveillance tape?”

  “Here it is,” Barney LeBarre said, crossing the living room with a cassette. “I got here as quickly as I could.”

  “Was there a tape for the camera at the door of the suite?” Jay asked his head of security.

  “No, Mr. King. I was watching that monitor myself. If I’da seen anyone at the door, I would have recorded it. Nobody went through those doors except you and Ms. Atwood at 9:32.”

  “He got inside somehow.”

  LeBarre scratched his chin thoughtfully. “At one point I thought someone was heading for your door. I saw you come out around 7:50, Mr. King. Then a little before 9:00, I saw a shadow in the corridor, close to the door, but it didn’t get any closer.”

  “He must have entered through the adjoining room,” Jay said to no one in particular.

  That was the room the surveillance men had occupied while Dianne was in the hotel, Kasey thought. No one used the room now that Dianne had gone home.

  Jay popped the cassette into the VCR and they viewed it. There was no sign of Cage or Paula Volger near any of the elevators, which led Kasey to believe Cage already had Paula before coming upstairs. He probably intercepted her downstairs and brought her up to the suite, where he forced her to call Kasey.

  One surprise, however, was seeing Howard Cummings, Jay’s chief executive, getting off the elevator at 9:11, about the time the security guard had been dispatched to check out a bogus complaint at the other end of the floor and Kasey was alone on the roof.

  “I’ve already sent for Cummings,” Jay said. “He should be here any minute.”

  One of the crime investigators, holding an evidence bag reading Biohazard in gloved hands, approached Loweman. “Frank, we took plenty of blood samples. There’s enough broken glass around in there that the killer could have nicked himself.”

  “I was cut,” Kasey said. She opened her hand to reveal a wad of bloody tissue in her palm. “My blood is on at least one piece of broken mirror. My fingerprints, too.”

  “We’ll get your blood type and prints,” Loweman said to Kasey. He turned to Jay “You?”

  “No, I wasn’t cut.”

  “I doubt he left prints. We might get lucky and find a hair or two. And if he raped her, there could be something for the DNA lab. I’ll send along those two containers of nasal spray you gave me yesterday, Jay. If we can tie him to the attack on Dianne and again to something in the bathroom tonight, it could be the break we’ve been looking for.” Loweman scribbled in the notebook. “We need everything we can get. Without witnesses, the rest is pretty much circumstantial. This guard you spoke to this evening, did he see or hear anything?”

  “Nothing. Lucas Cage managed to send him off in another direction.”

  “We don’t know that it’s Cage—”

  “It’s Cage. And he’s got friends in high places within the club. I’d stake my life on it.”

  “He has friends outside the club, too. His alibi.” Loweman turned to Kasey. “Get your friend to recant her statement and we might have something.”

  A moment later, Howard Cummings joined them. Cummings looked confused; and if Kasey knew anything about reading people, she would swear the chief exec was more than a little nervous.

  “Christ, Jay, I heard. I came as soon as I could.” Cummings looked from the detective to his boss and back again. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Det. Loweman took over. “Mr. Cummings, we have you on video. At a little after nine this evening you were seen coming off the elevator onto this floor. What were you doing here?”

  Cummings looked at Jay. “I got a message you wanted to see me. I came right up.”

  “And?”

  “I knocked. No one answered so I left.”

  “Did you see anyone else on the floor?” Loweman asked.

  “No. Not that I recall.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t knock and, when no one answered, open the door with a master,” Jay asked evenly.

  “Open with a master? Why would I do something like that?”

  “So your man would have no trouble getting in.”

  “My man? Jay, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “Lucas Cage. Are you going to deny knowing a punk by the name of Lucas Cage?”

  “Hell, yes, I’m going to deny it. I never heard of this Cage.” Cummings puffed himself up. “You don’t think—Jesus Christ, Jay, you don’t think I had anything to do with the terrible things that have been going on around here? The bomb? The murders?”

  “What were you doing here so late tonight? You usually head home before nine.”

  “I had some business to wind up. I was expecting a call.”

  “Did the caller tell you to come up here?”

  “No. No,” Cummings said emphatically.

  “Have you been in contact with Doyle lately?”

  “Doyle? Ansel Doyle?” Gradually, like pages riffling under a thumb, Cumming’s face registered complete awareness. “Jay, as God is my witness, I haven’t talked to the man since I came to work for you. Look, I won’t deny that I didn’t wonder about Doyle, I suspected he might have something to do with the things happening here; but Jesus, Jay, I never dreamed you’d think I was in with him.”

  “Why did the bomber call you? How did he get your private cellular number?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “As of right now, Howard, you’re on leave.”

  “But—”

  “Take a vacation. Take the family to Disneyland.”

  “What about the club? I have unfinished business—”

  “What little business is left, I can handle myself.”

  “Jay, I wouldn’t turn on you. Brad has filled your head with this crap, hasn’t he? Your nephew has been out to get me since the first time we butted heads. He’s the one you should be interrogating.”

  “Brad has nothing to do with this. Take some time off, Howard. We’ll talk in a couple of weeks.”

  Cummings opened his mouth to say something and thought better of it. With a solemn expression, he nodded, turned and left the suite.

  Jay turned to Loweman. “Why the hell didn’t you have someone follow Cage?”

  “We did. Two of our best. They tailed him to some dump on Lake Street where he took a room for a month,” Loweman said. “He shook ‘em.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  At six that morning, Det. Loweman and the CSI finally packed up and vacated the suite, sealing the crime scene. Jay had packed a satchel, and he and Kasey moved down the corridor to her room.

  While Kasey showered. Jay ordered coffee from room service, then made some calls. A steaming cup of coffee and an assortment of toiletries sat on the basin counter when she stepped from the shower.

  As she dried off, she heard him on the telephone talking to Alan Ginsburg, the chief bodyguard protecting Dianne.

  “…extremely careful. Al, under no circumstances is Dianne to leave the house until I talk with her. That means no swimming, no sunbathing. I should be there by the time she gets out of bed.” He left his cellular number and instructed Ginsburg to call if anything the least bit suspicious occurred. A moment later, he was talking to the front desk, leaving a message for Brad to call Kasey’s room on the cellular line.

  She scrubbed her face of makeup, combed her wet hair straight back, tucking it behind her ears, then put on the same clothes she’d worn the night before.

  Leaving the bathroom, she said, “I’m sorry now that I took my things home yesterday. I’m beginning to feel like this outfit is a permanent part of me.”

  Ja
y hung up the phone, went to Kasey, and took her in his arms. “Of everything you own, now and forever, this will be my favorite. It’ll always have special meaning to me.”

  She rested her head on his shoulder. They held each other in silence for several long moments.

  Kasey stepped back. “Jay, I have to go home. I won’t be able to do anything until I see for myself that everyone’s okay.”

  “I’m going with you. No arguments.”

  “None from me.”

  He kissed her lightly on the lips and released her. “Give me a sec. Don’t open the door to anyone while I’m in the shower.”

  He went to the satchel on the bed where he came up with a travel bag of toiletries and the rolled-up leather case that held his collection of straight razors. He tossed the holstered gun onto the bed.

  He kissed her again as he passed her to go into the bathroom.

  Kasey turned and stared into the vanity mirror at herself. She saw a stranger with large dark eyes and, underneath, dark circles to match. From her clutch bag she took out her lipstick, applied it to her lips, and then, using it as a blush, a bit to each of her pale cheeks. The fresh color helped some.

  Her day yesterday had begun badly and ended badly. Finding the body of Paula Volger would be forever seared into her brain.

  She called home and talked to her mother. So far, no sign of Cage. Artie would stay as long as he was needed.

  Water running in the basin told her Jay was out of the shower. She went to the bathroom and stood in the open doorway. Jay, a towel wrapped around his waist, was lathering his face with a shaving brush. She watched in silence as he selected a razor, the one with his father’s initials carved in the plain brown handle. She had guessed right on that day she’d packed his things for the move to the hotel—of all the straight razors in the case, Jay used the one belonging to his father. He was sentimental, after all.

  When he made the first long, deft stroke, Kasey felt her stomach roll ever so slightly and a feeling of love and affection rushed over her.

  Jay saw her in the mirror. He paused with the razor at the side of his face and smiled. She smiled back.