Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

  But had he acted alone? It was a question they were asking back at the Tacoma Police Department. In fact, a lot of questions were being asked. Nothing got cops talking like a beautiful and bloody blonde. The Connelly case was a far cry from a drug- or gangland-related murder, by far the most common in gritty Tacoma.

  A little digging by Cal Herzog had turned up one little nugget that suggested Alex Connelly might have had a girlfriend, possibly someone at work. And that affair, if true, had occurred before Tori slept with Darius Fulton. Had she done so to get back at her husband? The scenario was familiar.

  Kaminski stopped to catch his breath and rested his hands on his knees. Ten more pounds off the middle and a final run up and down the Spanish Steps downtown would be easier. He slowed his breathing a little and acted as if he was doing just fine when a young woman jogging with her Rottweiler ran by, the gravel crunching under the dog’s heavy black paws. As she disappeared around a corner, he resumed his labored breathing. Sweat streaked his back and the space between what he imagined should be well-defined pecs, but weren’t quite there yet.

  A moment later, composed, lungs no longer contracting, he went back to the office, showered, and dressed. He had an appointment at Alex Connelly’s office. The president of Pacific Investments had made the call himself.

  When the elevator doors opened to the seventh floor of the Tacoma office building that was Alex Connelly’s place of employment, it was like the scene in The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy opened the door of the tornado-hurtled Kansas farmhouse to reveal the shiny, colorful world of Munchkinland. Pacific Investments was an opulent place of white leather couches, a tsunami of colorful artwork splashed on the walls. Eddie Kaminski was duly impressed—as would any visitor to a floor accessible only by invitation.

  Or by detective’s shield.

  “Detective Kaminski?”

  He turned around from a painting that held his attention.

  A young woman in stilettos and a dark blue suit had crept up behind him.

  She was pretty, so he smiled. “Yes. That’s me.”

  “I’m Daphnia. Mr. Johnstone and the rest of Alex’s team are in the boardroom. Follow me.”

  She led the way, Kaminski’s eyes embarrassingly, but unavoidably, riveted to her backside as they made their way past a row of rosewood desks and Eames chairs. She pressed a burnished nickel-plated button and a pair of frosted-glass double doors slowly opened.

  Three people—two men and a woman—occupied a conference room large enough to play a volleyball match. A Chihuly hung like a sheaf of glass bananas from the ceiling.

  The firm spared no expense.

  Eli Johnstone was a physically fit man of about sixty, with light gray eyes, a shaved head, and a tuft of white hair protruding from the front of his collar. The firm that his father had built from nothing was impressive—a multimillion-dollar portfolio that had made it through the junk bond years and the scandals that defined Wall Street in the first years of the new millennium. Johnstone was no Bernie Madoff. Eli sat at the head of a black walnut table in a conference room that looked out to the cold waters of Commencement Bay. At his right was a woman of considerable beauty. She had faded blue eyes and a short blond haircut that looked still damp from the shower. She seemed cold and indifferent—almost as if she had better things to do and couldn’t wait to get back to them. Next to her was a young man with the kind of eager-beaver attitude that Kaminski knew might come in handy.

  Overly helpful is always a plus, he thought.

  “I’m sorry for the loss of your friend and colleague,” Kaminski said as he approached the group.

  Johnstone put out his hand and shook the detective’s like he meant to choke the life out of him. “Thank you,” he said. “Alex was an important member of our team here.” He motioned for Kaminski to sit as he introduced his colleagues: Lissa March was the ice-princess vice president of Human Resources, and Hank Wooten was Alex Connelly’s assistant, a trainee that he’d mentored for the past year.

  “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “Alex was very important here. Important to all of us.”

  Kaminski looked at the others, but none seemed broken up at all. They were young professionals on autopilot with their emotions.

  “You said you had some information that might be helpful in the investigation of his murder,” Kaminski said.

  The company president acknowledged the remark with a quick nod. “That’ll be your job to determine.”

  Neither of the other two said a word, though the younger man appeared to bobble-head with great enthusiasm.

  “Ms. March advised me of a turn of events that we thought you might find of interest.” He turned slightly in Lissa’s direction and she immediately produced a black file folder.

  Kaminski looked at the folder. “What do we have here?”

  “Last year Mr. Connelly made a change to his life insurance policy,” Lissa said, her voice softer than her standoffish body language might have suggested it would be. Kaminski caught a faint accent, maybe North Carolina.

  Maybe Lissa wasn’t as tough as she wanted the world to believe she was.

  “What kind of a change?” he asked.

  “An interesting one,” she said, her tougher façade back in full force, “especially considering the recent tragic turn of events. Alex removed his wife as a beneficiary and left the sum of the policy’s payout to his son, Parker.”

  It was an interesting change, indeed.

  “I see,” Kaminski said, reaching for the document that Lissa had excised from the black folder and slid across the high gloss table. “Shouldn’t the beneficiary be his wife?”

  “Ordinarily, yes,” Johnstone said. “In fact, she called here not wanting it that way at all. She said it wasn’t about the money, but what was best for Parker. Tori thought that setting up a trust for Parker would be best for the boy, too.”

  Kaminski directed his attention to Hank.

  “Were there any problems between the Connellys?”

  The younger man drank some water before answering.

  “Well, not that I know about. I mean—”

  “—everyone has problems,” Johnstone said, effectively cutting short Hank’s comment.

  “Tell me,” Kaminski said, in part, a comment about his own life and dusted-up marriage, but also, he wanted to know more. “This is a murder investigation.”

  “We work in black-and-white here. We don’t delve into pie-in-the-sky theories or gossip.”

  “Understood,” Kaminski said, “but was there trouble in the marriage?”

  Pacific Investments President Johnstone’s eyes flashed and he glanced in the direction of the comely human resources executive.

  “This doesn’t leave this office,” he said.

  Kaminski shook his head. “I can’t promise that.”

  “It has nothing to do with any of this.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Johnstone, but you can’t be the decision maker on that. That’ll be up to me, then the Prosecutor’s Office. What are you holding back?”

  He looked at Lissa and she shifted nervously in her chair. All of a sudden she looked more frightened than sophisticated. Kaminski had seen it before, many times. Fear had a way of dissolving all traces of beauty.

  “I had a brief affair with Alex,” she said. “Tori knew about it.” Tears started to roll down her cheeks and she turned away to wipe them. She dabbed gently at her skin as if she didn’t want the humiliation of her disclosure made worse by the smudging of her makeup.

  Eli Johnstone handed her a second tissue.

  Kaminski would never have thought the woman in the pencil skirt would have been a crier.

  “The affair was brief. Very brief. Lissa came to me and disclosed the indiscretion—which was against company policy. Since she reported it to me, I agreed to keep her on.” He looked in Lissa’s direction. She was dabbing her eyes. “Alex was reprimanded, too.”

  “I see. When was this?”

  “Last year,” s
he said. “It was a couple of dates following our Christmas party. We broke it off amicably.”

  If it was so amicable, why was she crying about it still? he wondered.

  “How do you know his wife knew?”

  “She confronted me and I broke it off the next day. There was a lot of drama, but it was really over after a week or two.”

  Kaminski pushed the button to the elevator and got inside. Just as the doors inched closed, Lissa March slipped between the panels. Her eyes were red and her makeup was smeared. She caught a glimpse of herself on the polished chrome-plated doors.

  “I look like hell.”

  “Going down?”

  “I’m already down. But, no.” She reached over and pushed the STOP button. “I just wanted to tell you that Tori Connelly scared me.”

  “How so?”

  “Look, I know I shouldn’t have messed with Alex. I can’t even say it wasn’t my idea, you know, to make me look like a better person. And I wouldn’t lie about a dead man. She came to my condo after she found out. She’s a pretty woman, but she wasn’t pretty that day.”

  Lissa took a breath. She was beautiful, smart. She’d made a big mistake and it was clear that she’d been paying for it.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  “All right,” she said.

  “From the beginning.”

  Lissa March was sweaty from a workout on the elliptical machine in the living room of her top-floor Stadium District condo overlooking Commencement Bay. It was a Sunday afternoon and she relished the respite from Pacific Investments. While others were at church or with families on Sundays, she was usually at the office catching up on paperwork. Her job was her life. Lissa wrapped a towel around her neck, put on some smooth jazz, and poured herself some Evian with a slice of lime and looked out at the water. Things were good just then.

  The mezzanine doorman buzzed to tell her that a woman was there with a delivery—a large bouquet of white lilies.

  “Can she leave them?”

  “She wants to come up. Says she knows you.”

  Lissa wasn’t expecting a visitor, much less flowers. Fleetingly, she allowed herself to believe that Alex had sent them as a peace offering.

  “Oh. Who is she?”

  “Name’s Tori Connelly.”

  Lissa could feel the air go out of the room. It wasn’t Alex, after all, but his wife. Lissa felt a wave of nausea. She never wanted to be the ugly part of a triangle. It was certainly nothing her Southern upbringing had ever considered even the remotest of possibilities. Her mom always said, “The other woman is always a tramp. Tramps always end up with nothing but a swim in a pool of shame.”

  In that instance of guilt and introspection, Lissa felt she had no choice but take her lumps and steep in the shame of what she’d done.

  “All right, send her up,” Lissa said. She patted her face with the towel, ran her fingers through her hair, and made the best of her attire by smoothing out the black T-shirt she wore over a pair of black workout shorts. She didn’t look good.

  I don’t deserve to look good.

  A knock on the door, and she opened it. Tori Connelly stood outside, poking the bouquet of overly perfumed lilies at Lissa.

  “Are you alone?” she asked, her blue eyes sparking disgust as she ran the length of Lissa’s body.

  Lissa’s face tightened, but she nodded. “Yes. I’m alone.” She knew that the comment was a dig, a suggestion that she’d pulled herself away from a horny suitor just then.

  “You look so damp, I just thought . . .”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to get out of our lives.”

  Lissa took a step backward. “I’m out. It’s over.”

  “Really? I know women like you never give up on what you want. I brought these for you,” she said, shoving the white flowers at Lissa as if they were a weapon. “When my mom died we buried her with these, her favorite flower.”

  Reflexively, Lissa took the bouquet thrust at her. “I don’t want any drama, Tori. I made a mistake. I’m working through it.”

  “Poor you.”

  Tori looked around the condo, her eyes taking in the expensive furnishings, the original artwork over the fireplace.

  “You have expensive taste, Lissa. Uninteresting, but expensive. You can’t have my husband.”

  A chill ran down Lissa’s spine. “I don’t want him. Will you go now?”

  “I’m leaving. I just wanted to make my point. If I can’t have Alex, no one can. You see, he’s boring and rich. That’s enough for me. At least the rich part is. You’ll be sorry—he’ll be very, very sorry—if you cross me.”

  The elevator holding Lissa and Kaminski started to move and the female executive quickly pushed the button to the next floor with her perfectly squared-off French-manicured nails.

  “I’m getting out here,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that Tori Connelly was a total bitch. I might have deserved what she said, but I want you to know I felt that she making a serious threat. She looked at me with those ice-cube eyes of hers and told me basically that it wasn’t beyond her to make sure that no one got in her way.”

  Lissa stepped across the threshold of the elevator. She was more composed than she had been. It was as if getting the story out had eased her mind.

  And maybe her conscience.

  “If she couldn’t have him, no one could,” Kaminski repeated.

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you think she was threatening to kill you?”

  “No. Not at all. I think she was going to kill him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Tacoma

  The previous summer

  Tori Connelly looked out the front window, the sun falling in patches over the precision-mowed lawn onto the street and into Darius Fulton’s front yard. She sipped a diet soda through a long red plastic straw. She’d bleached her teeth to an icy white and didn’t want to stain them. She was dressed in a filmy sleeveless blouse and capri pants. A strand of liquid silver coiled around her spray-tanned neck.

  There was a lot to think about. The summer was edging toward fall. Alex had been more distant than ever, and Tori wasn’t exactly sure why. She’d been so very careful, covering her tracks.

  Taking a lover right under their own roof had seemed reckless at first, but it had proved to be the cleverest solution to a problem that needed solving.

  Parker came down the stairs, showered and with a tiny piece of tissue red-glued onto his chin. He’d shaved, though he barely had to.

  “Plans for the day?” she asked. “We’re having dinner tonight with your dad at Indochine.”

  “I hate Thai food,” he said.

  “Oh, really? I thought you liked a little spice, now and then.”

  The teenager smiled, catching the sexy undercurrent of her words. He felt himself get hard. All she had to do was look at him in a certain way, turn her head, laugh, talk. Just about anything excited him to the point where he had no control over his body.

  At least what was below his belt buckle, anyway.

  “You’re going to have to learn how to tame that,” she said, looking at his obvious arousal.

  He moved closer and touched her. She pulled back.

  “What up?” he asked.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “You might want to try using your other head.” She was irritated, but she hadn’t meant to hurt him. The look on his face told her she’d gone too far.

  “That’s harsh,” he said.

  “What I meant is that we need to figure a way out of this, and that will take two of us. I can’t be expected to do everything, Parker.”

  “Just leave him. We can go away.”

  “I’ve explained that to you. Maybe you just can’t grasp what I need you to.”

  “I know what I want you to grasp,” he said.

  “Knock it off, Parker.” She looked out the window again. She could see Darius Fulton move about the space of his open carriage-house
garage. He was clearly organizing the things that his ex-wife had left behind.

  “I’m going to wash the Lexus,” she said.

  “I can do that for you,” Parker said.

  Tori shook her head and went toward the staircase. “Why don’t you play a video game or something?”

  “You can be such a bitch,” he said, softly, in the quiet voice that is still meant to be heard.

  “I guess I can be,” she said.

  A few minutes later, she passed by Parker’s bedroom. She was wearing short shorts and a tank top sans bra.

  “I hope I don’t get my top wet,” she said.

  He watched her from the window, as she lathered up the car, allowing the spray to fall over her. Darius Fulton was watching, too.

  They always did.

  Later that night after the strained dinner with Alex, Tori arched her back and Parker’s eyes landed on the scars under each of her breasts. They were thin, faint, but unmistakable reminders of the surgery that had made her look the trophy wife that his father had wanted. She had once told him that his father had always wanted triple Bs.

  “Huh?” Parker had never heard of the size.

  “Boobs, blond, and brainless,” she said.

  “That makes me sick. I think you were probably perfect before,” he said.

  She wrapped her arms around her breasts and shook her head.

  “I don’t like talking about it.”

  “I’m sorry. I just think, well, that I would love you no matter what. You’re more than a beautiful body,” he said.

  “Your father didn’t think so.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  He reached over and loosened her arms, to expose all that she was.

  “He’s just wired like a lot of men, Parker. You’re not that way. You’re deeper, more evolved than those typical guys. That’s one of the reasons you fascinate me so.”

  Her words pleased him and he wanted to know more. It was as if whatever Tori had to say was like a giant candy bar; he’d always want another bite.

  “I fascinate you?” he said.