Frankie didn’t seem to hear him. She was dealing with her own thoughts. “He killed her last night, O’Bannon,” she said in a hollow voice.
Luke looked at her sharply. “I know what you’re thinking. Even if you’d stayed in the squad room and worked on this case all night, you wouldn’t have come up with a name, a lead to follow,” he insisted. “There’s no way you could have prevented this, DeMarco. Take the pluses and we’ll work with that.”
“Another woman is dead, O’Bannon,” Frankie said through clenched teeth.
“I know that,” he responded calmly. “And maybe, if we use her dating profile and look into the hits she had, we’ll find out the name of the guy who did this.”
She wasn’t nearly so hopeful. “He probably used an alias.”
Luke sighed. “Didn’t anyone hug you as a child?” he asked, feeling for her and feeling exasperated at the same time.
Frankie looked at him, confused. “What does that have to do with it?”
Luke just shook his head. “Think positive, DeMarco. Just think positive.”
“That’s not easy for me to do,” Frankie quietly confessed.
He laughed dryly. “Yeah, I noticed. Try,” Luke urged. He saw that she was staring intently at something in the vicinity of the coffee table. “You think of something?” he asked.
“Vanessa had a vase with orchids,” Frankie replied.
He wasn’t following her. “So?”
“Orchids aren’t exactly your run-of-the-mill flowers.”
“Still not following,” he confessed.
“Ellen O’Keefe had a vase of yellow orchids in her living room. The vase was identical to this one.” She looked at Luke, excitement beginning to enter her voice. “Now that I think of it, Kristin had the exact same orchids and vase in her living room, too.”
“You think a florist is our killer?” Luke asked, trying to follow her line of thinking.
Frankie shrugged, frustrated. This was as far as she had gotten.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe. Or maybe the killer leaves this behind as his calling card.” She came closer to the vase. “Yellow orchids symbolize new beginnings and friendship.”
It was his turn to look at her, a little mystified. “And you know this how?”
She supposed that did seem to just come out of the blue. “I worked part-time for a florist when I was in high school,” she told him. The next second, she was annoyed with herself for telling him that. She was letting O’Bannon into her life a lot further than she’d intended. It was as if she’d lost the ability to censor herself when she was around him.
He read her body language and put two and two together. It wasn’t all that difficult. “Don’t worry, that secret’s safe with me, too,” he told her. Then, turning toward his uncle, he raised his voice and said, “DeMarco and I are going to join White Hawk and finish canvassing the neighbors, then we’re going back to the squad room. Let me know when the victim’s autopsy and the tox screen are done,” he requested.
“Hold on a minute,” Frankie requested as he started to leave the apartment. “I want to give Mrs. Jackson my card.” She saw him raise his eyebrow. “Just in case she thinks of anything else that might help,” she explained to O’Bannon.
Luke nodded. “I’ll be outside,” he told her. “Maybe White Hawk’s finished canvassing and we can just get back to the squad room.” It was wishful thinking, but he was nothing if not optimistic.
Frankie went over to the victim’s mother. She was still trying to pull herself together so that she was able to have the patrolman take her home.
“I forgot to give you my card, Mrs. Jackson,” Frankie told the woman, placing it in her hand. “If you think of anything else that might be helpful to the investigation, please don’t hesitate to call.”
The woman nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“And if you need someone to talk to,” Frankie added, looking at the distraught woman, “that’s my cell number on the back.”
Mrs. Jackson nodded numbly. She folded her fingers around the card.
Feeling incredibly helpless, Frankie walked out of the garden apartment.
She stood in front of the door, scanning the area for Luke. He was across the way, just outside of the development’s fenced-in pool. He was talking to a woman dressed in clothes that seemed to be just a little too young and too tight for her. The woman had a very hyperactive toy poodle on a leash.
White Hawk was standing right next to him.
Seeing her, White Hawk waved her over.
Maybe they’d found a witness, Frankie thought, hurrying over.
My Lord, now I’m being optimistic, like O’Bannon.
She couldn’t wait for this investigation to be over. Not just because that would mean they had found Kristin’s killer, but because she wanted to be back on her own, able to think dark thoughts without having O’Bannon’s cheerful platitudes invading her mind.
She worked better alone, anyway.
“This is Gloria Hernandez,” Luke told her as soon as she drew closer. “Ms. Hernandez says she saw our victim and her date returning around nine-thirty last night.”
Gloria had a mass of bright blond curls that bobbed up and down as she nodded her head. “I was out walking Clancy. It feels like I’m always walking Clancy. Poor baby has a bladder the size of a pea,” she confided, bending over for a moment to pet the dog’s head affectionately. “Anyway,” she continued, standing up again, “I saw this big, fancy car pulling up in guest parking and this girl and guy get out. I’d seen her around, so I knew he had to be the one who was the guest.”
They were obviously in the presence of an Einstein, Frankie couldn’t help thinking, doing her best to keep her thoughts from registering on her face.
“Anyway,” Gloria went on, “I could see that he was talking her up and she was laughing at everything he was saying. I noticed she was kind of walking funny, too.”
“What do you mean, walking funny?” Luke asked before either Frankie or White Hawk had a chance to.
The blonde shrugged. “You know, like she’d had a few too many.”
“Or like someone might have drugged her,” Frankie suggested as the idea suddenly occurred to her. She looked at Gloria to see if the thought had jarred something for their witness.
“You think?” Gloria asked, her eyes growing wide. “Could it have been the guy she was with?”
“Good odds,” Luke said.
Gloria appeared stunned. “He looked so clean-cut,” she marveled.
“If we took you down to the station and put you together with our sketch artist, do you think you could describe him?” Luke asked, hoping that, just maybe, they had caught their first solid break.
The woman began to backtrack. “Maybe. It was kind of dark and Clancy was barking a lot so I wasn’t paying that much attention, but yeah, sure. Why not?” She gazed up at Luke hopefully. “Can I get a ride with you?”
“Actually,” Luke told her. “You’ll be riding with all three of us. We only brought the one car.”
“Oh, what a shame,” Gloria replied with genuine feeling. She put her hand on his chest. “Let me just bring Clancy home and I’m all yours.”
Frankie had absolutely no doubt that the woman meant that sincerely.
Chapter 12
“Does that happen often?” Frankie asked him as they stood outside of their witness’s apartment, waiting for Gloria Hernandez to do whatever she had to do with her dog in order to accompany them to the precinct.
The question came out of the blue. Luke had no idea what she was talking about. “Does what happen often?” he asked.
“Women throwing themselves at you.”
Luke looked at her as if she was crazy. And then he decided that this was some kind o
f a joke.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” he told Frankie. “All the time. What’s why I have to wear all this protective gear on me, to protect me from all the bodies hurling themselves at me.”
“He doesn’t let it interfere with the job,” White Hawk confided in a pseudo whisper, managing to suppress the wide grin that was attempting to surface.
“Well, that’s heartening to know.” Her response dripped with sarcasm.
Frankie would have gone on to say something more, but just then, their potential witness’s apartment door opened and the woman they were waiting for stepped out.
“You changed your outfit,” Luke noticed, surprised that the woman would take the time to do that.
Gloria Hernandez beamed at the observation. “Oh, you noticed,” she purred. “A girl’s gotta look her best when she steps out. These days you never know when someone might snap your picture,” she told him, sidling up to Luke and wedging herself between the detective she’d set her cap for and White Hawk.
“You do realize that you’re coming down to work with a sketch artist to recreate the man you saw last night, not to pose for a portrait,” Frankie couldn’t refrain from pointing out. She watched Gloria’s face to see if her words had sunk in, even remotely.
“Of course I know,” Gloria said, glancing at Frankie over her shoulder. “Just because I’m helping you find this man who did this terrible thing doesn’t mean I have to look...” she paused as she gave the woman behind her the once-over before saying “...messy.”
White Hawk leaned in toward Frankie and said in a low voice, “Welcome to the colorful world of Homicide.”
Approaching the sedan, Gloria called out “Shotgun!” Then asked Luke, just to be sure, “You are the one driving, right?”
“He’s the lead,” Frankie told the other woman, assuming that answered the witness’s question.
Luke glanced over his shoulder toward White Hawk. As if reading his partner’s mind, he shook his head. “You have the car keys,” he reminded Luke, wanting nothing to do with the overly amorous witness.
“This is so exciting,” Gloria told Luke as she got into the car and almost snuggled into the passenger seat. “This is my very first murder. I mean, my first time being a witness in a possible murder.” She flushed and laughed. “This isn’t coming out right.”
“As long as you can give the sketch artist something he can work with,” Luke told her. “That’s all that matters.”
“No problem,” Gloria promised, giving him a thousand-watt smile.
* * *
“There’s a problem,” White Hawk said more than an hour later, returning to the squad room. Luke had had his partner remain with Gloria while she worked with the sketch artist.
That left him, as well as Frankie, to compare the various victims’ tox screens, looking for telltale similarities.
Luke stopped going through the file he had opened on his desk and looked up.
“What kind of a problem?” he asked, just a little leery. He expected White Hawk to tell him that their so-called eyewitness had started hitting on the sketch artist, but it turned out to be even worse than that.
“Unless Jimmy Stewart has come back from the dead to conduct a killing spree in Aurora,” White Hawk complained, “it looks like we’re back to square one.”
“Jimmy Stewart?” Luke questioned his partner, totally confused.
“Look for yourselves,” White Hawk told him, holding up the sketch that the department’s artist had compiled from Gloria’s description.
Luke frowned. “That certainly looks like Jimmy Stewart, all right,” Luke agreed, none-too-happily. He looked at White Hawk for an explanation.
“Seems that Ms. Hernandez and her faithful dog, Clancy, had been watching a Jimmy Stewart marathon on the classic movie channel last night when Clancy felt the call of nature,” White Hawk told him. “I should add that it turns out our so-called eyewitness saw the killer from a rather long distance.”
Luke shook his head. So much for reliability, he thought. “Where’s Ms. Hernandez now?”
“I thanked her for her service and sent her home with one of our police officers,” White Hawk told him. And then he smiled broadly. “She didn’t want to go without first seeing you, but I convinced her that you were otherwise occupied and couldn’t be disturbed.”
In Frankie’s opinion, Luke seemed sincerely grateful. “I owe you one,” Luke told his partner.
White Hawk’s grin only grew wider as he said, “Yeah, I know.”
Hearing every word, Frankie frowned. “So we’re no closer to identifying Vanessa Jackson’s killer than we were this morning.”
“Well, thanks to you,” Luke reminded her, “we know she used The Perfect Date website to wind up getting in touch with her killer. We can find out who she exchanged messages with, get a court order and have The Perfect Date people open up their files so that we can at least get the information they have on Vanessa’s date.”
Frankie looked at him doubtfully. “You think you can find a judge to give you that court order without hard-and-fast proof?”
Luke smiled. This was where being a Cavanaugh came in very handy.
“We have a couple of judges in our family tree,” he said out loud.
“Wouldn’t that be considered a conflict of interest for the judge?” she asked in all innocence.
Luke stared at her, stunned. “Seriously? You’re asking me that?”
She realized that he was alluding to the fact that he was allowing her to stay on despite her own conflict of interest. She’d gotten so caught up in the case, she’d temporarily forgotten that.
“Sorry, lost my head,” she murmured.
Luke was already letting her remark pass and was back to thinking about the court order.
“It might take us a couple of days to get one,” he guessed. “In the meantime, we still have all these tox screens to go through and compare.” And then he thought of something else. “Or we could follow up on that idea you had,” he suggested.
“What idea?” Frankie asked. Things had been moving so fast, she’d actually lost track of things she’d said.
“Those yellow orchids,” he reminded her.
“Oh, right.” She flushed. How could she have forgotten about that?
“We could run a background check on the florist who delivered those vases,” Luke said, thinking out loud. “Check out the people he has working for him. Might be a dead end,” he allowed philosophically, “but we won’t know that until we look into it. How about it, DeMarco?” he asked, looking at her. “You game?”
“Absolutely,” she answered, already on her feet. She was anxious to get moving, to be out in the field. Sitting behind a desk, inertly turning pages and getting cross-eyed, had never been for her.
“White Hawk,” Luke called out, turning toward his partner.
“Yeah, yeah,” White Hawk replied with a sigh. “I know. Hold down the fort.”
Luke clamped a hand on the man’s muscular shoulder. “You’re a good man, White Hawk.”
“I just need a change of scenery obviously less than you two do,” White Hawk responded agreeably.
* * *
The florist who had delivered all three vases turned out to be located all the way over on the other side of Aurora.
When Frankie went to open the door to the small, thriving shop, Luke had to pull her out of the way quickly. Otherwise she would have been directly on a collision course with a fast-moving messenger. His vision was obstructed by the rather large plant he was carrying out.
Frankie felt like the air had been all but knocked out of her. Luke might have yanked her out of the way of the deliveryman, but he had wound up pulling her back right up against him.
Contact was immediate and hard, leaving imprints on both of them.
“You okay?” Luke asked her, releasing Frankie after a beat.
She drew in a long, shaky breath before answering. “I’m not sure,” Frankie confessed.
Her body was throbbing. She could still feel the impact of his body against hers even after he had stepped back.
She supposed that was preferable to being knocked flat to the ground, but in all honestly, she wasn’t altogether sure.
The next moment, Frankie managed to say, “I’m fine. It’s okay.”
“Hey, I’m—I’m really sorry,” the deliveryman stammered. “I didn’t see you standing there.”
“That’s because you’re carrying a giant tree in front of you,” Frankie commented, looking at what looked like a miniature palm tree in a decorative pot.
The commotion from the near collision brought out the manager of the flower shop. The man instantly began to apologize for his deliveryman.
“I’m so very sorry.” He spared the deliveryman a dismissive glance. “He’s new and still has some bugs to work out. I’m sorry if Roy alarmed you. Please, pick out an arrangement as a token of my apology. It’ll be on the house.”
“We’re not really here to buy any flowers,” Luke began to tell the shop manager.
Not to be put off, the shop manager guessed, “A plant, perhaps?” He looked from Luke to the woman with him. “Or an arrangement of balloons to celebrate a happy occasion?” he asked hopefully.
Luke took out his badge and ID and held them out. He had a feeling that the man would just go on guessing what had brought them to the shop if he wasn’t stopped.
“Detectives O’Bannon and DeMarco—she’s the one your deliveryman almost mowed down,” he added as Frankie belatedly fished out her own credentials. “We would like to ask you about some deliveries that were made from your shop.”
The manager’s bright smile faded by several watts. “I’m sorry. Our clients’ privacy is very important to us. I’m afraid I can’t really release any information without a court order. You understand,” he added, looking from Luke to Frankie.
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