Deadly Force

by Beverly Long

  He didn’t waste any time. “We were notified this morning that two of our entries are finalists in this year’s contest.”

  Two. Wow. The competition was incredible. If an agency had one finalist, they were generally ecstatic. Even the more nonchalant staff members were sitting up straight in their chairs.

  “I’m delighted to share that both Pete Mission and Claire Fontaine will be competing for this year’s grand prize.”

  Oh, my God. She’d only been at Alexander and Pope two weeks when the memo went around, encouraging everyone on the creative staff to get their entry completed and submitted. She’d reviewed the guidelines and worked like a crazy person to develop something.

  Hannah stood up and pumped her arm in the air. “Two. Amazing. Congratulations, Pete and Claire.”

  Everyone clapped and cheered. At least Claire thought it was clapping and cheering. Maybe it was just her heart clanging in her chest. She made eye contact with Pete. Even he looked stunned.

  Victor held up his index finger, attempting to bring order to the room. “Their designs will compete against the other four finalists. The committee will announce the winners exactly one week from today at the awards dinner. This is big, people, really big.”

  As they filed out of the room, there were more private congratulations. Claire looked for Pete to offer her congratulations to him, but he was gone.

  “Where’s Pete?” she asked Hannah.

  The woman shrugged. “Probably out arranging for a tux and a limo. He’s entered for ten years straight and this is the first time he’s been a finalist.”

  Ten minutes later, Hannah was still hanging over the cubical wall that Claire shared with her. She was speculating on what Claire should wear to the awards dinner. Claire’s telephone rang and she reached for it, grateful for the interruption. Hannah smiled at her, before her face disappeared from view.

  “Claire Fontaine.”

  “Hi, it’s Sam Vernelli.”

  Like she wouldn’t have recognized his voice. She cupped her hand around her phone, attempting to create some privacy. Hannah out of sight didn’t necessarily mean Hannah out of hearing. “Detective?” she said, her voice low.

  “How’s it going?” Sam asked.

  “I just...” She stopped. She couldn’t tell him about the contest, about how absolutely psyched she was about being a finalist. That was something you told a friend, a confidant. He was neither.

  “You just what?” he prompted.

  “Nothing. What can I do for you?” she asked, her tone purposefully brisk, businesslike.

  “I wanted you to know that we’re releasing the scene. You can get your apartment cleaned up.”

  She pictured the splattered wall and swallowed hard, suddenly glad that she’d skipped breakfast. “I’ll call the painter now. Maybe I can have him meet me there tonight.” She really didn’t want to return to her apartment, but unless she planned on living indefinitely in a hotel, she needed to do it. She needed to put the ghosts behind her.

  All night, she’d tossed and turned, wondering about the woman, reliving every word she’d said. At about two, she’d given up all pretense of sleeping, booted up her laptop and forced herself to work on upcoming proposals.

  The work was bad and would need to be redone, but it beat dreaming about dead women and blood-spattered walls any day. She kept thinking about the woman’s family. “Did you talk with Mr. Bird?”

  “Briefly and only on the phone. He’s busy planning a funeral. I gather that he’s pretty worried about how his boys are going to handle this—they’re just ten.”

  Three years younger than she’d been when she’d faced death for the first time. She’d lost her sister before she’d ever really known her.

  When Tessa had left Nebraska at eighteen to go to college in Chicago, Claire had been in fifth grade. She’d been more interested in computer games and birthday parties than in establishing a relationship with her sister.

  She barely remembered the funeral. It had been a crazy couple of days. People in and out, calls to and from the police in Chicago, trips back and forth to the airport to pick up relatives. Death was a noisy affair.

  Then, when all the people had left, the house had gotten quiet, very quiet. She’d been too young to understand it then. It was only later that she realized that everyone had been drowning in grief. Tessa’s death had stripped the sunshine out of their lives, leaving behind a cold, unforgiving torrent of rain.

  And as hard as she’d tried, as good as she’d been, she’d never been able to make her parents smile in quite the same way again.

  “Is there anything else, Detective?” she asked, her throat feeling tight.

  “We’ll continue to investigate—probably talk to a few neighbors and check out the drugstore where Fletcher Bird works. I’ll call you if I have any more questions.”

  “That’s...fine. Goodbye, Detective.” She hung up before he had the chance to respond.

  Hannah’s head peeped over the cubicle wall. She didn’t even look embarrassed. “So? Does the detective have a name?”

  She’d told Hannah about the shooting in her apartment. There hadn’t been much choice. Hannah’s cousin lived on the first floor of the building. It was through Hannah that Claire and Nadine had found out about the available third-floor apartment.

  “Vernelli. Sam Vernelli.”

  “Married?”

  Hannah was thirty-eight and spent most of her evenings filling out profile sheets for online dating services. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Straight?”

  Sam Vernelli radiated testosterone. “Pretty sure he is.”

  “Does he in any way resemble a troll?”

  Claire smiled at her friend. “He’s...very handsome.” It was the truth and it begged the question of why he had never married. Was it possible that he was still in love with Tessa, that he’d never gotten over his first true love?

  Or gotten over the guilt of harming her?

  She was going to drive herself crazy. She deliberately looked at her watch. “Wow. Where is the day going? I better get busy.” She grabbed the top file off the pile on her desk, opened it and pretended to read. When she heard the squeak of Hannah’s chair, she started to breathe again. After another ten minutes, she quietly pulled her cell phone from her purse and left the office area. She took the elevator down to the lobby, exited the building and walked just far enough that she wasn’t bothered by the smoke from the office workers who were huddled around the front door grabbing their morning nicotine fix.

  She dialed Nadine’s cell.

  “Hey, Claire,” Nadine answered.

  “How’s Omaha?”

  “You know, nothing much changes in Omaha. What’s going on there?”

  “The police said that we can return to the apartment. I’ll call the painter today.”

  “Thank goodness. So, do the police have any more thoughts on what might have happened?”

  “Apparently not. When I did speak to Detective Vernelli this morning, he said that they were continuing to investigate.”

  There was a pause on the line. “What’s to investigate?” Nadine finally asked. “She must have just been crazy.”

  “We could attest to that, right? I guess they intend to talk to the husband. I guess that’s all probably routine.”

  “Yeah, sure. I thought you were going to ask for another detective to be assigned.”

  After the shooting, in between questions from the police, Claire had given Nadine the Cliff Notes version of her visit to Sam Vernelli’s house the night before.

  “I’m calling Detective Vernelli’s boss next.”

  He’d come to her rescue—she was grateful for that. And he’d been decent about giving back her check. But none of that mattered. She detested Sam Vernelli.

  Chapter Four

  Sam sat in his car and watched Claire open the door to her apartment building. In deference to the unusually hot September, she wore white shorts, a red tank and flip-flops. She
walked with purpose, her stride confident, the slight sway of her hips sexy. Her bare legs were tanned and firm with feminine muscle.

  Suddenly feeling as if the necktie he still wore was choking him, he pulled it off and tossed it in the backseat. She’d really pushed his buttons this morning. She’d been just polite enough, just curt enough, just distant enough that he’d had no trouble visualizing himself as dirt on the bottom of the cute little white tennis shoes she’d worn that first day.

  He wished he didn’t care. Wished he didn’t feel a sense of responsibility toward Tessa’s sister. The Fontaines had hurt him badly when he’d most needed support. They’d put a target on his back and had done their best to ruin his life.

  And Claire Fontaine had made it pretty clear—her loyalties lay with her parents.

  But he had a case to solve. Yeah, it was still his case. Claire had made her call that morning. His boss had told him that. Had also told him that Claire had been pretty unhappy when he’d told her no. He said he might have considered it, but he was three detectives down and one more was hinting that he needed hernia surgery. His parting words to Sam had been, “Don’t screw this up.”

  It was hard to screw up nothing. Which was about all he had. A woman with no apparent motive to harm Claire or Nadine had tried to kill them and now she was dead. None of it made any sense. That’s what nagged at him. Not that he didn’t believe in random acts of violence. He’d read through Tessa’s murder investigation file often enough in those first years on the force that he couldn’t dispute that sometimes horrible things just happened.

  But more often than not, Sam believed that things happened for a reason. He just needed to figure out what those reasons were.

  A white van pulled up and parked in front of Claire’s building. Daybreak Professional Painters was scrawled across the side in red letters. When the driver opened the door, Sam judged him to be about forty. He had a belly and walked with a slight limp.

  Harmless. See, nothing to worry about.

  The driver slammed his car door and Sam saw big, beefy fingers, thick palms. Sam knew the damage that hands like that could do.

  He reached for the door handle.

  He stopped. What the hell was wrong with him? The guy was a referral from one of his own. He wasn’t a homicidal maniac. Claire didn’t need and certainly wouldn’t appreciate his interference.

  Sam watched the man walk into the apartment and managed to count to forty-five before thick, choking apprehension made his stomach turn and his legs move. He dodged across the street, cutting in front of an oncoming car. He ran up the three flights of stairs and knocked sharply.

  The door swung open and Claire stared at him. He looked over her head. Mr. Beefy-Hands was looking at the wall and scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he lied. “Thought I might stop by. My...uh...apartment could use some paint,” he added. He was blabbering and he felt dangerously out of breath.

  It could have been from taking the stairs two at a time but he thought it more likely was a result of being up close and personal with Claire’s full breasts as they pushed against her thin knit shirt. The narrow straps on her shoulders were practically straining with the weight. Sam stepped into the apartment.

  Claire didn’t try to push him back out. She ignored him, acted as if he wasn’t there and proceeded to negotiate Beefy-Hands down from what was a pretty good quote to begin with. Finally, with a nod in Sam’s direction, the man left.

  Claire walked over to the counter, picked up the man’s card and handed it to Sam. “Here. Call him for your own quote.”

  He didn’t bother to reach for the card. “I know I’m sticking my nose where it has no business being,” he said. “But I’m concerned about you. Chicago is a big city and while 99.9 percent of the people are great, there’s also scum out there.”

  “I don’t want any favors from you, Detective Vernelli.”

  “Sam.”

  She shook her head. “We don’t need to be on a first-name basis. I understand that this is going to be your case. I’m not happy about it, but quite frankly, I’m not going to spend a lot of time thinking about it. I expect you to do your job.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” he said, fighting back the urge to tell her just how good he was at his job. He had a drawer full of commendations. But he had nothing to prove to her.

  “If that’s all, Detective, I need to get to my hotel before it gets dark.”

  “I’ll drop you off.”

  She shook her head. The telephone rang, but she made no move to answer it. “Probably telemarketers,” she said. “They’re the only people who don’t use our cell phones.”

  The answering machine kicked on. “Please leave a message.”

  “Pretty panties. Pretty Claire. Pretty Tessa.” It was a man, his voice muffled. “Not that Tessa was so pretty when she was dead. Nasty two-by-four. Such a shame if the same thing happened to Claire.”

  Sam moved quickly but he still didn’t reach the machine before they both heard the very final sounding click of the receiver.

  “Son of a bitch,” Sam said. He slammed his fist on the counter and his mouth was tight with fury. “Who the hell was that?”

  Speechless, she shook her head.

  “Think, Claire,” Sam demanded. “Think.”

  She could hardly breathe, how could she think? My God, was it possible? It had been eleven years since Tessa had been killed. Who would say such a thing? What kind of cruel trick was this?

  Sam pressed the rewind button on the answering machine and they listened to the horrible thing again. Then again. Until finally Claire put her hands over her ears. “Stop it, Sam. Stop it.”

  He chewed on his bottom lip. Then, very deliberately, he opened up the answering machine and lifted out the small tape. He dropped it in his pocket. His movements were jerky, almost mechanical in nature. His skin was pale and the dark pupils in the center of his brown eyes seemed bigger.

  “I have to get this tape down to the station,” he said. He looked her direction but sort of past her, as if there was something fascinating over her right shoulder.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she demanded.

  “What do you know about Tessa’s murder?” he asked, his voice low.

  Only that it changed everything. “Not much,” she admitted. “The details were always kept from me.”

  “That was probably best,” he said, his voice even more subdued. “It wasn’t pretty.”

  She must be in The Twilight Zone. No one in their right mind would have predicted that she’d be having this conversation with Sam Vernelli. Or that she’d have an insane urge to comfort him, to try to erase the grief that shadowed his eyes, narrowed his lips.

  “What do you think happened, Sam?”

  His head jerked up. “I thought you had a pretty good idea. Both you and your parents.”

  She wanted to defend herself, them, but she couldn’t. Not when she was facing his absolute despair. “Tell me about it, Sam,” she said gently.

  He started pacing, making slow circles around her couch that someone from the police department had kindly covered with a sheet. “There were no witnesses and very little evidence at the scene,” he said, his voice almost monotone. “Except what I left when I discovered her that morning. I touched her... I just couldn’t believe that she could be dead.

  “When the police came, I was a wreck. It’s no wonder they didn’t have trouble believing that I’d done it once your parents started pressuring them to look my direction.”

  “I heard you and Tessa arguing the day before.”

  He nodded. “I was worried that she wasn’t going to pass all her classes. She didn’t take school seriously. Your sister was always the life of the party, everybody loved her. But she was drinking too much, too often. I told her she needed to stop. And if she didn’t, she was going to be sorry. She wasn’t listening and I got upset.”

  Claire wrapped her arm
s around her waist. “I’ve never heard anything about her drinking.” However, Claire’s parents had preached incessantly about the evils of teen drinking. Was it possible that he was telling the truth? Had her parents somehow been aware that Tessa had a problem and they’d been doubly focused on keeping Claire on the straight and narrow? There was no way of knowing. The only thing she knew for sure was that there was nothing to be gained now by arguing about it. “What did the police think happened?”

  “They didn’t have a clue. After I joined the force and read the investigation file, I realized how little evidence there was.”

  He said it without emotion, as if he’d come to terms with it.

  “And what do you think now?”

  “The same thing I thought when I saw your sister lying in a pool of blood on her kitchen floor with her head bashed in.”

  “What was that?”

  “That, someday, I was going to get this guy, make him pay.”

  Claire swallowed hard. Her throat felt very dry. “You can’t do that. You’re a cop,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I loved her,” he said simply.

  Claire felt a pain deep inside, almost as if it radiated from her center. “I loved her, too. But it was eleven years ago,” she said. “You need to let go.”

  “Let go? Let go?” he repeated, his voice louder.

  “How do you even know it’s a real threat? Maybe some crackpot heard about the recent shooting and somehow got my name. Then they searched online and information about Tessa’s death came up.”

  He shook his head. “The newspapers said that she’d been beaten. They never said anything about the two-by-four. I knew it because I found her. The only other place I’ve ever seen the details was in the police report.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve got to get this to the lab, blow up the background noise, hopefully get a lead,” he said. He opened the front door just inches, then shut it. He turned to look at her. “You should go back to Nebraska.”