As happened often these days, I found my thoughts drifting back to that day. I was no longer at a roller rink but on a lonely rural road. A poke from Erin brought me back to the present. “It doesn’t take a mind reader to know what you’re thinking about,” she said. “And it isn’t skating.”
“Sorry,” I said, smiling sheepishly.
“It’s okay. You’re entitled.”
A couple of eager kids bumped the table on their way to the rink and knocked one of Shannon’s gifts onto the floor. Erin picked up the brightly wrapped package and said, “As long as you’re thinking about him anyway, what’s the latest word on Sam Caldwell?”
“He’s still in the prison hospital, but his prognosis is good for a full recovery. A trial date hasn’t been set yet.”
“Are they still making noise about charging you?”
“Thankfully, that issue has finally been put to rest.” The question of whether I’d acted in self-defense was resolved when a well-respected attorney took on my case pro bono. He claimed he wanted to stop a miscarriage of justice, but I suspected the publicity the case generated was what actually caused him to volunteer his services. Whatever the motive, he successfully represented my interests and that was all that mattered to me.
Jack was out of breath when he returned to the table and collapsed into the chair next to mine. “How’re you doing, Grandpa?” I asked.
“Not bad for an ex-cop. How’s the ex-concierge feeling?”
“I don’t know about ex-concierge, but I’m doing pretty well, now that I’m an ex-media darling.”
“I hear ya. Fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Kevin Gleason is certainly not averse to a little fame,” I said.
Jack grimaced. “A little! That guy is milking it for all it’s worth. His fifteen minutes should’ve been up a long time ago.”
“It might have ended quicker if you hadn’t beaten him to a pulp,” Erin said.
Jack claimed it was his partner’s betrayal that caused him to double up his fists. After all, he’d been cheated out of the collar of the year. But Erin insisted the fight had nothing to do with the case. Jack hadn’t been there when I needed him the most. When he beat up Kevin, she said, he was really beating up himself. That was all a bit too touchy-feely for me. Jack had always believed a good fight settles all scores. It definitely settled the matter of his job.
“Fame or not,” I said, “Kevin still has a job. And you’re on the unemployment line.”
“Ha! Gleason can have my job. Hell, he can have the lieutenant’s job. But I’ll be damned if I’ll give him credit for solving this case, no matter what the brass believes. You did that all on your own.”
“Not true,” I said. “It was a team effort. Our team.” I pulled an envelope out of my handbag and handed it to Jack.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s your birthday, too, isn’t it?”
“Oh, hell. Once you’ve passed the big four-oh, you don’t keep track of birthdays anymore.”
I gestured to the envelope. “Then think of this as my way of saying thank you.”
“For what?”
“For…I don’t know…for putting up with me. I wasn’t exactly the most cooperative informant.” Actually, I felt sorry for him. He’d lost the biggest case of the year to a brash rookie and now he was out of a job.
Jack grinned. “I think you’ve got it ass-backward. You’re the one who put up with me. Ace detective outdone by an amateur.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Erin said. “Open the card.”
Jack stared at the insert I tucked inside the birthday greeting. “What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s a gift, silly. What do you think?”
“Sailing lessons?”
I hoped he didn’t read more into the gift than I’d intended. “I know how you’ve always wanted your own sailboat. Buying you a boat for your birthday seemed a tad excessive and more importantly, out of my price range. You’ll just have to make do with a few lessons. Your friend Allen Kingston says his fiancée Kellie is the best instructor in Seattle.”
Jack was momentarily speechless. When he leaned over to kiss my cheek, I didn’t pull away. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You’re the best ex-wife a guy could ever have,” he said.
Erin smiled and said, “Before this gets too mushy, there’s something about the case I still don’t understand. There were two cars involved when you got run off the freeway on your way home from Portland.”
“That’s right,” Jack said. “Sam drove the crash car and another car picked him up afterward.”
“So who was driving the second car?” Erin asked.
“It was supposed to be Tom Lamont, the former security guard at BellaVilla,” I said. “But he couldn’t get off work to go to Portland with Sam. And he felt so bad about letting him down that he couldn’t stop apologizing for it.”
“Why would he want to get involved? I thought he was scared silly by the murders at BellaVilla,” Erin said.
“Tom says he didn’t know what Sam had in mind when he asked him to go to Portland with him,” Jack said. “That doesn’t surprise me. For such a supposedly smart college boy, he’s clueless. He thought Sam was his friend. Sam thought he was a patsy. He’d have told Tom to drive the other car and the kid would’ve done it, no questions asked.”
“So who did drive the other car?” Erin asked.
“Sam got one of his former coworkers at the Novikov project to help him out. The guy had run out of unemployment benefits and was desperate for the cash Sam offered.”
When the disc jockey announced a boys-only number, Shannon joined us at the table with two of her friends in tow. The girls were a little wobbly on their skates, but they giggled and helped steady each other by holding hands. They were having fun and it showed on their flushed and sweaty faces. Erin and I exchanged looks. She’d been worried about Shannon’s ability to make friends at her new school. It didn’t seem to be a problem now. “Here, girls,” I said, handing them cups. “You look thirsty. Have some punch.”
“Is it time to open my presents yet?” Shannon asked eagerly.
“We have to eat first,” Erin told her. “You have time for a few more laps around the rink.”
After the girls left, Erin turned to me and said, “I’ve been wondering about Carla. I know she’s been cleared in the death of her parents. But does she still have a job at BellaVilla or did she become a massage therapist?”
I laughed. “She not only has a job, but she took over the lead concierge position after Peter was chosen to be the new facility manager.”
“Heaven help BellaVilla,” Jack said.
“Fiona would’ve been my choice, but what can I say? Carla may surprise us all now that she’s not running from a killer.”
“What about you? Have you decided what you’re going to do?” Jack asked me.
“I’ve been thinking about going into business for myself.”
Jack leaned forward in his chair. “That’s interesting. So have I.”
Erin eyed us both as if we’d lost our minds. I guess starting a business when the economy was still sputtering along sounded crazy. “Doesn’t starting your own business take money?”
“Don’t forget,” I said. “I was hot property for a while. Selling my rights to a Hollywood movie about the case paid very well.”
“I thought you used that money to stop the foreclosure on your house,” she said.
“I did. I also paid for Sylvie’s assisted living care for another year. But there’s still enough left over for what I plan to do.”
“And what’s that?”
“I went to work at BellaVilla thinking that the concierge job was a temporary fix and that I’d go back to engineering eventually. Then something happened—I discovered I loved the work. Despite Peter’s claim that I was a terrible concierge, I don’t want to do anything else. So, that’s why I’ve decided to start my own premier concierge service. I�
��ve already lined up a couple of luxury condominiums that are eager to talk to me about a contract. I’m going to start hiring some staff if everything comes together soon like I expect.”
“Cool. What about you, Dad? Wait, let me guess. You’re going to start your own private investigation firm.”
“Isn’t that what all ex-cops do? Luckily, I don’t need much money to get started. I can even work out of my apartment for a while. But there is one thing I do need.”
“What’s that?”
Jack turned to me. “A partner. How ’bout it, Katie? You said we made a good team. Let’s make it official.”
Erin acted like she’d forgotten all about my plans for a concierge service. “The two of you together again. Why, that’s a great idea!” she exclaimed. “What do you think, Mom?”
“It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Other than that, you’re okay with it, right?” asked Jack.
“I’m a concierge, not an investigator.”
“I was going to call it Doyle’s Private Investigation Service. But it could just as easily be called Doyle and Ryan Investigations. Or Ryan and Doyle Investigations, if you prefer.” He paused a moment. “But here’s an even better idea. We could call it Doyle and Doyle Investigations.” He winked at me and added, “Of course, we’d have to get hitched again first.”
“Not in a million years,” I said.
“Then how ’bout in one year?” Jack said.
Erin shook her head and smiled. “And the beat goes on.”
CHAPTER ONE
“Woman Falls from Sky; Narrowly Misses Bystander” was the headline in the Seattle Times article that covered the suicide of Marie Talbot. It was a creative attention-grabber, but the report had little resemblance to the actual facts. I know. I was the so-called bystander.
First of all, Marie didn’t fall from the sky. She fell from the roof of a ten-story apartment building. Second, she didn’t commit suicide; she was murdered, pushed to her death by person or persons unknown. Third, her name wasn’t Marie Talbot; she was christened Marija Trstenjak. Although she’d never legally changed her given name, she’d dropped it as soon as she turned eighteen. And finally, I wasn’t just standing by on the sidewalk waiting for her body to tumble out of the sky and land in a heap five feet in front of me. I was on my way to a meeting with Marie at my ex-husband’s office.
At the time, I didn’t know all these details. I didn’t even know it was Marie who had plunged headfirst off the building. All I could focus on then was how broken the woman’s body looked—legs twisted and crumpled, neck and head crushed, both arms cruelly torn from their sockets. She had apparently stretched her arms out in front of her on the way down as if they could somehow cushion the impact. They didn’t. There was surprisingly little blood at first, but within seconds she was bathed in a gruesome pool of red. For some odd reason, I was struck by how the afternoon sun brought out the blond highlights in her hair—until they became nothing more than sticky-looking dark red streaks. I turned my head away from the grisly scene, but it was impossible to avoid the obvious. I wasn’t just an eyewitness to a tragedy; I was smack dab in the middle of it. And I was going to be late for my meeting.
It was a meeting I hadn’t wanted to attend in the first place. I’d never met Marie Talbot and wasn’t pleased I’d let my ex-husband coerce me into agreeing to do so. I’d told Jack when he called that I didn’t want to get involved with his clients. He owned Doyle’s Private Investigations and thought I was his partner. I was no such thing. I ran my own business—Premier Concierge Services—and didn’t need any distractions, least of all from my ex-husband. But Jack was insistent.
“We used to be a damn good team once upon a time.”
“You just don’t get it,” I told him. “We’re not married anymore. That’s what the ex in ex-husband means.” We’d been together for over twenty years and it had been several years since our divorce. Jack had been married and divorced again in the interim and his second former wife apparently had better sense than to answer his phone calls.
“Don’t think of me as your ex-husband,” Jack said. “Think of me as an investigator who needs your expertise.”
“And just what expertise would that be?”
“Let’s not get into all that right now. Just say you’ll meet with us.”
“I can’t. I really don’t have any time to spare.” I’d just inked a new contract for concierge services at a condominium in a wealthy Seattle suburb. It was something of a coup that my fledgling business won the contract and I was determined to succeed. I explained all this to Jack, but he wasn’t the type to be put off so easily.
“Just this once. Meet with Marie and me one time. That’s all. Then you can go back to whatever you have to do. Please, Katie.”
My name is Mary Kathleen Ryan, but most people know me as Kate. When Jack started calling me Katie, I knew he was desperate. Jack liked to project a macho vibe, but he had a vulnerable side he tried to keep at bay—usually with too much alcohol. He’d been semi-sober for a while now, but getting booted out of the Bellevue Police Department had done a number on him. It seemed to me he was close to the edge again—which is probably what he was counting on. My weakness had always been bad boys in trouble and Jack knew it.
“Okay,” I sighed. “One meeting. I have to be in Seattle anyway, so I guess I could swing by for a few minutes.”
“That’s my girl! Meet us at Java Joe’s.”
Short on funds, Jack couldn’t afford a regular office. He conducted all his business at a corner table in the coffee shop next door to his apartment building. The business so far consisted mainly of working the phone to drum up referrals from his former colleagues who’d still take his calls. He even courted the so-called scumbag lawyers he used to avoid like the plague. I suspected that one of these sources was how he’d snagged Marie Talbot as a client, but it didn’t matter. I planned to meet her as promised, give whatever expertise I could to help Jack out, and then get on with the rest of my day. But Marie had other plans.
The neighborhood where her life ended wasn’t the best Seattle had to offer, but it had great character and “great characters,” as Jack often joked. The city’s guidebooks called it “in transition,” which was a nicer way of saying “less desirable.” No upscale shoppers, dressed-for-success types, or tourists need apply here. Nevertheless, a woman’s screams as she fell ten stories to her death attracted a lot of attention from the upwardly mobile and downtrodden alike.
Someone in the mixed crowd that had gathered to gawk at her shattered body had evidently called 911. The sirens wailing in the distance jolted me out of my dazed state. I’d just eased away from the onlookers when I spotted Jack sprinting down the sidewalk toward me.
“Kate!” he shouted. “Wait up!” Although he’d missed the woman’s actual fall, word about it had quickly spread to the coffee shop. Most of Java Joe’s patrons were now milling about with the rest of the throng.
I leaned against the fender of a nearby parked car. “She was wearing only one sandal,” I said as Jack approached.
“What?” he asked, struggling to catch his breath. Jack and physical exertion were not on the best of terms. His six-foot-two frame was still muscular, but he’d put on a few pounds of late around his belly and it showed. Not that he’d ever admit it. Turning forty-five a few months ago was hard enough for him to accept.
“A bright red Jimmy Choo,” I said.
His dark blue eyes locked on mine, clearly concerned. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I wonder where her other sandal is.”
Jack pulled a handkerchief from his suit pocket and gently wiped my face. I’d been so stunned when the poor woman hit the pavement that I hadn’t realized some of her blood had splattered onto my face and suit. Jack fussed over me until I brushed his hand away. “I’m fine,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
Maybe not. I’d begun to shiver even though it was a hot August after
noon, which, for Seattle, was a scorching seventy-five degrees. An ambulance pulled up alongside the curb, followed by two police cars. As the medics barreled through the crowd to aid the victim who was beyond help, two uniformed officers barked orders for the curiosity seekers to disburse so they could secure the scene.
Jack took off his suit jacket and wrapped it around my trembling shoulders. “We need to get you out of here,” he said. When he was still working for the BPD, Jack never paid much attention to what he wore. He called his look casual; I called it careless. But someone must have convinced him that image was important when you own a business. The jacket he gave me today was a neatly pressed Brooks Brothers, and the smart look he now favored also included a crisp white shirt, knockoff designer tie, and spit-and-polish Florsheims. He was dressed to impress Marie Talbot.
“I don’t think I’m up to meeting your client right now,” I said.
“Marie never showed,” Jack said. “I guess we’ll have to make it another day.”
“Hey, Doyle!” The shout came from one of the uniformed officers. “You got a minute?”
“I’ve gotta see what this guy wants,” Jack said. “I’ll be right back.” Although he had spent the latter part of his career as a homicide detective in the suburbs, it wasn’t surprising that Jack was recognized by Seattle’s uniformed rank and file, especially since he’d been brashly marketing his new business to anyone in the precincts who came within spitting distance.
I passed the time while he was gone by taking in some deep breaths to get my nerves under control. I was just beginning to feel more like myself again when Jack wandered back to the car a few minutes later. He ran a hand through his thick, recently trimmed hair and frowned. There was more gray than black in his hair now, which, frankly, I found appealing. That anything about Jack still appealed to me after all these years was annoying.
I took in his pale and sweaty face and realized he was visibly shaken. As horrible as the woman’s bloodied and broken body was, I knew he’d probably seen worse in his day. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
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