Had Misty awakened Edna? Jill guessed a sleepy scolding and Come back to bed, Misty dear. Jody enjoyed imitating her.
Cold, moving air came from someplace.
“Feel that?” David whispered.
“Yes, look.” The chandelier was swinging slowly, creaking back and forth.
They found the source: a rushing, icy draft coming from a crack along Jody’s door.
“She left this open too,” David muttered, touching the door. “Downstairs and here. She ran out in a panic.”
Jill swallowed. Her heart thudded.
He pushed the door lightly with his foot – night wind blasted -- and they were in. Staring at an open slide bolt, two hanging chains, and an open dead bolt. Edna had a horror of newfangled burglar alarms; they scared and confused her. Jody had still loved the apartment and overcompensated…but tonight, she’d just run out.
David closed the door, and they stared ahead.
The vestibule was feebly lit by a table lamp. Jill looked up, not breathing. The shadowy owl on the wall looked grotesque. Its glass eyes glared; the wind gusted, and its wingspread lifted with a horrid cracking sound. She cringed. The place was blowing and freezing. This looked so bad. The wind and the yanked drape they’d seen…
David dropped to a crouch with his gun and flashlight before him. “Stay for a sec,” he said. “Tight to the periphery, touch nothing.”
In his nervousness he said what they both knew.
“Be careful,” Jill breathed.
He disappeared and she pressed her back to the wall, hearing dim sounds from the gusting interior: David casing rooms, racing up the stairs to check the upper floor. She looked at the ceiling; heard his footsteps overhead and doors open and close. The vestibule blew. The damned owl glared and lifted its wings, and from somewhere came that other sound. Thud!
Louder now.
Jill hugged herself, her heart throbbing, her mind seeing Jody stumbling out, sick and afraid…
Then David was back. “Nobody,” he said, replacing his gun. “Different trouble. Something broken.”
Jill got out her flashlight. With their two beams leading, they stepped into the living room.
The far end of the long room moved in shadows. Closer, on a front table, was the lit lamp they’d seen from outside, its shade cruelly tipped, the drape behind it ripped halfway off. The table’s pot of African violets had been flung to the parquet floor, which was strewn with broken shards and black earth.
“She was attacked,” David groaned.
Jill’s heart dropped. She stopped breathing. Oh Jody, no…
David’s light fanned the floor as Jill’s light seemed to move jerkily on its own, sweeping down the room for that odd knocking sound, muffled and rhythmical. Thud! Thud! Something getting whammed by the blowing air. Jody’s beloved props, looming hulks in the room’s center, were in the way.
Then she looked back and froze.
With his light in his left hand, David crouched using a ballpoint to poke at a sweater coat, its delicate silver yarn matching the dress Jody had worn. Threads glinting, it lay in a heap as if flung.
“No…” Jill whispered.
She crouched down too; watched David lift a silver sleeve.
“Look,” he said bitterly, his pen indicating threads. “The strands are torn. Jody struggled with the son of a bitch. And over there.” He moved his light along the floor’s molding to a small oblong object. “Jody’s phone. She got it out but her pal sent it flying.”
Jill sucked in a horrific gasp. A fit of nausea gripped her.
So here the fight for life had happened. Jody’s cell phone skidding away, her desperate grab for it as, sick and terrified, she wriggled out of her coat to escape.
“God…no.” Jill’s eyes squeezed tight but she still saw it: the shadowy figure attacking the dying, stumbling girl, preventing her from calling for help.
“It’s murder,” she breathed raggedly.
“Time to call the cops.”
Jill blinked through stinging, raging tears. “Take pictures first. I want us to have our own.”
David’s hand shook as he shone his light. Jill, trembling, got out her phone and snapped the coat from several angles.
“Both sleeves.” David was breathing fast. “Come in closer.” With his ballpoint he lifted the coat’s undamaged side. Jill flashed and, feet away, flashed again over the flung phone and crushed violets.
She stared, hurting, at the crushed violets as David got to his feet.
The wind gusted harder. Beyond the darkened, hulking movie props, the thudding got louder.
“C’mon,” he said, skirting the room, heading that way.
Jill followed, her knees knocking.
A mangrove tree, fake, served as a space divider. Jill ducked its blowing fake Spanish moss and David shined his light on a praying stone angel, replica from a New Orleans cemetery scene, and then on a tall tangle of mangrove roots carved into a real bar overhung with more moss. A Southern Gothic creep show – nothing to beat it for weird, Jody had said, explaining why she’d given away other props from jungle, sci-fi, Victorian and western sets. She had loved to haunt studio lots and just-wrapped film sets.
Bath 2 Bits, said a weathered sign above the bar. David’s light beamed over the fake cobwebs and the real booze bottles and glasses. The barstools were upright. Every last wine and martini and shot glass was neatly lined-
CRASH! Jill whirled with a cry toward the sound. The room’s back entrance.
David headed there. She followed and stood by him, her whole body shaking.
Fifteen feet ahead, past grouped armchairs and a sofa, heavy drapes billowed and broken French doors hung crookedly on their hinges. Night wind thudded them against a just-toppled floor lamp. Its shade had been green Tiffany glass. Crazed shards of it still spun and skidded.
“Surprised it hung on this long,” David muttered as they skirted the breakage. With the French doors open, they were visible from outside. He leaned carefully, cold gusts ruffling his hair, and with his hand hooding his light he examined the doors’ mangled frames. “Broken from inside,” he muttered. “The attacker crashed out, not in.” His beam lit glass shards out on the balcony, then moved up jagged, pointing-out splinters along each doorframe.
Jill gaped back to the front of the room. “The struggle was there. The coat, the phone...”
“But no sign of forced entry, so he was no stranger. She let him in.” David turned back, frowning in thought, to the shattered doors, the wrought iron balcony and fire escape beyond. “So…this is weird. Jody broke free and stumbled out the front. Why’d her killer crash out the back?”
“Maybe he didn’t want to be seen on the front stairs.” Jill stepped closer, her heart rocketing as she read the silent language of a crime scene.
A thought came unbidden.
“Could a second person have come?” She was nearly stammering. “Someone the killer caught seeing the struggle through the glass - and he took off after that one? Lost his cool, his plan to make Jody’s death look like an accident - and he smashed his way out?”
“Whoa. It’s a possibility.”
Still hooding his light, David hunched by an overturned, armless chair. “This is lightweight, with the legs pointing out. The killer held it by its back and smashed its legs through. Nice way to avoid flying glass. Plus this drape” – he glanced up at a blowing panel – “is thick velvet, could have been used to hold the chair. What do you bet he was wearing gloves at this point?”
“More photos,” Jill said tremulously.
David held his parka to hide her flashes as she snapped the broken doors and lamp.
“I can’t breathe.” Her hands shook.
David put his parka back on and gave Jill his gun. “Take this.”
“What?”
“I’m going out for a sec. Check the fire escape and below. If a second person did come, someone who witnessed…”
Jill glanced at the gun in her clammy hands. “Is
it too late for shooting lessons?”
David stepped through the mangled door into the dark. “Just point and pull the trigger,” he said, leaning back in. “Be careful, the safety’s off.”
“I know that. You be careful.”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “You know what a careful fellow I am. I’ll be right back. Hold the fort.”
He stepped out further over broken glass, then moved along the balcony toward elaborate, wrought iron stairs.
8
Outside was near total darkness. The blowing garden below, the next street’s backs of houses and high-walled gardens. Some dim lights in upper windows. The silence was eerie, so Upper East Side.
David breathed in, staying tight to the building as he eased down the stairs to the lower balcony. He peered over the rail, re-thinking Jill’s idea. Could a second person have come? Someone worried about Jody after her meltdown? If so, that person would have knocked on the French doors’ glass before realizing the danger. Was it possible?
The wind picked up and the breakage above thudded. He moved carefully past the lower balcony’s French doors. Edna’s.
Done. No yipping dog, even. He reached the bottom, and looked around.
Not a sound.
He crossed a small, square terrace to a narrow brick walk.
The garden walls were high enough to use his light, which he beamed over shrubs and into a wisteria-clad arbor. Nothing. Just still-bare vines tapping in the wind. He turned, wanting to go deeper into the twiggy beds, but the earth was soft; leaving the bricks was a bad idea.
But soft earth speaks volumes. Systematically, he walked the bricks and beamed his light here, there, looking for footprints. No sign of blood or a struggle.
Something rustled the brush next to him. Startled, he turned his light on it.
Just a yellow cat, darting up the path to the front side of the house.
He stared to follow it, and heard Jill cry out.
She had moved to the right of the doors, training her light on a musty old organ. On the higher keyboard, beneath white candles, her beam lit a man’s hand – “Oh God!” – then his black sleeve and his chalky face, chinless and bulge-eyed; then the thing on the wall the parson dummy was staring at.
A collection of antique daggers, arranged fan-like on red velvet.
A hand on her arm, and she jumped.
“Jill-”
“I just died of fright,” she gasped.
There was almost a crazy calm in the way he pulled her away. “I just thought of this.”
With a jerky movement she gave him his gun, and they looked at the daggers.
The one closest to the door was missing.
David’s flashlight lit the missing blade’s velvet impression: S-shaped, new and clean in its field of dusty red. They stared at it for what seemed like a long time.
“Someone else did come to the back,” Jill whispered. “He grabbed this and chased.”
“Cops might not have noticed,” David said. “I didn’t. Saw it for a second but the missing knife just registered.”
It hadn’t been intended for Jody.
They took pictures of the red velvet board and the missing knife impression. In the dark air, each flash seemed to multiply into hideous, floating, S-shapes. The wounds that such a blade would make… Jill shut her eyes; kept seeing a hand grabbing the dagger.
They forced themselves to turn away, David wincing, drawing air in under his teeth. “Horrible,” he whispered. “Who could have come?”
The thought hit with the force of a train bursting out of a tunnel.
“Celie Jarrett?” Jill whispered, her breath catching. “Jody could have called her when she ran out of the party. Celie was her main shoulder to cry on. Oh God, what if?”
“We don’t know, we don’t know.”
Moving faster, they photographed the trinket-covered coffee table, tall ficus plants with broken foliage, the downstairs bedroom and bathroom, then the kitchen - where David concentrated on a rinsed glass in the sink. Next to the sink was an open, abandoned quart of chocolate milk. One chair was pulled out from the small table.
“Think that glass had penicillin in it?” David said.
“CSU will check it.”
“They were two people. Why would there be one glass?”
“He was probably standing over her at the counter. Leaning over her, faking comfort.”
“Until she started to feel sick, too weak to fight.”
Upstairs they took more photos of the two bedrooms: one large with hairdryers, tossed clothes, and Jody’s unmade, frilly canopy bed; one small and looking, in the beam of their lights, bizarre.
Jody’s beloved “family:” her antique dolls in elaborate lace and finery crowding the old Victorian settee and wood floor. She’d loved being surrounded by her dolls, and each one, she insisted, had a name and a personality.
Was it fatigue? The late hour? Painted china faces seemed to gaze out at them with polite wariness. The dolls held hands, shared parasols and teacups, and seemed eerily alive. One fine lady in high, tiny boots was turned to her bonneted neighbor, whose glass eyes watched her baby nurse, arms outstretched toward what must have been a fleeing toddler who was no longer there.
David, taking photos, stepped on a floorboard that creaked. There was a hitching sound, then an eerie tinkling, and the arms-outstretched baby nurse began some jerky steps toward them. Clunk…screech…clunk…
Jill shrank back. “Oh jeez…”
The doll approached, and an old music box by the settee plinked the ghostly opening notes of “Swan Lake.”
They backed out to the hall. The doll stopped approaching.
“An automaton,” David muttered. “Her wind-up wound down.”
Through her parka Jill scrubbed goose bumps on her arm. “Jody told Tricia she never let boyfriends upstairs. Said her friends were fine ladies; the idea of sex would upset them.”
They checked the upstairs bathroom before returning to the living room. Carefully, hugging the side of the stairs. Jill peered along the room’s bookshelves. “She said she kept a secret diary someplace.”
“If they find it, it’ll have twenty guys’ names in it.” David punched at his phone. “Okay, let’s call the cops.”
Pacing, solemn-voiced, he talked to Alex Brand: Jody was attacked here in her apartment. There may be a second person who witnessed the attack and ran. No call to 9-1-1? That’s not good. There might be a second victim.
“Jody was definitely murdered,” David said. “Come.”
Kerri and Alex arrived, and the CSU and uniformed cops. Lights lit, and the place was busy. Jill and David showed the detectives what they had figured was the killer’s murderous timeline: no forced entry, the rinsed glass, Jody’s torn sweater coat, her flung phone, the glass doors, the missing dagger.
“Definitely yanked out tonight,” Kerri said, her gloved fingers touching the red velvet. “No dust in its impression.”
Alex, looking up from glass shards said, “You saved us, like, days. When would we have gotten a warrant? Nobody called about these broken doors.”
Kerri and Alex looked wired. They’d caught this case and the media was already blaring about it and they’d be up all night with it.
The four of them edged back through the blowing crime scene, talking and pointing.
Jody’s phone was key, the detectives agreed, going through it all again. The killer kept her from using it. Clearly planned for her to die here, have it look like an accident or suicide after her party meltdown. A cold, methodical planner, this son of a bitch was. Then - yes, he lost it. Wasn’t chasing sick, dying Jody when he crashed through the French doors. Was after a second person he caught seeing him; a witness who, ironically, allowed Jody to break free and stagger out the front. Ruin his plan.
Kerri, watching CSU people, pulled in a deep breath. “Mr. Cold Planner’s game explodes? He’s going to be worried. Furious with himself. Maybe start to make mistakes.”
Alex
tiredly gave David’s arm a soft arm punch. “Thanks doesn’t begin to say it. You even scored us some sleep.”
David shrugged, looking depressed, and Jill watched Jody’s phone getting brushed for prints.
“That’s going to be wiped down,” she said faintly. She felt unbearably sad and weary. “Oh, wait. He had no time…”
“He may have been wearing gloves by this point,” Kerri said. “This place is gonna have a thousand prints from all the parties she gave, people she had over. For handling her phone and what followed, if he was clever he pulled on gloves.”
Alex filled them in on other detectives’ interviews, especially with Reid and Deborah Wylie.
“Connor and Zienuc interviewed them, two lawyers who know the drill. They’re oh so sorry and gave nothing; won’t interview with us again. Which is damned frustrating, since others interviewed described Jody as still being crazy about Reid, still calling him, pleading, even after the Wylies reconciled, even at the office. Some cast member said Reid in January had seemed to Jody like the protective father she never had. They were both in pain - him from his wife troubles, her from her fights with Rennie. Two lost souls rescuing each other, until Reid wanted out.”
“Eric Rennie also came running to the hospital,” Kerri put in. “Protested all kinds of grief, but other interviews said Jody’s Reid obsession made him yell and throw things on the set. He told people they were past sex; he was trying to help her.”
David shook his head skeptically.
Kerri’s eyes went from him to Jill. “There’s also some lawyer Jody couldn’t stand at the Wylies’ firm. You know anything about that?”
They didn’t. Jody had never mentioned any lawyer bothering her. She’d only cried about Wylie and Rennie.
Alex threw his hands up, grimacing. “This case is going to be a nightmare – for us. High profile, sixty partygoers career-dependent on Jody, and two bad romances. Plus - hell, the killer could have been someone from all those parties she gave, or someone from her old coke days. I fear an Unsolved and the media’s going to kill us.”
A CSU man was examining strewn potting soil and terra cotta shards. Jill stared down at the broken, dying plant. “Poor little violets,” she said tremulously. She fought tears. David saw, and reached for her arm.
EMBRYO 5: SILVER GIRL (EMBRYO: A Raney & Levine Thriller) Page 4
