Power

by Debra Webb

“The case is closed. We will not be pursuing the Chandler investigation further unless new evidence comes to light.”

  “Burnett has given his seal of approval?” She was pushing here and she knew it, but this felt wrong. Particularly since she hadn’t gotten that impression from Burnett.

  “The final decision came down from a higher office, Jess,” Black warned, using her first name for emphasis. “Let it go.”

  The affair. That had to be the motive for a speedy closure.

  What trumped a Chandler? Jess had been gone from Birmingham too long. She would need Lori’s help there.

  “Are we clear? Do you need me to have Chief Burnett confirm where the department stands on the matter after he and I have spoken?”

  Jess focused on the man staring at her expectantly. “That won’t be necessary, Chief Black. I think we’re more than clear here.”

  Black reclined in his chair and studied her a moment. “I worry that somehow we are not where we need to be, Chief Harris. I feel some amount of animosity or resentment festering between us. I don’t need to remind you that we are on the same team.”

  She should let it go. She really should. Burnett had urged her to play nice so she would eventually fit in and be accepted, sooner rather than later. But she’d never been very good at holding back when it came to what she believed in.

  “As long as I stay clear of your territory, is that right?” No use pretending that wasn’t the true issue.

  “You believe that our differences stem from my not acknowledging and respecting your position as a deputy chief. Is that right?”

  Jess smiled. If only it were that easy. “I suppose you could boil it down to terms as simple as that. You question all my decisions and rarely agree with my conclusions. And this isn’t the first time. Should I think differently?”

  He did not smile. “Shall I speak frankly, Harris?”

  “Absolutely.” She braced for battle.

  “I find your tactics questionable more often than not. Your lack of respect for the chain of command, particularly Chief Burnett, appalling. And your absolute certainty that you can do the job better than anyone else, regardless of rank or experience, utterly unacceptable.” He turned his hands up. “Other than that, I recognize that your investigative skills are exemplary.”

  Wow. Harper was wrong. It would take far longer than two years to earn this man’s respect. “I see. Well. It appears we have a ways to go before that whole team concept really sets for us.”

  He clasped his hands in front of him, steepled his fingers. “I hope that doesn’t prove the case. Time is rarely an asset we have to spare in our line of work.”

  Jess struggled not to let his opinion get to her, but it did. Didn’t matter that she had suspected as much. Hearing it this way wasn’t so easy to swallow. “I appreciate your candor.” She reached for her bag. “We’ll have to do this again sometime.” Like maybe in ten or so years. Or never.

  “Just so you understand,” Black said, stalling her preparations for a quick exit, “my feelings are based entirely on my concerns for this department and for Dan. I’ve known him since he was just a rookie. He’s worked hard to gain the position he holds. I don’t want the actions of anyone else to detract from his achievements. He wants you here. I hope you won’t force him to regret that decision.”

  Jess couldn’t breathe. Her eyes burned. Had Dan shared his misgivings about her with Black?

  That clunky clang called out from her bag. She forced the painful thoughts away. “Sorry.” She reached for her cell, immensely grateful for the reprieve.

  Lily calling.

  Her sister.

  But Black didn’t know that.

  “Excuse me, Chief, I have to take this.” Jess stood and turned her back to him. Blinking to hold back the tears she refused to shed, she accepted the call. “Jess Harris.”

  “I found the perfect house!” Lily squealed.

  “What’s the address?” Jess went for a business tone in hopes of leading Black to believe it was Harper.

  “Right across the street from me!” Another delighted squeal.

  Oh God.

  “Thank you for keeping me up to speed. I’ll get right on that.”

  “If you want to see it, I’ll have to call the Realtor. Do you want me to call?”

  “I can handle it. Thank you.” Jess ended the call and turned back to Chief Black. “I have to get out to Druid Hills. I’m glad we had this chat, Chief.”

  Her sister was probably still staring at her phone, aghast that Jess had basically hung up on her.

  “Good, solid communications are always best. We—” The intercom on Black’s desk buzzed, cutting him off. He looked from Jess to the phone and back.

  “Take care of that,” she suggested as she backed toward the door. “I can see myself out.”

  Before he could argue, his secretary’s voice reverberated from the speaker. “Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt but Detective Roark is on the line. He’s at the Chandler home. There’s been a new development and he needs to speak with you immediately.”

  Jess stalled. Her gaze locked with Black’s. What now?

  Breathless, the secretary rushed to add, “Alexander Mayakovsky has just confessed to killing his wife.”

  13

  Interview room 2, 4:58 p.m.

  The Russian was lying.

  Jess didn’t need to be in the same room with him. Having a sense of the rhythm of his breathing might have been a bonus but wasn’t really necessary in this case. She watched his every move through the viewing room’s two-way mirror. Listened to his voice as he spoke, noting his pauses as he struggled to find just the right words… the tremble in his voice whenever he said his wife’s name.

  He was lying.

  “Walk me through this once more,” Black said quietly. “This time we’ll make sure the tape recorder works right.”

  Detective Roark fumbled with the handheld recorder and placed it back in the center of the table. The malfunctioning recorder was a ruse. Video and audio was at that very moment capturing every image and sound and digitally storing it for use in a court of law just as it had been for the last three-quarters of an hour.

  Chief Black sat with his back to the viewing mirror, allowing Jess and Burnett an unobstructed view of Darcy Chandler’s husband as he confessed to killing her—accidentally, of course—in a moment of overpowering angst and frustration. Detective Roark slouched at one end of the small table. A suspect always felt more intimidated with two cops in the room. The attorney, Isaac Matheson, occupied the chair at the remaining end of the table.

  Matheson—not quite the powerhouse his colleague Zacharias Whitman, the Chandler family attorney, was but a big name around these parts nonetheless—had advised his client not to make this statement but the Russian was determined to spill his guts.

  Problem was, his statements up to now were so far off the mark that he couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. Not in Jess’s opinion anyway. But this wasn’t her case and her opinion didn’t carry much weight. If she’d had any doubts, she now knew for a certainty.

  “Talking on the phone wasn’t working. So I came to the house. I only wanted her to listen,” Alexander repeated. “She refused. I followed her up the stairs…”

  Right there was where Jess would have asked why they had gone up the stairs. “Why doesn’t Black ask the obvious question?” she muttered, her exasperation kicking up a notch.

  “Give him time.” Burnett glanced at her, gave her that knowing look of unqualified confidence that men in positions of power and experience so loved to toss around. “He’s done this before.”

  Jess reminded herself that she was lucky to even be watching this interview. With that hammered into her brain once more, she scraped up whatever patience hadn’t fled or expired in the last forty-five minutes and focused on the interview.

  “Why did your wife go upstairs?” Black asked

  No way was she meeting the gaze now fixed on her. Just because Burnett wa
s right about Black getting around to the question didn’t make him right about anything else.

  “What’d I tell you?” he remarked.

  “Shhh.” She wanted to hear the answer to that long-awaited question.

  The Russian shook his head. “I don’t know. She went. I followed. I needed to make her hear me. To destroy our marriage was one thing, but to destroy the studio—which would be nothing without me—was absurd. She needed to be reasonable.”

  That last part sounded heartfelt… sincere.

  “Was there anyone else in the house?”

  Jess groaned. “He already said no to that! Rephrase the question!”

  “Wait,” Black said before the suspect could answer his last inquiry, “did you say Ms. Dresher was still on the property delivering lunch for the dancers in rehearsal when you arrived?”

  “Hmm. Interesting alternate approach,” Burnett commented just to get on her nerves.

  “Fine. Fine. That works.”

  Burnett chuckled. “You just can’t stand the idea that anyone else can do this as well as you.”

  She was not going there with him just now. Her feelings were still stinging from Black’s comments. Was it possible that Dan regretted having offered her this position? The bottom line was that Black was right about her actions directly affecting Dan. But she couldn’t think about that right now.

  “Ask him about the shoes,” she suggested, knowing Black could not hear her but determined to ensure Burnett knew exactly how she would handle every step of this interview.

  The Russian shook his handsome head. “There was no one else in the house. No one.”

  He scrubbed his hands over his face, then through his long blond hair. It was no wonder Chandler was ready to be rid of her husband. He looked exactly like the kind of guy whose destiny it was to be unfaithful. Too handsome. Lean, muscular body that looked as good in jeans as it did in tights. An eastern European accent that would make most any woman swoon. A man accustomed to being showered with attention from all who orbited his universe. Like Annette said, the union was likely doomed from the beginning.

  “Might someone have heard the two of you before you went upstairs?” Black ventured. “That marble floor in the entry hall of your home has a tendency to echo, especially the way a lady’s high heels click-click-click.”

  “Uh-huh.” Burnett folded his arms over his chest. “And the shoes are on the table.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Black wasn’t doing a bad job. Too bad his suspect was lying like a rug. His every mannerism, facial expression, the subtle nuances of each word signaled extreme distress and an urgency to provide an answer that made him look guilty enough. Not good signs in a murder confession.

  The husband shrugged. “I don’t remember hearing any sounds like that… There was no one else in the house… to hear us. I’m certain of that.”

  How was he certain? Half a dozen little girls were with Andrea in the conservatory. Unless he checked every room of the massive house, he couldn’t sit there and say with such conviction that there was no one else in the house.

  “So when you got upstairs,” Roark spoke up, “you saw your chance and you tossed your unsuspecting wife over the railing. Bam!” He banged the table. “Just like that!”

  Even Jess jumped at the abrupt display. “That was a little over the top.”

  “What is the meaning of this?” Matheson railed. “Don’t say another word, Alexander. This has gone too far already.”

  Chief Black scolded his detective, though Jess felt confident the moment was staged, then ordered him out of the room. Talk about old-school.

  When the door had closed behind Roark, Black righted the overturned tape recorder and held up his hands in a show of dismay. “I apologize. As you can imagine, we’re all a little tense. The pressure is on for us to get this right. Please, gentlemen, let’s continue.”

  The Russian blinked a couple of times and glanced at his attorney who shook his head. To Jess’s surprise, he kept going despite his attorney’s advice. Why the hell would a guy with so much to gain, a seven-figure insurance payout and the freedom to set up a new studio wherever he chose, confess to killing his wife when the police had no, N-O, evidence a homicide had even occurred?

  Didn’t make sense.

  “Once we were in the upstairs hall,” Alexander went on, “the disagreement escalated into something more physical.”

  Jess leaned as close to the glass as possible and tried to see his pale blue eyes. “The truth this time,” she whispered.

  “She slapped me. I grabbed her by the arms and shook her. She tried to pull away and…” He dropped his face into his hands. “She went over the railing. I couldn’t reach her quickly enough. I couldn’t save her.”

  Shook her? Jess wanted to go in there and shake him all right. She wanted to shake some sense into the guy. If he had grabbed Darcy Chandler and shaken her that way, why weren’t there bruises on her arms? And what about the damned shoes?

  After a lengthy stretch of silence, Black prompted, “What happened then, sir?”

  “I rushed down the stairs and tried to help her.” He flattened his palms against the table and visibly fought for composure. “She was dead. There was nothing I could do.”

  “It couldn’t have happened that way,” Jess commented. She kept expecting Burnett to say something along those lines. The ME had diligently scanned the body for signs of a struggle. None existed. The only mark on the body that did not appear consistent with Chandler’s crash landing was the first-degree bruise on her lower left leg.

  “Did you notice that your wife wasn’t wearing shoes?”

  The Russian looked up, his face red and damp from crying. “Shoes?”

  “Yes.” Chief Black glanced at the open file in front of him. “Her shoes were set aside upstairs near the area where you stated your struggle took place. Did you set them there? Had she been wearing her shoes when she fell, they would have landed somewhere below, perhaps near her body.”

  The husband shook his head. “I don’t remember her shoes. When I realized she was dead, I”—he made a keening sound deep in his throat—“ran away… I was in shock.”

  “Without bothering to call for help,” Jess mumbled, “in case you were wrong about her being dead.” Calling for help was a basic human reaction, shock or no. The man was absolutely not being truthful about all or most of his story.

  The same man who spoke his wife’s name so reverently, who could scarcely speak of her without breaking down, just takes off, leaving her on the floor, without calling for help? A man with no criminal record? If the events had happened as he’d just stated, her death was an accident. Why flee the scene and risk having it look any other way? What was he hiding?

  “Let’s go back to those final moments before she fell,” Black suggested. “Do you remember when you were shaking your wife if you pulled her toward you? Perhaps lifted her up to your eye level to get her attention?”

  Jess recognized where he was going with this. He’d taken a different route than she would have but he did appear to be getting to the proper destination. Although she couldn’t believe Matheson wasn’t screaming that his client was being led by the phrasing of the question.

  “Why don’t you just write him a script?” Matheson demanded. He threw his hands up. “This is so far beyond ridiculous.”

  Better late than never, Jess supposed. It was like watching the Grammy Awards with that five-second delay in case of unexpected wardrobe malfunctions or colorful language.

  The husband considered the query a moment. “Yes.” He nodded. “Yes, I did. I wanted her to look me in the eyes. She”—his voice quivered—“was so much smaller than me. I lifted her like a tiny doll.”

  “You see,” Burnett offered. “There’s the answer to the bruise on her leg.”

  But it didn’t explain the lack of bruising on her upper arms. To grab her, shake her, and lift her up, he had to be gripping her tightly. No matter that the Russian considered his wife small, s
he had been about Jess’s height and weight. A firm grip would have been necessary to lift her up to his eye level.

  And it still didn’t explain the shoes.

  “One last question, Mr. Mayakovsky.”

  Jess couldn’t wait to hear this one.

  “What made you decide to come forward now?”

  The husband took a moment to compose himself. His chest swelled with a big breath, then fell with the audible release. “I saw the news. I knew it was only a matter of time before you discovered what I had done. The announcement gave me the necessary courage to come forward with the truth.” He dropped his head and shook it, then lifted his gaze to Black. “I swear to God I did not mean to harm her.”

  Chief Black nodded. “Thank you, sir. That’s all the questions I have for now.” He pushed a notepad and paper across the table. “We like to get all statements in writing. You take your time and I’ll find you and Mr. Matheson some fresh coffee.”

  “And he nails it,” Burnett announced. “See, I told you Black had this under control.”

  Jess faked a smile. “It seems he does.” Except for the big glaring fact that the Russian was lying through his perfect white teeth.

  “Black and his people have this wrapped up. What do you say we catch an early dinner? We can hash out any misgivings you still have. You can bring me up to speed on the Simmons case.”

  Standing here now in this semidark booth with him not two feet away, she felt the distance widening between them.

  Had last week’s intensity prompted feelings that were only temporary? Maybe their shared past combined with the extreme emotions related to the missing girls and then the Player case had created an illusion of a connection that wasn’t real. Was this the new normal between them? Or was this the regret Black had suggested Burnett might begin to feel?

  “There’s a place over on Twenty-Ninth, Cappy’s,” Burnett continued. “Has the best burgers, wings, and ribs in town, according to just about everybody in the department. Something like forty kinds of beer. We can talk shop or we can just relax and forget about work.”

  The last time they had forgotten about work, they had spent about twenty-four hours in her bed. This was certainly a drastic turnaround. Chitchat at a cop hangout.