Prime Suspect

by Maggie Price

  “What area of town?”

  A.J. gave a location in the far northwest part of the city. “Out in the sticks, basically. Sawyer was a marathon runner who jogged up to twenty miles at a time. The place she died was about the halfway point on her regular workout route.” A.J.’s brows drew together in concentration as she paced. “If I remember right, her husband said she could do a mile in something around eight minutes.”

  Michael gave a soft whistle, his eyes following A.J.’s progress from one end of the small room to the other. “Not world-class, but a time like that would leave most people eating dust.”

  “That tells you what kind of physical shape she was in.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Multiple stab wounds.” Whirling, A.J. walked to the table where she turned the file folder in Michael’s direction. She flipped to the autopsy report which showed a frenzied assault directed toward the woman’s left chest. Beneath her hands, A.J. could almost feel the suspect’s rage rise off the page. “Sawyer put up a big fight. Her legs, arms and hands were covered with defense wounds. But her fingers were left intact.”

  Michael’s eyes whipped up to meet hers. “Go on.”

  “The polish on Sawyer’s fingers is a deep red,” A.J. continued. “Her toenails are painted a frosted pink color.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “I think so,” A.J. said as she fanned the photographs across the table. “You can see the different polish colors in the morgue shots. I noticed it when I first reviewed the file, but I figured Sawyer had polished her fingernails with a different color and hadn’t bothered with her toenails.” Leaning across the table, she pointed at a picture of the victim’s hands, then searched until she found one of the feet and placed the photos side by side. “It’s something a man probably wouldn’t notice. But a woman would. I’ve done the same thing myself when I was in a hurry. If I’m not wearing sandals, nobody knows my polish doesn’t match.”

  “You think the guy took the time to paint her fingernails after he killed her?”

  “The man who murdered Dianna Westfall did.”

  “Was Sawyer raped?”

  “Yes,” A.J. answered. “Prior to death.”

  Michael remained silent for a moment, then said, “Dianna Westfall and Laura Sawyer both died of stab wounds. By the look of these photos, both women were similar in build. Both had auburn hair—”

  “And the polish on their fingernails was the same shade of red. Reentry Red,” A.J. said, the mounting comparisons quickening her pulse.

  “Fingernail polish. I’ll be damned.” Michael smiled as he said it, an unmistakable undertone of admiration in his voice. “Let’s put your theory to the test, A.J. What about forensics?”

  She tossed back her hair and shoved up the sleeves of her sweater. “I didn’t have a chance to check the lab report on Sawyer before you came in.” With quick efficiency, she flipped through the thick sheaf of reports. When she got to the last one, she lifted a palm. “Not here. Damn.”

  “You’ll have to get Sky to pull up the report on the lab computer. Have her compare their findings on Sawyer with what she’s got on Westfall. Tell her this takes priority.”

  A.J. looked at her watch. “I’m not sure Sky will be here yet.”

  “She’s here. We pulled Billy Hollis in about three this morning. I called Sky in to take blood and hair samples.”

  “Oh.”

  Michael raised a hand to rub his unshaven chin. It wasn’t his usual casual gesture, A.J. realized. It was one of fatigue. Instinctively she searched his face. The inadequate wash of light from above had helped mask the shadows she now saw beneath his eyes.

  “You’ve been up most of the night?” she asked.

  “All night.” His lips curved. “Comes with the job. I’ll catch up when all this is over.”

  A.J. nodded, looking back at the file. “What about Hollis? Do we know yet if his samples matched those from his aunt’s crime scene?”

  “They didn’t. His blood type is O. Dianna’s killer has AB.” Michael glanced away for a moment. “We had to cut Hollis loose a couple of hours ago.”

  “So, we’re back to square one.”

  “If you’re right and the same guy killed Sawyer and Westfall, we’re back to a whole different square one,” Michael commented.

  Leaning alongside him, A.J. began gathering up the photographs. “Do you want me to wait at the lab while Sky checks things out?”

  Michael’s hand settled lightly over hers, stilling her movements. “A.J., we need to talk. Something came up during Hollis’s interview.”

  “What?” She turned her head, and found herself eye to eye and mouth to mouth with Michael. His fingers curled around hers, sending heat creeping into her cheeks. One touch and the wall she’d built to keep him out began to shake.

  For an insane, unthinking moment, she wanted him to kiss her as he’d done before. No, she corrected, as her lashes fluttered against her cheeks. Not like before, when his lips had been gentle, savoring. Now she ached to feel the passion, the same fierce, urgent need in him that threatened to engulf her.

  She opened her mouth but couldn’t speak. Not while she couldn’t breathe. Not while her heart refused to beat.

  “We need to get together later,” Michael said.

  “I...I’ll be here all day.”

  “Away from here, someplace where we can talk. We need to talk about Hollis.”

  If either of them leaned in, their lips would touch. The thought made her heart stick in her throat. With a tug of longing, she realized all she had to do was close the space between them....

  She jerked her hand from beneath his. God, what was she thinking? What the hell was she thinking? She took a step backward. Her stomach did a slow roll when Michael rose off the table and moved with her.

  “We’ve got one hell of a problem here, A.J.”

  She pulled off her glasses. “I know. If Sky links these cases—”

  His hand came up, his fingers feathered against her chin, forcing her gaze to his. “I’m talking about what’s going on between us.” In the dim light, Michael’s eyes shone like lightly tarnished silver.

  “There...can’t be anything between us.” She turned and began shuffling the photos into a clumsy stack. Her face was on fire, her heart pounded in her ears.

  Michael stood motionless at her side, the silence between them lengthening until it seemed to A.J. that an eon had passed.

  “You’re right,” he agreed softly. “There can’t be anything between us. But you and I know there damn well is. And I think it’d be incredibly naive on both our parts to pretend that things will stay the way they are now after Ken’s case is resolved.”

  “Ken’s and my case, you mean,” she said, then slowly turned, giving him a long, level look. “And what if it’s never resolved? What if you never find proof one way or another, to clear the Duncan case?”

  “Then it continues—”

  “And so do your doubts. About Ken. And me.”

  At the far end of the room the door swung open, admitting a wedge of bright light and a sleepy-faced detective.

  “Lieutenant, there’s a DEA agent—Demenchi, Delmonte—something like that, looking for you. I told him to wait in your office.”

  “DiMaiti,” Michael said, giving the detective a glance across his shoulder. “I’m on my way.” He looked back at A.J., his eyes somber. “Let me know what Sky finds on the jogger case.”

  “I will.”

  When he was gone, she sagged against the table. It was a long time before the hard, thick throbbing of her pulse slowed.

  “They cut his tongue out by the roots, Mike,” Tony DiMaiti said over the rim of his coffee mug. “Left the damn thing in Hollis’s pocket. That’ll make the other street slime think twice about squealing on the big boys.”

  Michael’s thoughts went back to the early morning hours when Billy Hollis sat in the grimy interview room, his fear of being charged with his aunt’s murder so intense
you could smell him sweat. Shaken to the bone from having pictures of his mutilated aunt shoved under his nose, the man had offered to work a deal. Hell, he’d begged for the chance to tell all he knew about Benito Penn and Benito’s boss, Snowman.

  Snowman. As he’d stood watching the interrogation through two-way glass, Michael had felt his spine go rigid as Ken Duncan’s words played in his mind. I’m into something... need help getting out. Has to do with a dealer named Snowman. I’ve got evidence to turn over.

  Michael had stared into Hollis’s face, his cop’s instincts telling him that Dianna Westfall’s streetwise drug-dealing nephew held the key to the Duncan investigation.

  The man had been busting a gut to talk, yet in the space of ten minutes he’d clammed up and screamed for a lawyer. Ten minutes. That had been just long enough for Sky Milano—accompanied by Helene St. John—to draw a vial of Hollis’s blood. What had happened in those ten minutes to change the man’s mind?

  “You still with me, Mike?”

  “Yeah.” Michael propped his elbows on his desk and gave Tony a bleak look. “We had him. Hollis was ready to tell everything he knew about Benito Penn and Snowman, then all of a sudden he clammed up.” Michael’s hands clenched into fists. “Dammit, how long have we been looking for a lead on that bastard, Snowman?”

  “Since someone blew Ken Duncan away.”

  Michael stared across the desk. Tony DiMaiti was another of the growing list of law enforcement personnel whom Billy Hollis’s arrest had dragged out of bed. The DEA agent’s brown hair showed signs of a wind combing; his jeans and flannel shirt looked suspiciously as if they’d been pulled from the bottom of the laundry hamper. His eyes were bloodshot; he needed a shave. Michael figured he didn’t look much better.

  Tony cocked his head. “Speaking of Duncan, is there anything new on him?”

  “Plenty. I’ve got a mountain of circumstantial evidence that says he dumped on his badge. And a motive.”

  “Greedy bastard.”

  “Wrong. The guy didn’t want the money for himself. He needed to get his very likable aunt on a high-dollar cancer clinic’s waiting list.”

  “And,” Tony began, his eyes narrowing in thought, “one might ask, did the niece also take part in this so-called honorable attempt to save her aunt?”

  “One might ask that.”

  Tony leaned forward, his coffee mug cradled between his thick fingers. “Bet that was the first question out of your chief’s mouth when you told him.”

  “McMillan didn’t ask,” Michael said evenly. “Because I haven’t had a chance to bring him up to date.”

  “Okay, Mike. How about you? Have you asked yourself if A.J. was in on it?”

  Michael nodded slowly. “Only about a hundred times. Dammit, I just don’t think she had a clue what her brother was doing.”

  “You don’t think,” Tony echoed. “But you don’t know.”

  “That’s right. I don’t know.”

  Michael closed his eyes as the vision of A.J. leaning over the small table in the file room formed in his mind. He’d been intrigued, not just by the way her slender jeans had shown off her legs better than any miniskirt could. Her tense roaming of the room, the excited spark in her eyes as she performed the mental exercises that linked the homicides had entranced him. It was an aspect of A.J. Duncan he’d not seen before. An aspect that had attracted him as surely as if she’d stepped into his arms.

  “You’re unsure of her innocence, but you’re protecting her,” Tony said carefully. “Want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  Michael expelled a breath. “She’s gotten to me.”

  A slow smile formed beneath the agent’s scraggly mustache. “Excuse me, Lieutenant, could you repeat that? I thought you just admitted that a woman has gotten to you.”

  “You heard me, DiMaiti.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  Michael leaned in. “You enjoying yourself?”

  “Matter of fact, I am. I’ve got a right to. After all, I’m the guy who hauled you around for weeks after your divorce, listening to how you’d had it with the entire female population. ‘To hell with them all’ is how you put it right before you swore you’d never get involved again.”

  “Put a lid on it.”

  Chuckling, Tony rose and settled his mug on the corner of the desk. “I’ve got to check in at the office. I’ll let you know if we get anybody wanting to squeal about who offed Hollis. But don’t count on it. I don’t imagine anybody’ll be talking to the cops for a long time. Don’t blame ’em. I’m kind of partial to my own tongue, myself.”

  He paused, his eyes glinting as he hooked his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans. “Pop’s under the weather, so I’m subbing for him at the restaurant tonight. Why don’t you and A.J. drop by?”

  “Don’t push it, DiMaiti.”

  “In comparing hairs, we look for matches between pigment granules and their distribution.”

  A.J. peered through the lens of a comparison microscope at a lit field, divided in half. In the left field lay a hair from the suspect in the Westfall murder; the right field held a suspect hair found on one of Laura Sawyer’s bloody socks.

  Sky Milano sat on a stool opposite A.J., continuing her commentary while staring through a separate eyepiece. “Most of the time we can tell a person’s race but not sex by their hair.”

  Except for the two women bent over the microscope, the forensic lab with its U-shaped counters lined with beakers and test tubes was deserted this Saturday morning. A boxy instrument with dials and blinking red lights made a soft whirring noise. The evidence refrigerator beside the emergency shower clicked on and hummed.

  “With this scope we can do side-by-side comparisons of two objects at the same magnification.” Sky twisted a knob. “Now, I’ll scan the hairs and we’ll see how they compare.”

  A.J. nodded vaguely. To her untrained eye the hairs looked like long transparent worms with dark, fragmented spines.

  “You can easily distinguish variations in each hair’s microscopic characteristics,” Sky stated.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The structural features of the cortex of both hairs are similar. Ditto the medulla.”

  A.J. looked up, blinking to get her eyes into focus. “Are they from the same person?”

  Sky clicked off the scope and smiled. She’d taken off her thick glasses and for the first time A.J. was aware of the intense aquamarine color of the eyes that stared back at her.

  “Relax,” Sky said, patting her dark hair, lashed into its usual tight bun. “We’ve already checked the report on the jogger. Suspect had AB blood—same as the Westfall case. Probably the same guy.”

  “And the. hairs?” A.J. persisted.

  “They exhibit similar morphological characteristics.”

  A.J. linked her fingers prayerlike. “In English.”

  Smiling, Sky pulled her glasses out of her lab coat pocket. “I guess this means I should skip my standard dissertation on the amazing aspects of a hair’s cuticle.”

  “Only if you want me to stay awake.”

  “My money’s on one guy, with medium-length straight brown hair,” Sky said, sliding on her glasses. “He washes it regularly. Whoever cuts it uses a razor.”

  “Okay. You’re saying the same guy killed both Westfall and Sawyer?”

  “To know for sure we’ll have to do DNA tests on both samples and that’ll take time. All I can say right now is it’s probably the same guy.”

  “What guy?” Grant Pierce’s inquiring voice came from behind A.J. In the instant before she turned, she saw the chemist’s eyes spark behind her glasses.

  “What guy?” the detective repeated as he leaned his tall, muscled frame against a counter.

  A.J. slid off the stool. “No guy,” she said. Her next step was to report Sky’s findings to Michael. He would then advise the chief of the high probability that the same man killed Laura Sawyer and Dianna Westfall. If the press got wind of it before McMillan, there would
be hell to pay.

  Grant looked unconvinced. “Sure, keep me in the dark. And here I was, ready to tell you what just came in from dispatch.”

  Sky swept him a look behind her dark lashes. “Tell us, detective,” she coaxed softly.

  Grant flashed a careless smile. “Remember Dianna Westfall’s nephew?”

  “Billy Hollis. Type 0 blood.”

  “Yeah. Patrol found him in an alley. Someone caught him center shot to the chest with a .44.”

  A.J. frowned. “Didn’t he just get cut loose a couple of hours ago?”

  “Right,” Grant said with a shrug. “Too bad the scum wad decided to zip his lip about the drug stuff. He’d be in a cell right now, instead of headed for a morgue slab.”

  “That was the oddest thing,” Sky said to A.J. as she slipped the slides with the hairs off the microscope’s viewing surface. “Sam and Grant interviewed Hollis, had him singing like a church choir. Then Helene and I go in to take samples—”

  “Helene?” A.J. asked. “Why did Ryan call her in?”

  “I’m not sure he did,” the chemist said. “I think she heard on her scanner that patrol had picked Hollis up, so she just came on in. Anyway, she showed up, so Ryan sent her in with me. No doubt he hoped she’d keep Hollis’s mind off the matter of his rights—one being that he didn’t have to give us body samples. I got his blood okay, but all of a sudden he went ballistic.” Sky sighed. “Never did get any hairs.”

  “First time I’ve seen anyone lawyer-up like that,” Grant said. “One minute Hollis is ready to squeal like a kid on Christmas about Benito Penn and some dude called Snowman. The next thing I know—”

  “Snowman?” A.J. asked faintly. She placed a hand against the counter, unsure her legs would continue to support her.

  “Snowman,” Grant verified, then picked up where he’d left off. “Hollis starts screaming that he had rights and he wanted a lawyer.”