Then he lowered the gun and stepped through the doorway.
Rica followed.
The air in the bedroom was stale and suffocating. A gaunt blond man wearing only stained Jockey shorts was curled in the fetal position on the bed. His scrawny arms were tucked in close to his body, encompassing drug paraphernalia as if he had gathered it near him because it might save instead of kill him.
Mrs. Masters screamed, “Raymond!” Once. It might have been heard all over the neighborhood. Then she bolted from the scene, which seemed an odd thing for a mother to do.
As Rica hurried to the phone in the living room, putting on a show for the woman even though her son was obviously dead, she caught a glimpse of Mrs. Masters in the kitchen, pouring gin from a bottle into a glass with trembling hands.
“The deal is,” said Stack to acting MR Squad Commander O’Reilly, “we’ve pretty much come to the wall on this case.”
O’Reilly, who was standing with his hands clasped behind his back and pretending to gaze out his office window, shook his head in denial and turned around. “Doesn’t sound right to me, Stack. We got Mr. Prominent Citizen burned like a log in his kitchen, and we’re gonna let it slide?”
“If we’ve got no choice,” Stack said. “We have no logical suspect and we’re out of moves. Raymond Masters might have helped us, or even been involved, but he’s dead and not talking.”
Rica, standing off to the side and behind Stack, thought she’d better come to his rescue before he got into it heavy with O’Reilly. “We’ve followed all the leads, sir,” she said in a reasonable tone. “Danner’s friends, coworkers, girlfriend, neighbors…Nobody has a clue or can give us a clue as to why he was murdered.”
“And the truth is,” Stack said, “Danner wasn’t that much of a prominent citizen. A well-paid attorney with a middlin’-size midtown firm.”
“What about the twenty thou you found in his safe?”
“It isn’t that much money.”
“But has it been explained?”
Rica thought she could imagine a thou explanations.
“No” Stack admitted.
“Maybe he bet a winner at the track,” Rica suggested. Stack glared at her.
O’Reilly seemed not to have heard her. He was back at the window, posing and gazing at some imagined horizon. “The girlfriend,” he said, then turned around and slid down into his desk chair—Vandervoort’s chair. He looked up at them as if he’d said something profound. “Helen whazzer-name.”
“Sampson,” Rica said.
“Stay on the girlfriend,” O’Reilly said. “You tie up some poor bastard and light him on fire, then stand over him with an umbrella so he don’t go out, I’d say that’s a crime of passion. Check the girlfriend, see if she’s going out with some other guy now and was maybe two-timing Danner.”
“The way we read the relationship,” Stack said, “it was between two people who’d been around and wouldn’t get their underwear all twisted up if one or the other happened to see someone else. Maybe they’d argue and split, but hardly set each other on fire.”
“Who told you about the relationship?”
“Helen Sampson,” Rica chimed in, not wanting Stack to have to say it.
O’Reilly smiled broadly, his pockmarked face creasing in the morning light. “So stay on the girlfriend.” He motioned with a sweeping motion of his arm at his cluttered desk. “Now I got goddamn paperwork, if you’ll excuse me. I don’t know how the hell Vandervoort kept up with this shit.”
“Part of the job, I guess,” Stack said noncommittally. But it seemed to aggravate O’Reilly.
“Stay on the girlfriend,” he said again, as Stack and Rica left the office, “even if it takes weeks.”
“The girlfriend,” Rica said, when they were out in the hall.
Stack didn’t answer her. She knew he was pissed off, and it amused her.
She knew it shouldn’t, but it did.
TEN
February 2002
Where the hell was Sharon?
She’d gone out over an hour ago to get a pedicure in Shear Ecstasy, the salon just off the lobby of the Bennick Tower, where the Lucettes lived in a fortieth-floor apartment. She should have been back before now, even waddling in her open sandals, balls of cotton tucked between her toes to keep them from rubbing together and smearing wet nail polish.
The heat was running behind today, and the luxury apartment was uncomfortably cool. For some reason sound was penetrating more than usual, the blasting of car and truck horns, the occasional roar of a bus at the stop near the corner. A police or fire department siren was screaming shrilly nearby, as if the vehicle was unable to move and protesting vociferously, adding to Dr. Ronald Lucette’s aggravation, and his anger. Had Sharon opened a window and forgotten to close it? It had happened before.
But the doctor wasn’t really upset with his wife Sharon. The object of his anger was one of his patients, Lillian Tuchman. So the woman’s navel was a few centimeters off to the left. What did she expect, after he’d performed liposuction and a tummy tuck on a 250-pound woman? It wasn’t as if he’d messed up Gwyneth Paltrow. What were Lillian Tuchman’s postoperation plans, anyway, to enter a bikini contest?
But he knew what her postoperation plans were: she was suing Dr. Lucette and New Beginnings Cosmetic Surgery Center for two million dollars. New Beginnings had a law firm on retainer, but as Dr. Lucette’s partners pointed out, the new, almost slim Lillian Tuchman was a woman not in a mood to compromise. She had already refused a nuisance settlement offer of $100,000, and her lawyers were hinting that there were intimations of sexual misconduct while she was under anesthetic.
Thinking about that last absurd charge made Dr. Lucette more than simply angry—he was outraged. Never had he touched a patient improperly under any circumstances, much less in a brightly lighted OR full of assistants. The charge would never stick!
But he knew better than to be so certain of such matters. Any charge might stick in court. Juries were more and more unpredictable, and if you were rich, as Dr. Lucette had to admit he was, jurors considered you fair game, one of the enemy caught in the sights of the common man. The jurors would be much like Lillian Tuchman herself, rather than Dr. Lucette. In the minds of people like Lillian Tuchman, the rich existed only to be envied, cursed, and plucked—unless of course they could be joined.
Dr. Lucette got up from where he was sitting in his soft green leather armchair and went into the bathroom. He stood at the basin and washed his hands in a way so practiced that he thought little about his actions as he studied his haggard face in the mirror. He was sixty-two now and looked fifty, meaning he was almost ready for another eye operation and forehead lift. There wasn’t much more he could do about his thinning gray hair. Growth stimulants didn’t seem to work for him, and within another few years he’d be one of those men who plastered strands of hair sideways over the tops of their skulls so they looked like lines drawn with a felt-tip pen. Well, perhaps there would be advances in the field of toupees.
He suddenly realized several minutes had passed and he was still soaping and scrubbing his hands. He’d been doing too much of that kind of thing lately. Nerves? Or a developing compulsive disorder? Obsessive compulsion ran in the Lucette family on his mother’s side. He’d had a cousin, Herbie, who had actually scrubbed all the hair from the backs of his hands with a coarse brush.
He grimaced and turned off the water, then dried his hands roughly on a nearby towel. Not obsessive compulsion! he assured himself. Nerves! He sure as hell had plenty to be nervous about. His daughter, Minerva,