i 9fb2c9db4068b52a (10 page)

The door to the penthouse stood ajar. Claudia pushed it open and walked into the foyer. A folded Louis Vuitton overnight bag and black attaché stood against the wall. Atop the attaché was a white business envelope with her name written in handwriting she recognized as Ivan’s. Before stuffing it into her purse she automatically assessed the large, right-slanted, loopy script:
Overemotional, highly reactive, quick to jump to conclusions.
That was the Ivan she had come to know.

“Ivan,” she called. “Let’s go!”

No response. She raised her voice a few notches. “Ivan! Come on, it’s late.”

She was struck, suddenly, by the overwhelming stillness of the place. It felt almost as though the apartment were holding its breath.

Where
is
Ivan?

Still on the phone? Probably in Lindsey’s office where he couldn’t hear her. Passing a large arrangement of fresh funeral lilies on a table in the foyer, Claudia paused to check out the gift card. The logo on the envelope matched the florist’s truck behind which she had parked the Jag. The delivery person must have taken a service elevator, or she would have run into him on the way up.

In the living room, a single dim lamp in a distant corner cast more shadows than light. Just enough light to reveal a half-dozen or so large moving boxes. Claudia crossed to the spiral staircase and began to ascend, calling Ivan’s name again.

A few steps before she reached the second floor landing, she was halted by the sound of a yell, a muffled thud, a crash. The sounds came from below, deep in the apartment.

Ivan!

Adrenaline surged through muscles paralyzed by fear and sent Claudia racing the rest of the way up to the landing, her mind filled with one thought:
get help.

Fumbling in her purse in the dark corridor, she came to the awful realization that she’d left her cell phone in the car.

Lindsey’s office had a phone. She felt her way along the wall until she reached the door that she believed was the office where she had spent the morning. Locked.

Shit!

With as much caution as her shaking legs would allow, Claudia started back down the stairs. The sound of running feet below halted her once again, raising the fine hairs on her arms.

Someone was following the path she had taken through the living room, not bothering to cover the sound of heavy feet thumping across the foyer’s terrazzo floor.

Claudia stood still, straining for any sound. The silence was complete, except for the pulsing of her own heart in her ears. Dropping to her knees, she crawled to the banister and looked down. A man stood near the bottom of the staircase, his back to her, listening. Oily black hair, dark, long-sleeved shirt and trousers. Average height. Claudia held her breath.

Please don’t come upstairs!

A weapon—she needed a weapon—although God knew if she’d have the guts to use one. Even spiders got a second chance in her house.

His sudden movement took her by surprise. She’d lost sight of him. Had he gone out the door, or back the way he’d come?

Claudia counted to one hundred. Hearing nothing, she tiptoed back down to the first floor and into the living room. What had happened to Ivan? Apprehension twanged along nerves as taut as piano wire as she scanned the room. Her eyes lit on a cut-crystal ashtray on an end table. She picked it up, hefting it in her right hand. Heavy enough to do some serious damage if it connected with a vulnerable spot.

Treading silently on spotless white carpeting, she took the direction Ivan’s cry had seemed to come from, making her way past the sofa where she and Zebediah had sat chatting with Kelly after the funeral, past the doors to the deck where they had savored the view.

In the dining room, Claudia took in the empty breakfront, the blank spaces on the walls where artwork had hung. The moving boxes that had been torn open, their contents scattered, as if someone had been searching for something. A chair lying on its side.

A door neatly concealed in the wallpaper pattern stood open. She paused there, listening to the silence.

What the hell am I doing?

Behind the door was a utility corridor. Clutching the ashtray like a pitcher winding up for the throw, Claudia took a deep breath and forced herself to keep moving forward.

Hoping her sneakers would mask her footfalls on the unglazed floor, she eased into the shadows and crept along the wall, toward the rectangle of light at the end of the passage.

A spray of blood arced across the wall, splattering glass-fronted kitchen cabinets with crimson, like the work of some macabre graffiti artist. From the floor, the telephone handset emitted an insistent “off-the-hook” beep-beep-beep. A bloody handprint smeared the stainless steel refrigerator door.

Claudia’s horrified gaze registered the carnage, bile surging into her throat.

Don’t get sick. Keep your mind blank. Don’t get sick. Don’t think.
The mantra pulsed in her head as she swallowed hard to keep from heaving.

A seven-foot island dominated the center of the kitchen, blocking her view. She edged along it and turned the corner. The ashtray slipped from her hand and the puny weapon crashed on unforgiving terra cotta tile. “Holy Christ.”

Ivan lay on his side, his head bathed in a scarlet halo. His knees were drawn up in fetal position, one arm defensively covering his face.

Can anyone lose that much blood and still be alive?

Fighting nausea, Claudia did her best to avoid the gore, and crouched on her heels beside him. Gently, she removed Ivan’s arm away from his face and pressed her fingers to his throat. Almost dizzy with relief when a pulse quivered under her touch.

“Ivan,” she murmured. “It’s Claudia. Can you hear me?
”

Ivan’s eyelids fluttered. His mouth moved, emitting a few meaningless sounds. Abruptly, he turned his face away from her, exposing blood-matted hair and flesh the texture of tenderized meat.

Claudia had a sudden, sharp recollection from a high-school first-aid class: head injuries were the bloodiest of all, and often deadly. But it didn’t take a trained nurse to recognize that Ivan needed expert help. Fast.

“Ivan, I’m going to call 911.” Straightening, she shakily silenced the still-beeping phone, not at all sure that Ivan was able to comprehend her words.

“A man’s been attacked,” Claudia told the dispatcher, hearing her voice rising in panic. “He’s unconscious, he’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Calm down, ma’am.”

“His head’s bleeding. There was a man...”

“Ma’am?” The dispatcher’s voice was stern. “I need you to be calm. Now, are you safe? Where’s the assailant?”

How in God’s name am I supposed to be calm while I’m standing in a sea of blood, watching a man’s life trickle away?

“I’m not sure, but I think he’s gone.”

“Okay, ma’am, they’re on their way. Now, I want you to look for some clean towels so we can try and stop the bleeding.”

Claudia took the phone with her and began to search drawers and cabinets. She found a stack of clean dishtowels and carefully wadded them under Ivan’s head, Kelly’s tale of showing up here on the night of Lindsey’s death, and Ivan’s innuendo about Zebediah, hammering away at her as she worked. Neither of them was capable of this kind of violence; she would stake her own life on it.

The electric hum of the utility clock seemed as loud as a thou-sand-kilowatt generator, ticking the minutes away in slow motion. The refrigerator motor cycled on and off as always, as though a vicious crime had not been committed right in front of it. Ordinary kitchen sounds; things you never usually notice.

Shouldn’t something be different?

The 911 dispatcher was still talking, but Claudia wasn’t listening. Mutely, she laid the phone on the counter and leaned against the doorjamb. The tears came then, hot, and in a rush. She bent over, hands on knees, rocking a little as emotion poured out in ragged sobs. For a minute or two, she let herself go. Finally, exhausted, she tore off a paper towel, wiped her nose on it, and told herself she should turn on more lights for the paramedics.

She went around the apartment flipping switches, turning knobs, until all the downstairs rooms glowed as bright as daylight. But all the light in the world couldn’t blot out the scene in the kitchen.

Returning to Ivan’s side, Claudia felt like a rubbernecker on the highway, slowing to gawk at a horrible crash, denying what her eyes were telling her. She stroked his arm, murmured reassuring words, though she was worried about the thin trickle of blood that seeped from his ear.

Suddenly, his body spasmed, arms and legs jerking. He twisted away from her, exposing a small object lying on the floor beneath him. It looked like a miniature cigarette lighter with a plastic cap covering one end, which Claudia knew would plug into the USB port of a computer.

A flash drive—a miniature but powerful storage device for electronic media. She stared at it, her mind buzzing, yet strangely anaesthetized.

A loud shout came from the living room, announcing the arrival of police.

Claudia called out her location. A moment later rapid footsteps came along the utility corridor. She stared down at the flash drive in her hand, hesitating for an instant, then dropped it into her purse.

The lead detective strolled in at close to one in the morning with the casual air of a man who feels no sense of urgency and no great concern for his witness’s shaken sensibilities. In fact, Claudia decided, with his open-necked shirt and Haggar sport coat, and the toothpick dangling from his lip, he looked as if he didn’t give a rat’s ass about much of anything.

Around six-two, fortyish. Broad-shouldered, untidy thick brown hair shot through with silver. A patrician nose and devilish eyebrows, the left one curved in a permanent question. An interesting face that gave away nothing.

He passed through the living room on his way to view the kitchen crime scene, nodding in Claudia’s direction, but not stopping to speak to her.

Before his arrival, one of the female patrol officers on the scene had taken Claudia down to the high-rise lobby to wait with the shaken guard at the front desk until the penthouse had been cleared. After they had made certain that no one was hiding in any of the rooms, she was escorted back upstairs to Lindsey’s apartment. Meantime, paramedics had arrived and loaded Ivan onto a gurney, talking to a doctor by cell phone as they performed emergency aid.

Claudia had offered to accompany Ivan to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, but the cops asked her to stick around and give them a statement, confining her to a sofa in the living room to await the arrival of the detective assigned to handle the investigation.

As she waited for the detective to finish his inspection and return to her, she heard the patrolmen repeating the litany of events she had related. A bark of laughter erupting as someone cracked a joke offended her. Nothing about this evening was even remotely amusing. The realization that gallows humor was the cop’s safety valve was cold comfort. The image of Ivan lying senseless in his own blood remained etched on the insides of her eyelids.

Maybe I can learn to sleep with my eyes open.

“Ms. Rose?”

She jerked awake, wondering for an instant where she was. A drop of drool had dried at the corner of her mouth. Blinking, she swiped at it with the back of her hand, embarrassed to be caught dozing, though the hour was late and she was exhausted.

The detective was leaning over her. “My name is Joel Jovanic. I’m in charge of the investigation. I need to ask you some questions.” His voice wasn’t unkind. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t really anything. Claudia couldn’t even identify a regional accent. She pulled herself from her sleepy sprawl into a more dignified position and took the hand he offered. “Is Ivan going to be okay?”

“He’s still unconscious. The next forty-eight hours seems to be the critical period.” Jovanic seated himself beside her on the sofa so they were almost knee-to-knee. “I’d like you to tell me everything you can remember.”

“I already told the other officers,” Claudia said, still feeling disoriented from the shock of the violence she had witnessed. “Can’t you get my statement from them? I don’t want to talk about it anymore tonight.”

His expression was serious, but she couldn’t help noticing the smile lines crinkling the corners of his eyes, contradicting the serious set of his mouth.

“If you don’t mind, ma’am, I’d like to hear it directly from you.” Jovanic took a small spiral notebook and black rollerball from his pocket, holding the pen in his left hand, ready to take notes. “What did you see when you first arrived?”

Through the cloud of fatigue, Claudia noted that small detail. A lefty. She raked her hair away from her face. “Does it matter if I mind?”

“A serious crime has been committed here, ma’am, and we need your help. The sooner we get the information, the sooner we’ll find out who’s responsible for the assault on your friend.”

Feeling like a jerk, she pulled herself together. “I got here a few minutes after ten. The front door was open, it was pretty dark, I...”

“It was dark?” Jovanic cut in. “Who turned on all the lights?”

“I did. When I first arrived, only that light over there was on. I didn’t want to sit here alone in the dark until your people showed up.”

Jovanic gave a non-committal grunt. “Yes, ma’am. Did you see anyone?”

“Not at first. I was trying to figure out where Ivan was. Then I heard him cry out and there was a loud noise, which I assume was him falling after having his head beaten in. I hid up on the second floor landing. Then I heard someone running, but when I looked down, I could only see from behind.”

“What makes you so sure Mr. Novak was beaten?”

“I don’t... I don’t know,” she said slowly, wishing she could go home, curl up in her bed and escape into sleep. “I didn’t hear a gunshot. All that blood... I just assumed...”

If she could see the detective’s handwriting, she would know how to handle him. She tried to sneak a peek, but he held his pad at an angle, out of her line of sight.
Probably a block printer.
Most cops were trained that way. Block printers tended to be unemotional, harder to get close to. Harder to read.