Last to Know (7 page)

“Yes, you would,” Rossetti said briskly; this was after all a police inquiry. He checked his notes again. “You ran from the house with your hair alight, dunked yourself in the lake, saved your own life, in fact.”

“I remember now, there was also a small boy,” Bea said. “He wanted to save me. So sweet, so very sweet. But it was you who loaded me into the helicopter.” She was looking at Harry.

Her wide-blue-eyed smile not only touched Harry’s heart but reached into the pit of his stomach. He had never met a girl quite like this; even in her shocked state with the loss of her mother looming he knew she would be the kind of good polite woman who later would send a thank-you note written in her own hand, not simply a printed card. Whatever the mother might have been, she seemed to have raised her daughter properly.

“Please,” Bea said softly, “you have to help me.”

“Anything we can do, miss—er, ma’am.” Rossetti stumbled over his words, succumbing to her charm, making Harry smile too.

“Detective Rosssetti is correct, Ms. Havnel,” he said. “Just tell us what we can do for you.”

Throwing back the covers, Bea slid out of bed. Clutching the short flowered hospital gown around her, she stood silently, all long white legs, long blond hair wisping over her shoulders. There was something eerily childlike about her yet Harry had the gut feeling she knew exactly who she was as a woman, and how to use the power of her gentle beauty.

Now she turned that full power on him. “You came to tell me about my mother,” she said. “I know she’s dead. I was with her when it happened. I just wanted to know if you’d found her body.”

She was shivering and Harry reached for the terry bathrobe hanging behind the door and put it around her shoulders. She seemed to sink into it, then sink into the chair Rossetti held out for her.

“Tell us how it happened,” Harry said gently, standing directly in front of her. Rossetti stood to one side. They were in the classic interrogation positions of “good cop, bad cop,” though neither of them believed they were interviewing a criminal. Bea Havnel was a victim.

Bea clasped her hands in her white terrycloth lap. “My mother’s name is Lacey Havnel. She is fifty-four years old. I am twenty-one. My father…” She hesitated, looking embarrassed. “Well, the truth is there never really was a father, at least not one I ever met. There were always men with my mother but never a father.” She smiled hesitantly up at Harry. “I had to learn to fend for myself. Especially with a mother like mine.”

“Like what, exactly?” Harry asked.

Bea seemed to think for a moment, then she shrugged. “If you’d ever seen my mother I believe you would know what I mean. She was wild. ‘Flirtatious’ would be a kind word. Oh God,” she wailed in sudden despair. “The truth is my mother was a mess! She drank too much. She abused alcohol. She’d been in rehab many times, and was doing drugs whenever she could get her hands on them.” She lifted her eyes and stared from one man to the other. “What do you think caused the explosion anyway?”

Harry shrugged while Rossetti stared silently at his neatly filed fingernails.

Bea answered for them. “It was methamphetamine. She knew how to make crystal meth. It’s so simple even I could have done it. Not that I would of course.” She glanced up at them again. “She had a friend. His name is Divon. I never knew his last name. I never really knew him at all but she went out with him, partied with him … he got her the fixings, taught her how to make it.”

“And where were you when all this was going on?”

Harry’s question seemed to take Bea by surprise. “Why, I was just … home … I guess. Holding the fort, you might say.”

“You were not in college? Working at a job?”

“I dropped out of college after a year. Mom needed me. She was in rehab again, killing herself with all this other stuff.”

“What other ‘stuff’ exactly?” Rossetti focused in on her again and Bea gave him that wide blue-eyed look again.

“You name it, she used it. The first I remember as a kid is cocaine. There was always bags of it around, little piles on coffee tables with rolled-up ten-dollar bills just waiting to scoop it up.”

“You never tried it?” Harry’s tone was neutral but he knew she sensed his skepticism.

“You forget, I grew up with this. I saw what it did to people. One thing I will never touch in my life, Detective Jordan, is drugs.”

Remembering what she had said about her mother’s promiscuity, Harry wondered if she had the same negative reaction to men as she did to drugs.

“It’s funny,” Bea was saying now, smiling as though indeed it was something amusing she was about to tell them. “I always thought she would blow herself up with the meth; the ingredients are notoriously volatile. But you know what really started it?”

They stared silently at her, waiting for her to tell them.

“My mother smoked, Detective Jordan. She also liked her hair in a bouffant style, back-combed, piled up on top, and sprayed firmly into place. She’d gotten all dressed up in this sparkly top and white pants, she’d put on her lipstick, her lashes, arranged the hair. I can see her now, sitting back in her chair looking at herself in the mirror, misting her hair from the spray can. And then she lit a cigarette.”

“And…?”

Bea Havnel looked up at the two of them and said, “And then the hairspray ignited and she just sort of went up in flames. Then everything else caught fire and I was running out of there. And then the meth exploded…”

“Jesus,” Rossetti said.

“Your hair was on fire,” Harry said. “You threw yourself into the lake…”

“Actually it was a wig, my mother made me wear it when she could no longer stand looking at her young blond daughter.”

Bea’s tone was bitter, the first time Harry had heard that.

“I was trying to get the wig off, I burned my wrist.” She showed the bandage. “It must have come off in the water when I fell in.”

Harry thought the story about the wig was odd, and besides she had not “fallen in,” but he let that pass. He was simply glad she had survived without major burns. He reminded himself to ask if the wig had been found, washed up maybe near the house. As a detective he was used to checking every piece of relevant information, nothing against Bea Havnel, who he now had to help.

“Thank you for telling us. You were very brave,” he said gently.

“What will happen to me now? Am I going to be arrested?”

“On what charge?”

“Well, you know, sort of … accessory to drugs, her death. Isn’t that what usually happens?”

“Only under suspicious circumstances,” Rossetti hastened to reassure her.

Bea smoothed the terry robe and gave him that smile. “What will I do now, then?”

“I’ll call social services,” Harry told her. “They’ll fix you up tomorrow, take care of you, get you some clothes, find you a place to stay.”

“Oh, please,” Bea said quickly. “There’s money. Just book me into the Ritz-Carlton. I’ll ask one of the nurses to rush out to Target, pick up a few things for me. Target’s so good,” she added, solemn now. “They have everything. I always shop there.”

Harry was surprised that she had money of her own. “And what about relatives, Miss Havnel? Who should we call, ask to come and look after you?”

“I have no relatives.” Bea looked astonished he had even asked. “I don’t even have friends. We never stayed in one place long enough, and also because of my mother, you see. I mean, nobody ever wanted to know me … except maybe that nice woman across the lake, the one with the lovely family. Rose Osborne. She always had a smile and a wave. I used to watch that family. Roman, the twins, Diz, I envied them … I thought they were like real people.”

Lost in thoughts of a family she had never had, Bea looked infinitely sad. Tears stood in her eyes. “I wish I could live with them,” she said suddenly. “The Osbornes. They are my ideal.”

Looking at the pathetic child-woman standing in front of him, wrapped in the voluminous folds of the too-big terry robe and with that lost look in the back of her wide blue eyes, Harry wondered if he could do something about that. The Osbornes’ busy, bustling family house would be a better place than a hotel room for a recently bereaved young woman, alone in the world.

He and Rossetti said goodbye and walked away, then his phone buzzed. “Yeah?” He clamped it between chin and shoulder, turning to wave to the girl. Rossetti marched alongside him, phone also in hand, checking with the precinct. Then, “Jesus,” Harry said. “Okay, we’ll be right there.”

Rossetti looked inquiringly at him.

“They found Lacey Havnel’s body near the house an hour ago, it’s on its way to the coroner now.”

“Bingo.” Rossetti grinned, high-fiving. “Now we can wrap this whole thing up and let that young woman get on with her life.”

“Maybe,” Harry said, heading for his car, but then Rossetti always thought Harry stuck to the noncommittal until he was super-sure of his facts. That’s what made him a good detective.

“Except this time,” Harry said, “there’s a knife sticking out of her right eye. We’re looking at murder, Rossetti.”

*   *   *

The cold white room at the morgue was lined with refrigerated steel cabinets where bodies were stored pending autopsy and release for burial. If there was an ongoing investigation, as there was now, the body could be stored indefinitely.

Rossetti turned up his coat collar. “I hate this part,” he muttered, standing next to Harry in front of the wall of cabinets, each with a label giving the name of the deceased. If it was known, that is. Often it was not.

Lacey Havnel however had not yet graduated to a cabinet. She lay on one of the metal tables, zipped into a dark-blue plastic body bag under which Rossetti could make out her toes and the bump that was her head. He thought she looked very small under that plastic.

Murdered bodies were never a pretty sight but this time Harry had to stop himself from drawing in a shocked breath as the assistant unzipped and he found himself looking at the charred flesh and the staring still-open left eye of the woman who was Bea Havnel’s mother. A knife, approximately six inches long, protruded from the right eye socket. The flesh of the forehead was burned black, her hair was gone, and the rest of the face was unrecognizable as that of a woman.

“She might be anybody,” Rossetti said, turning away. “How do we know she’s who we think she is?”

“We won’t until we confirm dental records,” the assistant said.

“She was found just outside the burning house,” Harry told him. “Bea told us her hair was in flames and that she had run.”

“She didn’t tell us about the knife in her eye.” Rossetti’s gaze met Harry’s. “Tell me now, Detective, why did she not tell us that little detail? And anyhow, why would anyone knife a woman already burning to death?”

Harry looked again into the open staring left eye of Bea Havnel’s mother. “Who the fuck knows,” he said.

The police photographers had already taken pictures at the scene, now they came to photograph the body in detail. One more gruesome fact that Harry would not tell her daughter.

“I’m certain drugs are involved,” he said to Rossetti. “One way or another. And our first task, Detective, is to find who Divon is and exactly where he is.”

Rossetti stalked thankfully outside with Harry.

“That was an old kitchen knife in her eye,” Harry said, “A Wusthof.” As a cook himself, Harry knew about knives and had a collection of which he was proud. “It takes a lot of force to stab somebody, you need to put a lot of weight behind it.”

“Even in the eye?”

“Our killer may not have been aiming for the eye, maybe Lacey Havnel moved, tried to get away and that’s just where he happened to get her.”

“Lucky him.” Rossetti hunched into his coat collar, still cold. “The question is why.”

“Find Divon,” Harry said, “and we’ll find out.”

13

Paris

Mal knew it was trouble when instead of the text with the flight information she got a phone call.

She was back in Paris, sitting at a tiny faux-marble table in the Café Les Deux Magots on boulevard Saint-Germain, peacefully occupying herself looking at the small stone church in the square opposite, which she knew to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest in Paris, which information gave her a nice sense of history and of being part of a greater scheme of things. If only it were not for the phone ringing. Of course it was Harry.

“What?” she asked, knowing it was trouble.

“You know what,” Harry said. “Mal, it was unavoidable, I’d just finished talking to you when right before my eyes the house on the opposite bank burst into flames, and this girl with her hair on fire threw herself into the lake.”

“And the brave detective rescued her.”

“To serve and protect, that’s the police motto.”

Mal listened while he told the whole story. Then, “Tell me something, Harry Jordan.” She signaled the waiter to bring another glass of the champagne with which she had been celebrating Harry’s imminent arrival. Now she might as well drown her sorrows in it.

She said, “Tell me, Harry, do you find trouble? Or does it always just find you? And anyway, since you’ve already rescued the female swimmer with her hair on fire and I assume the house has burned down, what’s stopping you getting on that flight to Paris?”

Harry held the phone away from his ear; he knew he should just get on a flight to Paris, that’s what he should do. But, “Her mother burned to a crisp,” he said flatly.

“Oh, oh.” Mal was crushed, she felt small in the face of such disaster. “I hope the girl will be all right.”

“She’s a survivor,” Harry said.

It wasn’t what he said but the tone of voice when he said it that raised Mal’s female antennae. “I’ll bet she’s blond and nineteen,” she said, taking a swig of the fresh champagne, suddenly very much aware of being a woman alone in Paris, again. For a while, knowing Harry was coming to join her, she had lost that feeling. Now it was back in full force.

“Twenty-one,” Harry told her.

The cute guy she’d noticed earlier at the next table caught Mal’s eye and smiled. He looked so attractively French: lean, dark, mid-thirties, in jeans and an impeccable tweedy jacket, it even had leather elbow patches; and with a scarf tied that certain way all Frenchmen tied their scarves. Fuck it, she didn’t have to sit here and wait for Harry Jordan to get his ass on a flight, to join her in her petite Left Bank hotel room, to make love to her … she could trade him in for this French guy right now.