Authors: Kate Kinsey

Red (27 page)

BOOK: Red

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Chapter 30

“Sex” is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.

—M
ARQUIS DE
S
ADE

H
anson sent Griggs back to the office to deal with changing the APB to a black van, while he and Gina followed up on Quinn’s late-night rendezvous. They might not have Quinn’s phone, but they did have the name and number of his last coffee date.

“Stands to reason,” Hanson said, “that the next step would be a trip to his studio, right?”

“That’s how he usually worked,” Gina admitted.

Hanson had to hand it to her. Except for the occasional puckering of her brow and a slightly sour twist to her lips, Gina acted as if Quinn was just another case. She seemed utterly unfazed by either Maggie or the woman who now came scurrying into Starbucks like an amateur spy.

“Are you trying to ruin my life?” Angela Sabatta asked in an urgent whisper as she leaned across the table. “What do you want
now
?”

Her question was directed at Hanson, but it was Gina who responded.

“Tell us about meeting Quinn Lee at his studio last Sunday night.”

Her mouth fell open. She gaped at Gina, finally recovering enough to bristle.

“How did you know about that? And who the hell are you, anyway?”

“This is Ms. Larsen,” Hanson said. “She’s assisting the police in our investigation.”

Hanson wanted to tell Angela that she’d attract less attention if she’d stop glancing around the place like a crack addict looking for a dealer.

“So, you were there?” Gina asked, stirring sugar into her coffee.

“Yes,” she admitted sullenly. “It’s not illegal, is it?”

“You didn’t see it on the news?” Gina raised the cup to her lips and blew on it.

“See what?” Angela was annoyed. “I’ve been working twelve-hour shifts the last four days—”

“Quinn Lee was murdered.”

Angela stared first at Hanson, then at Gina.

“Murdered?” She paled. “He was the one—”

“So you did hear about it?” Gina asked.

“I heard there was another murder, but I didn’t realize—Oh, shit!”

Angela admitted that she’d gone to Quinn’s studio at eight o’clock that night to “play.”

“But that was it! We did
not
have sex—”

“Look,” Hanson said. “We don’t care whether you fucked him or not, but we’ve got three used condoms with your DNA on them. Don’t bother lying.”

They didn’t actually know if it was Angela’s DNA, but she didn’t know that.

“It insults our intelligence,” Gina said. “We don’t like being insulted, Angela.”

“All right, all right! We had sex. But I don’t know what happened to him after I left, and I don’t know who he was talking to on the phone—”

“He had a phone call?” Gina leaned forward, suddenly intent. “What did he say?”

Angela crossed her arms over her chest.

“I don’t know,” she whined, then glanced at the ceiling as if trying to remember. “He said hello . . . Then nice to hear from you, or something like that.”

Angela rolled her eyes.

“I figured it was some woman.”

“What made you think that?” Hanson asked.

“Just the tone in his voice.” Angela shrugged. “You know. All charming and shit.”

“What else did he say?” Hanson asked.

“He said he would be there for a little while longer. Then he listened, then he said yes, and then he hung up.”

“Did he say anything after he hung up?” Gina asked, staring into Angela’s face. “Anything about who he was talking to?”

“No. I was in a hurry to get out of there. I had to be at work for my shift at eleven.”

“All right,” Hanson said. “If you think of anything else, call us.”

Angela practically ran out of the coffee shop.

“Jesus,” he said, swigging the last of his latte. “Is everybody cheating?”

“Most of my clients are married men. They feel they can’t share that part of themselves with their wives. They’re too embarrassed. Some women feel the same way. It’s hard to admit to anyone that you want . . . what you want.”

Hanson felt a prickle of guilt but swallowed it away. Had Gina gone to Quinn in the same way as Angela Sabatta? Yearning for things she was afraid to ask for? But she had asked him. And he hadn’t been able to handle it.

He had to focus. He couldn’t let his brain go down these side roads.

“Miles put Quinn’s time of death between midnight and three a.m.,” he said. “It’s possible he’s off by an hour, but I don’t see Angela as a killer.”

“She feels too guilty over her cheating,” Gina said. “She couldn’t handle murder. She’s gonna spill her guts to her husband by the weekend.”

“So that still leaves us with a big question. Who the hell was he talking to?”

“It could be something totally unrelated. Quinn was always getting phone calls.”

Again, there was that missed beat between them, both of them intensely aware that she spoke from experience.

“I don’t know.” Hanson picked up the crumpled sweetener packets and shoved them into his empty cup. “I wish we had his phone.”

“Come on, Angela said he was talking to a woman. You already said women don’t kill that way.”

Hanson’s phone began vibrating. He answered it.

“Hanson . . . Yeah? Shit. Okay. Be there in fifteen.”

“What’s up?” Gina asked.

“A break-in at the lake house.”

“Where is she?” Hanson asked.

“She’s in the patrol car, sir.”

Hanson squinted at his badge. Officer Hill looked fresh out of the academy.

Then he turned and stared at the long wall that ran from the front door, past the kitchen, into the living room.

MINE was written in letters about a foot high, in what appeared to be blood.

“Surprisingly neat lettering,” Gina commented. “Not exactly the usual Helter-Skelter penmanship.”

“It’s the cat’s,” the other uniform—Officer Bowers, older and rounder than his partner—explained. “The blood, I mean.”

The cat was lying on the floor beneath the message.

Hanson hunkered down to get a better look.

“Looks like its throat was cut. Did anybody touch anything?”

Officer Hill looked uncomfortable.

“We came in first, you know, to check the house—”

“What do you mean, ‘first’?” Hanson demanded. “She left the house?”

“She had a doctor’s appointment,” Officer Bowers said, hitching his belt up onto his hips. “She’s under protection, not a prisoner.”

Hanson sighed.

“We followed her downtown,” Bowers continued. “Everything was fine until we got back here—”

Griggs appeared in the doorway.

“Shit!” He looked down at the matted lump of fur on the floor. “Goddamn it!”

“It’s just a cat,” Hanson reminded him.

“I happen to like cats more than I like most people,” Griggs shot back. He looked down at the cat again. “Aw, what kind of fucker kills a poor little animal like this?”

“A sadistic sociopath,” Gina murmured. “Did Cherry see this?”

“We told her to stay in the car, but she kept asking what was wrong—” Hill looked miserable.

“I told her it was just a break-in, that she shouldn’t go in until the crime scene unit got here,” Officer Bowers said. “But she insisted she had to find Gunther—”

“Gunther?” Hanson asked.

“The cat!” Officer Hill and Griggs shouted at him in unison.

“Man, you are one cold son of a bitch sometimes,” Griggs said.

“Hanson’s more of a dog person,” Gina said, looking at Griggs.

“What you’re telling me is that she came in here and picked up the damned cat. Am I right?”

“Yeah,” Bowers admitted.

“But CSU is on the way, correct?”

Bowers nodded.

Hanson noticed the smears on Hill’s uniform.

“Shit,” Hanson groaned. “How did you get blood on you? Did you pick up the cat, too?”

“I had to get it away from her,” Hill said, shamefaced. “She was hysterical! I thought we were gonna have to call an ambulance, you know, to give her something.”

“You guys can explain it to Fortner. She’s gonna be pissed that you contaminated the scene.”

Hanson walked around the outside of the house. The back door had a window in it, and one of the panes was broken.

“Nothing else seems to be disturbed,” Gina said, coming to stand beside him. “Just the door, the wall, and the cat.”

From inside the house, Hanson could hear Fortner’s voice.

“All I ask you people to do is protect the integrity of my crime scene. Is that too much to ask?”

They went back in and found Fortner putting Officer Hill’s shirt into a brown paper sack.

“Nice abs,” Gina said, winking at him.

The boy flushed pink.

Fortner threw a scrub top at him.

“That’s sexual harassment,” Griggs put in.

“Shut up, Griggs,” Gina said.

“So what are we gonna do with her?” Hanson nodded his head in the direction of the patrol car out front.

“Cherry?” Gina shrugged. “We have to find someplace else to put her.”

“Whatever you do,” Fortner called over her shoulder, “I need her clothes!”

“Nazi,” Griggs muttered.

“Moron,” Fortner snorted.

Chapter 31

What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.

—R
ALPH
W
ALDO
E
MERSON

C
herry’s parents were in Spring Hill, which was only half an hour down I-65, but Cherry refused to go there.

“I can’t tell them what’s happening! They would be so disappointed in me! I just can’t deal with that on top of everything else.”

Finally they settled Cherry into Gina’s place with two officers—Jamison and Silvy this time—parked out front.

Hanson was actually relieved. Protecting Cherry also meant Gina was protected, whether she wanted it or not.

“I’m really sorry about Gunther,” Griggs told Cherry. “He was a good cat.”

“Thank you.” Cherry nodded, still dabbing at her eyes. “I just can’t think why he had to hurt Gunther—Oh, God!”

She began sobbing again, and it was several minutes before they could pull the words from her.

“I just remembered!” she choked. “His last e-mail. He said I still hadn’t done something he’d asked me to . . . When we first talked, I told him I had a cat, and he said he was allergic and Gunther would have to go—”

Hanson expected Gina would put the girl in the little guest room downstairs, but she led them upstairs to the master suite.

The bungalow’s second story was just one room of slanted walls and a couple of dormer windows. But it was big enough for a small sofa as well as the usual bedroom furnishings, and it had a private bathroom.

Gina quickly stripped the bed, tossing the sheets soiled with her and Hanson’s bodily fluids into the overflowing hamper. She motioned to Hanson.

“Get me the other sheets out of the closet behind you, will you?”

Cherry looked around the room, blinking swollen eyes.

“But this is your room—I can’t take your room!”

“I’m not home that much,” Gina insisted, “and this will give you some privacy.”

“Really, I can sleep on the sofa downstairs—”

“You’ll have a bathroom to yourself,” Gina continued, gathering up a handful of her own essentials—some underwear, a few toiletries, and a paperback from the nightstand. “And I think you’ll feel safer up here.”

Cherry stopped resisting and crawled gratefully between the fresh sheets.

“Get some sleep,” Gina told her. “We’ll be downstairs if you need us.”

“So where are we going to sleep?” Hanson whispered as he followed Gina back down the stairs.

“I’ll be sleeping in the guest room,” she said. “You’ll be sleeping at your place.”

She must have heard his sigh, for she turned and pressed against him, kissing him hard on the mouth.

“Maybe some forced celibacy will do you good,” she said. “But there will be no more hot sex for us for a while, not here at least, not with a witness upstairs and uniforms outside.”

Hanson didn’t like it, but he thought a few cold showers were a small price to pay for keeping Gina safe.

When they reached the bottom step and turned the corner into the living room, Griggs was just flicking his cell phone shut.

“They found it.”

“The van?” Gina asked, instantly alert.

“Yeah, the van,” Griggs said. “Come on—No, not you, Gee. You ain’t going this time—”

“The hell I’m not!”

“No, you’re not,” Hanson said, pushing past her out the door. “Don’t be stupid, Gee—”

Griggs was already starting the engine, and Hanson had to physically block her as he opened the passenger-side door.

“You don’t have a badge,” he told her. “If we do catch this guy, I can’t let you fuck it up with some half-assed citizen’s arrest! You know I’m right.”

“Goddamn it!” She stepped back from the car, but her eyes were blazing. She slammed her fist on the hood before stalking away, still swearing.

“She’s pissed,” Griggs said, pulling away from the curb. “You ain’t getting none tonight.”

“She can be pissed all she wants, but she knows we can’t risk taking her along on this one. There’s no way I could trust her to just stay out of the way and let us handle it.”

“Yeah, she runs faster than either of us,” Griggs said, just as the radio crackled to life. “A patrol car spotted the van crossing Division Street on Twenty-first. Talk to them—”

Hanson snatched up the radio and identified himself.

“Don’t stop him yet, don’t approach in any way, understood?”

“Um, well, sir,” came a hesitant voice on the other end. “We already got the van, but . . .”

“Aw, shit,” Hanson groaned.

Griggs turned the car onto Twenty-first and they both saw it at the same time.

Grooms had been right: it was a crappy paint job. The van was sitting in a fast-food parking lot, with two unhappy uniforms standing beside it.

“You were supposed to wait ’til we got here,” Griggs yelled, exploding from the driver’s seat. “What the fuck?”

Hanson’s stomach sank into his shoes.

“We didn’t do anything,” the shorter of the two said defensively. “We were staying a couple of cars back, and suddenly he turned into the lot, parked it, and walked away.”

By the time they’d gotten through the crawling traffic, there’d been no sign of him.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Griggs was shouting.

“Come on,” Hanson said to him. “We don’t know for sure this was our guy.”

“It was him, damn it!” Griggs snapped. He gestured at the van. “Look at this piece of crap. You can still make out ‘repair’ under the paint on this side. You think there are two like this in Metro?”

“You think he saw you?” Hanson asked the patrol cops.

“I don’t know,” the taller uni said, shaking his head. “We saw him just park, easy as pie, and walk away. He looked like he had someplace to go, yeah, but he wasn’t running.”

“You forgot about the bag,” the other uni said.

“What bag?” Hanson demanded.

“He was carrying a duffel bag when he got out,” the tall one said.

“Shit.” Hanson groaned again, and his hands ran through his hair in sheer frustration. The evidence they needed was probably in that bag.

“What’d he look like?” Griggs demanded. He jerked his thumb at the restaurant. “You check inside?”

The driver had been of average—damn that word!—build, wearing a dark blue baseball cap, jeans, and a not-quite-white T-shirt with some kind of logo or picture on the front. Caucasian and clean-shaven, they said, but neither had gotten a good look at his face or hair.

The four of them spread out, checking the restaurant and the alley behind it, but there were so many businesses and restaurants jammed into this block of Twenty-first Avenue, their suspect could have slipped away without even trying.

“Maybe we should leave it here,” Hanson said, coming back to the van. “Maybe he just happened to be going someplace, and he’ll come back—”

“Yeah,” Griggs snarled, coming up in the other direction and peering into the van’s open window. “That’s why he left the keys in the ignition, along with a vanilla milk shake and a half-eaten Big Mac in the passenger seat—”

They called in backup, and sent twelve uniforms out in a four-block radius looking for anybody that fit their too-vague description.

“Fuckin’ waste of time,” Griggs grumbled. “We had him! We fuckin’ had him and we lost him!”

“Let’s tow it in.” Hanson sighed, staring at the van’s interior. “Maybe we’ll get something off it.”

BOOK: Red

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