The Lady Who Cried Murder (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (5 page)

“Nah,” David said. “The M.O. for the murder doesn’t fit.”

“Unless the contract killer purposely made it look like a crazed serial killer,” Mac suggested. “I’ve run into that. A contract hit that was made to look like the victim had run into a maniac. Only in this case, we have DNA that matches two other murders.”

“Then maybe it wasn’t Palazzi,” Ben said.

“Don’t tell me that you’re friends with Palazzi,” Mac said.

“I never said I was friends with the man,” Ben said. “Nor am I surprised by this. I learned a long time ago that the apparent character of a person, especially someone who is a public figure, is nothing like what it is behind closed doors.”

“Does Palazzi know you have this tape?” Mac asked him.

“He has to know someone has it,” Ed answered. “He did invite me for drinks soon after Florence’s death. He knows I’m her lawyer. I could tell he was feeling me out and trying to determine if we had anything on him. I gave him nothing. He’s nervous.”

“Are you going to move to prosecute?” David asked Ben.

“We don’t know any of the particulars,” Ben said. “The victim is dead—not killed by the suspect.”

“So you decided not to move forward,” Mac said. “Palazzi got away with it again.”

“It’s a very weak case, Mac,” Ben said. “If Florence was still alive, we’d have a chance.”

“Not only is there the matter of the rape,” Ed said, “but I can also see Khloe deciding to make a claim as Senator Palazzi’s daughter.”

“That would make Bevis’ day,” Ben said in a tone heavy with sarcasm. He even chuckled at the thought.

“Which makes Bevis a suspect,” David said. “Now that makes my day.”

“Unless Khloe didn’t find the recording,” Mac said. “We need to dive heavy into what she has been doing since getting to Spencer and moving into that house.”

This case is going all over the place.

Mac made himself at home at David’s laptop while he walked Chelsea out to Ben’s car after lunch.
The man never gives up … as well he shouldn’t.

Meanwhile, Mac was logging into the police database to bring up what information he could on Amber Houston’s murder. Her body had been found in a small rural town outside Pittsburgh. The case was being handled by the Pennsylvania state police.

Tonya buzzed the intercom into the police chief’s office. “Hey, Mac, Bevis Palazzi is on the phone for the chief. He wants to talk about Khloe Everest’s murder, and he wants to talk to someone in charge. I could make him sit on hold until the chief comes back in, or would—?”

“I’ll talk to him.” He grabbed the phone. “Mac Faraday here.”

“I want to talk to your so-called police chief.”

“You got me.”

“That’s unacceptable,” Bevis Palazzi said before launching into a tirade. “I specifically told that bitch that I wanted to talk to the chief of police about the status of locating Khloe Everest’s killer. She was a very good friend of mine, I might add. I specifically told that idiot—”

“That lady is a sergeant with the police, and she can beat the snot out of your fat little nose.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“It’s not a threat,” Mac replied, “It’s a statement. Sergeant Tonya is an experienced police officer who deserves to be treated, and spoken about, with respect.”

“Whatever!” he uttered a loud scoff. “She’s still a bitch.”

“You have three seconds to ask your question before I hang up,” Mac said, “because while I’m here on this phone listening to your foul mouth, I could be tracking down a killer.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, I know exactly what you are,” Mac said. “You’re a spoiled brat who needs to grow up and learn some manners. Call me when we can have a civilized, grown-up conversation.” Hanging up the phone, he resumed studying the information listed under Amber Houston’s murder.

The name of the lead investigator caught his eye: Pennsylvania State Homicide Detective Cameron Gates.

I know her.

The phone rang again.

“I’ll get that,” David announced while hurrying into the office. Pointing a finger of accusation at him, he said, “You’ve been a bad boy.” He snatched up the phone. “Police Chief David O’Callaghan here.” He grimaced while listening to Bevis’ outrage, which Mac could hear all the way over on his side of the desk. “If you would calm down, Mr. Palazzi, we could discuss this rationally like two adults.”

“You need one more adult to make that happen,” Mac said.

“Well,” David said, “if you want to know what I think about your involvement in this case,—” Without another word, he slammed the phone down on the base.

His eyes wide, Mac chuckled. “What did you just do?”

“We got cut off,” David said. “That’s how you hang up on someone. What are we going to do about him?”

“He’s a suspect,” Mac said. “We have legitimate cause to keep him and his father out of the investigation.” He pointed at the laptop screen. “You’ll never guess who the lead investigator is in the Amber Houston murder. Detective Cameron Gates.”

“You mean that detective with the cat? What was his name?”

“Irving,” Mac said, “but, if he likes you, you can call him ‘Irv.’”

“Big devil that looks like a skunk,” David recalled. “She takes him everywhere.”

“Because he has issues,” Mac said.

The intercom buzzed again. “Chief, now it’s the governor.”

“I’ll take it.” Mac picked up the phone.

Relieved, David gathered up his laptop and turned on his heels. “I’ll go call Irving’s mother.”

Downstairs, David took his laptop to a vacant desk in a corner of the squad room. After looking up Cameron Gates’ number on the police report, he placed the call to her office in Pennsylvania.

“Hello, Police Chief David O’Callaghan,” she greeted him with her low sexy voice.

“How’s Irving?” David asked with an equally husky tone.

“Still has issues,” she said. “How’s Gnarly?”

“Still a kleptomaniac.”

“How about his uncle?” she asked.

“Uncle?” David laughed. “You better not call me his uncle in front of Mac. He swears he did not sire that dog.”

“Josh is the same way about Irving.”

“Speaking of Josh,” David asked, “how is he?”

“My silver fox,” she said. “He’s better than fine. He’s downright fantastic. He’s prosecuting a case right now against a young man who tried to hold up a bar with an automatic handgun shortly before they closed. Unfortunately for the guy, he walked into a retirement party for a sheriff’s deputy and pulled his gun out while standing in the middle of a bar filled with cops. Josh has like twenty police officers for eyewitnesses.”

“I wish they could all be that simple.”

“So do I, sweetheart.”

The two of them shared a good laugh.

Recalling that Cameron had taken a stab wound in the shoulder during their case together, he asked, “How’s your shoulder?”

“Fine,” she said. “Yet another badge of courage. So tell me, are you still on the market?”

“Market for what?” David asked her.

“I’m taking about ladies,” she said. “A good looking piece of beefcake like you has to have a lady, or are you still shopping around?”

Thinking of Chelsea, he replied, “I’m working on it.”

“Don’t give up. She’ll come around.”

“I hope.” He settled into the reason for his call. “Amber Houston.”

“Tragedy.” The humor had left her voice. “What about her? Tell me you’ve got a lead.”

“We have a young lady who got stabbed and butchered,” David said. “Her uterus was taken. Plus, we got DNA that matches with the DNA left in your victim. Would you call that a lead?”

“That means our guy hit again,” Cameron said. “That’s three hits. I got a call last year about a woman in LA who got killed. The perp used the same M.O. What have you got?”

“Tell me about Amber?”

“I’ll do better than that,” she replied. “Does Mac Faraday still own the Spencer Inn?”

David grinned. “Will you bring the case file?”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“Deal.”

Chapter Five

“Are you ready for some television viewing?” Mac asked Bogie and David when they came into the police chief’s office. There was a big bowl of popcorn in the middle of the conference table and the television was set up with the Blu-ray player.

“You seem to be making yourself kind of comfortable here,” David noted.

“The killer placed Khloe’s body in front of the television with her reality show playing,” Mac said.

“And it was set to re-loop one particular episode.”

“Why that one episode?” Mac asked. “I looked it up. Khloe’s show had shot twelve episodes.” He pointed at the set with the remote. “Why this one? I think he’s sending us a message.”

“We need to watch that episode to see if we can find that message,” Bogie said.

“Can I delegate one of you to watch it?” David asked.

“You found the body.” Bogie poked David in the shoulder with his finger. “In this department, the responding officer who finds the body takes the lead in the investigation. Your daddy’s rule. This is your case, so you need to watch the hour-long cat fight between four material girls who wanna be stars.”

Mac held up the bowl to offer them. “Popcorn, gentlemen?”

David took a handful of popcorn. “I need a beer, too.”

One corner of his lip curled when Mac shook his head. “Sorry, man, you’re on duty. You need to watch this sober.”

While David took three bottle waters out of his portable fridge for them to have with the popcorn, Bogie asked Mac, “Tonya said the governor called to request we let Bevis in on the investigation. What did you tell him?”

“No,” Mac said.

“You said no to the governor?” Bogie shook his head. “You’re either the bravest man I know, or the stupidest.”

Seeing the arch in Bogie’s eyebrow, Mac added, “I also told him that I would present to him a weekend getaway at the Spencer Inn for his birthday if he kept Bevis away from this case—on account of him being a suspect. That was when he said okay.”

“Which proves it pays to have friends in high places.” After giving Mac a high five, Bogie slipped into a chair at the table.

Sitting across from him, Mac said, “You seem to know a lot about Khloe’s show. Have you ever watched it?”

“Only one episode out of curiosity,” he confessed. “It was everything I thought it would be.”

David set a bottle down in front of the deputy chief. “What was it you imagined?”

“Stupid,” Bogie said. “It was a stupid show about stupid women who couldn’t stop acting stupid with each other and everyone in their lives. Reality? Bah! I can’t believe real people could be that stupid.”

“I really want a beer,” David muttered.

“When you’re off duty.” Mac hit the play button.

The show opened with the sun rising on a sprawling home in the Hollywood hills. The first several minutes had the four roommates making cutting remarks to each other while fixing their breakfasts and checking their emails and texts. Bogie paused and introduced each of the three women who lived with Khloe.

“That’s Rain Drop,” Bogie said when a leggy redhead came into the kitchen. “She and Khloe hated each other.”

“She was the woman Khloe was fighting with on the show when I found her body,” David said.

“Rain Drop is a singer, and a good one,” Bogie said. “She’s the only one out of the four to make anything of herself. Probably because she’s the only one who had any talent for anything besides back-stabbing. Khloe was so jealous of her that she couldn’t see straight. Rain Drop saw Khloe for what she was, and she would call her on it.”

The show progressed, and Khloe and Rain Drop bickered during the course of the day about a singer in Rain Drop’s band being interested in Khloe. The fighting escalated into a knock down drag out fight in which the two women brawled until their two roommates had to pull them apart.

David recalled that was the scene he heard when he had come into the bedroom to find Khloe’s body. The show went on to end with later in the evening with Khloe tearfully drinking a glass of wine with a young man, Nick. In a sidebar, she told the audience that Nick was her best friend. A homosexual, he seemed to really understand her, and to love her unconditionally.

“He’s got a hundred times more talent than Rain Drop,” she told the camera. “I met him while he was singing at a club that my friends and I went to for my twenty-first birthday.”

Mac sat up. “Didn’t Khloe turn twenty-one the month before her so-called abduction?”

“Yes,” David said. “Five weeks before she disappeared.”

“Do you recall interviewing that guy?” Mac pointed to the television screen where Khloe was dissolving into tears. Her friend was an extremely slender young man. His face was so gaunt looking that his high cheekbones and sunken eyes made him resemble a skeleton.

“Nope,” David answered.

“No one could possibly understand,” Khloe sobbed on the show. “They don’t care about what I’ve been through. No one believes me—the police in Maryland are trying to have me arrested.”

“For what?” Nick asked.

“For getting kidnapped,” Khloe said. “They know I lied after I had escaped, but they don’t understand. Even if they did, they wouldn’t care. No one cares.” She reached for his hand. “You’re the only one who cares about what happens to me, Nick.”

“Tell me what happened.” Nick patted her hand. “I’ll believe you.”

Almost knocking his chair over backwards, Mac went to David’s desk to retrieve the case file for Khloe’s murder. He tossed it onto the table and opened it.

“I was kidnapped,” Khloe said. “I really was. I had been talking to this guy on the beach at the lake and he wanted me to spend the night with him, but it was getting late and I was tired. I was going to my car, and suddenly he grabbed me and threw me into the trunk of his car. Then, for the next four days—” She wailed. “We were in a motel. That part was true. But he had made me his sex slave for four days.”

“You poor girl,” Nick said. “Then what happened? How did you escape?”

“I crawled out through the bathroom window,” she said. “I thought he was going to kill me. I was afraid that if I told the truth that he would come after me and kill me, or worse, my mother.” She sucked in a shuddering breath. “I was only trying to protect my mother, but instead of being grateful, she turned on me like everyone else.”

“That’s bull!” David said when Mac paused the disc. The frame froze with Nick’s image on the screen. “She wasn’t raped.”

“She’s not a good actress,” Bogie agreed. “No wonder her career in Hollywood went nowhere.”

Mac went up to the television screen and held up the sketch drawing next to the Nick’s image. “Gentlemen, does this face look familiar to you?”

David and Bogie leaned forward in their seats to compare the image of Nick, Khloe’s homosexual best friend and confidante, to the drawing of the man Khloe had been seen speaking to on the lake before her disappearance. While the image of the man on the beach had a hairless face and long hair, Nick had shorter hair and a goatee. But the facial features, including the pointy nose, high cheekbones, and sunken eyes, were a match.

“Khloe said that the guy she was talking to on the beach abducted her and made her his sex slave,” David said. “But, according to that sketch, that’s the same guy she’s telling this story to.”

“We need to have a talk with Nick,” Mac said. “Even if he didn’t kill Khloe, he obviously knows something about that faked kidnapping.”

“It was a publicity stunt,” Bogie said.

“We all know that,” Mac said.

“Khloe wouldn’t have known the truth if it had bit her in the butt,” David said. “She was a pathological liar.”

“Which is why we need to talk to those close to her to find out what was really going on,” Mac said. “This…” He waved the picture in front of the image on the television screen while trying to recall his name, “Nick was seen with her the night she’d disappeared. Khloe claimed she spent four days in a motel having sex with a boy.”

“You’re thinking that boy,” David said.

“Whoever it was, he was in on the fake kidnapping, and we have yet to find him,” Mac said. “This guy matches the sketch. Do the math. The kidnapping was three years ago. This was shot almost two years ago. They’d been together for over a year at the time this was filmed—that makes it more than just a fling in a motel.”

“Does that mean he’s not Khloe’s gay best friend?” Bogie said.

“It’s not really reality,” Mac replied in a loud whisper.

Bogie’s mocking frown pushed his mustache up into his nostrils. “I’ll call the show’s producers and get the scoop on Nick, the fake gay guy.”

Mac realized he was being optimistic in hoping that Lily Carter, Khloe’s ex-best friend, would be of any help in identifying the murderer in their case. After the charade in which Khloe pretended to have been abducted, Lily immediately ended their friendship. While Khloe went off to Hollywood, Lily attended two more years of graduate school at West Virginia University. After receiving her master’s in business administration, she went to work at the Spencer Inn. In a year, she had worked up to assistant manager in the resort’s event planning department. It was her job to coordinate between guests and clients for special events, like wedding receptions and conferences, which took place at the Spencer Inn resort.

Lily was coming out of a staff meeting with the inn’s manager when Mac nabbed her before she had a chance to go back to her office with a stack of folders. She looked as simply pretty as she had three years before. When she saw Mac, her face beamed. “Hello, Mr. Faraday.”

Upon hearing Mac’s name, Jeff Ingles, the inn’s manager, rushed out. He tried to be nonchalant about looking toward the floor for any sign of Gnarly, the bane of his existence at the resort. When Mac directed his attention toward Lily, the rest of the hotel management team moved on to their respective jobs.

“Do you have a couple of minutes?” Mac invited her to join him in the lounge for a drink.

“What’s this about?” Her expression was one of confusion.

“Khloe Everest.”

Lily stood rooted in her tracks. “Khloe and I aren’t friends anymore.”

“Considering how she was murdered, I don’t think it’s a friend we’re looking for.”

Lily’s mouth dropped open.

Seeing that this was not hotel business, Jeff Ingles turned and went in the opposite direction toward his office.

“Would you like me to buy you a drink?” Mac offered.

“Depends,” she replied.

“On what?”

“Are you going to arrest me?” she asked.

“Depends,” he replied.

“On what?”

“Did you kill her?” Mac asked her.

“Would you believe me if I told you no?”

“You haven’t lied to me yet.”

He led the way to the inn’s lounge where Lily ordered a root beer float after Mac had told her to order anything she wanted. He ordered a Brandy Manhattan. After some small talk in the corner booth, Mac eased his way into his interview with her. “When was the last time you saw Khloe?”

She seemed to think for a short time before answering. “Last week. She and her friends had been coming in fairly regularly since she came back. I knew her mother had disinherited her. I stayed tight with Florence after what Khloe had pulled. I was surprised by how furious she was, but do you blame her?”

“No, not at all,” Mac said. “Thinking someone is hurting your child is the worst thing that a parent can go through. To find out that it’s a joke…” His voice trailed off when he saw a flicker of something in Lily’s eyes. I wonder if she’s talking about something else.

“You mentioned her friends,” Mac said.

“Khloe was coming in with a guy,” Lily said. “She had introduced him to me. His name was Nick, but I don’t know anything about him. I’ll admit, she and I had words after she started showing up here.”

“What about?”

“She was putting her stuff on her mom’s account,” she said. “She expected Florence’s estate to pay for it. So, I told Jeff. Next time she came in, Jeff went to her table and told her that they had to pay cash or put it on a credit card—no hotel credit. Well, without any hesitation, the guy she was with pulled out a credit card. Only the name on it was some woman—Sheila. Now he didn’t look like any Sheila. So Jeff told me to check into it. Sure enough, the card was legit and not reported stolen. So we let them use it—and man! They did. They were doing the spa, happy hour, dinner—everything.”

“Did you get the last name on that card?” Mac asked.

“I have it written down in my office,” she said. “But anyway, after Jeff cut them off, Khloe came to my office and called me all types of names. She said I was jealous because she didn’t take me to Hollywood and make me a star. ‘Really? Is that all you’ve got?’ I told her. ‘You’re a joke,’ I said. ‘You’re a pathetic pathological liar and a joke.’ Then I had security remove her from my office.”

After a pause filled with pride for what she considered a winning moment, she added, “But I didn’t kill her.” The ice cream in her float was gone. From across the booth, she leaned toward him. “I forgot to ask. How did she die? I mean, how was she killed?”

“She was stabbed to death.”

Lily shuddered. “You know, knowing Khloe the way I did, being friends from back when we were kids, I knew she wouldn’t live to an old age. She lived too fast and hung out with—” She shook her head. “Like that guy that I saw her talking to that night at the lake. I never did get a clear look at him, and it was dark, but I had a bad feeling about him—like he would only lead her into trouble. But then, she wasn’t kidnapped.” She cocked her head at Mac. “I wonder who he was.”

Mac wanted so much for her to confirm that the Nick that Khloe had come into the inn with was the same man she had seen her talking to the night that she faked her disappearance. “Have you ever seen that man since that night?” he asked while studying her face for a reaction.

Lily stared into her float for a long moment. “To tell you the truth, since it all ended up being a lie, I never looked for him. I mean, he didn’t end up being a killer or anything. Why?”

“Well,” he replied, “she did end up spending four days in a motel with him.” He shot her a grin. “They must have been friends. Maybe you’ve seen him around—hanging out with her and her crowd.”