Dead Certain (30 page)

A voice from the other room announced that the crime lab was done with pictures, and Joe Blades got to his feet. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said. “Would you mind hanging around a little while longer in case we have other questions?”

I nodded numbly. Part of me was hoping that this meant that at least this part of it was over, and part of me was filled with dread at the prospect of what was to come. “Is it okay if I use the phone to make a call?” I asked. “I need to tell her parents what’s happened.”

I have been the bearer of bad news in my time. I have looked men in the eye and told them that they were bankrupt, I have fired people, and worse. But I would have gladly given up every cent I had, pledged my family’s fortune and sold myself into slavery if it meant that I didn’t have to make that call, if it meant that I could bring their daughter back.

It was after midnight in Chicago, an hour later in New York. I called directory assistance for the number and took the phone, dragging the cord behind me, into the living room in the hopes of finding a small corner of privacy in my own home. Elliott found me just as the phone was ringing, and sat beside me on the couch.

A sleepy voice answered, a woman’s.

“Mrs. Stein?” I said. “This is Kate Millholland.” By the time I got my name out, I think she knew. Just those six words at one o’clock in the morning were enough. Now there was no turning back. “Something terrible has happened. Claudia’s been killed.”

At that her mother let out a terrifying sob, a plaintive expression of grief, and I felt the words dry up in my mouth. I shot an imploring look at Elliott, who gently took the receiver from my hand. I was out of the room, out of the apartment, on the street in front of the building before I even realized I was moving. If it weren’t for the police line they’d set up in front of the apartment, the barrier of blue sawhorses and yellow crime-scene tape, I would have been down the street and halfway to the lake. Instead I just stood there on the pavement, hugging myself against the cold, watching incredulously as life went on along Hyde Park Boulevard.

Eventually Elliott came and found me. “Her father is going to fly out in the morning. He said he’d call as soon as he booked the flight.” I nodded, grateful. “They want to talk to you inside,” he continued, gently putting his arm around me and leading me back up the steps like a reluctant child.

“What do they want?” I asked. I was close to the breaking point now.

“They want you to look at something, and then they’re going to take her away.”

I nodded, hearing the rushing sound returning. I did not want to go back into the apartment. Not tonight. Not ever. Silently I started bargaining with myself. I will go in now, but it will be the last time. I will do it and then it will be over. I will never spend another night in this apartment. I crossed the threshold and realized that I was breathing fast, almost panting in my panic.

“What do they want me to look at?” I asked as Elliott led me into the kitchen.

“The knife,” replied Elliott as my feet involuntarily slowed to a stop in the hall. “They need you to look at the knife.”

CHAPTER 22

Somehow it was worse, knowing beforehand exactly what I was going to see, and yet, strangely enough, it was Claudia herself who gave me the strength to do it. I kept thinking of her composure in the emergency room on the night when I brought Bill Delius in, the calmness of her demeanor, the measured “please” that preceded every request even as she struggled to save my client’s life. The least I could do was try to hold myself to the same standard tonight. I owed her that much.

Claudia’s body still lay on the floor of the butler’s pantry. I could see it just beyond the door, and it held me in a primitive kind of paradoxical fascination. I could hardly bear to look at it, and yet I could hardly force myself to look away.

Everyone had cleared out except for Blades and Kowalczyk. Now that he’d been here awhile, I could see the questions forming on Kowalczyk’s face. Most cops were ruled by Occam’s razor, the scientific principle that states that the simplest explanation fitting the facts is probably the right one. I could tell the whole thing bothered him— not just the murder, but Claudia, me, the apartment. By now Blades had filled him in on who I was and what I was worth. I could tell he saw me as a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit and that it bothered him.

They wanted to know if I recognized the knife.

I took a deep breath, determined not to disgrace myself, and slowly made my way to the butler’s pantry. Blades took me by the elbow and steered me around the blood, which had darkened in the hours since I’d stupidly blundered through it. I crouched down beside my dead friend and tried not to look at anything besides the knife. It was hard. There were little things I hadn’t noticed before—the hemostat clipped to the drawstring of her scrub pants, the piece of rubber tubing that peeked out of the breast pocket. Somehow as they’d gone about their work, the police had managed to knock her glasses askew. My hands itched to straighten them.

Of the knife all that was visible was the black wooden handle and about a quarter inch of blade. Whoever had killed her had done their best to ram the knife in to the hilt. Judging from the diameter of the handle and the width of the blade, I could tell that it was a paring knife. It had entered the right side of her neck, roughly an inch and a half below the ear. I forced myself to lean over her body and look, but the tip of the blade did not show through on the other side.

I stood back up and went back to the kitchen counter. All the knives were in their places in the wooden block except for one.

“It looks like whoever did it just took one of the knives from here,” I said. “I couldn’t tell you for sure without seeing the whole thing, but it looks like the smallest one of the set.”

“Pretty fancy cooking knives and not much else in this kitchen,” observed Kowalczyk. “Have you had them long?”

“About a year,” I said. “They were a gift from a patient of Claudia’s when she was still a resident, a German woman who came from a little town called Solingen that’s famous for their knives.”

“It looks like he must have come in through that window,” said Kowalczyk with a nod toward the shards of broken glass that lay in the bottom of the sink. From his voice it sounded like he’d already made up his mind about what had happened and was relating an established fact. “He must have thought the place was empty, but when he found Dr. Stein at home, he grabbed the knife from the counter and killed her. Then he took off through the front door without taking anything.”

“He couldn’t have come in through that window,”

I said automatically, noticing the broken pane for the first time.

“Why not?” countered Kowalczyk, obviously taken aback. “All the rest of them have burglar grates across them. He picked that one because it’s the only one that doesn’t.”

“Don’t you want to know why it doesn’t have a burglar grille?” I asked.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” offered Blades, looking up from his notebook. “Why?”

“I’ll show you,” I said, happy for the chance to get out of the kitchen, away from the body of the woman who had been my best friend. I opened the back door of the apartment and led the detectives out onto the small, dark landing that held the enclosure where we kept the trash. From the landing, stairs ran up and down connecting all three floors of the building. Elliott and the two homicide detectives followed me down the steps single file like a Boy Scout outing. We stopped at the walkway that led between our building and the one next door.

“Look,” I said. “None of the buildings on this block were built with the first floor on ground level. They were all designed to sit high up off the street to make them seem more grand. The first floor is actually a full story above street level. Front and back, you have to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the door, and then inside, there are more stairs. And see here where the steps go down to the basement?” I pointed to the concrete stairs that ran beside the exterior wall of the building and led into a deep well like a concrete bunker surrounding the basement door. “Take a look. What’s that directly above them?”

All three men looked up at the building. “Your kitchen window,” said Blades. “The one without the burglar grille.”

“That’s why there was never one put on that window. It’s almost impossible to reach. There’s a twenty-foot drop underneath it. You’d have to put a ladder in the stairwell in order to get in, but it’s not wide enough to give you enough of an angle to support a ladder that tall.”

Blades pulled a flashlight from his pocket and trained its beam down the concrete stairwell toward the basement door. “And here’s where all the glass fell when he broke it,” he observed.

“Yeah,” said Elliott, “but there’s much more glass outside than inside, so what does that tell you?”

“That it was probably broken from inside the apartment,” offered Blades. “Meaning that whoever broke it Was trying to make it look like a botched burglary.”

“Which explains why the front door was left open,” I said.

“How do you figure that?” asked Elliott.

“Because Claudia let her killer into the apartment. It was someone she knew. Most likely the murderer left this way, through the back door. That’s why he forgot that the front door was open.”

“Why would she have left the door open?” asked Kowalczyk, obviously not buying my theory.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe she wanted to keep open a line of escape....”

In the end I had Elliott take me to the new apartment downtown. It was closer than his place, and even though I’d never spent much time there, at least it was more familiar than a hotel. Besides, with the doorman in the lobby and security otherwise tight, it was one of the few places where I thought I might be able to feel safe. I just prayed that Claudia had never mentioned the address to Carlos.

If Danny was surprised to see me showing up in the middle of the night with bloodstains on my clothes and a strange man at my side, he was too well trained to show it. He merely touched his gray-gloved hand to the bill of his cap and wished us a very pleasant good night.

Upstairs it smelled of fresh paint and new carpet. Elliott hadn’t seen the apartment since it had been finished, and I could tell that even through his fatigue, he liked what he saw. Empty, it had been a beautiful place; now it was simply stunning. But tonight the whole world, no matter how physically perfect, seemed out of joint and beyond my understanding.

There were plenty of beds but no sheets. I really didn’t care. Elliott followed me into the master suite and took off his jacket and his tie. I stripped down to my silk blouse and underpants and curled up on the bed, struggling to keep my eyes open long enough to see Elliott disappear through the door. He came back a few minutes later with the matelasse coverlets that had been ordered for the guest room. He tucked me in carefully and gave me a chaste kiss on the top of my head.

“I’m sorry,” he said, lying down beside me fully dressed and wrapping his arms around me.

As I closed my eyes I noticed that he’d put his gun on the nightstand within easy reach.

The next morning I woke up to the smell of coffee and the sensation that someone had come in the night and hollowed out my heart. I opened my eyes and saw Elliott. He was sitting at the writing desk in front of the big arched window that looked out over the lake. He looked freshly shaved and showered and was dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a light blue oxford cloth shirt. There was a Starbucks cup at his elbow, and on the desk in front of him lay the Browning 9mm he always carried and what looked like a box of ammunition.

I propped myself up on my elbows as Elliott came over and sat beside me on the edge of the bed. He handed me the coffee. He must have just come back with it, because it was still hot.

“What time is it?” I asked, my voice still thick with sleep. Every movement was an effort, a battle against the heavy weight of grief.

“Six-thirty,” said Elliott. “I hope you don’t mind, but I went back to Hyde Park this morning and picked up some clean clothes for you and a couple of other things you might need. I had one of my people stay there overnight—it was Joe who suggested it. In a place like Hyde Park, as soon as word of the murder hit the street, every two-bit break-in artist would have tried to get in and make off with your stuff as soon as the cops had left.”

“Thank you,” I said. I felt it would be ungracious to explain that as far as I was concerned, the thieves could help themselves. Nothing, certainly nothing I owned, seemed important to me today.

“I’ve also talked to Claudia’s mother. It sounds like she’s taking it real hard.” I wrapped my arms around my body as if to ward off the cold, but in reality I felt like I was holding myself together. “Her husband’s already on his way. He arrives at eight-fifty at O’Hare. I have the flight number. If you want, I’ll go pick him up.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll go.”

“I brought you some muffins,” he said. “Just in case you’re hungry. I put shampoo and soap in the bathroom for you. I also called Cheryl and told her about Claudia. She said she’ll get in touch with the people at the hospital and let them know what happened.”

“Have you talked to Blades? Have they arrested Carlos yet?”

“It’s still early, Kate. You’ve got to give him some time.”