DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS (2 page)

“What’s her name?” Ethan asked Farrantino as he squinted at the scribbled words on the officer’s statement. He was going to have to ask that the officers receive penmanship lessons.

“Let’s see. Montgomery. Elaine,” Farrantino answered.

Montgomery.
His gaze snapped back to the witness just as the EMT finished with the bandage and she raised her head. He took in her features for the first time. Could her name be a coincidence? With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he thought about the late, infamous lobbyist Elliott Montgomery, comparing his memory of Montgomery’s narrow features and dark blue eyes to Elaine Montgomery’s face. It didn’t take much imagination to see the resemblance. The slender nose, full mouth and high cheekbones looked a lot better on her than they had on him, though.

So, Senator Darby Sills’s personal assistant was the daughter of the ruthless lobbyist for the Port of New Orleans unions. Ethan frowned. Was this case about to get even uglier? “Looks like the EMTs are done with her. What about the crime scene techs?”

Farrantino glanced toward the two young men in CSI jackets. “It’s probably going to be another five minutes or so before they can get to her.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll see how far I can get.” He stepped up to her with a small spiral notepad in his hand. “I’m Detective Ethan Delancey. I hope you feel up to talking for a bit, because I need to ask you a few questions. You are—?”

“I’m—Elaine Montgomery. Laney.”

“Okay, Ms. Montgomery. Can you tell me what happened here? Briefly?”

She had closed her eyes and was touching the area around the bandage the EMTs had applied with her fingertips. “What?”

“What happened?” he repeated.

“A man shot Senator Sills and when I walked in, he sh-shot me.”

“Did you see the man shoot the senator?”

Her face seemed to crumple a bit. “No.”

“Where was Senator Sills? Was he still alive?” Ethan had barely gotten the question out when Farrantino gestured to him.

He excused himself and walked over to the officer, who handed him a cell phone. “Sills’s,” she said. “You might be interested in some of his recent calls.”

Ethan checked the phone’s incoming call log. “‘Senator Myron Stamps,’” he read. Then a little farther down, “‘The U.S. federal minimum-security prison at Oakdale, Louisiana.’” He looked up at Farrantino. “That’s where Congressman Gavin Whitley is. Here.” He handed the phone back to her. “Take this and retrieve all the calls and times and the texts as well as voice mails.”

“How far back?” Farrantino asked.

“Far as it goes,” Ethan said. “Get me the list. We might want to talk with all of them. And set up an interview with Whitley and Stamps
this
morning. I want to find out why they were calling Sills.”

“Are you thinking this has something to do with Kate Chalmet’s son’s kidnapping?”

Ethan thought about his brother Travis, who’d come home to New Orleans eight months before, to find out that he had a son and that the four-year-old had been kidnapped. “Could be. Whitley claimed that it was Sills’s money that paid for the kidnapper.”

“I remember,” Farrantino said, then nodded toward Elaine Montgomery. “The crime scene techs are ready for her.”

“What do the EMTs say?” he asked.

“They want her checked out at the E.R. just in case. They think the wound is superficial, but they want a CT scan to rule out internal bleeding.”

“Okay. As soon as I’m done here, I’m going by the E.R. to see if I can get in a few more questions. Otherwise it’s going to be hours before I can finish with Whitley and Stamps and talk to her again.”

As Farrantino gave him a nod and headed toward Laney Montgomery, Ethan’s partner returned to his side. “Okay,” Dixon said. “We’ve got a preliminary time of death. The M.E. said he’s been dead two, maybe three hours at the most.”

“Great. The hotel’s been cordoned off and everyone is being questioned. Thankfully there are no conventions or weddings scheduled for today. The only event is—or was—the longshoremen’s breakfast, where the senator was scheduled to speak.”

“Yeah. Still, I doubt our murderer has been hanging around for hours waiting to see if we can pick him out of a crowd,” Dixon said wryly.

“Farrantino is bringing in Myron Stamps for questioning, and arranging with the warden at Oakdale to question Gavin Whitley,” Ethan said. “Both of them called Sills within the last couple of days. I want to know exactly where Stamps is now and where he was all evening. And I’m going to get every single phone call and every visitor Whitley has had since he went inside.” He didn’t have to tell Dixon why he wanted to talk to them.

Dixon nodded. “It must have really rankled to be under indictment like Whitley or facing certain loss in the next election like Stamps, and know that Sills came out of the kidnapping scandal smelling like a rose. I’d be surprised if both of them hadn’t wanted to kill Sills. But do you think Whitley could have arranged this from prison?”

“No. I don’t think he has the connections or the cojones to set up something like that at all, much less handle it from prison. But we’d better check it out.” The two of them stepped aside as the body of Senator Darby Sills was rolled out the door.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “I’m going by the hospital to talk with Elaine Montgomery, because I’m probably going to be tied up all morning with those two.”

“You know we’ve got to bring Travis in.”

Ethan grimaced. He sure as hell didn’t want to make his older brother come in for questioning, especially after everything Travis had been through in the past months. He’d like to give Travis and Kate and their son, Max, time to recover and heal from Travis’s months as a hostage and Max’s kidnapping ordeal. They needed time to get used to being together, to being a family.

“I know,” Ethan said dejectedly. “I’m sure I’ll be hearing from the D.A. within the next hour or two, making sure I’ve questioned him as a person of interest in Sills’s death, despite the fact that there was no evidence connecting Sills with the kidnapping. I’ll call him in a little while.” He looked at his watch. “He’ll be up and out on a run by six. Maybe I can be done with him before Farrantino gets Whitley and Stamps set up.”

* * *

W
HEN
E
THAN
GOT
to the emergency room and flashed his badge in order to get in to see Laney Montgomery, he found her lying on a gurney in cubicle three with a bandage on her temple, looking miserable. As he peered in, he saw her wipe her eyes with her fingertips. He stepped in through the curtain. “Hi,” he said. “How’s your head?”

“Who are you?” she said, sniffling.

“I’m Detective Ethan Delancey. I talked with you for a few minutes at the crime scene.”

“Oh, right.” She lifted her hand to touch the edges of the bandage. “I’m sorry. This has just been so—” Her voice cracked and her face crumpled. She covered her mouth with her hand.

“Hey,” Ethan said, glancing behind him at the closed curtain. He didn’t want the nurses to think he’d made her cry, and he sure didn’t want her to get so upset that she couldn’t talk. He stepped closer to the bed. “You’ve been through a lot. But everything’s going to be okay.”

“No it’s not.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Senator Sills is dead. I had just left him, not five minutes before. I should have—”

Ethan waited, but she bit her lip and didn’t continue. “Should have what?” he asked.

She spread her hands helplessly. “I don’t know. Been there? Done something?” Her voice was rising in pitch.

He laid his hand on her arm and squeezed reassuringly, then realized what he’d done and snatched it away. “You couldn’t have done anything. Not against a gun. If you’d tried, you’d probably be dead now, too.

“What we have to do now is try to catch the person who killed him and bring him to justice.”

Laney cut her eyes over to him. “You can catch him, can’t you?” she said, as if she were saying
you can leap tall buildings and stop a bullet with your hand, can’t you?

He felt as though he were letting her down just by being human. He smiled at her. “I’m going to do my best,” he said. “But to do that, I need to ask you some questions. Do you think you can answer them for me?”

She stared into his eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Yes I can.”

“Great,” he said, reaching out and patting her hand. “You said you’d just left the senator. Where did you go?”

“I went to my room. I was staying in the second bedroom of the penthouse suite. When I went back into the sitting room to check on the senator after I heard the pop, he wasn’t sitting in the desk chair. Before I could look for him, I saw the man dressed in black. He spotted me, he lifted his gun and I dived to the floor.”

“Was the senator dead or alive at that point?”

She shook her head despairingly. “I don’t know. I wasn’t able to get to him until the elevator came and the shooter ran out.” Her eyes glittered with tears and her hand kept darting up to her temple and stopping a fraction of an inch above the bandage. “Do you think he was lying there alive? Do you think if I’d gotten to him earlier—?”

“You can’t worry about that. You were in danger. If you’d tried to get to him, the man could’ve gotten off a better shot. You could be dead, too. Plus, as good as the technology is, there’s no way to pinpoint the second when he died. So let’s take it one step at a time. You came in. The figure in black saw you, shot at you. You dived to the floor. How far away was he?”

“I don’t know. Ten feet or so?” She closed her eyes. “Why are you asking me all these questions? I told the first officer all this and he wrote it down.”

“Why do you think the shooter missed you?”

She frowned. “He didn’t miss.”

“He barely grazed your temple.”

Laney peered at him sidelong. “Maybe he didn’t expect me to drop to the floor.”

He gave her a little smile. “Did he fire a second time?”

“No, but then you know that. You’ve got your CSI people and you’ve got the gun, don’t you? And all the bullets are in the wall or the floor?”

“That’s right. But he could have fired into a sofa or a pillow or something. So you only heard two—”

The nurse came in, followed by an older man dressed in blue scrubs.

“All right, Ms. Montgomery,” the nurse said. “We’re going to take you to get a CT scan. It won’t take long, but the doctor wants to be sure you don’t have an injury inside your brain that could cause bleeding.”

“After they finish, I can go home, right?” Laney directed the question to Ethan. Her blue eyes pleaded with him.

“No. I’m afraid not,” Ethan said. “One of the officers will take you to the police station as soon as the hospital releases you.” He caught himself before he asked her if there was someone she’d like to call. That was a reflexive statement he used with witnesses all the time.

He hadn’t been here ten minutes and he’d made a serious mistake. He’d been way too nice to her—way too sympathetic. He needed to start asking the tough questions. Because he didn’t know what had happened in that suite yet. For the moment, Elaine Montgomery was playing three roles in this murder case—witness, victim and possible suspect.

* * *

M
ORE
THAN
FOUR
hours later, Ethan looked through a two-way mirror at Laney Montgomery. She looked sad and miserable and bored. He couldn’t blame her. He’d left her at the E.R. at around six o’clock, which meant she’d been here at the police station, waiting for him, for four hours. Her face and neck still weren’t completely clean of blood, and a small dark spot on the bandage told him the graze on her temple was still bleeding a little. He had the EMT’s report and he’d just printed out the E.R. doctor’s assessment of her and the results of the CT scan. Her injury was minor. It was going to be painful for a few days, but there was no internal bleeding or damage.

As if she’d read his thoughts, she lifted her gaze to the mirror and glared at him. Or that’s the impression he had. It felt as though she was staring right into his eyes, although he knew she couldn’t see him through the two-way mirror. She knew he was there, though. He could see it in her suspicious gaze. He glanced away as if they’d held each other’s gazes too long.

She closed her eyes and rubbed her temple gingerly, just below the edge of the bandage. Her expression changed to a wince. She looked at her fingernails, then began picking at one with a thumbnail. Even from this far away, Ethan could see the tiny leftover stains from the fingerprint ink.

He ran a hand over his face, feeling the day’s growth of beard. He’d been running ever since he’d gotten the call at four o’clock this morning. By the time he’d gotten back to the station from the hotel, Travis was there, waiting to be interviewed. Then he’d taken a few minutes to review the reports from the crime scene unit, the first officer on the scene and the medical examiner, before spending almost an hour bringing Commander Jeff Wharton up to speed. He and Dixon had just finished questioning Myron Stamps and Gavin Whitley, a process that had taken over two hours, not a pleasant experience. Stamps had shown up with his lawyer. The phone call with Whitley had been a three-way, involving his attorney. Ethan’s jaw ached from gritting his teeth while nearly every question he or Dixon asked was parried by their shysters.

As Dixon came into the viewing room, Laney yawned. She covered her mouth with her hand, even though there was no one in the room with her. Then she winced and patted the bandage with her fingertips again.

“She’s had a long night,” Dixon commented.

“She’s not the only one,” Ethan said, suppressing a yawn of his own. “Where’d you run off to?”

“I ran down to the lab to see what the crime scene techs found outside the penthouse service door and on the stairs.”

“What’d they find?”

Dixon pulled out a notepad. “Black scuff marks, probably made by leather-or synthetic-soled shoes. Not rubber. A few fibers of black fleece, like from a sweatshirt or hoodie. That’s about it. No indication of how long they might have been there.”

“Fingerprints?”

“They dusted the service door’s handle and the railing at the top of the fire stairs, but didn’t get anything except some smudges that probably came from the shooter’s gloves. There was gunshot residue in the smudges.”