The Perfect Suspect (17 page)

Ryan hesitated. She had assumed he was at home, safely tucked away in the castle loft. But he was still at a bar. She shut the phone, aware of the adrenaline pumping through her. She pulled the hoodie low over her forehead, then jammed her foot on the accelerator, wheeled out of the lot and headed for the castle. The cell started ringing. God, Jeremy was calling back. She fumbled with the buttons and managed to shut it off. She would have to get rid of the cell tonight. Jeremy could be starting home now. She could picture him hurrying along the sidewalk, crossing the street at the corner, dodging under the canopy into the entry. Smiling and waving at the guard, stepping into the elevator. And she was blocks away. She pushed the accelerator to fifty, sixty, squealing around the corners, then forced herself to slow down. There couldn't be any record of her being pulled over. How would she answer the questions? What were you doing in the neighborhood when one of Mathews's staffers was shot?

She kept the sedan at the speed limit through LoDo. The bars had let out, and groups of people were wandering about, weaving across the middle of the streets, calling to one another through the traffic. She looked hard for the tall, slim, muscle-knotted man with blond hair who had stared at her this afternoon and looked away, a mixture of recognition and fear blossoming on his pink face. He was nowhere.

Ryan parked two blocks away from the Hudson building. The video cameras, she knew, stopped at the next block. She pulled back the layers of newspaper on the package until the .38 Ruger, black and shiny, new looking, was exposed and slipped it inside the pocket of her sweatshirt. For an instant, she stepped back in time. She was a rookie cop in Minneapolis, walking the streets and once in a while drawing a surveillance, the kind of assignment that had allowed her to prove herself and had gotten her promoted.

She got out and, staying close to the buildings, hunched inside herself, she made her way toward the Hudson building. Even when the cameras picked her up, she would be nothing more than a dark shadow moving against brick walls. She had a clear view of the glass front door, the overhead lights flaring across the sidewalk, from the doorway she ducked into. After only a few moments, she saw Jeremy Whitman lurching down the sidewalk toward her. He was alone. Every few steps, he pressed his shoulder against the wall for a moment before pushing off. He was drunk, and that made things easier. She waited until he was at the doorway, then she stepped out. “Hello, Jeremy,” she said, keeping her shoulders hunched, turned in on herself, away from the cameras.

He did a series of rapid eye blinks, as if he were trying to conceal the fact that he recognized her. The smell of alcohol poured off him like the odor of a wet cat. He took a couple of steps backward, then tried to lurch past, but she took hold of his arm and held him in place. The hard knots of his muscles meant nothing; he was drunk. She could topple him with one shove. She smiled at the idea, and that seemed to unnerve him even more. He rammed his arm toward her, as if he could push his way through a crowd. “Get away from me,” he said.

“I want to talk to you.” Ryan stayed in front of him, still hunched forward. His eyes darted about, as if he expected someone to materialize out of the brick walls and whisk him away. “We have a great deal in common. We both loved David Mathews.”

He swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing like a cork. He licked at his lips, gathering courage, she guessed, before he said, “You were at his house when he was killed.”

She could feel herself still smiling. “That is ridiculous.” He had surmised more than she anticipated. Somehow he had placed her at the house. The image of the dark figure on the sidewalk floated before her. Jeremy Whitman on his way to David's house last night? Oh, this was perfect. She had thought there were two people who might link her to David, but there was only one, the scared, drunk guy in front of her reeking of alcohol and fear. Tonight she would solve both problems.

“I want to find David's killer as much as you do,” she said, the good cop, cajoling him toward a place of safety from which he was unlikely to bolt down the street screaming. “I wouldn't want to be removed from the investigation because you happened to see us together.”

“You killed him.” He seemed almost sober.

“We need to straighten things out.” She nudged him toward the car. She knew exactly where she would take him; she hadn't known before, but now it was as clear as a map on her GPS. Out to Lakewood, along an old creek bed where a new light-rail was under construction, with piles of dirt and bulldozers and tractors, where a body might not be noticed for days. “We'll go to headquarters, and you can tell the officers on duty everything you know about me. I'm anxious to get this behind me. I want to worry about finding David's killer, so let's clear the air. What do you say?”

“You must think I'm stupid,” he said. “I'm not going anywhere with you.”

“Get in the car.” She removed the gun slowly and pressed it against his side.

“You gonna kill me, like you killed David?” He seemed to settle into the sidewalk, as if his boots had gotten stuck in cement. “You'll never get away with it. I'm not the only one who knows.”

Ryan pushed the nozzle harder into his side. “What are you talking about?”

“Somebody saw you last night. A witness was outside. She heard the gunshots and saw you leave David's house. You gonna kill her, too? You gonna keep killing until nobody's left?”

“Where did you hear this?” Another campaign staffer, she was thinking, on her way to see David last night. To sleep with David! Did he not have any pride? Any sense of decorum? Any sense of risk? “Who told you?”

“It doesn't matter. The truth will come out. The newspaper knows about the witness.”

“You're lying!” Ryan was aware of her hand shaking. It was impossible, and yet it made sense. The shadowy figure out on the sidewalk had been too afraid to go to the police. She might be dismissed as a crank, and the detective she had accused would know who she was. So she had gone to the
Journal
. But the
Journal
couldn't prove any connection between her and David, until Jeremy Whitman had lumbered into the picture. Jeremy, who could also connect her to David. She tightened her grip on the gun, her finger quivered on the trigger.

Jeremy made a move as if he intended to walk away, and Ryan jammed the gun into his flesh, close to his heart. “You're not gonna shoot me,” he said. “There would be witnesses.” There was no one around, she was thinking. The sidewalks had emptied, there was no traffic. “Somebody looking out the window,” he went on, the cockiness about him making her hate him. She could feel the hatred erupting inside, the way it had with David, grinning and wagging a finger at her, saying, “You're not going to shoot me.”

She pulled the trigger and watched Jeremy stagger backward, the shock of it registering on his face, just as it had registered on David's. She leaned over his body, warmth emanating from his chest and face, his eyes wide and frozen, and managed to extract the wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. The area was deserted, the old brick buildings silent, lights glinting in the windows here and there. She walked back to the sedan, hovering close to the buildings, and made sure no one was around before she got behind the wheel and drove away.

16

The shivering had started before she reached her apartment. On the Dumpster dump, stomping on the cell phone and tossing the pieces in different Dumpsters in different alleys, watching over her shoulder for the moving shadow of some homeless guy huddled in a cardboard box who might get curious and go looking for what she left behind, or a patrol cop checking alleys in LoDo.

Shivering as she drove across town to the Golden Triangle and the one-bedroom apartment in the 1920s building with the steel and glass art deco façade. Shivering so hard in the elevator, she had trouble pressing the button for the sixth floor, the number jumping in front of her eyes. It had taken three tries before she managed to jam the key into her lock. Thirty minutes in the hot shower, shivering, dropping onto the floor, gripping her legs to her chest, pulling in on herself with the water pounding her back. Now, trussed up in the worn blue terrycloth robe that had followed her through twenty years, Ryan lay on top of the bed, curled into a fetal position, images playing in her head and projecting themselves on the walls and ceiling, dancing about with the slats of light that worked past the blinds. She couldn't escape. She would drown in the images.

This was not the way it was supposed to be, everything so twisted and messed up. They were supposed to be together, she and David. Not right away, she had accepted that, but soon after he had settled into the governor's job. There would be the early months in office when the press would scrutinize everything he said and did, every policy he proposed. But that would also be the honeymoon period when everyone wanted the new governor to succeed. No matter what the reporters wrote, the people would give him the benefit of the doubt.

That reporter—who wrote the articles she had seen in the newspaper? Catherine McLeod?—had been a pain in the neck. Digging into the fraud charges brought by the idiot old man who had been David's partner. Even after the charges were dropped and the matter settled, McLeod had kept showing up, asking questions, delving into public records. David had finally made a call to the publisher with a pointed but gentle reminder—David was a master at throwing a steel punch inside a velvet glove—that the fraud issue was over, settled. After all, David and the publisher served on civic boards together. They were the same kind of people, as David had put it. Ryan remembered wincing at that, as if he had thrown a steel and velvet punch at her, a reminder she was not one of them.

McLeod had kept on during the campaign, probing beneath the smooth surface that David and his staff created. And now this! She could feel the pressure of her knees tight against her chest. Somehow McLeod had learned about the woman on the sidewalk. She must have told Whitman. How else could he have known? She had probably insisted that Whitman go to Internal Affairs and spill everything about Aspen, and that would have been the beginning of the end. Pulled off the investigation, asked a lot of questions about her relationship to David Mathews. She would have become a suspect. Some bright investigator might have gone to the evidence room, found her name on the sign-in sheet the day before she left on vacation. Maybe even discovered that a gun was missing. Oh, that would have taken some work, but it could have happened. The missing gun could have been identified as the murder weapon.

Then Catherine McLeod would have played her trump card—the witness. The image of the dark figure on the sidewalk burst past the other images: David stumbling backward, the blond-haired staffer crumbling against the brick wall, the same stunned look in their eyes. Like a projection on the wall across from the bed was the slim figure on the sidewalk, swaying a little as if she were caught in the wind or summoning the energy to run. Whoever she was, she had contacted McLeod. But here was the thing: McLeod couldn't do anything.

Ryan loosened her grip around her legs and watched them stretch down the bed, as if they belonged to someone else, the feet wrinkled and gray in the slatted light. She let her arms fall along her sides, willing herself to relax. McLeod could do nothing. She had counted on Whitman to tell Internal Affairs about Aspen. But Jeremy Whitman would not be talking to anyone, which meant that, more than likely, whoever had been on the sidewalk would refuse to stick her neck out.

Except, the bitch had already contacted Catherine McLeod, and McLeod was the kind of reporter who couldn't let things go.

Ryan pushed herself off the bed, went over to the dresser and stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair was still wet, plastered to her head. Her face had a scrubbed, skeleton look, eyes dark and opaque. She couldn't see into them. Her work wasn't done yet. She had known all along, she realized, and it was the knowledge that had brought on the terrible shivering. Jeremy Whitman was only part of the problem. She would have to find the witness and silence her before Catherine McLeod could convince her to go to the police. And then, of course, she would have to deal with Catherine McLeod.

The morning was cool, the first hints of autumn in the air, but Catherine could feel the warmth of the sun on her shoulders and the backs of her legs as she jogged along the sidewalk with Rex pulling ahead on the leash. She'd had a few glasses of wine last night, and a dull ache buzzed in her head. Highland was a hilly neighborhood, built on bluffs, and she had felt the strain in her calf muscles as she and Rex ran up a steep hill a few blocks from home. They hit an easy stride across the top, running past deep front lawns and trimmed bushes that abutted the brick bungalows, the sun wavering ahead. She tried for a run with the dog every day, either in the mornings or the evenings, whatever worked out. Yesterday nothing had worked out. She'd left for the office after hearing about Mathews, and she'd gone to Nick's last night.