What She Doesn't See (14 page)

“Yes.” He was still openly skeptical, but
there was a glimmer of interest. “Hitch seemed pretty excited about
it. When he called me later that night, he said he’d taken the lens
to a friend for unofficial analysis and that it appeared to be some
sort of computer chip or advanced technology. He was really hyped.
He planned to pick it up and take it to the state lab the next
morning.”

That glimmer of interest abruptly died. “His
friend was one Timothy O’Neill?”

She sure hadn’t seen that one coming. “Yes.
The kid whose house blew up.” She gave him the abbreviated version
of her encounter with O’Neill.

Patton stared at his coffee for a moment.
“Jackson, we’ve been had.”

Confusion drew her eyebrows together. “I’m
not sure I know what you mean.”

“Hitch was a bit of a computer buff. Turns
out he and O’Neill were friends. He was the first cop to arrest
O’Neill after he dropped out of high school. He befriended the kid
and tried to set him on a better path. Let me emphasize here,”
Patton said, pinning her with a firm look, “O’Neill is not a
legitimate source for police business.”

Alex nodded. “Hitch told me the analysis was
unofficial.”

“Anyway,” Patton went on, “Timothy O’Neill
turned himself in late yesterday.”

About five seconds elapsed before the full
impact of his words penetrated deeply enough to evoke a response.
“Turned himself in?” She had to tread carefully here. Patton could
be fishing. “Wasn’t he supposed to be dead?”

“We’ve confirmed that the body pulled from
the rubble wasn’t him. We just didn’t know who or why. Apparently
Timothy couldn’t live with his conscience and he turned himself
in.”

“Did he tell you why his house blew up?”
Turning himself in seemed logical to her. The kid feared for his
life. He must have realized he couldn’t disappear as easily as he’d
hoped.

“He told me what he told you,” Patton went
on. “Alex, he made the whole thing up to draw attention away from
his own guilt over what really happened.”

Alex didn’t get it. “What guilt? Someone
tried to kill him.”

Patton gave up on resisting the coffee and
drank long and deep before continuing. “The explosion was an
accident. He was afraid he’d be blamed for his friend’s death so he
made up this elaborate story.”

“You’re saying he used Hitch’s accident for
an alibi?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Another long draw
from the foam cup. “Desperate people do desperate things, Jackson.
No surprise there.”

“But what about the contact lens he analyzed
for Hitch? O’Neill insisted it contained government data.” None of
this made sense. O’Neill had been terrified when he returned that
contact lens to her.

“He made it up. The contact lens was just a
contact lens. It blew up along with his house.”

Alex tensed. Had O’Neill not told Patton he
gave the lens back to her? “Where is he now?” But why turn himself
in and then tell this elaborate story to the police?

“We have him in custody. He waived his right
to call an attorney. We’ll keep him here, maybe get a psych eval
done, until we can sort out this whole mess.”

Her head was spinning with all the arguments
she wanted to toss back at Patton but none of it mattered. O’Neill
had confessed to blowing up his house. He’d insisted that
everything he told Alex was a lie. Why would he do that? Jesus. He
could end up doing time for negligent homicide.

“I was going to call you this morning,”
Patton explained. “Losing Hitch has been tough. O’Neill’s stupid
game only made bad matters worse.”

“Wait.” This just wasn’t right. “I went back
to the scene of Crane’s suicide. The whole place was like a setup
for a life that never got lived.” She told him about all the unused
items.

He leaned forward, set his coffee on the
table. “Jackson, I’ve been a cop for a long time. If you really
want to find trouble, it’s always there. Hitch’s death stunned us
all. The way some of us deal with it is by denying the facts. We
prefer to believe otherwise. Think about it. Focusing on the idea
that he was murdered keeps you from having to face the reality that
he’s simply gone. You can keep him alive, so to speak, by
investigating his death.”

The conversation only went downhill from
there. Patton wasn’t going to buy anything she had to say. He
refused to allow her to see O’Neill. She’d wasted her time coming
to him.

At least she knew where she stood with the
cops on the case.

Hitch had been murdered.

And no one was going to find out why.

No one—unless she did.

Her determination increasing as she exited
the building, she came to an immediate stop when she saw Murphy
waiting near her vehicle.

Her first instinct was to run back inside and
get Patton, but then something else kicked in. The mere sight of
him ignited her fury, propelling her forward once more. Somehow he
was responsible for all this.

“The police aren’t going to believe you,
Alex.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” She wanted
to tell him to kiss off and then just drive away but he was her
only connection to everything Patton didn’t see. “Who the hell are
you?”

He pushed his hands into the pockets of his
navy designer trousers. “You already know who I am. I can’t help
you, Alex, unless you help me.”

He wanted the lens or chip or whatever the
hell it was.

She was not parting with the one piece of
potential proof she had. “How could I possibly help you? I don’t
have whatever it is you’re looking for.”

“You need to be smart like Mr. O’Neill. I
recommended he take himself out of the game. All he has to do now
is sit back and let the police protect him until this is over.”
Murphy took a step closer to her. “He told me he gave you the item
that started all his trouble in the first place.”

Son of a… “You know what?” She took that
final step, went toe-to-toe with him. As angry as she was, some
part of her acknowledged that he smelled great, like the night,
dark and exotic. “If you were as good as you think you are, you’d
know the kid was lying. He didn’t give me anything.”

Murphy smiled, the gesture only affecting one
corner of his mouth. “I know who’s lying, Alex, and it isn’t
O’Neill.”

Now he’d just made her mad. “Let’s get this
straight, Murphy. You need to back off. I don’t play well with
bullies.”

With that warning, she turned on her heels
and strode deliberately to the driver’s side of her vehicle. Screw
this guy. The contact lens was all she had. The only connection to
what really happened to Hitch. She wasn’t about to turn it over to
anyone until she had some answers.

Taking her warning literally, he moved back
two steps. He said nothing, but that pale blue gaze burned right
through her, telling her far more than she wanted to know. This guy
would not give up.

She opened the door and scooted behind the
wheel. The sooner she was away from him the sooner she could think
straight.

“One last question, Alex.”

Damn him. She hesitated before closing her
door, shouldn’t have but she couldn’t resist that he might give her
some tidbit of useful information.

“Are you going to wait until someone else has
to die before you realize I’m the only person who can help
you?”

Three beats passed before she could slam the
door against the words that kept echoing in her head. She drove
away without looking back.

She didn’t care what Patton believed. She
didn’t care how smart Murphy thought he was. No one pushed Alex
Jackson around. And she never, ever let down her friends. She would
find out what happened to Hitch.

Hours later Alex realized she would miss
lunch again.

With the Professor and Hernandez on scheduled
calls, she’d spent the entire morning catching up on paperwork with
Shannon cracking the whip. Marg had been busy finagling an
interview for Never Happened in a Miami Who’s Who magazine. Just
when Alex had considered ordering lunch for the three of them,
she’d gotten a call from a lady who needed an estimate on getting
an unsightly mess cleaned up ASAP. She indicated there was blood
and other things but hedged whenever Alex asked for additional
details. She insisted she would pay a bonus if the job could be
completed today.

Anyone who avoided the details and offered to
pay a bonus usually had something to hide. Not that it was
necessarily a criminal act. People made really bad mistakes
sometimes. Accidentally killed a loved one, and then they were
afraid to call the police. Alex would end up having to make the
call while the client sobbed hysterically about how he or she
hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. Most of the time she chose to believe
the story. The explanations were too bizarre to be made up.

Alex felt reasonably certain this one would
fall into that category considering the amount of blood the woman
talked about. She hadn’t sounded hysterical but there had been an
odd tension simmering beneath her calm. Only one way to find out.
The woman obviously needed assistance of some sort.

With Murphy right behind her, Alex headed for
the location. The temperature in her SUV took forever to cool down.
The midday sun had turned the closed-up interior into an oven. If
there was a body at this scene, she hoped the house was
air-conditioned.

She made the necessary turns and then cruised
along the specified street, watching for the house number of her
potential client. Kids played in the yards, toys cluttering what
was otherwise a neatly trimmed landscape, surrounding equally tidy
cookie-cutter houses.

The home of the woman who’d called was a
different story, however. Chipped, peeling paint that screamed for
attention. A tangle of overgrown grass, more brown than green as a
result of the heat and longstanding negligence. The dented garage
door was closed, the driveway was cracked and crumbling. Not
exactly home sweet home.

A middle-aged woman came out onto the porch
as Alex climbed out of her SUV. She waved a hello. “I’m Alex
Jackson of Never Happened.” Alex gestured to her vehicle. “I have
to grab a few things but I’ll be right in.”

“I don’t want you to do anything until I have
an estimate,” the woman, who was hopefully Janet Bell,
reminded.

Alex nodded her understanding and went around
to the cargo door to prepare for entering the house. Since she
didn’t know what to expect outside blood, she pulled on shoe covers
and gloves.

“You’re Mrs. Bell?” Alex asked as she climbed
the steps leading to the porch.

“Yes.” Janet dragged in a heavy breath.
“Prepare yourself, Miss Jackson, this is not a pretty sight.”

Alex gifted her with a comforting smile.
“Trust me, it won’t be anything I haven’t seen before.”

Mrs. Bell managed a tight smile. “This
way.”

Alex followed her inside. Air-conditioned.
Good. But even the coolness of the interior couldn’t disguise the
smell of blood. Coppery, goose-bump inspiring.

No matter how often she walked into a scene
and encountered the same bodily fluids, there was something about
blood that made her shiver.

They passed through the living room and moved
down the dimly lit hall. Mrs. Bell hesitated outside what was
probably a bedroom door. “I apologize in advance for this immoral
image. Please don’t associate what you’re about to see with me.”
She moved her head solemnly from side to side. “This has nothing to
do with me.”

Alex kept that smile of reassurance tacked in
place. “Why don’t you stay out here while I have a look? There’s no
reason for you to go in again.”

Mrs. Bell nodded jerkily.

Alex reached for the door but hesitated. As
sorry as she felt for the lady there was one thing she had to know.
“Mrs. Bell.” She turned to look at the poor woman. “Is there
anything in here that merits calling the police? I wouldn’t want to
contaminate a crime scene.”

Her eyes rounded like saucers. “Oh, I
couldn’t have the police coming in and seeing this. I’ll call them
as soon as you’ve taken care of...” She motioned toward the still
unopened door. “I couldn’t possibly bear the humiliation of having
the neighbors get wind of this. If the police are called first,
it’ll be a circus.”

This was not good. Evidently this woman
understood that whatever was in this room required the
participation of the police. Alex couldn’t make her call, but once
she’d viewed the scene she could damn sure call herself.

Alex opened the door and a blast of metallic
odor—coagulated blood—hit her in the face. Mingled with that
overwhelming smell was the stench of urine. Her empty stomach
roiled in protest. Not even those smells could detract from the
shock at what she saw.

A thin man, late fifties she guessed and
naked as the day he was born, hung from the ceiling fan in the
middle of the room. There wasn’t more than two inches of space
between the tip of his toes and the worn blue fabric of the chair
directly behind him that he had apparently stepped off.

At first glance it looked as if he had
committed suicide. Not only had he hung himself, he’d somehow
managed to cut an artery in his neck. But then the other details
came into focus. Like the careful padding around the rope’s noose
and the loose way his hands were bound in front of him by the silk
scarf. Both the noose’s padding and the scarf were soaked in
blood.

The straight razor with which he’d apparently
attempted to cut the noose had fallen onto the floor near an open
magazine. At least he’d died happy it seemed, considering the
sultry vixen so vividly exposed on the magazine’s centerfold.

For a few seconds more Alex tried to figure
out why he hadn’t just kicked around until his toes found the
chair. Then he certainly could have reached above his head and held
on to the rope to take the pressure off his neck. Maybe cutting
himself loose was another part of the excitement. She’d heard how
some people got off on the whole danger element of asphyxiation,
but the knife was over the top. Most claimed that asphyxia made the
orgasm better, out of this world even. Some sexual partners
strangled each other to achieve the effect.