Aren’t you? Busting my chops?”
“Nope.” It was Fox’s turn to grin.
They got out of the car. Fox moved up the sidewalk at a stroll, a few steps behind Rafe’s more rapid pace. An officer stepped into the door as they reached it. Fox read his name tag when he joined them. “Hey, McGee, what’s the story?”
McGee thrust a thumb over his shoulder. “The vic’s in the library. Through those doors there and down a bit to your right.”
Fox stepped into a marble-floored vestibule. There were French doors at the back. Odd architectural touch, he thought. That was a Yankee for you. In his humble opinion, they weren’t long on welcoming hospitality. This effect made it look as though they were trying to keep guests out.
One of the inner doors was ajar as well. Fox turned sideways to pass through it without touching anything and Rafe followed him. They headed down a wide center hall.
Stephen Carmen lay in the middle of his library floor. Fox automatically stooped to take his pulse. In one memorable case, the vic had been only unconscious and he’d learned right then and there to be thorough, not to make any assumptions. When that “murdered” woman had sat up, he’d nearly dropped dead. That had been in his rookie year.
Carmen, however, was definitely deceased. His skin wasn’t quite cold yet but both his lips and his nail beds were going blue. He’d been dead less than three hours.
The dome of Carmen’s forehead shined in the library lights. He had a receding hairline and pudgy features, with the kind of petulant mouth that always made Fox’s skin crawl a little when he saw it on a man. He dropped the man’s wrist. “Sorry, pal. Rough way to end it even if I wouldn’t have wanted to shake your hand while you were alive.” He straightened away from the corpse, leaving it to Rafe.
Everything in the library was good quality, from the rich indigo of the Persian rug to the teak desk. Fox peered behind the drapes, into the fireplace, around and behind a tiny tea table with two ornate chairs bracketing it. He moved the chairs by nudging the legs with his toe.
Nothing underneath.
Fox went to the open safe and sifted through its contents. He found a wad of legal documents but nothing valuable. He scanned the papers. They chronicled the court battle between Carmen and Tara Cole.
He really wanted to meet this lady.
In the meantime, he studied row upon row of books on shelves that lined two walls. None of them looked as though they’d ever been cracked open. What a waste, Fox thought. Some of them were classics. He took a pair of gloves from the first of the crime scene techs to arrive and he removed the tomes one by one.
Finally, he was satisfied. There was no ruby in this room, especially not a twenty-four-carat-size one.
“I’ll just check out the rest of the house,” Fox said, and Rafe nodded.
It took him nearly an hour to go through the remainder of the place. There was a lot of it but nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. By the time Fox got to the kitchen, he knew nothing else was going to be. This whole scene had clearly gone down in the library.
He reached for the pantry door and peeked inside. Nothing but canned goods and darkness. Then he heard Rafe call to him from down the hall. He closed the door again with a quiet snick and went to rejoin his partner in the library. The body-catchers had arrived from the morgue and Rafe had released Carmen to them. The crime scene techs were leaving fingerprint dust in their wake wherever they passed.
“Okay, here’s my play on it,” Rafe said. “Ms. Cole got word from the court today that she’d lost her fight. She came over here in a nice temper, walloped Carmen with the poker, maybe in a rage, or maybe she planned to.”
Fox frowned. “That’s cold.”
“Yeah, well, either way, she did us the courtesy of calling 911. Then she grabbed the ruby and took off. It fits.”
“Don’t it though,” Fox drawled. Too neatly, to his way of thinking. “Nobody’s found her yet?”
“No. She’s either traveling on foot or by public transportation. She could be anywhere. She doesn’t keep a car—she lives in a high rise on Poplar—so we can’t put anything out on the vehicle.”
Fox nodded. If he hadn’t had a love affair with the ’68 Shelby since he was a boy, he wouldn’t have bothered to own a car in the city, either.
“We’ve got officers at her building waiting for her to come home,” Rafe continued. “If she doesn’t turn up by morning, there’s our cause to put out an APB on her.”
At which point, Fox thought, she could be in Duluth. “Let’s nudge it some,” he suggested. “Give her until midnight to appear, then hit the airwaves with her description.”
“That would be my inclination,” Rafe agreed, but they both knew the score. “Plattsmier will balk. You know how he gets when there’s any money or clout involved and something tells me these folks have some income.” Their captain was more politician than cop, more worried about lawsuits than justice. He’d started his career with enough integrity but the title had done him in.
Plattsmier and Rafe did not get along. Luckily, Fox could charm a snake. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll deal with him myself.”
He left the library again. He went down the hall and finally stepped outside into the backyard. He circled the house once, then twice, without finding anything interesting there, either. Rafe caught up with him in a winter-dead garden in the backyard.
“The techs are on their way out,” Rafe said.
“Go ahead and catch a ride with one of them.”
“You’re going to stay for a while?”
Fox nodded. They had worked together for eight years now. It was Fox’s strong opinion that no case ever got solved by jumping to conclusions. He took things slowly. Rafe, on the other hand, tended to crash right in, angry and righteous in his pursuit of justice. They balanced each other well.
Fox watched his partner leave then he cleared snow from a stone bench. Several aspects of this crime bothered him. He sat down to dwell on them.
Chapter 2
Behind the pantry closet, crunched down into a too-small wedge of space, Tara listened to the new quiet. She didn’t remember this cubbyhole being so cramped. Then again, the last time she’d used it, she’d been maybe eleven years old. Now, even moving her hand to wipe at an errant tear required clever effort.
Stephen was dead. No, she couldn’t mourn him, but everything inside her still shook with the horror of it.
Tara listened to the silence as she tried to steady herself, then she wriggled into the pantry again. The cops were finally gone. She was sure of that. She squeezed beneath the shelf once more and pushed the door open gently, just a crack.
The kitchen was dark as pitch. The house stayed quiet. Tara crawled out and stood. She thought she heard her bones crack. She went back to the hall, keeping close to the wall.
There might still be gaping
