A Clean Kill

'Oh, she had her usual hangover. That's all I thought about it,' he said defensively. 'She . . . had a tendency to drink too much, but a lot of people drink. 1 talked to her about it and she promised she'd stop.' His tone changed as he defended her. 'She's had problems in the past, but as long as she stayed away from the heavy stuff, I tried not to make too much of a few glasses of wine. Everybody needs something, right?' Suddenly he seemed not to want to be mad at his wife. He glanced quickly at April, then down at his watch. After he registered the time, he caught the three of them staring at him.

'I have trouble sitting still,' he explained. 'Why are there so many people here?' He indicated the voices upstairs, the number of detectives searching his house. They were all over the place. They wouldn't let him go into his own room. Crime Scene was still working it.

'It's normal procedure for an unnatural death,' Mike said.

'But didn't you just tell me this was an accident, that she died in her sleep?' He looked alternately angry and dazed by it all.

'I said she was found in bed. But we're not certain of anything yet.'

'Oh God.' Perkins turned away for a moment as if the idea occurred to him for the first time that someone else might have caused his wife's death. 'Not . . . ?' He didn't finish the question. His expression was one of complete horror, as if murder was the last thing he could have imagined happening to his wife.

'Can you think of anyone who might want to kill your wife?' Mike asked.

At that moment, Lynn returned through the front door, and Perkins's face paled. 'Only her,' he said slowly.

Thirty-two

After Eloise Gelo hung up with Lieutenant Woo, she called the unit meeting. Five people were on duty that day, including Hagedorn and a forlorn-looking Woody Baum.

'Where's the boss?' Woody asked.

'Still on the Wilson case,' she lied.

'I wrote up my canvass. What does she want me to do with it?' he asked.

'I'm sure she'll want it,' Eloise replied crisply.

'Can I take over it to her? I could continue the house-to-house.'

'She may want you to do that. I'll let you know, Woody.'

She didn't want to inform them just yet that there was another death and investigation in progress. Instead, she assigned the sixty-ones (the complaints) that had come in during the night, reviewed the progress of ongoing cases, and looked over the written reports. A couple of them were incomprehensible as to what action had occurred, so she returned them to their authors for a rewrite. Everybody had to write in complete sentences, whether they wanted to or not, and she guessed the poor reports were a test to see what she'd do about it.

She told them to fix the problems and ignored the grumbling that followed.

Finally, when everybody was busy or had gone out, she went into the lieutenant's office to locate the tapes of Woo's interview with Alison Perkins. They were in her desk, carefully labeled, exactly where Woo had told her they'd be. Eloise knew that the existence of a record of the interview could be a bad thing, depending on what the dead woman had said; therefore she was a little disappointed to find them. If the tapes had been lost, they couldn't be delivered to the principal investigators, and no one could be held responsible for anything. The prospect of blame possibly accrued to her boss or herself down the road weighed heavily on Eloise's mind. A little edgy and not wanting to tell anyone else what was going on, she found the equipment she needed and set up the machine to copy the tapes in her own office. There wasn't time to listen to the interview now, but she thought she might sit down with it later. The boss hadn't told her not to.

The second job Woo had given her was to do the background checks on the nannies who'd found the bodies of their two employers. This caused Eloise another twinge of anxiety. She left the reels . spinning in her office and headed to the computer where Charlie spent his time staring at a screen. Her opinion of him had undergone something of a sea change since he'd come through for her on the Peret case, and she actually smiled at him.

'What's up?' He seemed surprised by both the smile and the visit.

'You know that woman the boss brought in here yesterday? Alison Perkins?'

'How could anyone forget that knockout?' he said.

'She just turned up dead,' Gelo replied sharply. She hated it when men referred to women as dogs or knockouts.

Charlie's pale face sobered quickly. 'No shit? When?'

'Just now, a little while ago,' she amended.

'Wow. I didn't hear that.' He seemed as shocked as she was. 'Where is she?'

'In her home.'

'I meant the boss,' Charlie said.

'She was on her way to the scene when she called in. It's like yesterday—the nanny found her.'

Charlie thought about it for a moment. 'Looks like a little window of opportunity there,' he said slowly.

'What do you mean?'

'In the morning the two husbands are gone; the nannies are out. You see the pattern. They're vulnerable then.'

'Yeah, she wants us to check out the nannies. Anderson Agency,' Eloise told him.

He nodded. 'Okay, that's not a problem.'

'But won't there be a task force working on this?'

'So?' Hagedorn raked a hand through his thinning hair and punched some keys on his keyboard.

'We'd be doubling up on a key part of the investigation.' As a newcomer in the precinct and a boss for the first time, Eloise needed some clarification. The lieutenant hadn't instructed her to coordinate with the task force, and they were supposed to work together on cases like this. Every interview

had to be written up and handed in to the officer in charge. Lieutenant Woo might be the officer in charge of them at Midtown. North, but was she in charge of the task force putting together the file? Eloise had always been a team player and didn't like the idea of working out of the loop.

'Don't make it a problem,' Charlie advised her.

'But how does this work?' Where Eloise came from, they didn't do things like this. There was one file in one place and everybody contributed to it.

He shrugged. 'She helps them out when they ask her to. We help her out. Everybody's happy.'

Eloise frowned. 'But couldn't it bite us later?'

'Well, sure, anything can bite back later, but I've worked all the big cases with her. They pull in people from other units to do stuff all the time. It may not be kosher, but the boss has a hundred percent solution record.' He shrugged. 'And she's very well connected.'

Gelo wasn't ready to let it go so easily. She put a hand on her hip. 'Do you guys work this way often?'

'Don't worry about it. They have hundreds of people working a case like this.'

But all in one location, not all over the place, Gelo wanted to say. When people worked independently, things got passed over that shouldn't be, or not included at all. Other agencies around the country made these kinds of mistakes, not them. She didn't say anything for a moment, wondering again what was on the tapes being copied in her office. Well, Woo was turning them over, wasn't she? Charlie interrupted her internal debate.

'Here we go. Look at this.'

Eloise was amazed by how quickly he'd jumped from one case to the other. They'd been out until late. She'd had to sack out on a cot in the female uniformed officers' room because there was no special place for ranking female officers. A lot of other things were vying for her attention, including the stripper they were interviewing at two p.m. for the Peret case. Charlie, however, had moved on. He was already working the East Side homicides.

'Anderson is the premier employment agency for domestic positions in the U.S.,' he said. He clicked on PRINT, and the pages started spewing out. 'Okay, what we have here are domestic positions for the very rich— cooks, laundresses, butlers, chauffeurs, nannies, bodyguards, nurse-companions, caretakers, baby nurses.'