“You’ve got sixteen minutes,” Lassiter said as the elevator doors slid open. He stepped into the car and jabbed the DOOR CLOSE button, forcing his partner to leap in before the panels slid shut in front of her.
“What’s the hurry?” she said.
“It’s a little thing called money,” Lassiter said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything to you, but it certainly does to the department. And I don’t feel free just to fritter it away.”
“They’re paying us the same whether we talk to this guy for five minutes or five hours.”
“It’s not our salary I’m worried about,” Lassiter said. “It’s the parking in this building. Fifteen dollars for twenty minutes? If we’re going to arrest anyone in this pit of depravity, it should be the guy who runs the garages.”
“You could have badged the attendant,” O’Hara said.
“As I’ve mentioned about eight thousand times, we have no jurisdiction in San Francisco,” Lassiter said. “Which means we have no right to expect to be treated as if we did. Which would make free parking an illegal emolument.”
“Maybe we could get a validation.”
“And if there actually is a killer and it turns out to be someone at the company?” Lassiter said. “Tell me then how we’re not hideously compromised.”
O’Hara flirted briefly with the idea of telling him a lot more than that, but she decided to let it pass. She knew Lassiter had only agreed to this trip because she had begged him. He still believed that Mandy’s death was a suicide and saw no reason to investigate further. If he’d stated his opinion firmly to Chief Vick that would have been the end of the case. But instead he gave the chief a passionate argument for keeping it open just a little longer, and even for taking a day trip up north to check out Mandy’s former employer.
That didn’t mean he was happy about doing it or that he believed they would find anything up here. But partners stick up for each other, he said. If Juliet hadn’t been willing to back down-and he could tell she wasn’t- then his only choice was to let her lead or put in for a new partner.
They’d spent the first part of the drive up the 101 going over the details of the case. Since there were essentially no details, that took them about as far as Solvang; then they’d ridden the remaining ninety percent of the way in silence. That was fine with her. She knew if they’d talked Lassiter would have spent most of the time trying to convince her that Mandy’s death had been self-inflicted and that they should close the case. That was a conversation she wasn’t eager to have again because she still didn’t have a substantive response for him. She couldn’t say why she refused to believe that Mandy had killed herself. She just did.
She knew it wasn’t just because, as Lassiter had hinted several times, she was identifying with the victim. It was true that the sight of a twenty-eight-year-old woman hanging by the neck in her cheerleader’s outfit had an immediate emotional resonance with anyone who’d ever called the Rebel Yell or the Tiger Roar or the Duck Quack. You couldn’t help but think of that time you were at your lowest ebb, fired from a job or dumped in a relationship or just lost in your life, and you put on the colors “just to see if they still fit.”
But she knew there was more to it than that. She wasn’t projecting her own psyche onto a suicide victim. She was too good a cop for that. Something about the crime scene was making her crazy. So far she’d just seen little things that didn’t make sense for an imminent suicide: a prescription for her mother she’d arranged to pick up the day after her death, a book on caring for ill relatives she’d requested from the library’s interbranch loan.
There had to be something bigger. She just couldn’t identify it. Whatever it was, it had registered somewhere in the back of her mind and she hadn’t been able to bring it forward yet. Usually if she took a quick walk or a long shower she could turn off enough of her conscious brain to allow the subconscious to seep through. But she’d walked and showered and showered and walked and still she was no closer to the solution. She’d hoped the hours in the car, staring out at the scenery, might coax the clue out of hiding, but by the time they cruised past old Candlestick Park and into the city there was still nothing.
That was why this interview with Mandy’s supervisor was so important. If she couldn’t find a lead here she’d have to admit there really was no case. She was not going to cut it short, no matter if the parking threatened to cost more than the unmarked Crown Vic was worth.
The digital readout on the elevator’s control panel flipped to 34 and the car decelerated suddenly. The doors slid open and they stepped out into open space. At least that was what it looked like. The vast lobby was nearly empty, a black slate floor running uninterrupted the entire length and width of the building, so that whichever direction you looked you saw nothing but floor-to-ceiling windows.
Or almost nothing, anyway. A football field’s length away from the elevators the slate rose to form some kind of large shelf, and behind that a wide spiral staircase led up to what Juliet assumed was the thirty-fifth floor. As they walked toward the eruption they saw a pair of tanned legs coming down the stairs, and by the time they were halfway there the legs had been joined by a torso and finally a head. The body parts belonged to an athletic young blond woman in a dress so short a professional tennis player might think twice about wearing it at Wimbledon. She seated herself behind the shelf and gave them a gleaming smile as they approached.
“May I help you?” she said.
“We have an appointment with Sam Masterson,” O’Hara said.
The blond woman’s smile faltered. “May I ask what this is about?”
“You can, but it won’t do you any good,” Lassiter said. “Take it from someone who’s been asking for weeks.”
“I’m Detective Juliet O’Hara with the Santa Barbara Police Department,” she said. “This is my partner, Detective Lassiter. We scheduled this appointment with Mr. Masterson to talk about one of his former employees, Mandy Jansen.”
“In that case, you’d better follow me,” the blond woman said. “I’m Chanterelle, by the way.”
“That’s a pretty name,” O’Hara said.
“It’s a mushroom,” Lassiter said.
“It’s a pretty mushroom,” Chanterelle said.
The woman named for a fungus got up from behind the desk and started up the spiral staircase. O’Hara looked up to see where they were going and found herself wondering why any woman who knew she’d be going up and down steep stairs all day would wear such a short dress, unless she was hoping to save money on visits to her gynecologist. Staring straight ahead she followed the sound of the receptionist’s footsteps until both of her own feet were on level floor. Then she looked around.
They stood in a much smaller lobby, which was only the size of the entire Santa Barbara police station. Corridors led off in either direction and they were dotted with doors spaced far enough apart that Juliet was certain the offices behind them must be enormous.
Chanterelle waited until Lassiter had stepped up next to O’Hara-his sense of chivalry had kept him from mounting the first stair until the hem of the receptionist’s dress had disappeared through the hole in the ceiling- and then pointed to a double door. “I’m going to put you in conference room B.”
“Are you going to put this Masterson in there with us?” Lassiter said. “Because we’d prefer not to bankrupt our city government.”
The receptionist smiled broadly, apparently choosing to ignore whatever she couldn’t understand, and walked to the double doors. She gave a gentle knock on one of them and then threw it open.
As Chanterelle headed back down to her station, O’Hara led Lassiter to the door. Inside, the room seemed to stretch the length of the building and it contained a polished granite table that ran from one end to the other. Enough leather chairs were clustered around it to seat a joint session of Congress. All the way at the far end of the table Juliet could make out the form of a man.
“Mr. Masterson?” Juliet said, hoping she could make her voice carry over such a distance without shouting.
“Please come in,” the man said. His voice was muffled by the distance, but Juliet thought there was something familiar about it.
O’Hara and Lassiter came into the conference room and started down the length of the table.
“Mr. Masterson, we talked briefly on the phone,” O’Hara said as they began to get close enough to make out the figure sitting at the end of the table.
“I’m afraid Sam Masterson isn’t with us anymore,” the man said.
“I just talked to him a few days ago,” O’Hara said. “He didn’t mention he was leaving the company.”
“I’m sure if he had left the company he would have contacted you first,” the man said. “Sam was really good
