She sighed. “This morning. The phone started ringing around six-thirty. One of our women out at the Jackson Street facility heard it on the news. After that…” She opened her hands. “Everybody.” Then, suddenly, in a kind of a double take, she seemed to focus on him more clearly. “You said you were investigating Dominic Como’s death?”
“Yes.”
“And you think Nancy’s is related to that?”
“We don’t know. What we do know is that Nancy called the hotline at our office after the reward was announced on Monday and said that she had a question, an important question. And would we please call her the next day, here at your offices, or at her home? She said she’d be at one of the two places, definitely, but never answered at either.”
“No. She never made it in here on Tuesday.” She paused. “But that wasn’t by any means unusual. I mean, she’d often get called out to one of the sites and have to stay until whenever…” Trailing off, she shook her head in obvious dismay and confusion.
Mickey gave her a minute. “Were you both here when the reward on Mr. Como’s death was announced?”
“And when was that, exactly?”
“Around four in the afternoon.”
“Well, then”-she considered carefully-“I’m sure we were here, yes, both of us. But I don’t remember hearing about it here. I know we didn’t talk about it.”
This was more or less what Hunt and Mickey had expected, but that didn’t make the bare fact-that Watrous had no information about why Neshek had called the Hunt Club-any easier to accept. He pursed his lips in frustration. “Might Nancy have spoken to anybody else here about it? Did she stay late, for example?”
Again, Mrs. Watrous gave the question its time. And again she shook her head no. “She left right at five on Monday, or a little after. I stayed on till a little past six.”
Grasping at straws, Mickey asked, “Was that also usual, that she left work right around five?”
“No. Usually she stayed much later. Unless she had a fund- raiser or some event or something like that. The work here is never finished, so we tend to put in some long hours.”
“So”-Mickey barely daring to hope, but here at last was a possible opening-“was there something Monday night, then?”
She started to shake her head again, and then abruptly stopped. “Well, yes… I mean. Oh, God, I hadn’t even thought of that.”
“What’s that, Mrs. Watrous?”
“They were having a COO meeting at City Hall.”
“COO?”
“You know? The Communities of Opportunity. Oh, and speaking of which, did you see that thing in the paper this morning, the CityTalk column? That’s what they must have been going to talk about, that report coming out.”
“Who was that? Besides Nancy, I mean.”
“Well, I suppose all or most of the beneficiaries. Us, Mission Street, Sunset, Delancey, all the others.” Now, her color suddenly high, Adele Watrous tapped impatiently on her desk. “People don’t realize. It’s harder than it looks. You’ve got to put on a song and dance to get people to come out and give you money for these projects. You see what’s in the paper today, you think it’s all about throwing this foundation money away on music or public relations consultants or other nonessentials, but you’ve got to spend money to make money, especially in these times, in this field. Mr. Turner understands that. There’s no other way to do it.”
“I believe you,” Mickey said, keeping his calm. The mention of Len Turner’s name in this other context suddenly put his brain on high alert. “So you’re fairly certain that Nancy was planning to attend this meeting?”
“I’m sure she was. But you can find out if she did easily enough.”
“You’re right, Mrs. Watrous, we can. Well”-Mickey started to get to his feet-“I want to thank you for all your help and cooperation here today. I know this news must have been brutal.”
“It was. I still can’t make myself believe it. And you know what’s really so terrible, almost the worst part?”
“What’s that?”
Suddenly her weariness seemed to overcome her. She sighed again and closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, she shook her head in what Mickey took to be resignation. “The worst part is that we’re so used to terrible news here. We get terrible news here every single day.”
18
Due to the late night they’d both spent at the Neshek home, neither Juhle nor Russo got into work until just before Hunt arrived to make his statement to them. In Nancy Neshek, they had a fresh homicide to begin investigating, and the crime scene analysis and report to review, but Russo wanted to go down and finish up whatever work remained with the limousine first. After all, they’d gone to all the trouble of getting a warrant and having the Lincoln towed to the impound lot, and that lot was only just across Seventh Street, adjacent to the Hall of Justice, where they currently found themselves anyway.
“But Hunt’s going to be here to make his statement any minute.” Juhle was at his desk in the homicide detail, a wide-open room filled with desks on the fifth floor of the Hall of Justice. “We’re going to want to talk to him about that and find out what else he knows or knew about Neshek. I’d bet you he’s also going to know about those CityTalk numbers-”
But Russo cut him off. “I don’t even want to talk about Wyatt Hunt.”
“Sarah, come on. It was late. What were we going to accomplish by taking him downtown?”
“We were going to accomplish the mandate of our job. We were going to accomplish what we’re supposed to do to somebody who discovers a body in any kind of a compromising manner. How about that?”
Juhle shook his head. “He didn’t kill Nancy Neshek.”
“No? How do you know that? How do you know he didn’t contaminate the crime scene? How do you know what he did before you got there?”
“Look, Sarah, Hunt isn’t going anywhere. If his statement’s squirrelly in any way, we haul his ass back here and grill him till he’s well-done. But that’s not going to happen. He was up at her place because she’d called with a question about the reward and… well, we’ve been through all this.”
“Yes, we have. And for the record, it still fries my ass. I don’t care what time it was. We should have hauled Hunt down here. And if Marcel”-this was Marcel Lanier, head of homicide-“if Marcel gets wind of this and goes ballistic, I’m laying the whole goddamned thing off on you as my senior partner who made the final decision. And meanwhile, just so I’m not tempted to lock up Hunt on general principles if he shows up here when he’s supposed to, I’m going to stroll on out of here and take a look at the guts of that limo right now. You and your pal can play patty-cake in the interview room and I’ll catch the rerun on the tape later.”
Sighing, Juhle got up from his chair. “You were way more fun when you were younger, you know that?”
“Not really,” she said. “People just think I must have been.” And she turned on her heel.
When Hunt got to homicide to make his statement, Juhle was waiting for him. After wrestling with the decision, Hunt decided that his job was to pass relevant or potentially relevant evidence along to Devin and Sarah. So he included an account of Alicia Thorpe’s completely unverifiable and somewhat provocative alibi for Monday night.
Hunt finished with Juhle, then grabbed both his sport coat and a tan overcoat against the still-gusting and cold north wind that he could hear whipping up the street. When he got back into his office, he waited for Tamara to finish her call and hang up, and asked about her progress with his potential pool of part-timers.
“We’re in luck. And more than that, you might be happy to hear that the downturn in business over the last six months might not all have been fallout from Craig.”
