an answer.”
“What time was it when the music started?” Harry asked.
“It was like three a.m.,” she said. “I put up with it for a couple of hours, threw a pillow over my head, and went back to sleep, but it kept waking me up. Finally I just went over there and started pounding on the door, but he never answered.”
“Did you go outside, or look out the window when the music first woke you?” Vicky asked.
“No, should I have done that? I mean did Nick get robbed or something?”
Harry found Pete Rourke standing over Nick’s body when he returned to the apartment.
“This isn’t the way I wanted this case to end,” he said. “Not with a confession and suicide by one of my own men.”
“I’m not sure it’s a suicide, or that the confession is legit,” Harry said.
Rourke’s head gave a quick jerk and he threw a questioning look at Vicky.
“I’m not sure it’s legit either. I want to wait for CSI to have a look, but I agree with Harry. It just doesn’t smell right,” she said.
Rourke turned back to Harry. “Talk to me.”
Harry went through the evidence he’d found at the scene. Rourke nodded as Harry explained each contradictory piece. When he had finished Rourke shook his head.
“Harry, I’d give anything to have it not be one of my guys, but if we can’t prove this isn’t a suicide, we’re not going to be able to ignore a written confession found in a locked room with a cop who blew his own head off. Let’s see if CSI can come up with anything that will nail this down as a homicide.”
Marty LeBaron arrived with his CSI team a half hour later. He listened to Harry’s concerns, did a quick turn of all the rooms, and then motioned Harry to follow him outside.
“I see what you’re getting at, Harry. You’re right on every point, except one.”
“The surveillance,” Harry said.
“That’s it. Now unless Nick didn’t shoot himself until Vicky was on watch, and went off to have a piss, we’ve got a situation where a killer would have had to break in through a rear window. There is an open window in Nick’s bedroom, but I can’t imagine Nick laying there watching a movie and not doing anything when some asshole starts climbing in his window.”
“He could have been in the bathroom,” Harry said. “He could have gone into the kitchen for a beer. There are several viable scenarios.”
“Yeah, there are, Harry. But each one’s a stretch.” Marty rubbed his chin. “Nick was a cop and a good one. If some asshole climbed in his window, my bet is he’d either be in cuffs, or stretched out in a morgue wagon.”
Marty and his team spent the next two hours going over Nick’s condo and car. Mort Janlow arrived when they were halfway through the crime scene and began a thorough examination of the body. Harry decided to wait for preliminary results from each of them. Janlow finished first.
They left the body to the morgue attendants and went out to Harry’s car. Janlow rested his considerable bulk against the left front fender.
“I love being called out on a Saturday morning,” he groused. “I work sixteen hours a day, five days a week, and half the time I end up working part of the weekend.”
“Yeah, but you get the big bucks,” Harry said.
Janlow gave him a fish-eye. He toed the ground and began to study his shoe. “Harry, why do you think this isn’t a suicide?” He raised a hand. “I’m not rejecting the idea. I just want to hear your reasons.”
“You noticed the feather in his hair, right?”
“Yes, I did. But he was lying in bed watching a movie before he… died. We’ll have to compare that feather to the type of feathers in his pillows.”
“They’re foam pillows,” Harry said. “I already checked them.”
Janlow nodded, conceding the point.
“It also bothers me that the next-door neighbor, who was already awake because of the music, didn’t hear a shot,” Harry said. “A 9mm Glock is a noisy weapon. But if you place the barrel in somebody’s mouth and a pillow over the receiver, the noise can be reduced significantly.”
“Did you find a pillow with gunshot residue, or scorching?”
“No.”
“So you’re thinking the killer took it away with him-another assumption we can’t prove.”
“That’s right.”
“What else?”
“The neighbor was awakened by the loud music, that we assume was turned on to cover the sound of the shot. Why cover the sound of the shot if this was suicide?”
Janlow nodded, but said nothing.
“Nick had just ordered a movie on pay TV, so if we buy into a suicide scenario we have to assume that he reached a decision to kill himself in the middle of a movie he was watching, that he left his bedroom, turned on the CD player at high volume, and ate his gun.”
“It’s possible.”
“He paused the movie, Mort… just like someone would if they had to go to the bathroom, or to the kitchen to get themselves a beer.”
“It’s still possible he did it that way. I mean suicides can be irrational, but okay, that’s another point in your favor.”
“And finally there’s the confession. It’s too well written, Mort. I’ve read a lot of Nick’s reports over the years, and frankly, like a lot of cops, he wasn’t that articulate. The confession doesn’t say anything about the masks that were used to cover the faces of the victims, or the words carved into their foreheads. Nick was a homicide detective, Mort, and homicide cops don’t like loose ends. He would have told us why he did what he did; he would have told us all of it.”
Mort Janlow issued a heavy sigh. “Alright, you’ve made your point. There are some legitimate concerns so there won’t be any rush to judgment on my end. I’m scheduled to do Bobby Joe Waldo’s post early this afternoon, and I’ll do Nick’s right after that. You’re welcome to be there, or you can check in with me about four o’clock.”
“I’m going to send Jim Morgan down to observe the posts. Vicky and I are going to canvass the neighbors, and then I’ve got to get Pete Rourke to buy us some time. If news about this confession leaks to the media, all hell is gonna break loose.”
When Harry returned to the condo Nick’s body had already been loaded on a gurney. He told the morgue attendants to take a break so he could make a final examination of the body, then undid the straps holding down the covering sheet and pulled it back.
Nick’s features were even more grotesque lying on his back. His bulging eyes had begun to cloud, and the facial features seemed even more distorted. Beneath the clouding in his eyes Harry thought he could detect a strong sense of fear. He leaned in closer studying them more carefully. Yes, it was there. He was certain of it. He had seen many suicides by gunshot. Fear had been there when the fatal wound was to the victim’s torso and death was not immediate. But not when death came quickly. Not when death came from a head wound. Everything he had read, every psychologist he had ever questioned about suicide, agreed that a great sense of calm came to the victim when that final decision had been made. From that point fear was seldom a factor. But Harry felt fear here. Nick had not been seeking his own death. It was not something he welcomed.
Who was it, Nick? Who scared you before you died? He placed his latex-covered hands on Nick’s chest but no sensation came to him. He looked up and saw members of the CSI team watching him. Marty LeBaron was smiling.
“Doing your dead detective thing, Harry?”
Harry ignored him, turning his attention back to the body. Staring down at Nick’s swollen, deformed face he recalled the first time the cop had been braced about his relationship with Darlene Beckett. He had been peppered with questions from the four of them-Rourke, Vicky, Jim, and Harry, himself. The questions had produced concern, embarrassment, and anger. But beneath that montage of emotions there had been a hint of fear as well. It was the same fear Harry had seen so many times with suspects he was out to nail, suspects who had come to the realization that nothing they said or did would get them off the hook.
Was that it? Was that what he was seeing in Nick’s dead eyes? He wondered if it was that simple-that in the
