later,” I said.
He didn’t like that. Life would have been so much easier for him if he could have distracted me with a shiny piece of jewelry or a trip to Bermuda. That’s the trouble with women: We’re so less easy to impress once we’re past the age of blushing and giggling.
“I can’t help you there,” he said, quickly losing all patience with me. “In fact, I’ve been advised not to talk about the girl at all.”
“Advised? By whom?”
“My attorney,” he said, looking me square in the eye. “Your father.”
That news should have come as no surprise, yet it still delivered an unwelcome kick. My father had just come one step closer into my life.
“Well,” I said, “you’re paying dearly for that advice. You’d better follow it.”
“I have a feeling you never did,” he said.
“No,” I said. And I paid dearly too. “But then, no one ever looked at me as a possible murder suspect.”
“I’m heading that off at the pass,” he said. “The best defense is a good offense. I didn’t have anything to do with that girl’s death, and I’m not allowing anyone to make it seem as if I did.”
I wondered what had happened to precipitate that move. Had Landry or Weiss pushed that button? Had the media?
The news hounds would be catching up to speed soon. I was surprised it hadn’t happened already. The instant they got wind of the men last seen with Irina, they would be rabid, particularly when Bennett Walker’s name surfaced. I knew for a fact that would be happening even while I stood there in the driveway of Star Polo with Jim Brody.
I knew because I had made the phone calls myself.
It’s never too late to be bitter or vindictive.
“Was there anything else I can help you with?” Brody asked. “I don’t mean to give you the bum’s rush, Elena, but I’m due to be somewhere.”
“No, no,” I said, glancing back at Lisbeth’s car.
“I brought some things for Lisbeth,” I said, lifting my purse for him to notice. “Some photographs I thought she might like to have from Irina. I know they were close.”
“Haven’t seen her,” he said, looking around. Pretending to look for her, I thought. “I don’t think she’s here.”
“Don’t you find that strange?” I asked. “Her car is here.”
“She probably went somewhere with a friend,” he said, and started moving away from me.
“You’re probably right.”
I thanked him for his time and went to my car. He climbed into his Escalade. I followed him out the driveway. He turned left, I turned right. When I had gone a mile or so, I turned my car around and went back.
I went inside the barn, found the same hand I had spoken with earlier, and told him I had something to give Lisbeth and wanted to leave it outside her door. Did he know where she lived?
Oh, yes, she lived upstairs, over the stable. Go out of the barn and take the stairs on the left. He would show me. I told him that wasn’t necessary and thanked him.
No one paid any attention to me as I went up to Lisbeth’s apartment. From the landing I could see a rider going down the driveway with three polo ponies tethered together on either side, taking them out for a jog. I was out of sight of the wash racks. In the other direction, a thick row of trees screened the stable area from the view from the big house.
I tapped on the glass in the door and waited. Tapped a little harder and waited. I tried the doorknob. Locked.
Through the glass and a sheer curtain, I could see the living area of the tiny apartment. A couch, a chair, a messy TV cabinet, a coffee table strewn with magazines. A breakfast bar dividing off the minuscule kitchen.
I tapped on the glass one last time, then pulled a couple of simple lock picks from my bag and invited myself in.
Chapter 38
“I have some news for you, Detective Landry,” Mercedes Gitan said as she stuck her head out the door of the autopsy suite.
“Good news?”
“Depends on your point of view,” she said. “Come on in. We just finished up a drowning victim.”
“Hell of a way to start your morning,” Landry said.
Gitan pulled her cap off, setting free a mop of curly black hair, and tossed the cap and her gloves in a laundry bin. “Sad. A young woman with her whole life ahead of her.”
“So was Irina Markova. What’s the word?”
“Toxicology came back.”
“Drugs?”
“Ecstasy. A lot of it.”
“That’s no big surprise, considering what kind of party she was at. A lot of X, a lot of sex.”
“She was an active participant. No date-rape drugs.”
“Anything under the fingernails?”
“Actually, yes. Her own skin,” she said. “She was probably trying to dig her fingers under whatever it was she was being choked with,” she said, pantomiming the action.
“Anything else?”
“Some tiny bits of leather fibers. I think she was strangled with a thin leather strap or cord. The fibers I removed from the neck wound also appear to be leather.”
“But nothing that might give us a clue to her killer.”
“Sorry, no. Are you desperate?”
“No. I’ve got a couple hot prospects, but my life would be a lot easier if I could say ‘You did it. And here’s the proof.”“
“My life would be easier if George Clooney would sweep me away to his villa in Italy,” Gitan said.
“Ha-ha. I’d better get out there and face the lions,” Landry said. “It’s going to be a long, bad day.”
“My office has taken a half dozen calls from the media already this morning and another half dozen from the powers that be telling me not to talk to the press. These hot prospects you have, I take it they’re not the usual suspects.”
“Not by a long stretch. Big bucks, social standing, pains in the ass.
“Oooh… an honest-to-goodness juicy Palm Beach scandal,” Gitan said, pretending excitement.
“Move over, William Kennedy Smith. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
“Well, here’s your bonus of scandalous dirt and motive: your vic was pregnant.”
“Shit,” Landry whispered. No need to decipher the bill from the Lundeen Clinic after all.
“Showed up in the blood tests,” Gitan said. “There was so much damage to her lower torso from the alligator, there was nothing for me to find in the exam.”
“Let’s keep that to ourselves for now,” Landry said. “I can still use the DNA threat.”
“My lips are sealed.”
Landry thanked her and walked out into the sunshine. It was hot. He unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and rolled them up as he walked back across the parking lot to the justice center.
From a distance he could see the news vans and reporters scattered in individual spots that gave good background. The shit had officially hit the fan. Someone had ferreted out or passed along the information as to who the suspects might be in Irina Markova’s murder. There was no other big case going on that would warrant this kind of attention.
Landry took a detour and went to his car, still far enough away that no one was paying any attention to him. He backed out of his spot and drove slowly down the row toward the building to get a closer look. As he sat there,
