retaliation for his clever courtroom maneuvering. Swyteck may have scored a few points for style at Friday’s hearing, but Gerry had the long-term winning strategy. And if Knight kept doing stupid things like this, he’d reap the rewards sooner than expected.
He pulled the hood release, got out of the car, and walked around the front to check things out. If this was what he thought it was, he’d definitely file a police report. But he didn’t want to be crying wolf, either. He wanted to see those wires ripped from the starter, maybe even take a few more pictures.
The hood had risen up about four inches before it caught on the safety latch. He reached underneath to find the trip switch that would completely release it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened the hood, and wasn’t exactly sure where the release was. Both hands were under the hood, fiddling for the switch, when a black blur fell from above him, swooping down like Spider-Man from atop the opened garage door that lay directly overhead suspended from the ceiling. It was a huge blur that took the shape of a man who pounced on the hood of the car, his sheer weight slamming it shut on Gerry’s fingers. He felt the back-spray of blood against his belly, heard the sickening crush of bones that just a split second earlier had been his precious hands.
A cord closed tightly around his neck, silencing his screams, as the man reached up and manually pulled the garage door closed. Gerry’s head rolled back, and that’s when he saw it, right above him: The access panel to the attic had been pushed aside-a passageway that had been hidden by the opened garage door in its rolled-back position, an opening that hadn’t been there when he’d entered the garage with the door closed.
Gerry stood face-to-face with his attacker, unable to run away or raise his mangled hands in defense, unable to pry his fingers loose from beneath the crushing car hood that had trapped him like an animal. The pain was so intense that his entire body tightened with spasms. He tried to scream, but the wire noose around his neck drew tighter. He could barely see, his vision blurred by the trauma, but he could see well enough to know that his attacker was looking right at him, his face hidden behind a ski mask.
The tension on the cord eased. Gerry could breathe again, hear again. The man was saying something.
“Poor Gerry Colletti,” he said taunting him. “Tried to hard-nose negotiate his way to the prize.”
“Huh?” he tried to say, but it was only a grunt.
“If only he’d known all the deals had already been cut.”
“What are-” he started to say, but the cord tightened around his neck, and again he was fighting for air. His knees buckled, and he would have fallen to the ground if his attacker hadn’t held the cord high like a rope from a tree limb. He could feel his life slipping away as he heard the man say, “See you in hell, Gerry. I hear it’s one big gold mine.”
Fifty-one
Homicide Detective Rick Larsen arrived at the home of Gerry Colletti just after dinnertime. It had been a comfortably cool autumn day, but temperatures were dropping with the setting sun. White short-sleeve shirts with a loosened necktie were the trademark Larsen attire, but tonight he broke down and pulled on a windbreaker, which was perfectly fine. His old buddies up in Buffalo were already trudging through eighteen inches of Thanksgiving snow.
Two squad cars were parked at the end of the driveway, blocking off traffic. The medical examiner’s van was parked just inside the squad cars, and yellow police tape marked off the entire yard as a crime scene.
Larsen was technically off duty, but he’d left word to be called immediately if anything happened to any of the remaining heirs under Sally Fenning’s will. With Mason Rudsky and Deirdre Meadows already in the morgue, it didn’t take a genius to see a pattern developing. He’d considered putting a tail on Rios, Colletti, and Knight so that the police would be right there if anything happened to one of them. But stakeouts were expensive, and there just wasn’t room in the budget for one of them, let alone three, especially when his instincts told him that the killer would probably lie low for a while until the media hoopla settled down, wait a few weeks or possibly even a few months before striking again.
In one of the few lapses in his long career, his instincts had steered him wrong.
Larsen got out of his car and walked over to the uniformed officer in charge of controlling access to the scene.
“Is it who we think it is?” said Larsen.
“No official ID yet. But it’s his house, his car, and as best I can tell the face matches the mug shot on his driver’s license. If it ain’t Geraldo Colletti, it’s his twin brother.”
“Who found him? Someone driving by?”
“No. Garage door was closed.”
“Doesn’t look closed.” There was reproval in his tone, as if to convey his sincere hope that someone on the team wasn’t in line for a severe ass kicking for having altered the crime scene.
“His secretary opened it. She saw him through the window, thought he might still be alive, so she opened the door.”
“His secretary?”
“He missed eleven scheduled appointments for the day, didn’t answer his beeper or his cell phone. By late afternoon she was getting pretty worried, drove over. Found him there in the garage.”
Larsen looked up the long driveway of Chicago brick. The forensic team was at work in the area around the garage opening, and the assistant medical examiner was tending to the body.
“His secretary still here?”
“In the squad car. I took her statement, but she’s too shook up to drive home.”
“Ask her to stick around, okay? I may want to talk to her.” He gave him a wink and a slap on the shoulder, then started up the driveway toward the garage.
A gust of wind stirred up some fallen mango leaves, sent them swirling past the opening. It was a northeast wind, the kind of wind that ushered in those awful cold fronts that could send late November temperatures plummeting all the way down into the fifties or even forties. Larsen actually liked a little nip in the air, though he sympathized with the poor slobs who were spending two months’ salary to walk around Miami Beach dressed in winter coats. He was a sympathetic guy, or so people told him. Took every homicide personally, showed real compassion to the families and the victims. Even when the victim was an asshole lawyer.
“Gerry Colletti,” he said to no one in particular as he stopped at the entrance to the garage.
The cord was still around the victim’s neck. His bloody hands were still trapped beneath the hood, his limp body draped over the front of the car like a hapless deer that someone had nailed while barreling down the highway at sixty miles per hour. Larsen focused on the hands and said, “Ouch.”
“No kidding,” said the examiner. He was on his knees, taking measurements. “Man, I remember when I was twelve, my sister slammed the piano key cover on my fingers.”
“Has to hurt bad.”
“Shit yeah. Of course, ligature strangulation with a fifty-pound picture-hanging wire has a way of taking your mind off your fingers.”
“That our cause of death?”
“Take a look for yourself. Cord’s still around his neck, and I don’t think it was planted there to throw us off. We got bleeding sites in the mucosa of the lips, inside the mouth and eyelids. Face and neck congested and dark red. All consistent with strangulation.”
“I guess we can rule out suicide.”
“I’d say so. The bruising pattern on the neck is a horizontal straight line,” he said, indicating. “With a suicidal hanging you find the more vertical, inverted V-shaped bruise. Suicide by straight strangulation is pretty rare.”
“Especially with your hands trapped beneath a car hood.”
“Good point, Columbo.”
A guy inside the garage climbed down from a ladder. It was Larsen’s young partner. “Rick, have a look at this.”
The ladder was right beside the car by the passenger door. Larsen climbed up to the fourth step, high enough to get his head between the ceiling and the suspended garage door in its rolled-back position. The access panel had been pushed aside, and Larsen shined his penlight through the opening to the attic. “Point of entry,” he said.
