The tower was a bland sheet of blue glass, turned at an angle to the avenue, utterly dead at street level. The architect, if you could call him that, had intended the building to have a relationship only with the automobile. Like all its siblings, it was attached to a long, multi-level garage that sat on its backside.
That’s the way I made sure to come in with others. My timing let me catch up with a half dozen of the few people that still worked there. It was eight-thirty. I was the tallest in the group, dark hair, broad shoulders, too memorable. I was the only one who pressed the elevator button to the eighteenth floor.
When the doors opened, a sign directed me to a law office in one direction. He was not a lawyer. I went the other way until I found the suite number that Jerry had written on the notepad. It went to a door, five long steps on the carpet and ten more on tile, making the turn that the building’s cube shape demanded. The door was only adorned with a number, no nameplate. Across from it was a fire extinguisher set into the wall, nothing else. Not even restrooms or a drinking fountain. It looked like a dreary place to work.
I listened for a few minutes, pretending to study the note. Only the electrical hum of the tower’s core spoke back. Was the occupant a guy who rolled into the office early to talk to clients on the East Coast, or did he keep ‘Zonie mañana-time hours? There was only one way to find out.
I put my hand on the door and turned it.
The door opened.
The view was dazzling through large windows. The outer office was empty and the lights were off. A receptionist’s desk was unstaffed. Two chairs and a sofa held no customers. On a low table, several celebrity magazines were neatly laid out.
The art on the blond wood walls consisted of colorful, vintage travel posters: “visit the Pacific Northwest wonderland-travel by train,” “Grand Hotel Roma,” and “the Dune Beaches by the South Shore Line.”
It was difficult to tell what business resided here.
I decided to wait by the glass, taking in the South Mountains and Sierra Estrella. The air wasn’t too dirty this morning. I prevented my gaze from going lower, where it would find the white hulk of the hospital.
And like the hallway, the room contained only the silence of human-made spaces, especially the whoosh of the air conditioning.
“Anyone here?” I finally called out. The reception area had two doors. One, I had used to enter. The other was between the sofa and a sickly looking potted tree. I knocked and no one answered.
I said “hello” as I opened the door inward. No one responded.
This office was large but spare. The walls held more of those travel posters with fantastical images of trains, ships, and bathing beauties from the twenties and thirties. Two dark wood chairs sat in front of a desk that might have been new when the building went up. An executive chair with the stuffing coming out of a tear beside the head completed the ensemble.
It was dim with shades down keeping out much of the light.
I stepped in.
“Hello?” Out of old habit, I added, “Sheriff’s Office.”
It looked as if I had beaten everyone to work this morning.
Then I saw the shoes attached to legs hanging at a low angle in a doorway to my left.
The legs were attached to a man who was attached to the doorknob by a necktie. Make that two neckties, one solid blue and the other a red rep pattern. I was all for wearing ties in this barbaric age, but this was a little overboard. His face was one foot from the floor and his arms were stiff at his sides.
On one hand was a 1995 class ring from the United States Naval Academy.
I snapped on the lights to the bathroom but there was no need to check a pulse. He was as straight as a well-planed two-by-four. Rigor mortis sets in within three hours of death and fades away after twenty-four. Given his stance of attention at the absurd angle, I would say he had killed himself twelve hours ago.
A more thorough sweep of the office revealed nothing special, certainly not safes containing stolen diamonds for wholesale.
I slipped on the latex gloves and locked the door from the office to the hallway. Then I went back into the private office.
The corpse’s wallet contained credit cards, a health-insurance card-little late for that now-two twenties, and a few business cards that only gave his name and phone numbers. Stuck to a credit card was a driver’s license. I disentangled them and held it up to the ambient light. The license was issued to Matt Pennington. He was forty-five and showed a Scottsdale address.
“Find Matt Pennington,” Peralta had written to me. Here he was.
Using the memo app on my iPhone, I wrote down the information. Then I slid the wallet back and went through his front slacks’ pockets with more difficulty. His bladder had emptied and, surprisingly in the dry climate, the pants had not dried. Keys in one pocket. A pack of cigarettes in another.
No cell phone. I ran my hand around his belt, and there was no phone case on it, either.
I went back to the pack of smokes, reached in, and pulled the box out.
It was the distinctive blue hardpack of Gauloises Blondes, the same brand Lindsey sometimes smoked. She bought them online because they weren’t imported into the country anymore.
The health warning was inscribed in French at the bottom of the azure front panel.
“No kidding.” I muttered quietly. Talking to dead people was something I had learned as a young deputy, the black humor that saved us. Tom Frazier and his fellow EMTs probably did the same thing. Always out of earshot of civilians, of course.
The pack had been unwrapped and I opened it. Half the cigarettes had been smoked and a matchbook was inside. I dug it out, hoping it advertised a bar or restaurant where Pennington might have been a regular. It was blank.
But not on the inside.
In blue ink, someone had written a phone number. I copied it on the iPhone and replaced the cigarettes in his damp pocket.
Down on one knee, I could see his face. “What the hell did you have this for?”
I asked. The face, purple from lividity, blood collecting after the heart stopped, did not answer.
Chapter Nineteen
The air conditioning switched off and the rooms grew very quiet as I studied the scene. There’s no easy way to die but this was particularly…I searched for the right word. Something between “gutsy,” the ability to hang yourself from a doorknob and not stop when all you had to do was lower your arms and hands and take the pressure off your neck, because this would not be a fast way to kill oneself.
That, and “preposterous.” If you wanted to kill yourself and you are on the eighteenth floor of an office tower, why not leap through the window, or toss a chair through first and follow it down to the pavement? This building was a creation of the 1980s and I doubted the windows were that strong, particularly since it was thrown up on the cheap during the years of the savings-and-loan racket.
Unless you didn’t kill yourself but had help.
You were “suicided.”
I was very conscious of the sound of my breathing as I checked his wrists.
Pennington looked a little under six feet and in good shape, easily strong enough to fight back against a five-five woman. Unless she had a gun on him.
What if he had been handcuffed from behind and left to slowly strangle? Or tortured for information, a little bit of pressure applied from the back, as he slowly suffocated from the neckties. He would have held out hope until the darkness closed around him and slammed shut for the last time.
His pale, stiff wrists showed no cuts from being handcuffed. But there were ways around this, such as putting something like a washcloth between the skin and the hard metal of the cuffs. That way, any evidence the person had been shackled from behind as he slowly suffocated and struggled would be more difficult to detect.