I didn’t know what to do with the box. I felt a great sense of fatigue creep over me and I wanted to put my head down and close my eyes and sleep for a hundred years.
“Why don’t I hold on to it for a while,” I said. “If it turns out we don’t need it, I’ll forward it on to Tessa in the mail.”
Fatone nodded. He stared out the window, noticed the dead flies in the sill, and brushed them out with the edge of a magazine. Against my hip, my cell buzzed. I didn’t recognize the number, but it had a Connecticut area code so I answered. When I heard who it was, I excused myself from Fatone’s trailer and stood just beyond it, under the shade of a large pine.
“Pete? Thanks for holding. My name is Gemma Monroe, I’m a detective in Cedar Valley, Colorado.”
Chapter Forty-five
Annika’s boyfriend had been sick, was still sick, and so our conversation was punctuated with coughs and great, heehawing squawks as he repeatedly blew his nose.
“Like I said, I haven’t talked to her in weeks. She’s batshit crazy, man. I couldn’t take it anymore,” Pete said.
He sneezed and swore. “I hope to God she’s not coming back in the fall.”
“Can you tell me anything else? I get that your breakup was bad, but some details would be really helpful.”
Pete spent the next ten minutes describing the living hell Annika put him through for the majority of their relationship. I asked him the same question I’d asked the others-why?
Through the phone I heard a sigh and then he spoke again. “I don’t know why, man. She’s rich, privileged. You know, bored.”
Pete’s voice was a mere croak by that point and I decided to let him get off the phone, but he had one more thing to say.
“Hey, ask that bitch if she’s got my hand,” he said. He coughed, a wet hacking sound that was thick with phlegm.
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “Your hand?”
“Yeah, my hand. My claw. I haven’t seen it since the night we broke up. The thing’s custom-made, cost me eight hundred bucks.”
I was confused. “What does this claw look like, Pete?”
“Check out the clip of our show at the Oriental in July, in Concord. That was the last time I had it on stage. Hellkat’s just not the same without it.”
“Do you have a video you can send me?”
Pete sighed and coughed again. “YouTube it, lady.”
He hung up and I stood a minute, under the tree, searching online, but the browser on my phone seemed to load at a snail’s pace. I went back to Fatone’s trailer. He answered on the second knock, and I could see that I’d woken him from a nap.
“Just lay down for a minute. This heat-” he began.
I interrupted him. “Do you have Internet?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, no.”
“That’s okay but I’ve got to go, Mr. Fatone. I’ll be in touch,” I said, and left with the box of photographs and postcards and headed into town. At the local Starbucks, I pulled into the parking lot and sat, my engine running, the air-conditioning pouring over my body like a salve. I fished my laptop from the trunk of my car and checked the browser-the signal was at full strength, the wireless from the coffee shop powerful.
On the video-sharing Web site YouTube, I typed in the words Hellkat, July, and Concord and ten links popped up.
I clicked on the first linked video.
It was grainy, likely shot on a cell phone, but then the person recording zoomed in to the stage and the band crystallized into focus. Pete was center stage, screaming into a microphone. The drummer was going nuts behind him, and a couple of bass players flanked him, their long hair waving in the breeze supplied by two giant fans on either side of the stage.
And then Pete raised his right hand and waved it in the air.
I saw the claw and my heart stopped as another large piece of the puzzle fell into place. I watched one more minute and then threw the laptop on the passenger seat and raced out of the parking lot.
I had to get to Ravi Hussen.
The medical examiner was at the morgue, finishing up on an elderly man. The attendant whispered “heart attack” to me as I paced the hall, anxiously waiting for Ravi to wash her hands and slip off her sterile robes. The minutes dragged by like hours.
“Gemma, what is it? You look ready to burst,” she said.
I pulled her into an empty side room and popped open my laptop. I’d bookmarked the site and it was up and running in under a minute.
She watched the clip and then hit the back button and watched it again, her forehead furrowed.
“Hmmm,” she said.
“Well? Don’t you think?”
I played it again and paused at the moment where Pete’s arm was first lifted. The claw glittered in the stage lights, each two-inch nail picking up the flashes of strobes and cameras. It was wicked looking, a cruel parody of a cat’s paw. It was an instrument of torture.
It was an instrument of death.
Ravi exhaled and sat back and stared at me. “Yes, it could be. Without seeing it in person, and matching the claws to the wounds on Nicky’s throat, I’m not willing to go on record as saying it’s a match.”
“How about off record?”
She nodded. “Off record… yes. The length of the nails, the edges, it could definitely be our murder weapon. Now tell me who the hell that is, and where that thing might be.”
“I can’t. Not yet. I need to check on a few things first,” I said, and grabbed my laptop and purse.
“Gemma-” Ravi started to say but I’d left the room before she could finish her sentence.
I needed to find Chief Chavez, and fast. The kidnappers’ deadline for the money transfer was coming up and once that half million dollars left the Bellingtons’ account, all bets were off.
Chapter Forty-six
Five o’clock in the afternoon, and the police station was empty. The lone receptionist-a temp-sat at the silent switchboard, her neon green nails flicking the pages of a newspaper with a crisp efficiency.
Outside, an evening shower had crept in, and rain fell gently against the windowpanes.
I was out of breath and I couldn’t get my pulse to slow down. “Where is everyone?”
The temp looked up at me and smiled. “I’m not sure, honey. Chief Chavez left a message that he was going to be gone the rest of the day. I think he was attending some political dinner tonight. A couple of guys took a call on an accident out east. Everyone else is out on patrol. You know.”
Yeah, I knew all right.
I was halfway down the hall when the temp called me back. “Oh, I do have a message for you, from Finn. He said he got a tip that he’s checking out, but he’ll be back real soon and you shouldn’t wait for him. He signed it ‘dear,’ now isn’t that sweet?”
She flipped the note around so I could see the word scribbled at the bottom but I barely noticed it.
“Did he say what the tip was? Or where he was going?”
The temp shook her head and resumed her newspaper perusal, each flip of the pages sharp-sounding in the silent station.
Shit.
I paced at my desk for half an hour, calling, and then leaving messages, for Chief Chavez and Finn. I tried the Bellingtons, but no one answered. Not even a machine picked up, and I cursed again. I called the mayor’s office and some man with a snooty voice explained that Mayor and Mrs. Bellington were attending a fund-raiser dinner and would be unavailable for the rest of the evening.
Nothing kept this family away from the voters, it seemed.
I left another round of messages. “Call me, it’s urgent, very important. Call me.”
Where the hell was everyone? At six-thirty I couldn’t wait any longer. I stopped at the front desk on my way out.
“You tell the next damn cop that walks in that door-I don’t care who it is-to call me, all right? I don’t care what time it is. Call me.”