Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

Stride exchanged a glance with Serena. He didn’t trust Lenny, but the car dealer was right. Anyone who set foot inside his office was a suspect. Anyone who slept with Cat might have seen the ring.

He examined the dark study in the century-old mansion. When he’d come here for the first time, Lenny had been in the same chair, drinking, crying, his face a hollow mask of grief. Rebekah was still on the floor in the upstairs bedroom, where he’d found her. Lenny had come home from the Keys to discover his wife’s body, cold and dead. A bullet in her brain.

‘There’s another motive we have to consider,’ Stride said.

‘What is it?’ Lenny asked.

‘Someone may be covering up a murder. Rebekah’s murder.’

‘You already got the guy who did that,’ Lenny said.

‘We thought we did, but it looks like someone else was part of the plot. Somehow, a man named Marty Gamble wound up with this ring after the burglary. He had cash, too. Clearly, he had a connection to Fong Dao that we didn’t know about back then.’

‘So ask him.’

‘Marty’s dead. So’s Fong. The thing is, we didn’t find anything in Marty’s place to link him to Fong or the burglary. Nothing. No cash. No jewelry. Someone cleaned up after him. Someone else was part of the plot.’

‘Look, guys, I wish I could help you, but I can’t.’

Stride let the silence draw out. All they heard was the crackle of the fire. Lenny kept sweating.

‘After we searched Fong’s apartment, we did an inventory of the cash and jewelry we found there,’ Stride said. ‘You told us we’d recovered everything that had been taken.’

‘Yeah, so? I’m sure I told you that the ring was still missing.’

Stride shook his head. ‘You didn’t. If we’d known it was missing, we would have kept looking for it.’

‘Well, what do you want from me, Jon? My wife was dead. My world was over. I was kicking off a fucking political campaign. I had things on my mind.’

‘What about the cash? Could more money have been taken than what we found?’

Lenny shrugged. ‘I don’t have a clue how much cash is in my house. I’ve got a lot of money. Maybe there was more than I thought.’

‘Did you know this man Marty Gamble?’ Serena asked.

‘I don’t know the name. Who knows, maybe he bought a car from me.’

Stride slid a photograph from inside his pocket. ‘What about the face?’

He passed the picture to Lenny, who studied it and shook his head. ‘Mean-looking SOB, but I don’t know him.’

‘Would you remember him if he was a customer?’

‘Do you know how many thousands of customers I see every year? Give me a break.’

‘Marty was a construction worker,’ Stride said. ‘Did you have any building projects going on during that time?’

‘I’m sure I did. Office buildings, condos, whatever. If he was part of a team working on one of my buildings, you’d have to talk to the general contractors. Look, this guy might know me , because I’m a celebrity around these parts. I’m on TV commercials, understand? The papers write about me. The point is, I didn’t know him .’

Stride didn’t think that Lenny was lying about Marty, but the car dealer also wasn’t telling them the full story about the burglary. A sharp businessman like Lenny didn’t forget about a seventy-five-thousand dollar ring. No way. He’d known all along that they hadn’t recovered it, and he’d deliberately concealed the fact that it was still missing.

Why?

‘Just curious,’ Stride said, ‘did you ever change your security code? Is it still 1789?’

‘Of course, I changed it.’ Lenny tapped his head. ‘I keep it right up here. Nobody except me knows what it is.’

Stride nodded. ‘That’s what you said back then, too, but Fong obviously had the code.’

‘I told you, Rebekah probably screwed up and told someone what it was, or she wrote it down or something. She was forgetful. The alarm kept going off because she’d get inside and not remember the code. She was always calling me to ask what it was. Didn’t you guys say you thought you knew how Fong got it?’

‘Fong was a nurse’s aide at St. Luke’s,’ Stride acknowledged. ‘He was working there while Rebekah was having plastic surgery done. We assumed that somehow he learned the code while she was there.’

‘Yeah, so?’

‘So we couldn’t prove it. We couldn’t prove that Fong had ever been in her room. Fortunately, there was enough other evidence that the jury overlooked it.’

‘He figured it out. Isn’t that the main thing?’

‘No, we can’t assume anything anymore,’ Stride told him. ‘We need to look at everything again. Fong, Marty, Margot, everything. I think we missed something big on this case, and someone’s willing to kill to keep us from taking another look.’

‘You’re alive,’ Serena said.

Maggie sat in one of the chairs in Stride’s office. She had a fresh white bandage on her forehead, tucked under her black bangs. When she swung her head, she winced in pain. ‘Yeah, sorry about that. Maybe you’ll get lucky next time.’

‘Promises, promises.’

Stride sat down behind his desk. ‘Sure is nice to have the gang back together again,’ he said ironically, as both women smiled at each other with faux sweetness. ‘Seriously, Mags, what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at home recovering?’

‘Jeez, you and Guppo. I’m aces. Leave me alone.’

‘Whatever you say.’ Stride leaned back in his chair. His eyes shot between the two of them, which was like studying tigers in side-by-side cages, both with sharp claws. He opened his mouth to say something, but he figured anything he said would make it worse. He let it go.

‘So what do we know?’ he said. ‘Originally, we thought Margot was interested in a high-class prostitution scandal. Maybe that’s why she went to Lenny’s in the first place, but now we think she connected Cat and Lenny via his wife’s ring. Is that a reasonable conclusion? Or are we getting ahead of ourselves?’

‘It’s too much of a coincidence not to mean something,’ Serena said.

‘I agree with Angie Harmon here,’ Maggie said, drawing a withering stare from Serena. ‘Margot knew about the ring that Cat wore. She specifically mentioned it in the article she did about Cat a few months ago. I think if you see that ring, you don’t forget it.’

‘It also explains why Margot was asking Bill Green about Cat’s parents on that Saturday,’ Serena added. ‘She was trying to figure out how Marty Gamble got his hands on the ring.’

‘So how did Margot wind up dead?’ Stride asked.

‘Somebody figured out what she was doing,’ Maggie said. ‘Somebody didn’t want her asking questions about that home invasion.’

‘Lenny?’

Serena shrugged. ‘He’s scared of something. You can see it in his face. I’d like to know why. If Margot spotted the ring, she must have mentioned it to him. Even an off-handed comment to see how he reacted. Lenny also knew that Margot was talking to Dory Mateo on Saturday. Curt Dickes called him.’

Maggie gingerly stretched her arms like a yoga instructor. Her flying elbows came dangerously close to Serena’s head. ‘Why would that raise red flags? We never connected Fong and the burglary to Marty, Michaela, Dory, or anybody else. They’d be strangers to him.’

‘That’s true, unless Lenny knows more about the burglary than he’s telling us,’ Serena said.

Stride shook his head. ‘We can speculate all day, but it’s not going to get us any closer to finding out what happened. We’ve been investigating in the present, but I think we need to go back to the past. Ten years ago, the trail to the burglary ended with one person.’