Joel Goldman - The Dead Man

"What if she's pushed?"

"Her initial velocity will depend on how hard she was pushed and where on her body the push was applied. If she was hit fairly hard, say between the shoulder blades, her initial velocity would carry her farther out from the deck and she'd follow a nice parabolic curve to the bottom, something like this," she said, drawing a curve out from the deck and down to the midpoint of the alley. "And if she was pushed, there's a good chance she was startled and would have been swinging her arms and legs in midair, which could widen out the curve, carry her farther across the alley."

I picked up the incident report and studied the diagram of the scene. "Regina's body was found ten feet from the base of the parking deck. The sketch shows her lying at roughly a forty-five degree angle to the deck."

"I'd say that's consistent with her being pushed," Lucy said.

"Except we don't know if the homeless guy who found her moved the body. It's also possible that she didn't die on impact, managed somehow to stand up and then fell over and died."

"That doesn't work with her injuries. She had massive head wounds. You don't get that falling over. You get

that falling three stories and landing on your head."

"What did you get in physics?"

"An A," she said, smiling.

"Well, I got a C but I agree with you. It looks like Regina was pushed. Were there any security cameras in place?"

"None. Probably will be once the construction is finished but not before."

"Were the entrances from the garage to the building locked?"

"No, but I was there during working hours. The construction crew was still on the job."

"More people to talk to. Find out if anyone saw someone."

"Delaney's neighbors tonight, construction crew tomorrow. Don't wait up," she said, grabbing her coat and my car keys.

"Where's she going?" Simon asked from the dining room when Lucy left.

"Delaney's apartment building. Looking for witnesses. How are you guys doing?"

Simon and Kate exchanged glances, each waiting for the other to take the lead. Simon raised his hands, palms out, in a you-first protest.

"I found a log of the videos," Kate said. "They range anywhere from five to twenty minutes. Best guess is that they average around ten. Setting aside the Delaney, Blair, and Enoch videos, that leaves two hundred forty-seven videos times ten minutes which equals twenty-four hundred and seventy minutes which is a little over forty-one hours of viewing time. And that doesn't allow any time for replay, slow-motion, frame-by-frame analysis, or just plain thinking."

"It's the same story with the background checks," Simon said. Entering the search requests for all those people, plus any of the staff you toss into the mix, will take me a few days. Then I have to match the hits to the volunteers, make certain I've got the right person. If something interesting turns up in the first cut, I have to dig deeper. Until I know what I've got, there's no way to predict how long this will take."

"Then," Kate said, "we've to cross-reference the videos to the background checks, see if there are any videos we need to revisit based on the background checks or vice versa."

"And your point is?" I asked.

"Unless you can narrow this down, we need help," Kate said. "A lot of help."

I shrugged. "So get the help. Milo will pay for it."

"I'm a one-man band," Simon said. "I don't have minions at my disposal. Plus, we're dealing with confidential information and a murder investigation. I can't just call a temp agency and tell them to send over ten people who won't ask questions and who will keep their mouths shut."

"What about you?" I asked Kate.

"My father taught me how to read microfacial expressions. Alan isn't bad at it but he's not as good as Dad and I are. They're the only ones I'd trust with this."

"Henry and Alan? Your ex-husband wants to drop the ex and your father wants to give away the bride. On top of that, they hate me. That's who you want me to hire?"

"They only hate you because they think you almost got me killed," she said.

I didn't blame them. I'd let Kate push her way into Wendy's case and she had almost gotten killed. She had given up trying to convince her father and Alan that it was her fault, not mine, but people hold on the hardest to the beliefs that get them through the night. Now I was asking for her help again and she wanted to ask them for theirs.

"You think they'd be willing to help?"

"Our cash flow is tighter than last year's pants. If we don't take this work, we could all be looking for jobs. And, we've got half a dozen staff people whose families are counting on their paychecks and health insurance. Simon can keep them busy. Dad and Alan will do it for the employees if nothing else."

I looked at my watch. It was nine o'clock. "Do they work nights?"

"For premium rates?" they asked in unison.

"Ultra premium."

"I'll meet you at your office in an hour," Simon said to Kate.

He packed his laptops, leaving one for me, and left. Kate took her time. I stood behind her, rubbing her shoulders. She leaned into me and I wrapped my arms around her waist. She turned, hugging me, lifting her face to mine, kissing me. I started to shake, my head sliding down her neck to her shoulder, her grip tightening as my knees weakened.

"I can stay. I brought my toothbrush," she said.

"I'm fine. Besides, you have to get things up and running at your office."

"Okay, but I'm leaving my toothbrush here."

"Good. At least I'll have something to cuddle with."

"Roxy and Ruby will be jealous."

There were times when I knew that the job could get me killed, when the people on the other side of the door might be high enough, stupid enough, or scared enough to shoot instead of surrender, or when the creep I helped send away might try to make good on his threat to get even when he got out. Those risks came with the territory, like living in Kansas City where the blaring of tornado sirens was a rite of spring sending throngs of people outside with their video cameras searching the sky for twisters instead of taking shelter in the basement.

The possibility that a serial killer had plucked my name from the top of Walter Enoch's dead letter pile lay closer to the odds of being sucked into oblivion by a tornado than it did any risk I ever took as an FBI agent. But no matter how remote the chance, I'd learned one thing people living in trailer parks knew about tornados. It was human nature to tease the bear and curse God when the bear did what bears were meant to do.

In the four days since Simon Alexander had bought me a cup of coffee, it was possible that I'd gone from being a some-time security consultant to being both a murder suspect and serial killer target, depending on whose paranoid flavored Kool-Aid I drank. I had one advantage over Kent and Dolan and Walter Enoch's killer. Shaking made it easier to look both ways and see who was coming at me.

It wasn't only my status that had changed. So had the other volunteers in the dream project and, for that matter, Maggie Brennan's, all of whom could be targets if we were dealing with a serial killer. Tom Goodell never missed a retired cops' lunch and the next one was on Wednesday. I hoped he could close the loop between my Maggie Brennan and his.

The house was quiet and the dogs were sleeping. I reached in my pants' pocket and retrieved the flash drive that held Enoch's dream video and that Kent and Dolan would have taken along with my laptop had they bothered to search me. I loaded the video on the computer Simon had loaned to me, expanded the image to full screen, and turned up the volume.

The video began with the credits: Harper Institute of the Mind, Dream Project, Anthony Corliss, PhD, Project Director, Maggie Brennan, PhD, Assistant Director. Bold yellow font identified the subject as Walter Enoch and the date of the video as January 12.