Currying Death, page 17
“They said he hasn’t been in the last two days. He took the day before off as a mental health day and no one talked to him during the day.”
“I saw him here that day. So sometime between then and now…”
“He left,” Anna said. “He wasn’t planning to go anywhere. And we were going to spend the evening together tonight. I was planning a little candlelight dinner…”
“And it doesn’t look like he had started packing for his move.”
“His move?” Anna repeated blankly. “What move?”
“His move out of this apartment. Did he have a new place lined up, or was he still looking?”
“He wasn’t moving out of this apartment.”
“He accepted the landlord’s offer to buy him out of his lease early.”
“No, he didn’t.”
Cameron glanced toward the hall, where the landlord was probably still standing waiting for him.
“The landlord said that he did.”
“I don’t think so. He would have told me that. We talked about it when Mr. Harris started to push for him to move out, but he wanted to stay here and so did Scott, for the time being. We talked about what we could do with the money, get a nicer place with a bigger down payment… but we would have to be able to afford the monthly rent, and we weren’t sure we would be able to.”
“The two of you both working couldn’t afford a place together?”
“It’s really tough out there, detective. Rents are crazy high. A lot of people our age are moving back in with their parents. A person should be able to afford an apartment on a full-time salary, especially since we’ve both been working for a few years, but it isn’t that easy.”
Cameron had, of course, heard the same thing from a lot of young people. He had managed to buy a house before the economy had tanked. If he were renting now instead of paying a mortgage, he wasn’t sure how he would have managed to support a family.
“So he either lied to the landlord or he changed his mind again. Or he didn’t have a chance to tell you yet that he had changed his mind and decided to take what the landlord was offering.”
She looked at him, calculating, thinking about the three possibilities. Eventually, she nodded.
“I’m sure he didn’t decide to leave. We had already been through all of that. We’d discussed it to death. He didn’t want to move out of here; he was going to stay until the lease expired. He was hoping that by that time, he would have a promotion or a better job, or the rents would go down and we would be able to afford a place more easily.”
“Did he talk to you about Scott’s company?”
“What about Scott’s company?” she shook her head.
“That Scott had named Alex as his successor. If anything happened to Scott, Alex would be in charge of the start-up and getting it off the ground.”
“Oh, that… I remember him joking about it a few weeks ago. Asking me how I would like to be married to a billionaire CEO when it all worked out.” She blushed. “We aren’t married; we didn’t even talk about it seriously. It was just a joke. You know…” she shrugged. “Just one of those unattainable dreams. Not something that was actually going to happen.”
“But he was named as Scott’s successor, and now Scott is dead.”
“But you don’t mean that… he has to take over the business now, do you?”
“Has to?”
“Gets to, I guess.” Anna shrugged, and then she shook her head. “No, I don’t think he actually would have wanted it. I mean, it’s fun to talk about making that kind of money sometimes, but I don’t think Alex would like the work. He is… he is a lot more fun than that. Down to earth. He isn’t the kind of financial planner who always has his head in the clouds and dreams about annuity tables or whatever it is that they do. He likes to help people to plan for the future and meet their goals, but he isn’t a shark like Scott. He isn’t stupid; I’m not saying that. Just that… it isn’t how he wants to spend his life. With Scott, that was his life. Every moment of every day, he was thinking about it, trying to figure out how he was going to make all of it happen. But not Alex. He wants to have fun, marry, have a family. He wants to have leisure time to go boating or skiing or travel around the world.”
“And if he accepts the position of CEO of the start-up, that won’t happen.”
“No. He’d be locked into that for twenty years. Building the company out. For Scott, that was heaven. Bringing it all to fruition. But it wouldn’t be like that for Alex.”
“He would turn it down.”
“Yeah. I’m sure he will.”
“Then the money that would have gone into the start-up will revert to the trust.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did you know Scott’s brother, Kirk?”
She looked blank. “No. I don’t think I even knew he had a brother. Oh, wait a minute, he… no, that wasn’t him. No, I’m sure I never met any Kirk.”
“And no one mentioned him? Not Scott? Not Alex?”
“No.”
“You don’t think he’d ever been to the apartment?”
“There were people who stopped by for visits sometimes. Scott didn’t usually introduce them. He just took them to his room for a private visit. I don’t know who any of them were.”
35
Kenzie saw Cameron’s name on the caller ID on the desk phone and answered.
“Detective Cameron.”
“Hi, Dr. Kirsch. How is your day going?”
“Oh, it’s going along. How about yours?”
“Zachary doing okay?”
Kenzie sighed. “You heard?”
“You know cops. They gossip worse than… er, something that isn’t sexist.”
Kenzie laughed. “Word does get around pretty quickly around here,” she agreed. “Yes, Zachary is fine. He slept more than usual, which means he got about five minutes. Today, he says he is fine, everything is back to normal, and he’s working on his cases like usual.”
“And how is he really?”
“Maybe a bit more distracted than usual. But he’ll be fine. He’ll use work to take his mind off of what happened yesterday and, in a few days, it will be less raw.”
“Good. He’s a good guy.”
“He is,” Kenzie agreed. Zachary was always trying to do the right thing. Many people were just looking out for number one, and didn’t put much thought into what happened to anyone else. But with Zachary, it was the opposite. He was always worrying about everyone around him and whether they would be okay. He was a good person, thoughtful and loyal, right down to his core, and people sensed that.
“So, what were you calling about? Not just to ask about Zachary, I assume.”
“No. We’ve had some interesting developments on the Robertson murder and I thought you might want to hear the highlights.”
“Of course.”
“Or lowlights.”
“Hmm?” Kenzie was a little confused by the comment.
“I’m not sure I’d call them highlights.”
“Oh, got it. Right. What’s the news, then?”
“Alex Collins has disappeared.”
“He ran?”
“He is officially a missing person. I think we will be lucky to ever see him again.”
“Wow. I guess he was spooked by the search of the apartment, even if you didn’t find anything there. Maybe he suspected you would be searching dumpsters, too, and he should have disposed of the pills farther away.”
“It wasn’t hard for him to guess that we would focus on him as a suspect the deeper we got into the investigation. He had the best access to Robertson. Could access his food and monitor his symptoms. He had a motive: all of the money he would have his hands on as the CEO of the company. He had the means; he knew how to get his hands on enough steroids to kill Robertson and the temerity to keep feeding them to him until he was dead.”
“Do you have any leads on him? Where he might have gone?”
“Left without a trace. Nothing on his computer indicating where he was off to. Checked his browser history for anything to do with travel, and there wasn’t anything. Maybe he did some searches on his phone. We don’t have that.”
“Does he have it with him or did he dump it?”
“If he has it with him, we’ll know about it the next time he uses it. Have a flag on his credit cards as well. It’s not as easy for a novice to disappear as it used to be.”
“But if he ditches the phone and just works for cash…”
“Then he won’t be able to work in his chosen profession. He’s going to be a blue-collar worker. Under the table. Possibly for the rest of his life. And even then, maybe we’ll get a hit on his fingerprints or DNA sometime.”
“So that’s it, just waiting for him to mess up?”
“We’re still working the case. Waiting for the forensic test back. Reviewing your report. Tying up any loose ends.”
“And then waiting.”
“And then waiting,” Cameron agreed.
“Well, thanks for letting me know. I guess I won’t expect to see anyone arrested for Robertson’s murder in the next little while.”
“We’ll do what we can. We’ve got a pretty good solve rate. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
Kenzie took a break at lunchtime to get herself something from the closest sandwich shop rather than the vending machine. She patted herself on the back for looking after herself in two ways, both by taking a break and by getting a sandwich that was reasonably healthy for her. After unwrapping the sandwich and taking the first few bites, she tapped her phone to call Zachary. He sometimes needed a reminder to stop and get himself lunch. While Kenzie tended to get too busy, Zachary got too distracted or had no idea how much time had passed since he had last eaten or come up for air.
He didn’t answer his phone. That was not of immediate concern. There were a lot of reasons he might not answer his phone. He was talking to someone else, working on something important, too distracted to notice his phone ringing, had accidentally left it in another room, or was in a meeting. Rather than leaving him a voicemail, she texted him to call or text her back when he was free. She reread the message she had sent for any autocorrect errors, just to be sure. She ate her sandwich and browsed through her social networks for anything of interest.
It was a couple of hours later that her phone rang, and she reached for it and answered, thinking it would be Zachary, without looking at the caller ID.
“It’s about time.”
There was a laugh at the other end of the line that was not Zachary. Kenzie looked at the name, but she had already recognized the voice before she processed it. Heather, one of Zachary’s older sisters. She helped him with some of the administration for his PI work and did some computer investigations from home.
“Oh, sorry. Hi, Heather.”
“I guess that means you haven’t heard from Zachary for a while.”
“No.” Kenzie sat back in her chair and thought about it. Zachary should have called her back by now. But it wasn’t particularly alarming that he hadn’t. She wasn’t really worried about him.
But maybe he had been more traumatized by the encounter with the abusive mother than Kenzie had realized, and had crawled back into bed to shut out the flashbacks and emotion it had stirred up. She had seen him react like that before, spending all his time sleeping until he had been able to start processing the trauma.
She should get him in to see Dr. Boyle as soon as possible. She didn’t want him reverting back to that kind of existence.
“No. I wonder if he’s sleeping. He had something happen yesterday. I don’t know whether he told you about it…”
“No, he didn’t say anything. But I don’t think he’s sleeping.”
Kenzie frowned at the phone. “Oh?”
“I was checking his location to see if he was home.”
“And he isn’t?” Kenzie switched to the map on her tracking app to verify this. Zachary’s location did not pop up on the map. She entered his name and waited for it to locate him.
No location found
Kenzie stared at the screen. “That’s weird. I can’t track him. Are you seeing a location?”
“No. I’m not getting a location.”
“Me neither. Maybe he forgot to charge it.”
“Could be,” Heather agreed. “But he hasn’t checked his email either, so I don’t think he’s on his computer.”
“What are the odds he isn’t on his phone or his computer?”
“He could be out in the field,” Heather said. “If he’s on surveillance or something like that. He might be actively tracking someone and is focused on that. Or he could be…” Heather trailed off. “Doing something else,” she finished eventually.
“He might have turned off his location tracking,” Kenzie said, staring at the map on her screen.
“I guess so. It’s probably just something going on with his phone. Maybe he’s out of range. That’s happened before.”
And if he were out of range for long enough, the phone would stop looking for a cell tower to conserve battery power. If Zachary didn’t realize that it was out of range, he could go hours without realizing there was a problem. He might not realize no calls or texts were coming in because he was busy with something else.
There was no reason to panic.
“I guess we just wait and see,” Kenzie said in a slow, measured voice. “This has happened before, and he was just fine.”
“Yeah. Okay, well, let me know if you hear from him. It isn’t anything urgent. I was just going to touch base,” Heather said lightly.
“Sure. No problem.”
“Kenzie…?”
“Yeah?”
“What happened yesterday?”
Kenzie sighed. While she didn’t like to share private information about Zachary, Heather was family, and she was sure Zachary would have said it was fine to talk to her about it. She gave Heather the bare bones of the confrontation and police response the day before.
“But he was okay this morning,” she told Heather. “He seemed perfectly fine.”
“I’m sure he still is,” Heather assured her. “Thanks for letting me know.”
After Heather disconnected the call, Kenzie sat staring at her phone, but Zachary’s location didn’t suddenly pop up on the app.
There was nothing to indicate that anything had happened to Zachary.
He had been kidnapped once. But he wasn’t working on any files that were dangerous. Everything was fairly routine, as far as she knew. And Heather would know if he were working on a file that was dangerous or might attract the attention of bad actors. She would have told Kenzie if that were the case.
The other thing Kenzie worried about was Zachary’s obsessive stalking of Bridget, his ex-wife.
He had seemed to have been cured of that behavior following the kidnapping, which had occurred on Bridget’s street. Zachary had developed a strong aversion to the place, which had suited Kenzie just fine. She and Dr. Boyle had both been relieved that Zachary now avoided the area as assiduously as he had once been drawn to it.
Had the encounter with the abusive mother destabilized Zachary, impelling him back toward Bridget? It had been pretty clear to Kenzie that Bridget had been a substitute for the abusive mother Zachary had grown up with, who had eventually abandoned him, telling him he was incorrigible and that the dissolution of the entire family was his fault.
It made perfect sense that an encounter with an abusive mother who reminded him of his own mother could drive him back toward Bridget.
But what was Kenzie to do about that?
She was sure that Bridget or Gordon would have called her if they had seen Zachary camped outside their home. But they might not have noticed, since it had been months since Zachary had last been there.
She could drive by and see whether Zachary was parked nearby.
Kenzie wanted to call him to find out what was going on in his head, but she couldn’t very well do that if his phone was turned off or he refused to answer it.
36
Kenzie reluctantly returned to her work. Chances were, Zachary was just fine and had simply turned off his phone or accidentally let it run out of juice. After his incident of the day before, he would most likely stay home for at least a day of recovery. He was probably sleeping. Panicking wouldn’t help anything. She would return home at the end of the day, and he would be there waiting for her, working on his laptop or sleeping. No amount of worrying or imagining the worst was going to help things.
It was challenging to focus on her work, and she knew she would have to double-check anything important the next day. She might ask Dr. Cook to check her work for silly errors. Or she might not. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to know she was susceptible to an emotional reaction or distraction.
After looking at the clock ten times in as many minutes, she decided she was finished for the day. She would head home an hour early but make it up the next day. Or on the weekend, when she usually came in to work a few hours on Saturday, even though she technically had weekends off unless she had a callout. She let Dr. Cook know she was leaving early, but didn’t give him any explanation as to why. He had never required her to account for her time. On the contrary, he had told her that he knew she put in extra hours and she could set her own schedule.
Most medical examiner work was not rush. Even getting to a callout. They would wait for her. Occasionally, they used technology and had a cop with an iPad walk them through the crime scene and show them the body in situ.
It wasn’t like they were going to get any deader.
Death could be declared by another professional at the scene, and the crime scene techs and the ME’s transport crew were perfectly capable of collecting any trace evidence on or around the body.
“Have a good evening,” Dr. Cook told her, unconcerned by Kenzie’s abrupt decision to leave early. “Do you and Zachary have something nice planned?”
“I’m not sure what we’re doing tonight,” Kenzie told him honestly.
He nodded, eyes on the file in front of him. “Well, have a nice time whatever you do.”
