The Littlest Witness

“It’s…Mrs. I’m a waitress at a diner near the university. I already gave this information to Officer McGowan.”

The detective’s piercing gaze met hers. “You weren’t home tonight?”

Thea shook her head, shoving her hands even deeper into her pockets. “I’ve been away since before seven o’clock this morning. I didn’t see anything.”

“No strangers lurking around the building lately? No loud arguments, anything like that?”

“No, nothing unusual.”

Gallagher nodded almost absently. “I wonder if you’d mind taking a look at the body. See if you can identify the victim.”

The request was courteous enough, allowing her to decline if she wanted to, but Thea knew she had no real choice. No matter how much she didn’t want to look at that poor dead woman, she mustn’t do or say anything that might make Detective Gallagher suspicious.

She nodded and followed him over to the victim. The woman was lying on her back, her face surprisingly unscathed from what must have been a horrendous fall. But as Thea looked more closely, she saw the cuts and the terrible bruising that gave the body an almost ghoulish appearance. Her arms and legs were at strange angles, too, the bones undoubtedly shattered.

“I’ve never seen her before.” But Thea had second thoughts almost at once. There was something vaguely familiar about the woman, but she couldn’t place her. Which was good. At least she didn’t have to tell an outright lie.

As if sensing her hesitation, Gallagher pressed, “You’re sure?”

She could feel his gaze on her and she tried to suppress a shudder. “I don’t remember seeing her around here before.” Thea paused, then couldn’t resist asking, “Do you really think she committed suicide?” Jumping from a building seemed like such a ghastly way to die, but then, so was a bullet to the heart. A sick feeling rose in Thea’s throat, but she swallowed it away as she glanced up at Detective Gallagher.

His gaze narrowed on her, and she thought for one heart-stopping moment he might have recognized her. Then he said, “Suicide’s a possibility. We’ll know more when we’ve done a thorough search of the area. Right now you’d better get in out of this rain. We’ll be in touch if we need you.”

Alarmed, Thea started to ask why he would need to contact her again, but then realized he and the other officers would begin almost immediately the grueling work of talking to everyone in the building, searching for potential witnesses. Goyakod, Rick had always called it. Get off your ass and knock on doors. He would have been a good cop if he hadn’t been dirty.

But Thea wouldn’t think about that now. She’d become an expert at compartmentalizing her emotions, and right now all she would allow herself to concentrate on was getting away from Detective Gallagher without arousing his suspicions. She was desperate to go inside and check on Nikki.

She took the card he handed her, trying to control the trembling in her hands. But he noticed and said softly, “It’s rough when you’re not used to it.”

If you only knew, Thea thought, but aloud she said, “I’m okay. I just need to be inside, out of the cold.”

He nodded. “If you think of anything that might help, call me at that number.”

Thea stuffed his card deep into the pocket of her coat, knowing all the while that Detective Gallagher would never get a call from her, no matter what. He was a cop, and that was all she needed to know about him. His badge made him one of the enemy.

SHE SEEMED AWFULLY NERVOUS for a bystander, John thought as he watched her at the front door of the building.

She dropped her keys on the stoop, and even from his position several yards away, he could see how badly her hands shook as she bent and picked them up. She started to insert her key into the lock, but then, realizing the door was already unlocked, she hurried inside. A pale blue scarf hid her hair while the oversize coat she wore wrapped her from neck to toe.

But even bundled up like that, John could tell she was a small woman. Petite, he supposed, would be the word. Her thin face was pale and translucent, her features—dark brown eyes, slightly crooked nose, full lips—almost fragile-looking.

There was something about her, apart from her obvious attractiveness, that intrigued him. She had the demeanor of a woman who had been badly frightened and was trying her damnedest to hide it. But if she didn’t recognize the victim, what did she have to be scared of?

His inherent distrust was working overtime tonight, he decided, scowling. A lot of people were nervous around the police. Maybe the real reason Thea Lockhart triggered his distrust was that she reminded him a little of his ex-wife.

Meredith hadn’t cared for cops, either. At least that was what she’d said the night she walked out. But then two months later, she’d married another one, leaving John to conclude that it was one cop in particular she hadn’t cared for. Even though they’d been divorced for nearly two years, her betrayal still rankled.

But Meredith Clark was no longer his concern, and Thea Lockhart was probably just the nervous type, someone who fell apart at the sight of blood. The only woman John had to worry about now was the Jane Doe lying mangled on the concrete.

“Where’s the building manager?” he asked the officer nearest him. “We’ll need to start knocking on doors ASAP.”

“He’s on the roof with Detective Cox,” the uniform told him. “Want me to radio up?”

“I’m headed that way.” John took another look at the victim. Had she jumped off the building of her own free will or had she been pushed? In spite of the note found in her pocket, John voted for the latter. His every instinct told him this was a homicide, and if his hunch panned out, the next forty-eight hours would be critical. After that, the trail would start getting cold. If a case wasn’t solved in the first two days, odds were good it would never be cleared. John knew that better than anyone.

“Hell of a night for a murder,” he muttered as the rain started coming down harder.

Chapter Two

The rain peppered John’s face as he stood on the roof, his presence as yet unnoticed. The wind was stronger up here, and he braced himself as he watched Cox’s flashlight beam moving about the area.

The roof was surrounded by a concrete safety ledge, about three feet high and six inches wide. Near the stairwell door and to the left, pallets of building materials and twenty-gallon drums had been stacked in preparation for resurfacing and waterproofing the deck, but the rest of the roof was clear and open. But even so, at this time of night and in this weather, the prospect of an eyewitness was pretty dim.

John’s gaze tracked his partner’s progression across the roof. Roy Cox was a fifteen-year veteran of the Detective Division. He and John had been working together for nearly four years now, and although they couldn’t have been less alike in temperament and investigative techniques, the partnership had worked out well. Whereas John was intense, almost obsessive about their cases, Roy was laid-back and soft-spoken, his west-Texas drawl as pronounced as it had been the day he’d left El Paso nearly thirty years ago.

He was a tall man, wiry and grizzled, with a handlebar mustache that might have looked more at home on a Texas range than it did on the streets of Chicago. A second man, the building manager, John guessed, dogged Cox’s steps, his gravelly voice muted by the rain and wind. John switched on his flashlight, catching the man in his beam. Wide-eyed and startled, he looked like a deer trapped in headlights.

Cox called out, “Hey, that you, Johnny boy? Glad you could finally make it. I reckon even you gung ho-types have trouble tearing yourselves away from a warm body on a night like this.”

John refrained from telling him that the only female in his bed lately was Cassandra, the temperamental Persian Meredith had left behind when she’d moved out. But Cox was his partner, and a nosy one at that; John suspected he already knew. “McGowan said you found a suicide note on the victim.”

“Damn straight we did.” Cox walked over and handed the bagged note to John. The words had been typed on a sheet of plain white bond paper.

“Short and sweet,” John muttered, training his light on the note.

“Just the way I like my women.” Cox grinned, his face pale in the cast-off glow from his flashlight. Water dripped from the brim of Cox’s cowboy hat, the battered one he always wore in inclement weather. “Looks like this is our lucky night, Johnny.”

“What do you mean?”

Cox held up a second plastic bag and aimed his flashlight beam on the contents—an expensive-looking beige handbag. “Found it on the deck over there by the wall. Victim must have dropped it just before she jumped. We’ve ID’d her from her driver’s license.”

“Who is she?”

“Name’s Gail Waters. She had a press pass…”

The name hit John like a physical blow. Stunned, he stared at his partner as a shock wave rolled through him. “Who did you say?”

Cox gave him a quizzical glance. “Gail Waters.”

Son of a bitch, John thought, trying to hide his surprise.

Cox rubbed the salt-and-pepper whiskers on his chin. “I’m getting some bad vibes here, Johnny-O. Are you trying to tell me you knew the victim?”

“I never saw her before in my life,” John answered truthfully. But he knew the sound of her voice. He’d talked to her on the phone less than forty-eight hours earlier, when she’d called the station wanting to interview him about his father’s disappearance seven years ago. It was a case that had not been solved to this day.

Gail Waters had been a reporter for and the managing editor of a small newspaper on the near north side of town. She specialized in stories involving disappearances and missing persons. Although she was a print journalist—and had taken pride in pointing out that fact to John—she had also been the co-producer of a cable show called Vanished!, which explored intriguing cases the police hadn’t been able to solve.

Why she’d suddenly decided to investigate Sean Gallagher’s disappearance, John had no idea. But her death had to be a coincidence. It couldn’t have anything to do with his father.