Out Of Nowhere

The grief had ebbed and flowed through him sporadically for ten long years, then it had finally settled into something distant and bearable. Now Fox was determined. It was time to start over. Somewhere in Philadelphia, he thought, there was another gentle, quiet woman meant to be his wife.

“We’ve got to go,” Rafe said. “We’ve caught a stiff up in Chestnut Hill. A nice, fat rich one. There are officers there now, waiting for us. Seems a ruby the size of Mount Rushmore has disappeared as well.”

Translation, Fox thought—his night was over.

He returned to the bar and paid the tab, then he snagged his jacket from the back of his stool. On impulse, he caught the blonde’s hand and kissed it, a gentle touch that was gone before it started. Her eyes widened and she sighed. When he straightened, he saw Rafe roll his eyes.

Five minutes later, they were in Fox’s vintage Mustang, a 1968 Shelby convertible, heading north. Raphael filled him in on what he knew so far.

“We got an anonymous 911 call. A female. The call was traced to the home. She seemed to indicate that Carmen—that’s Stephen Carmen—was killed for a gem he had in his possession, but I haven’t heard the tape yet. Officers arrived and yeah, there was a body in the library but no apparent jewels lying about. The missing stone is a Burmese ruby, uncut, twenty-four carats. It’s called the Blood of the Rose.”

Fox frowned. The name tickled his memory. “I’ve heard of it.”

“If you’ve read the papers lately, you’d have to. Stephen Carmen and his stepsister—name of Tara Cole—have been tying up the probate courts over this baby for something like four years now. The ruby belonged to Cole’s mother, Letitia Cole Carmen, who apparently willed it to her stepson.” He paused for effect. “The court returned a ruling today—Carmen’s will was up to snuff. They gave him the gem.”

“So let’s find the lady and have someone take her down to headquarters.” Fox reached automatically for the radio handset on his dashboard.

“Not likely. I already put the word out for some officers to pay a visit to Ms. Cole. She doesn’t appear to be home.”

They pulled up in front of a house awash with lights. Brilliance glittered from three floors’ worth of windows. The front door was wide open. Fox cut the engine.

“So do you want to take care of the body or do the scene this time?” Rafe asked.

“I’ll handle the scene. You wouldn’t know a gem if you fell over it. You can’t tell rock salt from diamonds.”

Raphael frowned. “I was distracted during that case.”

“Yeah? How’s Kate?” He’d been distracted, Fox remembered, because he’d met his wife on that one.

“Pregnant,” Rafe reminded him.

“Read cranky between the lines.” Fox had four sisters back in Savannah. During his visits home, he’d noticed the trend. “Fear not, pal. It gets worse before it gets better.”

Raphael looked at him sharply. “You’re just busting my chops because I pulled you away from Bambi.”

“Her name was Candy.”

“Whatever. Aren’t you? Busting my chops?”

“Nope.” It was Fox’s turn to grin.

They got out of the car. Fox moved up the sidewalk at a stroll, a few steps behind Rafe’s more rapid pace. An officer stepped into the door as they reached it. Fox read his name tag when he joined them. “Hey, McGee, what’s the story?”

McGee thrust a thumb over his shoulder. “The vic’s in the library. Through those doors there and down a bit to your right.”

Fox stepped into a marble-floored vestibule. There were French doors at the back. Odd architectural touch, he thought. That was a Yankee for you. In his humble opinion, they weren’t long on welcoming hospitality. This effect made it look as though they were trying to keep guests out.

One of the inner doors was ajar as well. Fox turned sideways to pass through it without touching anything and Rafe followed him. They headed down a wide center hall.

Stephen Carmen lay in the middle of his library floor. Fox automatically stooped to take his pulse. In one memorable case, the vic had been only unconscious and he’d learned right then and there to be thorough, not to make any assumptions. When that “murdered” woman had sat up, he’d nearly dropped dead. That had been in his rookie year.

Carmen, however, was definitely deceased. His skin wasn’t quite cold yet but both his lips and his nail beds were going blue. He’d been dead less than three hours.

The dome of Carmen’s forehead shined in the library lights. He had a receding hairline and pudgy features, with the kind of petulant mouth that always made Fox’s skin crawl a little when he saw it on a man. He dropped the man’s wrist. “Sorry, pal. Rough way to end it even if I wouldn’t have wanted to shake your hand while you were alive.” He straightened away from the corpse, leaving it to Rafe.

Everything in the library was good quality, from the rich indigo of the Persian rug to the teak desk. Fox peered behind the drapes, into the fireplace, around and behind a tiny tea table with two ornate chairs bracketing it. He moved the chairs by nudging the legs with his toe.

Nothing underneath.

Fox went to the open safe and sifted through its contents. He found a wad of legal documents but nothing valuable. He scanned the papers. They chronicled the court battle between Carmen and Tara Cole.

He really wanted to meet this lady.

In the meantime, he studied row upon row of books on shelves that lined two walls. None of them looked as though they’d ever been cracked open. What a waste, Fox thought. Some of them were classics. He took a pair of gloves from the first of the crime scene techs to arrive and he removed the tomes one by one.

Finally, he was satisfied. There was no ruby in this room, especially not a twenty-four-carat-size one.

“I’ll just check out the rest of the house,” Fox said, and Rafe nodded.

It took him nearly an hour to go through the remainder of the place. There was a lot of it but nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. By the time Fox got to the kitchen, he knew nothing else was going to be. This whole scene had clearly gone down in the library.

He reached for the pantry door and peeked inside. Nothing but canned goods and darkness. Then he heard Rafe call to him from down the hall. He closed the door again with a quiet snick and went to rejoin his partner in the library. The body-catchers had arrived from the morgue and Rafe had released Carmen to them. The crime scene techs were leaving fingerprint dust in their wake wherever they passed.

“Okay, here’s my play on it,” Rafe said. “Ms. Cole got word from the court today that she’d lost her fight. She came over here in a nice temper, walloped Carmen with the poker, maybe in a rage, or maybe she planned to.”

Fox frowned. “That’s cold.”

“Yeah, well, either way, she did us the courtesy of calling 911. Then she grabbed the ruby and took off. It fits.”

“Don’t it though,” Fox drawled. Too neatly, to his way of thinking. “Nobody’s found her yet?”

“No. She’s either traveling on foot or by public transportation. She could be anywhere. She doesn’t keep a car—she lives in a high rise on Poplar—so we can’t put anything out on the vehicle.”

Fox nodded. If he hadn’t had a love affair with the ’68 Shelby since he was a boy, he wouldn’t have bothered to own a car in the city, either.

“We’ve got officers at her building waiting for her to come home,” Rafe continued. “If she doesn’t turn up by morning, there’s our cause to put out an APB on her.”

At which point, Fox thought, she could be in Duluth. “Let’s nudge it some,” he suggested. “Give her until midnight to appear, then hit the airwaves with her description.”

“That would be my inclination,” Rafe agreed, but they both knew the score. “Plattsmier will balk. You know how he gets when there’s any money or clout involved and something tells me these folks have some income.” Their captain was more politician than cop, more worried about lawsuits than justice. He’d started his career with enough integrity but the title had done him in.

Plattsmier and Rafe did not get along. Luckily, Fox could charm a snake. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll deal with him myself.”

He left the library again. He went down the hall and finally stepped outside into the backyard. He circled the house once, then twice, without finding anything interesting there, either. Rafe caught up with him in a winter-dead garden in the backyard.

“The techs are on their way out,” Rafe said.

“Go ahead and catch a ride with one of them.”