Her Sister's Keeper

CHAPTER TWO

MELANIE HARRIS drove with the practiced skill of someone accustomed to navigating busy city streets. They had spoken barely five words since he had hopped in the car and given his destination. As she deftly shifted the Mercedes into gear and pulled into the light prelunch traffic, Kent flipped open the file he had been reading when Melanie first stepped into his office. He wanted to glean as much from the notes as possible before he had to process the second scene.

Try as he might, he found it difficult to concentrate. He found himself distracted by the woman sitting just inches away. There was the perfume, for one thing. Subtle and pleasant, it kept wafting over from the driver’s side of the car. It was one with which he was unfamiliar, but he had a suspicion it would be forever linked with Melanie. He gritted his teeth and began reading the notes, but his eyes kept skipping from the words in front of him to Melanie’s legs. Tanned, shapely and in perfect range of his peripheral vision. After several minutes he gave up and stared out the window, trying to put his thoughts in order. He might have succeeded but for the fact that Melanie seemed to feel it was her duty, as driver, to initiate polite conversation.

“I hope you don’t mind classical music, Dr. Matt¬ son,” she said, in reference to the CD playing in the car’s state-of-the-art sound system.

He turned from watching the passing scenery to look at her. “Water Music’s definitely one of Handel’s all-time classics, but I guess I’m more of a rock and roll kind of guy.”

He went back to glancing at his notes, silently damning himself for sounding so Neanderthal. Still, his response had obviously discouraged Melanie, because she gave up on the small talk and concentrated on her driving instead. Too bad Kent couldn’t do the same with his notes. It was those legs of hers. What red-blooded man could possibly concentrate on the details of an unsolved murder when such a pair of legs was sitting a mere thirty inches away?

MELANIE WAS no stranger to the Beverly Hills Regency, and this was by no means her first visit to the city landmark, a place she had often seen at its busiest times. The luxury hotel was a longtime meeting place of the famous. It was where the rich came to play, to see and to be seen. As such, it was a popular spot for tourists and paparazzi ever on the prowl for celebrity sightings. Melanie had often dined at the formal Green Palms Restaurant or lunched at the trendy Brick Oven Cafe. Part hotel, part spa, part culinary destination, the “Beverly,” as the locals called it, was always crowded, so a packed driveway was to be expected. But as she turned off Wilshire Boulevard, Melanie wasn’t prepared for the sight of dozens of police cars, emergency vehicles, satellite trucks and television vans parked haphazardly on the driveway and even on the hotel’s prized gardens. When she slowed to a stop at the entrance, a squad car was blocking the way. She turned to her passenger, who was already holding out an official ID card for the uniformed officer, who waved them through. Melanie drove slowly between the police cars while Dr. Mattson scanned the scene.

“Park there,” he said, pointing to a slot between two police cruisers scarcely wider than her own car.

She barely managed to squeeze into the space and wondered how she’d ever get her car out of this chaotic maze. A tall black woman with close- cropped hair was coming out of the Beverly’s front doors and scanning the crowds. She spotted Dr. Mattson climbing out of the car and strode over.

“Hey, Murph,” Dr. Mattson said. He reached back into the car to collect his battered leather briefcase.

The handsome, well-dressed woman was obviously in no mood to exchange pleasantries. “Follow me, Kent,” she said, turning and striding briskly back toward the main doors.

Dr. Mattson left without so much as a goodbye, a thank-you or a backward glance. Melanie watched until they both disappeared into the building. In her rearview mirror she spied another cruiser, lights flashing, parking directly behind her and blocking her exit. She sat for a few moments as the engine idled, then switched off the ignition and blew out a breath.

“Now what?” she said.

KENT HAD WORKED with Carolyn Murphy for five years, and the two had become almost instant friends. Together, they had worked on numerous cases, and while Murphy at times had displayed disgust, frustration, anger and sadness at the varied degrees of human degradation they had come across, she always took it in stride, keeping her “eyes on the prize—catching the bad guys.”

A good team, they’d caught a lot of bad guys. Murphy had the hard, no-nonsense approach of a career cop. She gave no quarter and asked for none. A crack shot, she held a black belt in karate, was fluent in several languages and was the product of the meanest streets of South Central L.A. When necessary she could schmooze with the lackeys at Police Central, but she much preferred working in the trenches with her squad of detectives. For a grandmother of two, Kent had discovered early on, she was one hot-shit woman.

As they crossed the lobby toward the bank of elevators, Murphy glanced at him. “Your car. Did I hear over the radio that it had been stolen?”

Kent had been hoping to keep the information from her, but the garage attendant must have called it in. Too bad he hadn’t been that on the ball before the Audi had been stolen. “Yeah, they took it right out of the parking garage. Imagine that.”

He waited for her to chide him, but her grim expression never altered as she hit the elevator button, an indication to Kent that she was preoccupied. Otherwise she would most definitely have rubbed his nose in I-told-you-so’s. Murphy was the one who had cheerfully read him chapter and verse of the California crime stats on the Audi as soon as she learned he’d purchased one.

“The Audi TT convertible?” she’d said, arching her eyebrows with wicked intent. “Nice car. Do you know how many stolen cars were reported to the LAPD last year? One thousand, one hundred and fifty-two. Know how many were sports cars? Eight hundred twelve. I predict your fancy little set of wheels will last two weeks, max.”

Kent had managed to keep it for three whole months. Small consolation, he thought as he stepped into the elevator. If Murphy’s behavior was any indication, Kent had a pretty good hunch his missing car would be the least of his worries by the day’s end.

“So, do we have a name?” Kent asked as the elevator climbed.

“As a matter of fact we have two,” Murphy said. “Does the name Ariel Moore mean anything to you?”

“Should it?”

“Just what rock were you hiding under this week, cowboy?” Murphy asked.

Kent just looked at her, waiting.

“If you paid attention at the supermarket checkout line, you’d know Ariel Moore is the hottest rising star in town.”

“And you know this how?”

“I know this because my grandson has her poster pinned up above his desk. That, and the hotel manager filled me in. Apparently she stays here frequently in this same two-bedroom suite. The reservation was made under Ariel Harris, which is her real name. But,” she added, “here’s the interesting twist. The dead woman is Stephanie Hawke, and no one has seen Ariel Harris, aka Moore, or knows what happened to the baby that checked in with Ms. Hawke. We assume the baby was Ariel’s, since she gave birth only a week ago. Which you’d also know if you paid attention to the supermarket tabloids.”

Their arrival at the eleventh floor halted any further conversation and they exited the elevator. The hallway was silent. As Murphy strode briskly down the carpeted corridor, she told him that all the guests on that floor had been escorted into a large conference room soon after the police had arrived. When Murphy stopped to speak to a group of uniformed officers, Kent continued to the suite.

He was glad to see a minimal number of people in the room itself. His captain had done a good job of keeping the scene clear of extraneous badges, not always an easy task. This suspicious death had all the indications of becoming a high-profile case and Kent knew high-profile cases brought the promotion and publicity seekers out of the woodwork. He hesitated at the door of the suite and paused for a moment to clear his mind and center his focus.

Kent had once had a university professor tell him that crimes and crime scenes were all about patterns. Find the pattern, and the answer would naturally follow. From his own experience, Kent knew that could take skill and patience. By their very nature, crime scenes were chaotic. Trying to take one in all at once would be overwhelming, so Kent liked to break it up into manageable chunks. First, he eyeballed the entire scene, committing everything to memory. These first impressions would later be compared alongside the official crime-scene photos, police logs, investigating officer notes, forensic notes, medical examiner reports and his own written log.

Much of the official information and reports would arrive via fax or computer to his office at Chimeya. It was there, notes and photos spread around his desk, a fire blazing, Loki curled up on his favorite rug next to the hearth, that he would start the detailed and painstaking review and let the patterns emerge. When he hit an impasse, and it happened from time to time, then he talked to Susan. He was too much the scientist to believe in ghosts, spirits or the hereafter, but that never stopped him from posing questions to the one woman he had loved and who had been taken from him seven years ago. Now, as then, she could still guide him to the answers, but before there could be any answers, he had to collect the information necessary to pose the questions.

Kent drew a deep breath and stepped into the suite, crossing to the bedroom. There was the bed, still neatly made. The curtains were drawn, a sliver of sunshine coming in through the crack between the two drapes. The television was on, but muted. In the soft glow of the bedside lamp he could just make out the figure on the floor. He moved in closer to examine the body of a young woman with dark, shoulder-length hair, fully dressed in gray slacks and a white linen shirt. She lay curled on her side as if she’d lain down there to sleep, but her eyes were half open, gazing into infinity the way the eyes of the dead sometimes did. One hand was reaching out as if to gather up the small beaded purse that had fallen to the floor beside her. Kent squatted on his heels, looking for jewelry on her person and remembering with a stab of pain how they’d tried to take Susan’s wedding band and engagement ring. How they’d nearly torn her finger off, trying to remove them…

The memory caused his stomach to twist. After five years he still wasn’t used to this routine. He hoped to God he never got used to it. This young woman was still sporting three rings and a necklace, and he mentally ruled out robbery as a motive. He shook his head, rose to his feet and resumed scanning the room. No sign of a struggle. Nothing appeared to be out of place. He looked closer at the victim, seeing no evidence she had been restrained or physically abused. Kent jumped as a hulking figure lurched up from the other side of the bed. “Shit, T. Ray, are you trying to give me a heart attack?” T. Ray Boone laughed as he rose, and as Kent willed his heart to slow its beating, he found himself wondering how he had not seen T. Ray on the other side of the bed. The medical examiner’s bulk was not easy to miss.

“Sorry ’bout that,” T. Ray said, his Southern accent as deep and mellow as the tupelo honey produced by his native Mississippi.

By this time, Murphy had rejoined Kent. “What do you have, T.? Anything new?” she asked.

T. Ray consulted the clipboard in his latex-gloved hands. “Tell you what, y’all just change the name and location and it’s the same as that lady you dragged into my carving room this morning.”

“Not quite,” Murphy said. “According to the desk clerk, when this one checked into the hotel last evening, she was carrying an infant. The night auditor had a guest call down to complain about a baby crying shortly after midnight. Obviously, the baby is now missing.” T. Ray shook his head. “Well, I can’t speak for that, but what we have here is a female, Caucasian, age twenty-three to twenty-six, dark hair and eyes. Dead at least twelve hours, which puts time of death right around midnight. I’m going with dehydration and possible acute organ failure as a cause of death, which screams poison to me, same as that other one, but that could change with the autopsy. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find something in the blood chemistry, but I gotta warn you guys…” T. Ray’s brown eyes took on a somber look. “If this does turn out to be some kind of viral thing, you might not want to be gettin’ too close without a haz-mat suit.”

“Thanks for the belated warning,” Kent commented. “Did you find any evidence of viral or bacterial infection in the other woman?”

T. Ray shook his head. “Nope, I didn’t, except for the secondary pneumonia. No reason why that young thing should’ve gotten so critically sick and died all alone at night. No reason at all for her vital organs to just shut down, that I could find. That’s why I’m thinkin’ poison.”

“But no evidence of foul play?”

“None. Blood was clean, body was clean. If it was poison, I don’t know what the hell it was, but give me five minutes with this one in the morgue and I can tell y’all whether it’s the same as the other,” T. Ray said.

Kent glanced around. A pacifier lay on the floor near the body. A baby blanket was draped over the desk chair. And a baby bottle half-full of milk was on the side table. “What the hell happened to the baby?” he muttered to himself.

“That,” Murphy responded, “is something we’re trying to find out as soon as possible. We’re hoping the infant is with its mother, but we can’t locate Ariel Moore to confirm that.” Murphy’s cell phone rang, and she turned away to answer it.

Kent didn’t bother to listen in. He was far more interested in gathering as much information, tangible and intangible, from the scene as possible. The two deaths bore too many similarities not to be connected. If T. Ray suspected poisoning, that meant someone had killed them. He knew the sooner he could start building a behavioral profile of the killer, the faster they could capture whoever was doing this and, hopefully, prevent more killings.

Members of the crime lab were entering the room in a steady stream, dusting for prints, shooting photos and hunting for any trace evidence the killer may have left behind. Soon, Kent knew, he would be perceived as in the way. Even in a state where people routinely took their pets to animal psychics, Kent’s particular contributions to the efforts of law enforcement were not always appreciated. Not everyone in the LAPD had reacted with enthusiasm to the addition of a forensic psychologist. Kent had been surprised and flattered when Murphy had stepped forward and requested he be assigned full-time to her department and, after a grueling six-month stint at the FBI facility at Quantico, given the official designation of a homicide detective to quell the growing departmental dissent. It was a move neither had ever had reason to regret.

He saw Murphy was off her cell phone and walked over to her. Knowing that her take on things was oftentimes dramatically different from his own, he wanted her initial reactions to the scene. Kent’s back was to the door and before he could ask the captain his first question, he saw Murphy glance over his shoulder and a look of irritation flash across her face.

“What’s she doing in here? This is a crime scene, not a sideshow.”

Kent turned and saw Melanie Harris standing just inside the suite’s bedroom door. It looked like he had caught her in midwave; her hand was raised but something had diverted her attention, leaving the elegant fingers floating in midair. Even as he turned toward her, he could see her eyes widening in shock. She took a sudden step backward, stumbled on the threshold and would have fallen if Kent hadn’t moved as quickly as he did.

It had been seven years since Kent had held a woman in his arms the way he was holding Melanie now. He carried the protesting woman from the room, vaguely aware of the wall of badges parting to allow him passage and Murphy’s angry voice demanding to know how a civilian had gotten access to the crime scene.