The Littlest Witness Read online

  McGowan nodded and took off, leaving Thea standing alone to face Gallagher. She hoped he’d just go up to the roof and forget all about her, but when he turned and started toward her, she saw in his eyes that he had no intention of letting her get away so easily.

  “I’m Detective Gallagher.” His gaze was direct, penetrating. If he noticed her trembling, Thea hoped he’d blame the cold. “And you are?”

  “Thea Lockhart.”

  “Officer McGowan said you live in the building, is that right?”

  She nodded. “I was just coming home from work when he stopped me.”

  “You work around here, Miss Lockhart?”

  “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.

  But even so, names from John’s past flashed like a strobe through his head: Ashley Dallas, the young woman whose murder Sean had been investigating at the time of his disappearance; Daniel O’Roarke, the man convicted of Ashley’s brutal murder, who now sat on death row; and John’s own brother Tony, who had been in love with Ashley at the time of her murder.

  For some reason Gail Waters had wanted to dig up that old tragedy, expose secrets that had been buried for more than seven years.

  And now she was dead.

  A coincidence, John told himself again. But a cold finger of dread traced up his backbone as he stood in the icy rain.

  “You want to notify the old man or should I?” Cox was asking.

  The “old man” Cox was referring to was John’s uncle and their commanding officer. Liam Gallagher kept himself apprised of every investigation the detectives conducted under his watch. His knowledge of all the uncleared cases in his jurisdiction was nothing short of phenomenal, and John had always held his uncle in the highest esteem.

  But now a tiny doubt began to niggle at him. Liam had worked on the Ashley Dallas case, too. Had Gail Waters talked to him about John’s father’s strange disappearance?

  “Let’s hold off on that.” John stared at the note for a moment longer, then handed it back to Cox. “A type-written suicide note always worries me. I’d like to do a little more digging before we call in.”

  Cox groaned. “I don’t like the sound of that. You’re going to get a hard-on about this one, aren’t you? You’ve got that look.”

  “I’m going to do my job,” John said grimly. “And so are you. Until we get the coroner’s report, we’re going to treat this as a homicide investigation.”

  Cox muttered an oath as his radio crackled. He pulled it from his belt and walked a few feet away to respond. John used the opportunity to examine the wall and floor of the roof at the spot from where he judged the victim had fallen. Slipping on a pair of latex gloves, he knelt and scoured the area with his flashlight, knowing all the while the rain had probably washed away whatever trace evidence, including fingerprints, that might have been left.

  “Meat wagon’s here,” Cox called from the stairwell door. “You coming?”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” John stood and gazed over the side of the building. Down on the street, a handful of bystanders had gathered at the fringes of the yellow tape.

  As if sensing John’s gaze, one of them, a man wearing a black parka, a stocking cap and a muffler covering the lower part of his face, glanced up at the roof. Even five stories away, John felt a tug of recognition.

  He knew the man only as Fischer, an informant he’d used successfully in the past. John had no idea about the man’s real identity, but he seemed to have an uncanny knack for showing up at crime scenes, particularly the ones John was called out on. He suspected Fischer not only had a police scanner, but an inside line into the department. Whatever his connection, his information had proved invaluable in the past.

  As John watched, Fischer turned and headed down the street, his shoulders hunched against the sharp blast of wind from the lake.

  John rubbed the back of his neck where the hair had suddenly stood on end. Fischer always gave him a case of the jitters, although he couldn’t say why exactly. Maybe because there were elements of danger and distrust involved with all informants.

  The door to the stairwell slammed shut in the wind and Cox disappeared. John saw that the building manager remained and had started across the roof toward him.

  He was a short squat man, somewhere in his forties, who breathed in sharp, almost gasping puffs of air. In the dim light he looked eager and excited, his small dark eyes greedily taking in every last detail of the search.

  “Detective, if I may be so bold…” Rain glistened in the fringe of brown hair that circled the man’s bald pate like a dingy halo.

  “What is it?” John asked, annoyed at having his concentration broken.

  “It’s something I, er, mentioned to Detective Cox, but he, er, didn’t seem to take much notice.” The man stuttered and stumbled over his words, as if extremely nervous. He wiped moisture from his forehead with the back of his hand. “It’s over there.” He pointed to the stack of building materials near the stairwell door.

  “What is?”

  “I’m, er, not sure. Evidence maybe.”

  John said sharply, “What are you talking about, Mr.—”

  “Dalrimple. Morris Dalrimple. My friends call me Dal.”

  “Why don’t you show me what you’re talking about, Mr. Dalrimple?”

  The building manager touched his fingertips to his chin, then dropped his hand to his side. “I think I saw something. If you would, er, just shine your flashlight over there…a little more to your right…yes, that’s it. Right there. And then if you would, er, kneel, like you did earlier…”

  John complied, although there was something about Dalrimple that was a little unsettling. To be honest, the man gave him the creeps.

  John focused his light on the stacks of building materials. From where he knelt he could make out narrow channels running through the crowded pallets of drums. He didn’t see anything at first, but then he moved the beam back, playing it along one of the channels.

  “Yes, there it is!” Dalrimple cr
ied excitedly. He almost jumped up and down with glee. “I thought I saw something in there earlier, although Detective Cox couldn’t spot it. But if I may be so bold…tall people, er, tend to overlook a lot of things. You don’t concern yourself with places that accommodate only little people—like myself, for instance. I thought right off the space between the pallets might be a good place for someone to, er, hide, but Detective Cox was certain no one could fit in there. I must admit, since I, er, put on a little weight, it might be a bit of a squeeze—”

  Dalrimple broke off in midsentence as John stood and strode to the pallets. He bent and angled his light into the long channel between the stacks of drums. Something was lying on the floor several feet inside. Lifeless eyes gleamed in the crisp beam from John’s flashlight.

  John knelt and felt inside the channel. Using the flashlight as an extension, he dragged whatever was on the floor toward him, until he could reach it with his hand. His fingers closed around a scrap of fabric, and a tinny voice intoned, “Ma-ma” as he pulled a doll from its hiding place.

  “Well, I’ll be!” Dalrimple exclaimed, gazing down at the toy in John’s hand. “How do you suppose that got in there?” He started to touch the doll’s mop of dark hair, but John jerked it away. Dalrimple looked crushed.

  “There could be prints,” John felt obliged to explain. “You understand.”

  “Oh, of course. I know all about, er, police procedure. Mama and I never miss an episode of ‘Cops.’ So what do you think about the doll, Detective? Is it evidence?”

  “Possibly.” Walking back across the roof, he stood at the edge where Gail Waters had gone over and fixed his light on the stack of pallets. The channel between was tight, but as Dalrimple had suggested, a small adult could manage to squeeze inside. A child could do so quite easily. And if she had been hiding in the space earlier, she could have seen what happened without being detected.

  It was possible he might have himself a witness, after all. And if Gail had been murdered, it was imperative that he find the owner of the doll as quickly as possible.