Maid of Murder

Chapter Nineteen

I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry. “Why are you surprised, detective? This is my brother’s office.”

He said nothing and stepped inside. I backed up.

He flipped on the lights. “Your brother’s not here.”

“Afraid not,” I said. My heart was beating so hard, I was surprised that he couldn’t hear it.

“We have a search warrant.” He handed me a folded document on legal-sized paper. I read it carefully.

My shoulders twitched. “Okay,” I said as if they needed my permission.

Mains motioned for the two officers to enter the office. The maintenance worker, eagerly watching the cops’ every movement, remained in the hallway, but peered through the door. The room was cramped, but I couldn’t abandon Mark’s office under the circumstances. Unfortunately, that wasn’t my decision.

After instructing the officers where to pry, Mains turned to me. “Would you join me out in the hallway?”

Walking through the door, my bag brushed up against the doorjamb, and I became acutely aware of the engagement picture resting at the bottom. What if I hadn’t found it before the police arrived? What if they asked for my bag? I worried. The shoulder strap cut across my body; I adjusted it to hide the bag behind my back.

The maintenance worker, whose name tag read Pat, looked at us eagerly, undoubtedly thinking he was about to witness his first untelevised pistol whipping. Mains also seemed to notice Pat’s excited expression and asked the maintenance guy politely, but firmly, to wait in the stairwell.

The two officers rooted through Mark’s desk, muttering to each other.

Mains redirected his attention to me. “Could you tell me what you were doing in your brother’s office? Alone, at this time of day?”

“I was looking for Mark.”

He appeared unconvinced. “How did you get inside the office?”

“The door was unlocked,” I lied. “Mark often forgets simple things like locking doors.”

“Why were the lights off?”

“I turned the lights off. I was about to leave.” I counted that one as a half-truth.

Mains made a note in the tiny vinyl-bound memo pad he had taken from his jacket pocket.

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary in his office?”

The frame weighed heavily inside my shoulder bag. “No.” No half-truth there.

He snapped the memo pad shut. “You are free to stay if you like, but outside of the office.”

I nodded. A loud crash escaped Mark’s office door, followed by an even louder curse from one of the officers. Mains sighed heavily.

He and I peeked through the doorway and found one of the officers picking up the broken pieces of Mark’s prized slide rule from the floor.

“Make a note of the damage,” Mains said.

Red-faced, the youngest officer nodded.

I slipped back out of the doorway. “I need to make a call. I’ll be upstairs. There’s no reception down here.”

Mains barely gave me a nod in acknowledgment.

I hurried to the exit. When I reached the stairwell, I found Pat had abandoned his post. I broke into a trot. In Dexler’s parking lot, I hurried to my car. I unlocked the car and grabbed a T-shirt from the backseat. Like a fugitive, I glanced around before unlocking the trunk. I opened it and shifted the junk around until I could pull back the carpeted bottom to expose the empty tire well. Currently, the spare tire was on the right front wheel. I pulled the frame from my bag and wrapped it in the T-shirt. Carefully, I place the wrapped frame into the tire well, rolled the carpet back, and slammed the trunk shut. The bag was thinner, but I had to hope that I was the only one who would notice.

I was breathing hard as I stuck my hand in the bag again, this time for my cell phone. I scrolled through my phonebook for Lew’s number.

“Baxter and Clive, attorneys,” a woman’s voice chimed. I told her I’d like to speak to Lew and gave my name. Within seconds, he came on the line. “Did you find Mark?”

“Um, no, but I’m at Mark’s office, and the police are here searching it. They had a warrant, so I let them.”

Lew sucked air through his gaped front teeth. “I better come down there.”

I paced outside Dexler’s entrance until Lew arrived in his imposing SUV. Before we entered the building, I handed him the warrant that Mains had given me. He mumbled to himself while he read. Only five feet five inches tall, Lew was a stocky man with flaming red hair and beard and a perpetual sunburn. I didn’t know where he stood on the numerous left-wing causes that my parents chained themselves to, figuratively and literally, but he was an excellent lawyer. He’d bailed them out of lockup within hours of arrest and had helped them tap dance their way out of convictions.

Lew dropped his cigarette onto the pristine Martin walk, crushing it with his tasseled loafer. “The warrant does mention that the search is in connection to the Olivia Blocken case,” he said to himself more than me. I nodded anyway.

I fidgeted. My conscience nagged me about the purloined photo in the trunk.

In the dark stairwell that led to the basement level, we met the two uniformed police officers. One said that Detective Mains would like to speak to me. Lew and I continued down the steps. Aside from Mains sitting in Mark’s desk chair and the slide rule that sat in pieces on the file cabinet, the office didn’t appear disturbed. Mains frowned when Lew followed me into the cramped office space.

I introduced Lew as the family lawyer, and he rose to his full height. “I represent the Hayes family and, at this time, am providing legal counsel to Mark Hayes and his sister India pertaining to the untimely death of their good friend Olivia Blocken.”

“I see.” Mains stood up from Mark’s chair. “It would be wise if you’d advise Mark to come down to the police station.”

“Why?” I asked.

Lew waved my outburst away. “When I next speak to Mark, I’ll discuss the matter with him. Can I ask why you’d like Mark at the station?”

“I have some questions for him.”

“Such as?”

“You can hear them at the station. I assume that you plan to be there.”

“Yes, I’ll be there.”

“India, if you see your brother, ask him to come down to the station. It’s for his own good,” Mains said.

In my estimation, when something is for someone’s own good, it’s always bad news.

“I’ll try,” I promised.

Mains left the office. Lew followed him into the hallway, demanding to know if Mains’s officers had confiscated anything. Mains said that it would be in the report. I heard their heated voices travel further down the hall until they disappeared with the slam of the stairwell’s door. I sat at Mark’s desk and wracked my brain for an idea of my brother’s whereabouts. As far as I knew, he wasn’t close with anyone in his department or at Martin in general, aside from me, and I even suspected that had more to do with genetics than personal preference. I tried to think of people outside of Martin who Mark was friendly with, but no one came to mind. Mark never offered information to me about his friends or activities outside of his schooling and job. Was that because he really didn’t have any outside interests? Or was it because I never asked? I wondered

The door to the stairway slammed again. “India,” Lew’s raspy voice called down the corridor. I met him in the hall.

“What?” My nerves were shot.

He waved his cell phone. “Your father just called. Your brother’s at your parents’ house. Let’s go.” Not waiting for my reaction, he ran up the stairs like a warrior running full-tilt into battle. I got the distinct impression that Lew was enjoying himself.

I certainly wasn’t.