Whiplash

32

It was Sherlock who tucked Georgie in that evening and read her the next chapter of her Nancy Drew mystery. Erin and Bowie cleaned up the dishes in Erin's small kitchen.

Erin cupped her hand to her ear.

"What?" Bowie asked.

"I can't seem to hear Sherlock reading to Georgie. And her bedroom is only one crappy-thin poorly constructed wall away."

Bowie vigorously dried a cup. "Sorry about that, but you know it's usually true."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. You're off the hook." She tossed him a dry dish towel.

Bowie stared at a wet glass. "Sherlock was out of line to take you to see Jane Ann Royal."

She grinned at him. "Is that snark I hear? Why would you care if Sherlock took me along?"

"You're not FBI, Erin. You're a civilian. She shouldn't have taken you anywhere related to the investigation, and this interview was official."

Erin threw a handful of soapy water at him.

"Hey!" He wiped off his face and frowned at her.

"Sorry, but you deserved that, Bowie Richards. I'm good, and you're supposed to have the brains to know to use good people whenever you can. You and your precious FBI-like Agent Cliff got all that much information out of Andreas Kesselring?"

How did she know about that? He had no smart reply ready. Because he wasn't stupid, Bowie shut up. He dried another glass. "I was with Agent Kesselring most of the day."

"If I tell you about our meeting with Mrs. Royal, will you tell me about what you and Agent Kesselring did?"

He dried two plates before agreeing.

After Erin told him her impressions of Jane Ann Royal and what the woman had said, with many questions thrown in by Bowie along the way, he nodded. "So both you and Sherlock think she knows quite a bit about what her husband's doing, and she's just playing dumb. Sort of like Madoff's wife did a couple of years back?"

"I don't know how much Jane Ann actually knows, but I'll tell you, she puts on a good act, all straightforward and open, but she knows more than she lets on. And Sherlock, the consummate professional, agrees with me."

"All right, all right, I'll drop that if you will. The tennis pro, did you speak to him?"

"No, he just waved and left. Mrs. Royal said she hadn't decided to sleep with him yet. Evidently he wouldn't be the first tennis instructor she's bedded. She likes them young and hard. She said her husband prefers women nearer to his own age, like Carla Alvarez. An interesting reversal. I wonder if she's right. His name is Mick Haggarty and he really wants to be an actor. If what she says is true, he may not know much."

"Neither you nor Sherlock trust her, either. We'll see. I'll check out the tennis pro."

"Mick Haggarty. He's a tennis pro at the Glenis Springs Country Club right down the road."

Bowie nodded, put another glass in the cupboard. He was building a military-straight line of glasses.

She said, "Georgie was telling me about your long commute, how you get home tired a lot of nights. She said you were thinking about leaving Stone Bridge and moving to New Haven."

"The commute's not all that bad, really, but she's right, I am thinking about putting my house up for sale." He paused, frowned. "I don't know how she knew that."

"The kid's precocious, reads people, particularly you, very well, and she's a great eavesdropper. Actually, now that I remember back, I started early as well. I was a champ by Georgie's age. No one said anything I didn't pay attention to."

"That's what's in my future? Whispering whenever I'm in the house? Maybe it was a mistake to settle here in the first place, but given the current market, I may not have a lot of choice. Thing is, Georgie's school was highly recommended by a friend of mine in L.A., and that's what locked me on target. Georgie really likes her school, likes the kids, sure likes her dance class and teacher."

"Tough decision." Erin wiped her hands on a dish towel, found herself twisting it over and over. "Well, maybe it's not all that great a distance. I made it up to New Haven today to see my client, did it in under fifty minutes."

"What client?"

Big mouth, big mouth. Didn't matter. Who cared? "He's a professor at Yale, an old friend of my dad's. We ate in the Berkeley dining room, his college when he went there thirty years ago. Quite a place."

"What are you doing for him?"

Shut up, shut up. "Confidential, Agent Richards. Pull out my fingernails, you still can't make me talk. Tell me about Kesselring."

Why doesn't she want to tell me? He said, "Kesselring wanted to see Blauvelt's body today and that was when I decided to deal with him myself. I called Dr. Ella Franks and she met us at our local morgue, in the basement in the Stone Bridge Memorial Hospital. I have to admit he asked her good questions, and he said right off he didn't believe the killer obliterated his face to prevent identification. We've all been wondering about that."

Bowie thought back to the cold sterile room, standing across the autopsy table from Blauvelt's body. Bowie had watched Kesselring carefully as he stared down at Blauvelt's ruined face. "Dr. Franks, you said the killer struck a half-dozen blows to his face?"

Dr. Franks nodded. "Yes, exactly half a dozen, like his killer counted the hits. It was postmortem. Why do you think the murderer did this to him?"

Kesselring never looked away from Blauvelt's face. He said with complete certainty, "Rage, psychotic rage. Someone was really over the edge, so wound up he just didn't stop. He wanted to-how do you say it-erase the man, yes, that's it, the killer wanted to erase him, and he did."

And Bowie had said to him, "If the killer didn't care about his being quickly identified, then why did he cut off Blauvelt's fingers? Why not cut off his feet?"

Kesselring was silent a moment, chewing this over, and admitted it was strange. "Perhaps the psychotic rage had burned itself out, perhaps the killer heard someone coming. Perhaps he planned to come back and bury Blauvelt, but he was prevented from doing so."

All of that made sense, Bowie thought, and cursed under his breath.

Bowie had noticed that Dr. Franks, who admired him, dammit, respected what he said, was looking at Kesselring with something of the same expression he'd seen on Dolores Cliff's face. It burned his gut.

Bowie shook his head at the memory of his own conceit. He said to Erin, "Then Kesselring asked to visit the Schiffer Hartwin offices. The lawyers were camped out there. Caskie Royal refused to see us, sent us a message to talk to his lawyers. Kesselring and I met briefly with Bender the Elder. He was cordial to Kesselring, but of course offered no help at all.

"Then Kesselring wanted to speak to Carla Alvarez. We were both surprised when she agreed to see us, but then she simply smiled at us, and said she had no comment on the advice of their legal staff. And she didn't budge. I think she saw us just to rub our noses in it."

Erin asked, "What about the guy who's manager of accounting, Turley Drexel?"

"What do you know about Turley Drexel?"

"Didn't Sherlock tell you? She said when she walked into Alvarez's office the morning Blauvelt's body was discovered, she interrupted Alvarez and Turley Drexel in a loud and nasty argument. She didn't know what it was about, but could there be something there?"

"I'll check on that." He ran his fingers through his dark hair, making it stand on end. "This is precisely why there should be only one team working a case. This could be important, yet I didn't know about it."

"It's called debriefing, Bowie. I'll bet you haven't told Sherlock all about Kesselring yet, have you?"

"That's beside the point, I-well, smack me in the head. Okay, you're right. And you can stop that now."

"Stop what?" He was standing two feet away from her, staring at her hard.

"Stop being such a smart-mouth, even if you're right. It burns me."

Erin gave him a fat smile. Without thinking, she took a single step toward him, leaned up, and kissed him, fast and light and easy, and stepped back. She laughed. "Suck it up, Agent Richards," and she snapped his thigh with the towel.

"Georgie's almost asleep," Sherlock said from the kitchen doorway. "Since the walls are so thin in apartments, you know, I heard most of what you guys talked about." She raised an eyebrow, looked from one to the other. "Interesting."

"What's interesting?" Bowie asked, lips seamed.

"What you said about Kesselring. Where's he at this evening?"

"He's dining at Chez Pierre. He wanted to see where Blauvelt had his last meal. He wanted to speak to Estafan, see if he could find other witnesses. I wonder what the owner Paul Remier thinks of him."

Sherlock frowned. "Seems like a waste of time to me. He could read the reports, they're very thorough. Why is he rewalking in all our steps?"

"Maybe he doesn't think the FBI is thorough enough," Erin said. "Or more likely, he thinks you're holding out on him."

Bowie looked thoughtful. "Or maybe Kesselring knows more than he's told us and wants to see if anyone else does too."