Ellery had her own preoccupations, so she didn’t notice that Reed was unusually quiet on the way back to the hotel until they stopped in the parking lot and he did not get out of the car. She shifted in her seat to look at him. “Is something wrong? Or did you just put away too much food at dinner?”
Reed hesitated a moment before withdrawing something from his coat pocket. Ellery had difficulty seeing in the low light, but it appeared to be a bunch of folded tissues. “Sheriff Ramsey called me earlier to say that the DNA results came back on the knife. There is a second contributor, someone other than Cammie, and that someone is female.” Carefully, he pulled back the tissues, and Ellery saw a small black brush lying among them.
“You took Angie’s hairbrush?”
Reed’s mouth set in a grim line. “We have to run the test. It’s the only way to know.”
“Yeah, but … you can’t believe Angie is the one that killed her. I mean, look at her now—she’s still destroyed when it comes to talking about Cammie’s death. They were best friends. She loved her. What possible motive could she have had to attack her like that?”
“The money. By her own admission, Angie was one of the few people to know about the twenty-five thousand dollars. She was at the scene. She left town immediately after the murder. As suspects go, you could do a lot worse.”
Ellery folded her arms, wounded on Angie’s behalf. “You sat at her dining room table and ate her food. You saw her face when she talked about Cammie, how horrible the whole experience was for her, how much she misses her friend. Besides, what’s Angie weigh? All of a hundred and ten pounds? How’s she supposed to butcher another human being to death?”
“She’s haunted by what happened, yes. We don’t really know why. As for her size, Cammie was no bigger. They wore the same size, remember? The killer being female goes a long way toward explaining the protracted struggle at the crime scene. The attacker didn’t have the physical strength to subdue Cammie immediately.”
Ellery tried to envision it, Cammie screaming in fear as she tried to get away from her best friend, who was coming at her with a knife. “It doesn’t make sense to me. Say you’re right and Angie did want that twenty-five thousand dollars. Why not just take it? She had access to Cammie’s apartment and she probably knew where Cammie kept the money. It would’ve been easy enough to slip in there when Cammie was working, grab the money, and take off for L.A. She could’ve been three hundred miles away before Cammie even knew what happened.”
“You’re right,” Reed admitted. “That scenario fits better with the woman we met today. She doesn’t seem like a cold-blooded murderer. But as you and I both know, murderers can appear startlingly sane in ordinary contexts. Hell, it’s practically a cliché—you make the arrest and the friends and neighbors are all lined up ready to give their testimonials. ‘He seemed like a nice guy’ or ‘She always had homemade cookies ready for the school bake sale.’”
He exited the car, and Ellery followed more slowly, catching up with him at the elevators. “There are other possible suspects to consider,” she said as they waited for the doors to open. “Wanda slept with David, and Cammie found out about it. We have only Wanda’s word that Cammie forgave him so easy, or that Wanda was happy to let him go. Maybe Wanda figured if Cammie was out of the picture, she could have David to herself.”
“Maybe.” Reed didn’t sound like he believed this story.
She trailed him onto the elevator. “Also, there’s Amy.”
Reed eyed her. “What about her?”
“Remember she got a bunch of money right around the time Cammie was murdered. She said it was an inheritance, but—”
“We can check that out easily enough,” Reed said shortly, turning his attention to the lighted numbers as they climbed to the twelfth floor. He had his plastic room key out, tapping it impatiently against his thigh.
Ellery watched him in silence for a moment. “It’s almost like you want her to be guilty,” she said just before the doors dinged open. “Angie.”
“That’s ridiculous. Of course I don’t.” They walked to their rooms, and Reed didn’t glance at her as he opened his door. “We should head back to Las Vegas in the morning. I want to talk to Sheriff Ramsey about running the DNA comparison on Angie, and I think he’s more likely to agree if I make the request in person.”
Ellery didn’t reply and he didn’t seem to care. She stood in the hall after he had disappeared inside his room. There was one other woman with a motive to get rid of Cammie, a woman who knew about the twenty-five thousand dollars and who was eager to shut down the investigation. She was as adept at secret keeping as anyone Ellery had ever met: Reed’s other mother, Marianne Markham.
On the drive back to Las Vegas, Ellery explained her plan to go through with her meeting with retired journalist Bruce Carr. Reed frowned at the road rather than at her, but his tone was reproachful: “We now know Camilla Flores’s killer was a female, which means that any connection to Giselle Hardiman’s murder goes out the window. They are two separate crimes linked superficially by the weapon of choice, a knife. But they have vastly different victimology, different motives, and different patterns of attack. I think you’re wasting your time, and Bruce Carr’s.”
“It’s my time to waste, and I didn’t get the impression Bruce Carr had much else going on. Even if the woman who murdered Camilla didn’t kill Giselle, someone else did. No one much seems to care who. Maybe Bruce Carr can help with that and maybe he can’t, but at least we can spend a couple of hours talking about her. Giselle deserves that much.” Ellery figured no one had even bothered to say Giselle Hardiman’s name for several decades now. The cops were the only ones in a position to care about the case, and they had buried it deep.
“Suit yourself,” Reed answered, his jaw tight.
Ellery belatedly remembered she was supposed to be here to support him. “I’ll go with you to talk to Sheriff Ramsey about the DNA test on Angie Rivera if you want.”
“No, I can handle it. Now that Ramsay knows your history, it’s probably better to keep you out of it.”
Ellery turned to look out the window. “My history,” she repeated dully. “Right.”
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” Reed was genuinely apologetic. “I mean that you’re not currently working in law enforcement. You’re here in an unofficial capacity.”
“Sure, let’s pretend that’s the important part.” If Ramsey knew one part of her story, then he knew the whole thing.
Reed drove hunched over the wheel, leaning forward as if to make it there quicker. “Just think,” he said. “This could all soon be over.”
When they reached Las Vegas, they checked into yet another hotel, this one less fancy, with rooms on the same floor. Ellery assured Reed he could take the rental car to the LVMPD and she would call a taxi to take her to Bruce Carr’s house for their two o’clock appointment. “Just be careful,” she said before they parted.
Reed palmed the keys, impatient to be gone. “What do you mean?”
“Whatever Angie Rivera may have done, she didn’t slash our tires. She was two hundred miles away and didn’t even know we existed at the time.”
For the first time that day, Reed looked at her like she was talking sense. “You raise an excellent point. I’ll watch my back. Better yet, I’ll have Sheriff Ramsey do it. The car should be fine parked in the LVMPD lot, wouldn’t you say?”
Ellery declined to rule one way or another, and she let him go. She asked the doorman to procure a taxi for her and gave the driver Carr’s address, which proved to be on the north side of the city. The taxi stopped in front of a beige stucco house that was, like its neighbors, dominated by a wide front garage and a short driveway. The landscaping was tidy but minimal, a patch of green grass and a concrete walkway leading up to a brown front door with no decorations on it. The stoop held various-size pieces of painted pottery in desert-inspired colors. When Ellery rang the bell, she heard excited barking on the other side of the door.
“Bella, hush!” The man who opened the door reminded Ellery of the old guy from the movie Up, with his large dark-framed glasses and square-shaped head. His handshake was firm and his eyes lively as he welcomed her inside his home. “Ms. Hathaway, please come in. Ignore the feisty furry security system. I promise she doesn’t bite.”
A Bichon Frisé, all six pounds of her, rushed at Ellery’s legs, looping in and out in excited fashion. Ellery smiled and knelt to greet the dog, who responded by putting her front paws up on Ellery’s knee and wagging furiously. “She’s adorable.”
“Don’t think she doesn’t know it, too,” Carr groused, but his tone was affectionate. “Bella, get down already. She’s not here to see you. They’re never here to see you.”
“My dog always acts like he wants the pizza delivery guy to adopt him.”
“Yeah? This one even likes the mailman. She got out one day as I was signing for a package and she ran right up into his little car, like she was going to ride shotgun or something. Here, come this way to my office. Well, it used to be my office. Now it’s more like a museum.”
He led her through the living room to a sizable open area that might have been a den at one time. It held a desk, a small black leather sofa, and multiple framed newspaper clippings on the walls. “War stories,” Carr said gruffly as Ellery moved to check them out. “Old glories. Way old, in some cases.”
She saw a headline about the big MGM fire in 1980 and noticed Bruce’s byline beneath it. Eighty-seven people were killed when the fire broke out in a restaurant attached to the hotel. Ellery regarded the picture, which showed a firefighter helping a singed young man out of the building.
“Worst disaster in Nevada’s history,” Carr told her. “Later investigation showed that MGM had declined to update their sprinkler system a few years before the fire, despite advice to do so. What a senseless tragedy that turned out to be.”
Ellery moved on to the next clipping, this one from another fire, an arson at the Hilton. “I’ve heard about this one,” she said, pointing. “The busboy set it.”
“Yeah, he said he was trying to put the fire out. Everyone thought he was a hero at first. Only he effed up his statement to the cops and told them he threw ‘a trash can full of fire’ instead of a trash can full of water. They started looking at him funny after that.”
“You have an impressive collection here,” Ellery said as she circled the room and read the rest of the headlines. Pedestrian deaths in Las Vegas. Casino owners pressuring employees to vote for particular candidates.
“Back then, we had time to work a story, really dig into it, you know? Some of the stuff we wrote, it made a difference. We have pedestrian bridges now so tourists aren’t constantly wandering into traffic. These days, though, no one cares about the papers. Forget actual journalism. Everything’s online now. Video. Tweet this, chat that. My editors used to get excited when I pitched them a story about a payoff to a Strip mogul or loansharking or what have you. Now all they care about is ‘viral videos’ like a dog poops on a baby or some woman screams real loud on the roller coaster.” He shook his head in disgust. “The last assignment I got was to write about why cats are afraid of cucumbers. I said to him, I said, ‘Jimmy, I can’t take this horseshit you keep handing me. I’m dying here with these crappy little assignments that mean nothing to nobody. Please, let me take on something real. Something with teeth. Woodward and Bernstein would be rolling over in their graves if they knew what we were putting out there and calling journalism.”
Ellery scrunched up her nose. “Are Woodward and Bernstein dead?”
“They would be if they saw today’s paper.” He gestured at the leather sofa, indicating they should sit. “Never mind my gripes. You came here to talk about Giselle Hardiman. Pretty girl, or at least she once was. Giselle’s life started out hard and only stayed that way.”
“You knew her?”
“Oh, no, I never met her personally, but I did track down her mother in Texas after Giselle was murdered. That was something we did back then—follow up on stories, even if they took us outside the city limits. Anyway, it was a long, sad conversation that told me nothing and everything about why Giselle ended up the way she did. Her mom was three sheets to the wind when we talked, and I got the feeling she’d lived most of her life like that. She wanted me to know she tried to protect Giselle growing up from the different boyfriends who’d come home drunk and angry, looking for someone to pound on. Her mama would hide Giselle and take the beating herself—mind you, she was proud telling me this—but it never occurred to her to leave. Giselle, she left when she was fifteen, but she didn’t get very far, if you see what I’m saying.”
“I do.”
The dog came sniffing around their feet, and Carr scooped her into his lap and began absentmindedly petting her. “You asked me on the phone what I knew about the investigation, and the short answer is there wasn’t one, not really. The cops knocked on a few doors to see if there were any witnesses, and when no one came forward to identify the killer they just shrugged and moved on.”
“I heard rumors that the cops might’ve been friendly with Giselle before her death.”
“I heard exactly the same thing back when it happened. Makes you think the cops did not knock too loud on those doors, doesn’t it?”
“What do you make of the rumors—true or not?” Ellery put her hand out and lured the dog in her direction. Bella came across the sofa from Carr’s lap, wagging happily, eager for another round of scritching.
“Oh, they were true, all right. As I understood it, the cops back then looked at free sex with the working girls as just another perk of the job. The girls took it as the price of doing business.”
“Funny you should mention price. If a chunk of your clientele isn’t paying, you might find yourself looking for money in other ways. I heard Giselle might’ve been leaning on different sources of cash in the weeks before her death.”
“That’s right.” He paused, as if measuring how much to say. “She had a drug habit to support. The cops might’ve been willing to toss her the occasional dime bag as a payment, but Giselle would have needed more than that. If she was leaning on her connections to get more money, then that surely would’ve included the boys in blue.”
“Blackmail.”
He hesitated again. “Maybe. Nothing I could ever prove.”
“How long did you work the story?”
“As long as I could, which is to say maybe a few weeks. It seemed red-hot at the start. Sure, the victim was a prostitute, but she was reasonably good looking and her murder was the kind that raises goose bumps, you know? Stabbed in her own apartment. Readers eat that stuff up, and so we all thought it had legs. But the cops didn’t seem to have any kind of urgency. I asked ’em questions, they’d give me one-word answers and then change the subject. Maybe I’d like to do a piece on some heist attempt at the Tropicana instead. Eventually, my editor said I had to stop going around the station asking questions that got no answers, that I should find something we could actually print.”
“These cops, the ones that stonewalled you. Do you remember their names?”
“Sure do.” He didn’t miss a beat, didn’t consult any notes. “Jeff Highlander was the lead on the case. He’s dead now. Heart attack in ’93. James Finney, he retired ten years ago. Oh, and there’s our very own sheriff, Brad Ramsey. Back then, he worked the beat sometimes in Giselle’s neck of the woods. He helped canvass the neighborhood after they found the body, but damned if he would talk to me about anything they found out. ‘We’re still pursuing leads,’ he’d tell me.” Carr gave a short, derisive laugh. “I bump into him now and then, and sometimes I’ll still ask him about that: ‘Still pursuing those leads, eh, Ramsey? How’s that working out for you?’”
Ellery had stopped petting the dog at the mention of Ramsey’s name, and Bella pawed at her hand, reminding her. “What does he say when you ask about the case?”
“He says, ‘When we know something, you’ll be the first one we call, Bruce.’” He shrugged and then gave her a sly grin. “I’d always tell him that they must not know too much, seeing as how my phone never rings. He doesn’t like that answer.”
“Do you know,” Ellery began, pausing to think how to phrase her question. “Do you know if he might have been one of Giselle’s clients?”
“I guess it’s possible, sure. He was single back then. Liked to party with the best of them, or so I’m told.”
“What kind of evidence did they collect from the scene?” Ellery asked, changing tactics. “There was the knife, I know.”
“The knife, yes. They said it was from Giselle’s kitchen, so the killer didn’t bring it with him. According to the police, no fingerprints were found on the handle.” He raised his eyebrows to indicate what he thought of the official report. “There were no signs of a break-in. No one reported any unusual cars or strangers in the area. Of course, Giselle’s neighbors weren’t the kind to be actively looking, nor were they likely to want to ask the cops in for tea and conversation. There wasn’t much to go on.”
“Did she keep a record of her clients?”
“Ah, the million-dollar question,” Carr replied with a smile. He pulled the dog back into his lap. “I heard mixed reports. One of her friends, a fellow working girl, said Giselle did keep a little blue day planner that had records of her visitors. The cops said they never found anything like it when they searched the apartment.”
“So, someone made it disappear.”
“Possibly, yes. Or they’ve had it all along and never bothered to say. Whoever it was, whatever problems they had with Giselle, all of them disappeared with her death.” He made a magician’s poof gesture with his hands. “Her case went cold about a week after the murder, and no one has even mentioned her name to me in more than twenty years until you called me up. So I’ve got to ask: What’s your game?”
“The FBI is taking another look at a homicide that occurred around the same time as Giselle Hardiman’s murder. A woman named Camilla Flores was stabbed to death in her apartment.”
“I remember the case,” Carr said promptly. “Horrible, horrible death. The inside of that apartment looked like an abattoir.”
“We were exploring whether the two deaths might be related.” Ellery watched him closely, curious to see what he made of this theory. So far, no one but her seemed to think much of it.
“I’ve wondered that myself.”
“Really,” Ellery remarked, surprised. “Why?”
“Her boyfriend, David Owens. He was a cop. The cops were into the Hardiman case up to their eyeballs. I don’t know if one of them killed her or not, but they damn sure weren’t investigating it with their usual rigor. At the very least, they didn’t want to turn over too many rocks, on account of what might come crawling out and bite ’em on the ankles. There was something about the Flores murder that had the same feel to it. I figured it had to do with Owens.”
“You think David Owens might have been seeing Giselle Hardiman?” Ellery asked. She didn’t see how Carr found a connection.
“I don’t know one way or another. I’ve just seen enough crooked cops to be suspicious of all of them.” He eyed her. “No offense. Owens, I maybe talked to him once or twice throughout my career. He had a decent reputation as far as it goes. But like I say: I’ve wondered. There was a rumor back then that Owens liked to play the field. He sure up and married that other cop in a hurry, practically before Camilla was cold in her grave.”
“It seems to have worked out. They’re still together, forty years later.”
Carr made a face and waved her off.
“What?” she asked.
“They say everyone loves a happy ending,” he replied. “But that crap doesn’t sell papers.”
Ellery leaned over to give the dog a last scratch under her fluffy white chin. “If it all goes to hell,” she said, “I’ll give you a call.”
“Sure,” Carr groused. “That’s what they all say.”
Ellery took a taxi to the LVMPD, intending to meet up with Reed. When she arrived, however, she discovered he had already gone. “Is the sheriff back there?” she asked the desk sergeant, a buxom woman in uniform with a beautiful Afro, bright red lipstick, and a thousand-yard stare.
“No, ma’am, he’s in a meeting. I can take a message for you if you like.”
Ellery caught sight of Sergeant Don Price walking away from them down the hall. “No, no, thank you,” she said quickly, and took off after Price. She caught up with him easily, and he smiled when he recognized her.
“Officer Hathaway. I think your counterpart was just here visiting with the sheriff.”
“That’s right. He’s off running down a new lead now. I was wondering if you might help me out.”
“I’d be happy to try.”
“I’d like to see the files and any evidence pertaining to the Giselle Hardiman case from 1974.”
Price’s blue eyes darkened with his frown. “I thought you were investigating the Flores case.”
“We are, but they may be related. Sheriff Ramsey said it was fine if we wanted to take a look.” Her heart rate increased with the lie, and she hoped it didn’t show on her face.
Price checked his watch. “The sheriff’s in a meeting for another hour.”
“An hour’s all I need,” Ellery said, smiling broadly. “Just in and out—okay?”
Price thought it over for another few seconds. “I can’t let you take anything off the property,” he warned her, and she held up her right hand in a promise.
“I just want to read the murder book and get a look at the evidence.”
“I’ll have someone bring it up for you. Room 208.” He looked at her with curiosity. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”
“No. I’m just hoping to recognize it when I see it. Thanks.”
Price excavated the bones of another long-dead case, a cardboard box with a fitted lid covered in the same type of fine layer of dust that coated Camilla Flores’s files. “I’ll leave you to it then,” he said as she reached her eager hands for the lid. When she pulled it off, she saw that Bruce Carr had not been exaggerating the half-baked investigation. Whereas Camilla’s case had several binders’ worth of notes and files, Giselle Hardiman’s murder merited a single folder, an envelope of crime scene photos, and a few pieces of bagged evidence. Ellery started with the pictures, flipping through each of them to familiarize herself with the setting. Giselle Hardiman had died in a tangle of pink satin sheets, wearing just her bra and panties and a pair of four-inch heels. Her pose and the bedroom location did suggest Giselle might have been working at the time of her murder. She lay on her back, her eyes open. She had seen it coming, if only at the last moment.
Ellery froze as she heard footsteps and male voices out in the hall. If Sheriff Ramsey found her here, there was no telling what he might do. At a minimum, he could put her up in a jail cell overnight, as she was technically trespassing on police property. The voices receded and Ellery relaxed again, moving on to sift through the bagged evidence. She found the knife with blood on it and she gave it a good, hard look. It was slimmer than the one that had killed Camilla, more like a boning tool. To credit the Vegas cops, it did seem as though the knife might have been printed back in the day, because the handle still bore traces of powder. She set it aside and looked through the remainder of the evidence: Giselle’s negligee and panties, scant as they were; a wineglass that appeared to be the one from the bedside table shown in the crime scene photos; Giselle’s jewelry; a paperback romance novel that had what appeared to be dried blood on the cover; a bloody hand towel; and a small blue day planner marked 1974 in gold letters on the front.
Ellery looked over her shoulder, flush with shock. Maybe this wasn’t Giselle’s record book, if the cops had held on to it. Gingerly, she eased it open with her fingernails, careful not to leave fingerprints of her own. She only had to scan a few pages to determine that yes, this was Giselle’s client book. Unfortunately, the records seemed to be in code. “AN50M2D,” read one entry from February 12. Another entry that month said: “GGPCP*.” Ellery looked through a bunch of Giselle’s notes but could not determine any sort of obvious pattern. Some of the letters and numbers repeated, but often in different combinations. Occasionally, there was an obvious indication of what had transpired, such as the time when Giselle scrawled: “No-show,” or, more ominously, next to “DC40SNK”: “Never again!”
Ellery risked a look at the door and briefly debated smuggling the day planner out of the building with her. But Don Price would surely tell the sheriff what she’d been up to, and he’d no doubt perform an inventory. When the day planner turned up missing, she’d be the clear suspect—not to mention the part where she’d be breaking chain of custody. If the planner had probative value, she couldn’t just waltz off with it or she’d render it useless in court.
Inspiration struck her when she remembered passing a copy room at the end of the hall. Grabbing a pair of latex gloves, she took both the murder book and the day planner and poked her head out of the room to check if the coast was clear. She didn’t see anyone approaching, so she dashed from the windowless little conference room to the copy machine. The large, lumbering machine had been in low-power mode before she showed up, so it took a few minutes of humming and whirring to prepare for action again. “Come on, come on,” she urged it under her breath. Her fingers turned clumsy as she tried to rush through the delicate task of flipping the small pages and copying each one. When she had finished both the day planner and the meager murder book, she checked the hall again. No one.
She hurried back to the room and returned the evidence to the box, keeping the copies for herself. She wound a rubber band around them and tucked them inside her jacket. Outside in the hall, she passed a couple of uniformed officers who didn’t seem to pay her any attention, as they were deep in conversation with each other. Even still, she kept her head down and walked as quickly as she dared toward the exit. When she glanced up again, she saw the sheriff in her path. She made an about-face but not fast enough that he hadn’t spotted her. Mentally cursing herself for the blunder, Ellery made the only move she could: she ducked into the ladies’ room.
The room was empty but also useless, as it had a single exit point. Ellery battled as hard as she could with the lone window, but it only opened about four inches. There was no way for her to squeeze through it. She had an inside pocket in the lining of her leather jacket, but it was shallow and might not hold the papers long enough to fend off the sheriff. Maybe she could just wait him out. Or call Reed. She had her phone out, her thumb poised to hit the button, when she reconsidered. If Reed came to her aid now, they’d both be fried. Reed needed the sheriff to run that DNA test. Ellery cast a baleful glance at the window again, wishing she could shrink down and fly away.
As the seconds ticked past, she realized she had only one course of action. She had to outwit the sheriff just long enough to get off the property with the papers intact. Resolved, she prepped herself with a hard look in the mirror, made the necessary adjustments with the papers, and squared her shoulders. Maybe she’d get lucky and he’d be gone when she left the bathroom.
“And the house wins again,” she muttered to herself when she found him waiting in the hall just outside the door, chewing on a toothpick. He seemed to take up half the air in the hall.
“What’s that you said?” he asked, cocking his head at her.
“Nothing.” She forced a smile. “I was looking for Agent Markham. Is he here?”
“He left some time ago.”
“Oh, thanks. I’ll just be going then and catch up with him elsewhere.”
He moved to block her path. “Sergeant Price told me he already passed on that information. He told me you were looking into the Hardiman files.”
“Just a quick peek,” she said, spreading her hands. “Turns out there’s nothing much there.”
“I told you to leave that case alone. I said that expressly.”
“Did you?” She put on her best confused expression.
“I made that crystal clear to Agent Markham. Your access is limited to the Flores case only.”
“He must not have passed on the message,” she said with a shrug. “Sorry for the mix-up. Anyway, I need to go.”
He grabbed her arm. “Not just yet. Let’s have a chat, shall we?”
He marched her back down the hall, his fingers biting into her elbow. When they reached room 208 again, he pushed her inside and then closed the door behind them. “Look, I said I was sorry,” she said. “I didn’t disturb anything. You can check the box and see everything is all right there.”
“Take off your jacket.”
Her heart jumped in her ribs. “What?”
“You heard me. Take off the jacket.”
“Why?”
“Jimenez says you were in the copy room.”
“No, I wasn’t.” She swallowed hard and hoped he couldn’t see it.
“You aren’t authorized to make copies of these files. They are state’s evidence. Hell, you’re a private citizen now, Ms. Hathaway. I could lock you up just for looking at this stuff.”
She stuck out her chin. “Go ahead and do it then.”
“Lose. The. Jacket.”
She glared at him for a few seconds before shrugging out of her jacket. “There,” she said, throwing it down on the table. “Are you happy now?”
He picked it up and patted it down thoroughly, watching her with dark eyes the whole time. “Turn around.”
“No. I don’t have to take this. I don’t have to—”
He shoved her roughly up against the wall. “Oh, you have to, all right,” he breathed in her ear. He used his foot to spread her legs apart. “You have to do every last thing I say.”
Ellery felt her stomach surge to her throat as his hands started pawing over her body. She willed herself not to be sick. “Or what?” she asked, hating how choked she sounded.
“You don’t want to know.” He pulled her hands up and pressed her palms against the wall. “Keep them there and don’t move.”
He searched her slowly and purposefully, his hands lingering on her breasts, her hips, her thighs. “Whatever you’re looking for, I don’t have it.”
“You think you’re pretty cute, coming in here, giving my men orders like you run the place. You aren’t the law here, Ms. Hathaway. You aren’t the law anywhere, actually, and you’d do well to remember your place around here.”
“And where is that?” She spoke through clenched teeth.
“Here looks pretty good.” He leaned up against her, pressing her whole body from behind. She sucked in a breath but forced herself to keep her eyes open. She saw his huge hand, holding hers flat against the wall. Saw his hairy arm with its bulging tendons. Her eyes widened when she caught sight of the tattoo now visible beyond his raised shirtsleeve. A large ram, with angry eyes and huge curled horns. Angie’s words about the cop from the parking lot came back to her: he had a tattoo on his arm, something like a bull.
“If you’re arresting me, I get to call a lawyer,” Ellery told him.
He dropped his hands and stepped back. “Get the hell out of here. I see you back on my property, I will throw your ass in jail. Are we clear?”
Ellery gathered her jacket and looked him in the eyes. Her knees threatened to buckle, and her brain was screaming at her to run. “This isn’t your property. It belongs to the city.”
Sheriff Ramsey’s nostrils flared. “It’s my house and I make the rules here.” He pointed a long finger at her. “Go,” he said. “And don’t come back.”
Ellery went. She scrambled on shaky legs down the hall to the stairwell, where she half-ran, half-fell down to the ground level and out into the open air. The sky had darkened to angry purple streaks. She bent at the waist and sucked in great gulps of air to steady herself, her skin still crawling from the feel of Ramsey’s hands. Then she stood upright and slowly, cautiously worked her way around the building until she reached the shrubbery underneath the second-floor ladies’ room. She smiled. There in the dirt lay her bounty, a tube of papers wrapped in a rubber band.