He parked a block away from the house. It wasn’t safe to park any closer. The judge had apparently noticed him sitting in his car a few times, and had begun to peer a little too closely, to grow a little too suspicious.
This was the morning. He had it all planned. Anticipation made his pulse race. He sat and waited for his breathing to return to normal, his pulse to slow a bit.
The first thing was to make sure no one noticed him. No one at all. He didn’t want to throw up red flags before his entire plan—all of it—had succeeded.
His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. It was time to leave the car, to walk to the lush grounds along the Palace of Fine Arts, to stand behind the fir tree with the thick trunk and low, heavy branches, just as he had the past three days. There, he’d wait until the judge left the house to go on his morning walk along the Marina Green’s waterfront path to Fort Mason for a cup of herb tea, and then walk home again. It seemed to be a health routine. It wasn’t going to be very healthy for his wife, though.
He got out of the Honda and pulled the driver’s seat forward so that he could reach into the backseat for his bouquet of roses. An SFPD black-and-white appeared at the intersection and stopped at the stop sign.
He kept his head down. He could all but feel the policemen taking him in, probably calling in the license plate on his car to the DMV. What’d they think they’d discover? That the car had been stolen? Maybe they would check the registration. Did they really think he’d be so stupid as to register it in his own name?
Not that it mattered. He knew all about the DMV, their computer system, and the cops. He knew it’d take a long time before the cops put two and two together. He’d be finished here by that time.
In the rearview mirror, he watched the police car turn onto his street and slow down as it neared him. He waited, not moving, until he heard the sound of the engine as the car drove past. He glanced up, perspiration dripping from his forehead, and watched the car turn the corner.
They might have seen him. They should have. They must have. He breathed harder. What if they remembered something about him? Or his car? He had to be careful. His heart felt ready to burst from his chest. Patience, that’s what he needed. It was necessary to be patient now.
It was a straight shot from here to Richardson Street and the Doyle Drive approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. By the time the cops went around the block, he’d be long gone. He jumped into the driver’s seat, started the car, and sped away.
Today, the old woman was lucky. But her luck wouldn’t last.
Paavo sat in an overstuffed easy chair in Tiffany Rogers’s living room. The morning sunlight streamed in from the window, bright and cheerful, in stark contrast to the ugly dark stain before him. The body and most of the evidence had been long removed, indexed, categorized, sliced, and diced to be studied, analyzed, and preserved.
Fingerprints, hair follicles, blood types, DNA, anything that could potentially be matched with a suspect, once one was identified, had been collected. The estimated time of death put it the evening before the first day she missed work—about forty-eight hours before the police were called. A six-inch military-style combat knife appeared to be the murder weapon. The roses strewn around her body and the single rose on her bed were from florists because the thorns had been trimmed and the stem cut at some fancy angle. Checking on florist shops, he’d learned there were more of them in San Francisco than he’d ever dreamed, including a flower market that was also open to anyone who wanted to get up early enough. He’d tried gathering information about customers who’d bought a dozen long-stemmed roses three or four days earlier, but after checking with just a few florists, he quickly abandoned hope of tracking down the killer through that means. The numbers were far too high, and a number of purchases had been cash transactions by men—as if they very suddenly found they needed to give someone a dozen roses. Paavo could understand that.
No vase had been found filled with water for the flowers. Nor was there a florist’s box anywhere in the apartment. He couldn’t imagine any woman leaving a dozen long-stemmed roses lying about to wither and die. Whoever killed her must have brought the roses with him.
A gesture of a lover? Of someone wanting to court her? If, even after receiving the roses, Tiffany spurned the man’s advances, could that have driven him to murder? She hadn’t been raped, so it wasn’t a sexual assault.
The kind of killer who could have committed such a grisly murder and then stopped to pick up a florist’s box and its wrappings wasn’t anyone who had just committed a crime of passion. Someone had planned to murder this woman.
He walked around, looking out windows and in closets, trying to get a feel for the place and what had gone on here.
The apartment Tiffany lived in was supposedly secure. There was a locked, steel front door, requiring the occupant to buzz the person into the building. Yet, time and again it happened with this type of security that after someone had legitimately buzzed in a friend, a trespasser would stop the door from relatching. He would hold it open about a half inch, and, once the legitimate caller was out of sight, the trespasser would enter.
The night Tiffany was killed, however, none of the other residents remembered having had a visitor or having let anyone in for any reason. A couple of people came in late that evening. They insisted they had been careful not to let anyone sneak in after them, but it might have happened.
Even if the murderer sneaked past the front door, Tiffany would have had to open her door to him. Why would she? A single woman would worry about how some stranger had gotten into the building and up to her apartment?
None of this made sense unless the man had been someone she knew. Someone bringing her flowers. She let him in, and then he killed her.
Neighbors up and down the block were questioned, but no one had seen a man carrying a box that could have held roses.
The police tried lifting prints off the buzzer to Tiffany’s apartment, the front door handle, even the underside of her toilet seat, but found nothing, which meant the killer wore gloves or wiped off the prints. Again, the sign of premeditation.
In the meantime, a picture was emerging of Tiffany as a vivacious, ambitious young woman who had suddenly turned quiet. Everyone was convinced she’d been seeing someone who had warned her not to say anything about their relationship. Paavo asked why, but no one could say.
It also became clear that neither age, looks, nor interests mattered to Tiffany in the men she dated. If they had money or power, preferably both, they were date bait to her. In the last two months she had found someone to date who was so special—for whatever reason—that she hadn’t even told her best friend or her sister who he was, although it had become obvious that she and her sister weren’t very close.
Paavo had searched through her desk and papers, trying to find some clue as to who the mystery man was. Maybe Tiffany no longer wanted to keep his identity a secret, and maybe he didn’t like that. Whatever had happened between them, Paavo needed to find the man and question him.
There were few papers in the desk, no books, and Tiffany’s reading material consisted of the National Enquirer, Star, and a single edition of the Chronicle dated nearly a week before she died.
The day after her sister, Connie, had ID’d the body, he had accompanied her back to the apartment to go through Tiffany’s jewelry and clothes. They found gold and diamond jewelry from Moulin et Cie, Sans Souci Jewelers, and her namesake, Tiffany’s. She even kept the boxes, as if to prove the jewels weren’t paste.
Connie told him that the diamond tennis bracelet from Sans Souci Jewelers was new. It might have been from the new lover.
Sans Souci was where the Fabergé egg thief had killed Nathan Ellis. Could there be a connection between this death and Ellis’s? It seemed too big a leap—but then Paavo had never believed in coincidence. He’d check it out.
He walked into the bedroom and looked at Tiffany’s clothes hanging in the closet. Since meeting Angie he’d come to appreciate the simple lines and small details that separated quality clothing from that which was simply expensive. Tiffany spent more than the average working girl on clothes, that was obvious, but she hadn’t learned quality yet. The outfits were full of the kind of frills and ruffles Angie wouldn’t be caught dead in.
Paavo took the jewelry box with the tennis bracelet from the drawer and put it in his pocket.
He left Rogers’s apartment and went straight to Sans Souci Jewelers. The owner, Philip Justin Pierpont, was in the store working the counter with one of his clerks. He hadn’t yet hired a replacement for Ellis.
“Hello, Inspector,” Pierpont said. “Any news on the killer?”
“We’re still working on it. I’ve got something here I’d like you to check out for me.” Paavo opened the Sans Souci box to disclose the bracelet. “Does this look familiar?”
“Quite. We ran a special on those for Valentine’s Day.”
“Is there any way you can check to find out who you sold this one to?”
“Of course. We didn’t sell many of those. They weren’t the best-quality diamonds. Usually, if someone is looking for a diamond bracelet, they’re willing to spend a little more money to get top quality stones even if the size is smaller than they originally wanted.”
Paavo gave the box to the jeweler.
“We keep a record of all our merchandise.” He put on his jeweler’s magnifying glass and carefully inspected the diamonds. “Yes, it appears to have been one of ours.” Next, he led Paavo into his office, where he looked up the bracelet on the computer.
“Ah. Here we go. We sold five. Two to women in the city. One to a couple from Los Angeles, one to a man in the city, and…” He stopped talking as he studied the computer. “This is strange. I almost never see a transaction like this.” He glanced up at Paavo.
“What is it?”
“We keep records of credit cards and checks. That’s the way almost all of our customers pay us. Not in this case, though. The bracelet was paid for in cash. There was no need to get any customer information, not even a signature.”
“If the transaction was that rare, there’s a chance the clerk might remember it, right?”
“Absolutely. Except in this case.”
Paavo suspected he knew the reason before he even asked his question. “Why?”
“The clerk was Nathan Ellis.”
As Paavo took off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair, he looked at the flurry of notes and messages left on the desk in his absence. He added to them the names of the people who’d used checks or credit cards to buy diamond bracelets at Sans Souci, as well as the name of the clerk who had worked with Ellis the day the diamond bracelet cash purchase had been made. Except for early morning, Pierpont always had two employees in the store at the same time.
The clerk, Meredith Park, was off work that day. Paavo tried reaching her at home, but there was no answer. Next, he quickly disposed of the other buyers—all were able to give solid information as to what happened to the bracelet they’d bought.
He was about to try Park’s home again when the phone buzzed.
“Smith here,” he said.
“This is O’Rourke in Robbery. We just got a call I think you might want to check out.”
“What’s it about?”
“A jeweler. Said a small guy with a fake beard came in, held him up at gunpoint, and stole just one thing. When my lieutenant heard what it was, he said I should call you.”
Paavo could think of one object only that could cause the Robbery detail to think of him. “An imitation Fabergé egg?”
“You win the big banana.”
Paavo stood. Hollins had given Nathan Ellis’s case to the team of Calderon and Benson. But they were out working on another case at the moment. The possibility of a tie-in with Tiffany Rogers’s murder existed, but also he remembered his interview with Debbie Ellis, how she begged him to find whoever killed her husband.
“I’ll be right there,” he said.