Chapter 38
The cops couldn’t find Chandler anywhere. Neither could I. She hadn’t booked a plane ticket or run for the train or bus. She’d just poofed. A day went by. The trail was not only cold but arctic.
“She’s not just going to give up.” I turned to Tanaka, who was sitting in my client chair, glaring at me. “She has to be somewhere. Did you ask Allen if she had any ideas?”
“I’m done with you questioning my capabilities, you know that? I know what the hell I’m doing. I ought to arrest you right now. Your fingerprints have been all over this case since day one.”
“And you know why.”
“Don’t care why.”
“You saw that room. The trophies.”
“Yeah, you walked all over that, too. A good lawyer could argue you planted it all or at least tampered with it.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
Tanaka’s expression hardened. “I’m beginning to not like you.”
“I don’t care.”
She stood. “You don’t work well with others. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Yeah, everybody who I didn’t work well with. You got something to say, say it.”
“I just did.”
We gave each other the cop stare. It was more frustration than anything else, I thought. Chandler was out there somewhere. Time was ticking away. Allen was out there, too, going about her business, making herself a perfect target. No one, not even her Titan handlers, could convince her to lay low until Chandler had been found. She was lethal and on the loose, and no one had a clue as to where she was.
“Lyndon Barnes,” I said. “Or am I not allowed to ask?”
Tanaka paced. “You don’t quit, do you?” She faced me, resigned, it appeared. “DUI two years ago. Alcohol levels through the roof. He hit a pole, took a header into a swampy ditch. It took four hours for someone to find him. DOA at the hospital. And he had no connection to either Allen or Chandler, so there’s your theory down the tubes.”
“There is a connection, or else his ID wouldn’t be on her trophy shelf. She killed him, somehow. Question is, Why would she need to? Why was he a complication for her? She shot most of the others, except for Adkins and the Peetses. Why switch MOs?”
“MOs don’t usually,” Tanaka said. “You find something that works, you tend to stick with it, unless you can’t.”
“Dontell. She couldn’t run him down and be there to scoop up that letter she didn’t want anyone to find. She’d needed a hit-and-run driver. And she couldn’t have been there to run the Peetses off the road, again, into a ditch, because that was the night of that damned gala, and she needed to be seen with Allen.”
“So you’re saying she hired Barnes, then got him, too?”
“Tidying up,” I said. “I’ll bet you anything that’s who he is. That’s how he connects.”
Tanaka turned to leave. “Well, when we find her, I’ll make sure to ask her about it.”
“But Allen’s covered, you said?”
She frowned. “You do not give up.”
“That was rhetorical, right?”
“You can’t interfere from a cell.”
“I won’t lie. That would slow me down.”
She left. I turned toward the window, watched as Tanaka exited the building, got into her car, and drove away. I had a feeling, a bad one, that Chandler wasn’t long gone. Her work wasn’t finished. You didn’t do everything she’d done and then give up when the prize was close enough to taste.
Ben wasn’t in his room the next morning, when I stopped by the hospital. His nurse told me he was down in therapy and still doing well, which was great. I had wanted to talk things through with him, see if he saw an angle I’d missed, but I wasn’t used to feeling weird about it. What Carole told me was still fresh in my mind, and I wanted to ask him about it and get it all out in the open. I had even brought him another greasy sandwich hoping to make it easier to get things started. When I found the room empty, though, I saw an easy out and decided not to wait for him to get back. I left the bag on the table by his bed and went home.
I didn’t hear anything from Tanaka all morning. No more visits from Farraday or Marcus, thankfully. Allen was still, well, Allen. Maybe Chandler was dead somewhere, no longer a threat, or maybe not. I felt as though I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
That afternoon I spread everything out on my dining-room table, files, newspaper clippings, Dontell’s things, and went over again what I thought I’d been able to piece together. Allen had said she knew Chandler from the old neighborhood, that one day she was just there and never left. There was still no ID on the gun Chandler had used. The make and model matched, but was the gun Allen’s? Hers was missing from the safe, but make and model didn’t mean much until the analysis could be completed. What if it wasn’t Allen’s, and it couldn’t be traced to Chandler?
After walking the apartment all day, turning details this way and that, coming up with interesting scenarios I couldn’t prove, I grabbed my keys and bag and went to Allen’s, even though it was after eight and well past the time to pay a visit. Isabella buzzed me up and met me at the door. I knew instantly from the look on her face that something was wrong.
“Ms. Allen went out hours ago. She didn’t say where.”
“With Titan Security?”
Isabella shook her head. “She sent them away. She said she didn’t need them anymore. Mr. Elliott drove her.”
“Have you called the police?”
“Ms. Allen wouldn’t like me to call them.”
If she’d gone to her office or even to Chandler’s, the police would have spotted her. Where else would she go? And why alone, with just her driver, knowing Chandler was out there somewhere? “Did she have any visitors? Receive any calls?”
“Yes, a call. Then she went.”
I asked for a pen and paper and wrote Tanaka’s number down. “Call Detective Tanaka. Tell her what you just told me. Stay by the phone, in case Allen calls.” I dug in my bag, pulled out one of my cards. “My number. If you hear from her, if she comes back, call me.”
I sat in the car, no idea in which direction to point it. She’d gone alone, Elliott driving. Where? Had the call she had received been from Chandler? If so, why would Allen leave knowing the woman was gunning for her? What was Allen up to? I wracked my brain. They could be anywhere. No, not anywhere. Somewhere significant, somewhere familiar to both of them. It couldn’t be the Homes. They were no longer there.
The Peetses and Dontell; Sewell, Hewitt, Lyndon Barnes. The secret room, the trophies, the shelf. The scuffed purse. There’d been nothing inside of it to identify its owner, but the only victim not immortalized, the one I believed Chandler had also had a hand in killing, was Allen’s mother—shot to death outside the dry cleaners she managed.
I pulled out of Allen’s garage, headed for the West Side.