Haunted in Death (In Death #22.5)(3)

Cold,she thought. Freaking cold in here.

She moved along the second floor landing, imagined it packed with tables and people during its heyday. Music pumping out to shatter ear drums, the fashionable drugs of the time passed around like party favors. The chrome safety railings would have been polished to a gleam, flashing with the wild colors of the lights.

She stood as she was a moment, looking down as the ME drones bagged the body. Good view from there, she mused. See whatever you want to see. People ass to elbow below, sweating and grinding on the dance floor and hoping somebody was watching.

Did you come up here tonight, Hopkins? Did you have enough brains before they got blown out to come early, scope the place out? Or did you just walk in?

She found the exit at a second story window, unlocked and partially open, with the emergency stairs deployed.

“So much for that mystery. Suspect most likely exited the building,“ she stated for the record, “from this point. Sweepers will process the window, stairs and surrounding areas for prints and other evidence. And lookie, lookie.“ She crouched, shined her light on the edge of the windowsill. “Got a little blood, probably vic’s. Suspect may have had some spatter, or transferred some blood to his clothing when he moved in for the head shot.“

Frowning, she shined the light further down, onto the floor where something sparkled. “Looks like jewelry. Or… hmm. Some sort of hair decoration,“ she amended when she lifted it with tweezers. “Damn if it doesn’t look like diamonds to me, on some kind of clip. About a half inch wide, maybe two inches long. No dust on it – stones are clean and bright in what I’d guess to be a platinum setting. Antique-looking.“

She bagged it.

She started to head back down, then thought she heard the floor creak overhead. Old buildings, she reminded herself, but drew her weapon. She moved to the back wall, which was partially caved in, and the old metal stairs behind it.

The sound came again, just a stealthy little creak. For a moment she thought she heard a woman’s voice, raw and throaty, singing about a bleeding heart.

At the top of the stairs the floors had been scrubbed clean. They were scarred and scorched, but no dust lay on them. There was old smoke and fire damage on some of the interior walls, but she could see the area had been set up into a large apartment, and what might have been an office.

She swept, light and weapon, but saw nothing but rubble. The only sound now was the steady inhale, exhale of her own breath, which came out in veritable plumes.

If heat was supposed to rise, why the hell was it so much colder up here? She moved through the doorless opening to the left to do a thorough search.

Floors are too clean, she thought. And there was no debris here as there was in the other smaller unit, no faded graffiti decorating the walls. Eve cocked her head at the large hole in the wall on the far right. It looked as though it had been measured and cut, neatly, as a doorway.

She crossed the room to shine her light into the dark.

The skeleton lay as if in repose. In the center of the skull’s forehead was a small, almost tidy hole.

Cupped in the yellowed fingers was the glittery mate to the diamond clip. And near the other was the chrome gleam of a semi-automatic.

“Well son of a bitch,“ Eve murmured, and pulled out her communicator to hail Peabody.

Two

“It’s her. It’s got to be her.“

“Her being the current vic’s ancestor’s dead wife.“ Eve drove through spitting ice from the crime scene to the victim’s home.

“Or lover. I’m not sure they were actually married now that I think about it. Gonna check on that,“ Peabody added, making a note in her memo book. “But here’s what must’ve gone down: Hopkins, the first one, kills Bobbie, then bricks the body up in the wall of the apartment he used over the club.“

“And the cops at the time didn’t notice there was a spanking new brick wall in the apartment?“

“Maybe they didn’t look very hard. Hopkins had a lot of money, and a river of illegal substances. A lot of connections, and probably a lot of information certain high connections wouldn’t want made public.“

“He bought off the investigation.“ Whether it happened eighty-five years ago or yesterday, the smell of bad cops offended Eve’s senses. But… “Not impossible,“ she had to admit. “If it is the missing wife/girlfriend, it could be she wasn’t reported missing until he had everything fairly tidied up. Then you got your payoff, or classic blackmail regarding the investigators, and he walks clean.“

“He did sort of go crazy. Jeez, Dallas, he basically locked himself up there in that place for over ten years, with a body behind the wall.“

“Maybe. Let’s get the bones dated and identified before we jump there. The crime scene guys were all but weeping with joy over those bones. While they’re having their fun, we’ve got an active case, from this century.“

“But you’re curious, right? You gotta wonder if we just found Bobbie Bray. And the hair clips. Is that spooky or what?“

“Nothing spooky about a killer planting them. Wanted us to find the bones, that’s a given. So connecting the dots, the skeleton and our vic are linked, at least in the killer’s mind. What do we have on Hopkins so far?“

“Vic was sixty-two at TOD. Three marriages, three divorces. Only offspring – son from second marriage.“ Peabody scanned her memo book. “Bounced back and forth between New York and New L.A. with a couple of stints in Europe. Entertainment field, mostly fringe. Didn’t seem to have his grandfather’s flair. Parents died in a private plane crash twenty-five years back. No sibs.“