14 - J. T. Ellison [77]
“No. Nothing. Pockets were emptied. It’s probably just a robbery gone wrong.”
Lincoln was looking around the room. “This place looks deserted. Who belongs to the apartment?”
Parks handed him a paper, the classified ad circled in red felt-tip pen. “It’s vacant. A furnished rental. Checked with the landlord, he gave me the paper.”
“It’s just a robbery,” Fox interjected. “Shooter probably lives in another building, came down to score some crack.”
“Brilliantly deduced, Fox. How many robbers do you know who execute their victims like this?” Taylor was tired of this rubbish. “Roll him.”
“As you wish, Lieutenant.” He wasn’t endearing himself to Taylor this afternoon, there was no question of that. Lincoln shot her another warning look that said, Hey, you aren’t supposed to be here, go run off and get married. She glared back at him.
The body was rolled, and Fox moved out of the way. Taylor looked down. Her breath caught in her throat. She turned and screamed at the wall. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch!”
Lincoln stood over the body for a long moment.
“That’s Frank Richardson, isn’t it?”
Taylor’s head was pounding. The dry air of Captain Price’s office coupled with the stress of finding Frank Richardson executed was going to drive her mad. She dug into her pocket, dry swallowed three Advil covered in lint. Being debriefed by her boss was not the way she’d planned to spend the afternoon before her wedding. She was sick to her stomach, the desiccated pills stuck in her throat.
“Give me the rundown, Lieutenant.” Shit. Price didn’t use her title as a proper name unless he was pissed off.
“Richardson and I met for breakfast yesterday morning. Well, before that, he called me at home on Tuesday night. He’d just gotten back from France, was in New York. We talked for a while—he had pretty sound judgment when it came to Snow White. He pointed out there was plenty of information that didn’t make it into his actual print pieces. We agreed to meet for breakfast and planned to go back through all of his old stories, see if something jumped out.
“After we ate we went to the paper. I got called away with the Jane Macias MP report. Frank was going to stick around, go through the files, make some notes. He came to the office last night, trying to get something to me. Lincoln and Marcus saw him, said he didn’t leave a message or a note, just said he had some information for me and would drop it by later.”
“Do you know specifically what he was looking for?” Price fondled his mustache and twisted the handlebars. Taylor knew they kept their shape because of liberal coatings in wax, but she was still positive that the daily, ruminative stroking was more to blame.
“Not exactly. When I left him at the paper yesterday, he’d just started pulling all the stories he’d run on the first ten Snow White cases. This is on me, Cap. I lost track of him. I was with Daphne, Jane Macias’s roommate, then we had the Spanish girl’s shooting, the two murders at the massage parlor, all that paperwork, then we went to the strip club. It was a full day. I never followed up with him.”
Taylor rested her forehead in the palm of her hand.
“This is all my fault,” she muttered.
“It’s not. There’s someone out there with an agenda. You’re not to blame.”
“Of course I am. If I hadn’t pulled him into the case, he wouldn’t be dead. There’s just no two ways about that.”
“You don’t know that. This may be a completely unrelated incident. He may have been a target all along. What’s your gut say?”
Taylor stood and paced her boss’s office. It was much roomier than her little box downstairs. The box that had belonged to Price before he was moved up the ranks.
Price was a good man. He’d always been an ally for Taylor, as well as a friend. A lesser man may have thrown her to the wolves on any number of occasions. Instead, he always had her back. She had nothing to lose by telling him what was on her mind.
“My gut says he bought it because of something he found yesterday. He came to me, to the