Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [48]
She turned back to the receptionist, who gave Ellie a nervous smile as she quickly dialed another extension. On the wall behind the woman’s desk were three rows of framed, enlarged color photographs, eighteen in all, displaying Spalding’s hotel properties. One of them showed the high-rise hotel Ellie had just been looking at out the window.
After a few minutes, a man in a suit came down a hallway, introduced himself as the corporate counsel, and took Ellie to his office, where he questioned her closely about the investigation.
She told him what she was looking for and why. Satisfied that her visit was tied to a murder investigation and had nothing to do with corporate matters, he accompanied her to Spalding’s corner office, and watched while she searched.
Light flooded the big room through two window walls. It was sparsely furnished with two angular leather couches separated by a low coffee table, and a large, highly polished writing table with steel legs and a matching desk chair.
Ellie looked through the drawers of a built-in cabinet behind the desk and glanced at the framed photographs on the shelves above. There were several of Claudia Spalding, but most were of Clifford Spalding posing with movie stars and politicians.
There were no drawers in the desk and the wastebasket was empty. In Spalding’s private bathroom, Ellie found some personal toiletries in a travel kit and another empty wastebasket, but no prescription bottle.
“Was anyone here when Mr. Spalding returned to his office from his business trip?” she asked the lawyer.
“I doubt it,” the lawyer said. “We were closed for the weekend.”
“Where does he park his car?”
“In the underground garage,” the lawyer said. “But when he travels on business, he leaves his car at our hotel here and takes the VIP limo to the airport.”
Ellie thanked the lawyer for his cooperation, went back to the garage, found Spalding’s reserved parking space, and searched the area. There was the usual accumulation of trash under and around the nearby cars, but no prescription bottle.
She drove to the hotel and spoke to a bell captain, who called inside for the limo driver. An older, skinny man wearing a black suit, white shirt, and black tie hurried out the lobby doors.
“Did you pick up Mr. Spalding at the airport last weekend?” Ellie asked.
The man nodded. “Yes.”
“Did he leave anything behind in the limo?”
“Yes, he left an empty prescription bottle on the backseat. It had refill information on the label, so I kept it in case he needed it.”
Ellie broke into a big smile. “Where’s the bottle?”
Ramona Pino wanted her next case to be a cake-walk. Maybe a gang member who popped a round into somebody’s ear in front of ten witnesses, or a body dump case with enough physical evidence at the crime scene to lead her right to the perp, drinking a beer and watching the tube at home, just waiting to be arrested. Even a good old-fashioned domestic disturbance that had escalated into a murder of passion would be a welcome change of pace.
Santa Fe averaged only two homicides annually, but last year had been a real bitch, in terms of numbers and complexity. A lone, smart killer with a bad attitude had chalked up seven victims. One of them, the perp’s mother, had been killed years ago and buried under some backyard shrubbery. The rest were all fresh kills done within a matter of days. The perp had been stopped just short of adding Chief Kerney, his wife, and their newborn son to his tally.
Since Spalding had died in California, Ramona wondered if the case even technically qualified as a local homicide. Maybe an argument could be made that murder was committed the instant Spalding’s medication had been switched. That made it a slow kill, Ramona thought.
With a new search warrant in hand and three detectives to assist her, Ramona walked into Dean’s pharmacy to find Tilly Gilmore, the clerk, and a pharmacist talking in low voices behind the counter. The pharmacist wore a name tag on his white smock that read GRADY BALDRIDGE.