The Littlest Witness. Amanda Stevens

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СКАЧАТЬ Thea hung back from the policemen, hoping they hadn’t seen her. The cold air frosted their breath as they talked and laughed and went about their grisly business with the same disconnection Thea had always found so chilling in Rick.

      Teeth chattering from the cold and from nerves, she walked past them, her head still bowed. But as she approached the stoop, one of the officers called out, “Hey, you!”

      She hesitated and looked over her shoulder.

      “Yeah, you. Come over here.”

      Her heart still pounding, Thea turned and slowly descended the steps. The officer met her at the bottom. He was one of the uniforms, middle-aged and heavyset, his face puffy and lined beneath the bill of his rain cap. His poncho billowed in the wind as he lifted his flash-light in her direction.

      Automatically Thea turned her face away, but before he could switch on the beam, another car drove up and someone shouted, “Gallagher’s here.”

      The man beside her muttered, “About damn time.”

      Thea hoped the newcomer would distract the officer so that she could slip away, but he turned to stare down at her in the rain. “You live in this building?”

      Thea hesitated, then nodded.

      “Out kind of late, aren’t you?”

      “I was just coming home from work.” She bit her lip, trying to control the chattering of her teeth. “Wh-what happened?”

      “Someone took a dive off the roof,” the officer told her dispassionately. Then, “What’s your name?”

      “Thea Lockhart.”

      He carefully noted the information in his book. “Where do you work?”

      “Zelda’s Eatery. It’s on East Fifty-seventh, near the university.”

      Thea expected more questions, but the officer seemed to lose interest as the lights on the unmarked car that had just driven up were killed. They both watched as a man—Gallagher, she presumed—got out. He was tall and his shoulders beneath the heavy overcoat looked enormous. In spite of the cold and the rain, he wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves, and his coat flapped open in the wind, making him seem impervious to the brutal weather.

      With grim deliberation, he surveyed the scene, his gaze raking the whole area—including Thea—before he walked toward the body. There was no mistaking who was in charge now. The crowd of officers parted for him, and Thea got a clearer view of the victim. She hadn’t expected so much blood. It reminded her of that night—

      She staggered back a step and the policeman beside her caught her arm. “Hey, you okay?”

      “I’m fine…”

      But she wasn’t. Violence and death hit too close to home, and as ashamed as she was to admit it, her main concern was how to disentangle herself from the police. She couldn’t get involved. She felt sorry for the poor woman lying on the street, but she couldn’t afford to get caught up in a police investigation.

      Trembling, she watched as Gallagher knelt and examined the body. He didn’t touch the victim, didn’t disturb the crime scene with so much as a stray glance, but for a long moment, he remained there, studying her face as if her last thoughts might be lingering somewhere on her frozen expression.

      After several minutes he stood. “Who was the first officer?” His tone was deep, authoritative. Not cold exactly, but a voice belonging to a man Thea had no wish to confront.

      “McGowan,” someone told him.

      “Over here,” the man beside her called out.

      Gallagher turned and started toward them. His features stood out starkly in the streetlight. Even the rain didn’t diminish the angles of his face, the broad nose, the full sensuous lips. His eyes were blue, which surprised Thea. She’d thought they would be dark, like his hair. The light color was particularly striking against his grave features.

      He wore a suit beneath the overcoat, as if he’d taken the time to dress properly before coming out. But his cheeks were roughened with stubble, giving him a sinister appearance that made Thea’s stomach quiver in fear.

      His gaze barely grazed her before he said to McGowan, “What happened?”

      “Wait here,” McGowan told Thea. He and Gallagher took a few steps away from her, but the wind caught their voices and tossed them back at her. “Looks like a dry dive,” McGowan told him. “DCDS. Detective Cox found a suicide note in her coat pocket.”

      “Any idea who she is?”

      “Not yet. There’s no ID on her, but Cox has gone up to canvass the roof for a purse or wallet, anything she might have dropped before jumping.”

      Almost inadvertently Thea’s gaze followed Gallagher’s to the roof of the building. She thought she could see someone up there now, and she shuddered as the shadow moved away from the edge.

      “Who found the body?” Gallagher asked.

      “The building manager. Claims he came outside just before midnight to walk his dog, and that’s when he saw the victim lying on the street. He checked for a pulse, didn’t find one and then went back inside to call 911.”

      “Great,” Gallagher muttered. “Probably trampled all over anything resembling evidence.” He paused. “Just before midnight you say. How accurate do you figure he is on the time?”

      “Fairly accurate,” McGowan told him. “He says he’d just finished watching an old episode of ‘Hill Street Blues,’ which comes on at eleven, but the closing credits hadn’t yet run. He lives with his elderly mother. He says she can corroborate his story.”

      “How soon did you respond?”

      “Torecelli and I were on the scene within ten minutes after we got the call from dispatch. We secured the area and radioed for backup.”

      “The manager couldn’t identify her?”

      McGowan shook his head. “Claims he never saw her before tonight. She’s not a tenant, and he doesn’t know how she got into the building, unless someone buzzed her in. The outside doors are always kept locked.”

      That was true, Thea thought. But a policeman worth his salt knew how easy it was to obtain entrance to almost any unmonitored building. If someone wanted in badly enough, all he or she had to do was wait around until someone was either coming or going and slip through the unlocked door, usually unnoticed. Crooks did it all the time.

      And so did murderers.

      Thea shivered as she studied Detective Gallagher’s grim countenance. His gaze traced the angle of the building, studying the windows that faced the street. “What about eyewitnesses?”

      “None so far. No defense wounds, either, that we could see. We bagged her hands in plastic because of the rain.” Thea knew that normally the police liked to use paper bags, because the lack of air with plastic could alter the evidence. But that was something she didn’t want them knowing she knew.

      In fact, the less any СКАЧАТЬ