Mona Lisa Eyes (Danny Logan Mystery #4)
Read Mona Lisa Eyes (Danny Logan Mystery #4) Online
Authors: M.D. Grayson
MONA LISA
EYES
by
M.D. GRAYSON
Th
is novel is dedicated to
my friend Nancy
.
You are the gentle breeze—
the warm ray of sun
on my face
first thing in the morning.
P
rologue
July 5, 2012
9:45 p.m.
THERE WERE PEOPLE AROUND
.
CROWDS
OF
people. There were
always
people around. “Sophie—over here!”
“
Sophie—smile!”
“Sophie—wave!” People always wanted her, to be
seen with her, to have their picture taken with her.
Seattle wasn’t as bad as London, but still, there
was little peace. Sometimes she was okay with it—even
found it flattering. Most times, though, it was a little
much, and she wished she could be seen but not
bothered—just left alone. Still other times, she wished she
was invisible altogether—the proverbial fly on the wall. Those
times she mostly just stayed home.
It was worse when
Nicki was around and talked her into going. Sophie Thoms
watched her older sister enter the Genesis Club like royalty,
arm in arm with friends Judie and Josh, the instant
center of attention in a place where everyone competed fiercely
for the spotlight. She smiled as she watched the trio
make their way across the floor toward her booth. Nicki,
dressed in a short, clingy black dress, was in her
element—smiling brightly while pretending to ignore the admiring glances,
the jealous looks, the calls.
The popular Goth club was
packed shoulder to shoulder with Seattle’s leather and lace
devotees. Siouxsie and the Banshees belted out “Cities in Dust”
over the PA at sound levels loud enough to cause
ripples in Sophie’s Perrier to the beat of the
music. Dim red overhead lighting made it impossible to tell
whether the person in front of you wore heavy eye
makeup (safe bet here), or whether it was just the
shadows playing tricks.
“Love your dress!”
Sophie turned, startled to
see the waitress bringing a new round of drinks to
the table. She relaxed upon seeing the familiar face. “Yeah?”
She lifted an arm to show the tight black sleeve
adorned with layers of black lace. “You like?”
The waitress
nodded. “That’s sick! I love it. You guys have
the best dresses—you always look beautiful whenever you come
in!”
Sophie smiled. Even if she didn’t share Nicki’
s unconditional love for the crowds, she had to admit
that she’d always shared Nicki’s love for the
dramatic—the long, flowing black dresses, the studs, the bold
makeup. It was a way of enjoying a little fantasy
in the midst of her day-to-day reality.
In
London, the Goth scene had been an important way for
Sophie to declare her independence from her demanding father in
an unequivocal, in-your-face manner. Now, several years later
and half a world away, it had become a simple
way of setting aside the duties and accountabilities of a
demanding job. Today, even if just for a few hours,
the clubs were Sophie’s way of shedding her buttoned-up daytime persona and becoming someone else—someone who could
still be dark . . . mysterious . . . naughty, even. She smiled at the
waitress. “Dressing up’s half the fun, right?”
“Sure.” The
waitress giggled as she picked up an empty glass. “And
getting undressed is the other half.”
Sophie flushed. “I suppose
it depends on who you’re with.”
The waitress stopped
and thought for a second, then shrugged. “Nah,” she said,
shaking her head. She laughed and moved on.
“Sophie!” Nicki
cried as she fairly bounced into the seat beside her. “
Oh my God! You should have gone outside with us.
It was bloody marvelous.”
“Yeah, right,” Sophie said, looking closely
at her sister. Nicki and Josh liked to pop outside
every twenty minutes or so for “refreshments,” but Sophie never
went. The head-rush, the giddies, the dilated eyes, the
flushed cheeks, the rapid-fire speech—all that was Nicki’
s thing, not hers. “Here, wait a second,” she said
as she reached over and flicked away a small white
crystal from Nicki’s upper lip.
Nicki smiled. “I’ll
have you know I was saving that for later.”
“Sorry.”
Nicki gave her a fake frown. “Ah, poor Sophie. You’
re always looking out for me, aren’t you?”
Sophie
gave her a little scowl.
“No?” Nicki said, dramatically surprised.
She sniffed hard, then leaned forward. “Okay. What’s the
matter? You’re not having fun?”
Sophie gave her a
wry smile. “Sure. Bucket loads.”
“Yeah, right.” Nicki, despite her
buzz, still sensed an underlying tension in Sophie’s voice.
She stared hard into her younger sister’s eyes, serious
now. “Well, not that you asked, but if you had,
I’d say you’re working too fucking hard, little
sis.”
“Me?” Sophie smiled. “Not really, I’m—”
“Ricky!” Nicki
squealed, “Oh my God!” Nicki’s attention spun away from
Sophie as a tall, handsome man approached. She hopped back
out of the booth and threw herself at the man,
wrapping her arms tightly around his neck.
Sophie just smiled
and shook her head.
“Who’s that?” Josh asked. He
and Judie had slipped into the booth on Sophie’s
other side.
Sophie shook her head. “Don’t know. Probably
some bloke she just—” Sophie was interrupted by her cell
phone buzzing against her hip. She’d been expecting a
call and had been practically sitting on the phone to
make sure she didn’t miss the vibrating buzzer.
She
looked at the number and then answered quickly. “Did you
get it?” she asked. She listened intently for a few
moments, then nodded. “Brilliant. Okay, right. I’ll be there.”
She rung off and put the phone away.
“Well folks,
I’m afraid that’s gonna do it for me,”
she said, sliding toward the edge of the booth. “I
have an early meeting in the morning.”
“What?” Nicki demanded,
as Sophie stood up. She let go of the tall
man. “You’re leaving? Already? You can’t leave yet,
Soph! We just got here!”
Sophie tapped her watch. “Wrong.
We’ve been here for over an hour, and I
told you earlier I couldn’t stay late. Eight o’
clock in the morning I have a meeting.”
Nicki gave
her a confused look, mouth slightly open. “Jesus, Soph. Eight
o’clock? You were serious about that?”
Sophie reached back
and grabbed her purse. “Yep. Gotta go.”
Nicki looked at
her carefully. “You sure you’re alright?”
Sophie smiled. “Nicki,
I’m fine. I haven’t had anything to drink
at all.” She gave Nicki a little smirk. “Or any
other type of refreshments, for that matter.”
“Yeah, right,” Nicki
said. “But really? You’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Really.
And if you’re thinking about trying to talk me
into staying—don’t even start.”
Nicki stared into her
eyes for a moment and said, “Well . . . if you must.”
Sophie nodded her head. “I must.”
Nicki leaned over to
Sophie, and the two hugged. “I’ll call you tomorrow,
okay?”
Sophie nodded. “Perfect. Love you.”
“I love you too.”
Sophie looked at her. “You be careful, Nick. I mean
it.”
Nicki stuck her tongue out, then said, “Go home,
party pooper. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Nicki watched
Sophie turn and make her way through the crowd to
the front door. It was the last time she would
ever see her sister.
P
ART 1
C
hapter 1
I LEANED
OVER THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL
and watched her for a few
moments. She slept soundly, lips parted, and her dark, shiny
hair was splayed across the pillow. It never ceases to
amaze me that Antoinette Blair ended up in my bed
, after all these years. Me—Danny Logan. I kissed her
gently on top of her head. “I gotta take off
,” I said softly. It was 6:00 a.m., still dark
outside with a typical Seattle October light rain falling, and
I needed to get a training run in before work
. I looked at her and shook my head. Where I
find the discipline to drag my sorry self out of
a warm bed with Toni Blair in it, I’ll
never know.
“Be careful,” she murmured, stirring. She rolled over
and turned away from me. As she did, the sheet
fell away, revealing a long shapely leg and a bare
, heart-stopping ass. Toni likes to sleep with no pajamas
on (lucky me), and for a moment I was sorely
tempted to jump back in the sack. Alas, I’ve
learned my lesson about what you might call “uninvited advances
during dreamtime.” Toni places a high value on her sleep
, and I have to be very careful about how I
go about waking her up. Do it wrong, and I
’m almost guaranteed to get a
hard
elbow to the
ribs. I sighed. I had a race coming up. I
needed to get the run in anyway.
Still facing away
, she sleepily said, “Stop staring at my butt, perv.” She
reached back and drew the sheet up. “And remember we
’ve got the Wards at nine.” Then she murmured something
I couldn’t understand before falling back to sleep.
Two
hours later, I sat in my office at Logan Private
Investigations, or Logan PI as we call ourselves, and reviewed
the numbers while I waited for the Wards to arrive
. There’ve been 113 murders in the Seattle area from
the start of 2008 through September 2012. This may sound
like a lot, triple digits and all, but actually we
’re pretty lucky around here. One hundred and thirteen murders
in nearly five years is a tiny number compared to
almost any other big city in the country (Chicago gets
that many every
few months
if you base the numbers
on 2012). New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore—pick one. All
of them are much more dangerous places than Seattle—even
adjusted for population size. There’s undoubtedly some sociocultural explanation
for this, but I prefer to believe that it’s
because up here in the Northwest, we’re just a
little more laid-back and easygoing than people in those
other big cities. In general, people around here don’t
seem to be wound quite as tightly as they are
in a lot of those other places. Give us our
Gore-Tex and our lattes, let the ’Hawks steal one
from the Packers every now and again, and we’re
happy campers. Like I said, we’re lucky up here
.
Then again, I suppose how you view luck depends on
your perspective. If one of the 113 who were murdered
was your wife or husband or son or daughter or
—as in the case of the Wards who were due
in soon—your niece, well, then you probably look at
the numbers a little differently. And you probably don’t
feel so lucky.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet us
on short notice,” Cecilia Ward said with a very polished
British accent. The morning rain dripped from her black London
Fog trench as she shook my hand, looking me straight
in the eye, seeming to size me up. Her gaze
was steady; her grip was as firm as most men
’s. She’d arrived a minute ago, precisely at 9:00
a.m., accompanied by her husband, Oliver. Cecilia was an
attractive woman—late forties, I’d guess. She was trim
, and her blonde hair was worn stylishly short with long
bangs. As she unbuckled her coat, I saw that she
wore a dark tweed business suit and a white chiffon
blouse buttoned at the neck. A dark leather purse with
brass buckles hung from a strap over her shoulder and
she carried a slim, matching attaché case in her other
hand. My fifteen-second first impression: this was a very
efficient woman, probably all business. She could have been on
her way to a sales meeting or, in her case
, perhaps a board meeting.
I smiled. “It’s our pleasure
, Mrs. Ward. We were pleased to get your phone call
yesterday.” I released her hand and turned to Toni. “Allow
me to introduce my partner, Antoinette Blair.”
Cecilia nodded. “Ms
. Blair,” she said primly. She turned to the man beside
her. “And please allow
me
to introduce my husband, Oliver
.”
Oliver was a tall, distinguished-looking man with dark hair
beginning to turn silver at the temples. I guessed him
to be in his late forties, maybe early fifties. Like
his wife, he too was elegantly dressed. He wore an
expensive navy pinstripe suit over a crisp white shirt with
a lavender silk tie—and even a matching pocket square
. The pair made what the Brits would call a very
handsome couple.
We shook hands. “Mr. Logan. Very pleased to
meet you,” he said with an accent that matched Cecilia
’s. “Your firm comes highly recommended.”
I tilted my head
. “Highly recommended? Really? I’d like to hear more about
that.”
He smiled. “Well, it seems . . .”
“Oliver, dear,” Cecilia interrupted
, reaching up and touching him on his shoulder. Her touch
was gentle, but the effect was immediate—Oliver froze mid
-sentence. He looked over at Cecilia. She looked at him
for a moment, then turned to me. “We’re on
a bit of a schedule, here, Mr. Logan. I wonder
if we might just get started.”
Oliver looked at me
and shrugged. That settled it, then. The boss had spoken
, and who was he to say anything about it?
I
turned to Cecilia. I was right: no chitchat, all business
. I smiled. “Certainly. By all means. Follow me.”
We hung
their coats, then led Oliver and Cecilia back to our
conference room, which overlooks a currently rainy, gray Lake Union
. After we were all seated, Cecilia wasted no time in
getting started.
“Mr. Logan, obviously we’re here about the
murder of my niece, Sophie Thoms. To get right to
the point: we’d like to hire you and your
firm to represent our family in the investigation. I assume
this is the type of work you do?”
“Potentially,” I
said. “We’ve done similar work in the past.”
“Good
. Perhaps it would be appropriate, then, for Oliver and me
to tell you what’s happened.”
I smiled. “Please do
.”
“Very well, then. On the night of Thursday, July fifth
, my niece Sophie Thoms accompanied her sister, Nicki, and a
small group of friends to a local nightclub called the
Genesis.” She formed the words deliberately and said them as
if they had a sour taste. “Nicki stayed late—no
surprise there. But sometime near 10:00 p.m., Sophie received
a telephone call. After the call, she told Nicki she
was due at work early the next morning, so she
intended to leave and drive herself home.
“The next day
, July sixth, Sophie failed to show up for work—she
works at the Beatrice Thoms Memorial Foundation, our family charity
. At first, we were . . .” She searched for the right word
, then found it: “concerned, but not alarmed. That changed, though
, when we hadn’t heard from Sophie by the following
morning. Oliver contacted the authorities and reported her missing. More
than a week passed with nothing happening before some genius
at the Seattle Police Department finally connected Sophie’s disappearance
to the fact that a young woman’s body had
been pulled from the Cowlitz River one hundred miles south
of here on July sixth—the very day Sophie had
failed to report to work. Later that same day, Oliver
accompanied a local detective to identify the body. Sadly, it
was indeed Sophie.”
During the ensuing pause, I looked at
her for a moment, and for the first time noticed
the drawn, tired look in her eyes—the battle-weary
look of someone who’d been on the front lines
for too long. I suppose I could understand if the
last few months had not gone down easily for Cecilia
.
“And then,” Oliver said, “after I identified Sophie, the very
next day we collected her body and flew her back
home to her parents in London.”
“Right,” Cecilia said. “And
the local police have been bumbling about, looking for her
killer ever since. To no avail.”
The clock ticked quietly
for several seconds before Toni said, “We’ve seen the
news coverage. We’re very sorry for your loss.” She
shook her head. “It’s so very senseless.”
Oliver nodded
as he clenched, then unclenched his hands. “It is, isn
’t it—completely senseless. My niece did nothing to deserve
this.” His voice carried a mixed tone of sorrow and
disgust. He leaned forward across our conference room table, as
if to make it easier for Toni and me to
hear him. “She was twenty-six years old, for Christ
’s sake. She had her whole life in front of
her.” He looked back and forth between us for a
second, and then he rocked back in his seat.
Cecilia
reached down into her attaché case. “I took the liberty
of bringing in a few newspaper clippings on the off
chance you hadn’t seen them already.” She pulled out
a few papers with scanned newspaper articles on them and
slid them across the table to me.
HEIRESS DISAPPEARS!
Police
say few clues
I recognized the headline. The story had
been so big—Sophie Thoms was a name so well
known—that almost immediately the national news networks also picked
up on it and began running with it. Within days
, every talking head on television was pontificating about the disappearance
of the young woman.
“It was a completely miserable week
,” Cecilia said, “the week after Sophie went missing. We had
no idea what to think. I mean, if Nicki had
been the one to disappear, we wouldn’t have worried
so much. Nicki does things like that from time to
time.”
“But not Sophie,” Oliver said.
“No,” Cecilia agreed. “Not
Sophie. Sophie was the responsible one of the pair, even
though she was younger. She was not one to simply
disappear. I was very worried something was horribly wrong.”
Toni
and I had followed the case closely this past July
—I guess we were as obsessed about a missing-celebrity
case as anyone else, especially given our experience with another
missing celebrity, Gina Fiore, the year before. We didn’t
know Sophie, but based on the lessons we’d learned
in the Fiore case, I think we both suspected that
it was likely a wealthy young woman like Sophie Thoms
had
chosen
to disappear, just as Gina Fiore had chosen
to do the year before. Sophie had probably decided that
a break from the dull routine of fund-raising was
in order and had secretly jetted off to the Mediterranean
for a month. That was
our
theory, anyway. As a
matter of fact, we figured she was probably getting a
big kick out of watching the search efforts while safely
tucked away in someone’s Lake Como villa.