Mona Lisa Eyes (Danny Logan Mystery #4) (34 page)

“How is he?” I asked as I
walked alongside the rolling gurney.

“He took one in the
neck,” the paramedic said, all business. “I don’t know
. We’ve got him stabilized now. We need to get
him to Harborview.”

“How’s the girl?” Ron asked. “When
I came in, she ran into the living room but
I didn’t know where the bad guy was so
I just pointed to the front door. She split, and
I didn’t talk to her.”

“I got her when
she came out. I think she’s okay. The son
of a bitch cut her finger off.”

Ron turned to
look at me as the gurney reached the ambulance. “He
what?”

“He cut her finger off.”

“He cut her finger
off? What the . . .” He let go of Yoshi’s hand
and stood up straight, looking at me. “Damn, Logan, that
means this guy’s the serial killer?”

It suddenly hit
me. In the intensity of the last few minutes, I
hadn’t made the connection. “Do you think?”

“Unless there
’s more than one psycho running around killing girls and
chopping off their fingers, I think maybe we got him
.” A copycat murderer was unlikely since SPD had never released
the information about the mutilations to the public. No one
knew about the fingers except the police. And the bad
guy. And now, Katherine LaRue, of course.

I nodded toward
the house. “What about the perp?” I asked. “Is he
. . . ?”

“Problem solved,” Ron said. “Little buddy here stood there with
a bullet in his neck and ended that motherfucker. One
shot, right here.” He pointed to the spot right between
his eyes.

I nodded. “Good. Serves the bastard right.”

Ron
nodded. “Damn straight. Never been prouder.”

I’ve spent most
of my adult life working in the criminal justice system
, one way or another. This included three and a half
years in U.S. Army CID and now, the five
years since. I have full respect for the system, even
though I recognize that it’s not perfect. That said
, the most important aspect of the criminal justice system to
me has always been the part about justice, not necessarily
the system itself. I’m not saying that I’m
any kind of vigilante or anything—I don’t have
any patience for that kind of crap. But on the
other hand, if a known bad guy—a killer at
that, and a killer of women in particular—if that
bad guy draws down on me or anyone else I
know who happens to be armed, the decision’s easy
. We’re taking him out. See ya. Send him on
up to God and let the big guy sort things
out. Justice, after all, must be served. Way to go
, Yoshi.

I watched as they finished loading Yoshi into one
of the ambulances. Ron walked over, leaned in and whispered
a word of encouragement before turning and walking back to
me. The paramedics had wheeled Katherine over to the other
ambulance. I walked over. The kind paramedic, whose name I
never got, was holding Katherine’s right hand.

“Hey, Katherine
,” I said. “You alright?”

She looked up at me. She
nodded. “Thank you.” Tears formed in her eyes again.

I
smiled. “You going to be at Harborview too?”

The paramedic
nodded. “You bet. We’re headed that way now.”

“I
’ll stop in and see you when you’re feeling
better,” I said to Katherine.

She gave me a weak
smile and nodded. I stepped back, and they slammed the
doors shut. A second later, both ambulances roared off, sirens
blazing.

Ron and I watched them leave, then he turned
to one of the uniformed officers. “Linda!” he called out
. “Where’s the CSI unit?”

A tall police lieutenant looked
Ron’s way. “They’re on the way,” she answered
. “Should be here in just a minute. You okay?”

He
nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t do anything.”

“Well, I need
you to stay put. Your captain and my captain are
both on their way out. You can’t go back
inside until they get here.” SPD has a well-defined
policy in place to review all use-of-force incidents
. No doubt, Ron was going to be subjected to many
hours of debriefing.

As she was explaining this to Ron
, I suddenly remembered Katherine’s finger. Damn! How could I
have forgotten that, even for a minute? “Lieutenant,” I said
, “I need a few officers to go inside with me
. Our female victim had her finger cut off. We have
to recover it and get it to the hospital.”

She
looked at me for a second, then she smiled. “Mr
. Logan, is it? Don’t worry. We’ve already recovered
it,” she said. “The medics have it. It went to
the hospital in the ambulance with Ms. LaRue.”

Relief. I
nodded. “Thank God. Thanks, Lieutenant.”

Then came the surprise. “Mr
. Logan? One other thing,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Same thing goes
for you as goes for Lieutenant Bergstrom. Since you were
involved, I need you to stick around here and answer
some questions. You and Lieutenant Bergstrom shouldn’t speak about
the incident until after your debrief. You’re not to
go inside. Got it?”

I took a deep breath and
nodded.

She turned and walked back toward the house, leaving
Ron and me standing on the sidewalk. We stood there
silently for a few seconds, then Ron turned to me
. “Hey, Logan,” he said.

I looked at him.

He held
out his hand to shake. “Thanks.” We shook hands, the
sincere gesture of two guys who’d been through combat
together. “I mean it. You had our backs. We won
’t forget.”

I smiled and nodded. “Of course.”

He nodded
back. “Find me those fucking pictures you were talking about
. If they’re what you think they are, I’ll
take ’em to Captain Jerry. And I’ll sit on
him to make sure he does right by ’em.”

C
hapter
21

WE WERE SEATED AROUND THE CONFERENCE
room table for
a Thursday staff meeting the next morning.

“What’s the
latest on Detective Hinari?” Richard asked.

“He made it through
surgery yesterday afternoon. He’s still in ICU, but they
said he’s out of the danger zone now. He
’ll be laid up for a few weeks, but he
’s going to make it. Bullet missed everything important.”

“Thank
God,” Richard said. “And the woman?”

“They reattached her finger
—say the prognosis is good.”

“Physically,” Toni added.

“True,” I
said. “Physically. It’s going to take time to recover
mentally, after everything she went through. We’re going to
go see ’em both tomorrow. The nurse said they’ll
be moving Yoshi out of ICU and up to a
room tomorrow morning.”

Richard nodded. “Well, he’s certainly a
lucky man, GSW to the neck like that. Those are
often fatal. A couple of inches to the right, and
that bullet would have severed the spine or the carotid
.”

I shuddered. “And that would have been terrible. Good thing
the bad guy pushed his shot.”

“Indeed. And I heard
on the news last night that the crime lab matched
up the prints from the fingers they found in that
psycho’s freezer.”

“That’s right. If you can believe
it, the idiot made sure to keep the evidence that
ties him conclusively to all the women he abducted and
mutilated and killed over the past six years. There were
five—no doubt, Katherine LaRue would have been number six
. He was keeping a collection.”

Richard shook his head. “No
one ever accused your average criminal of being a refugee
from a Mensa camp.”

“That’s true.”

A few minutes
later, we got started. First thing, I turned to Kenny
. “Any luck on the pictures? Ron told me if we
find ’em, he’ll take ’em to his captain and
try to get him to keep the investigation on Sophie
open.”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Not a thing. I
went through all of Leonard’s cameras, went through their
desktops at home, Leonard’s laptop; Gloria even took me
over so that I could check the machines at his
office. No photos that match up to the time frame
. His Nikon uses a Compact Flash storage card,” he held
up his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, “It
could be anywhere.”

“Safe deposit box?” Doc asked.

He shook
his head again. “Went with her and checked it. Nothing
.”

“What about the brother who went with him?” Richard asked
. “Maybe he has something?”

“She said she’s asked him
before, and he said he didn’t have any pictures
,” I said. “I asked her to call him again. Maybe
he doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to
be looking for.”

“Yesterday she said she called him, and
he hasn’t called her back yet,” Kenny said. “Some
sort of a backup copy is logical for a tech
geek like Leonard,” Kenny said. “The McKenzie house is full
of high-tech stuff. Leonard would have been all over
the concept of backup, and he’d probably be predisposed
to some sort of off-site copy.”

“Other than a
hard-copy printout?” I asked.

Kenny shrugged. “That could work
. But more likely, he’d keep a copy of the
original digital files.”

“How ’bout one of those cloud storage
services?” Doc said.

Kenny looked at Doc and smiled. “Very
good, dude. You’ve been paying attention.” He looked at
me. “Carbonite, Mozy, those kind of places. Leonard could have
uploaded the photos and then hid the memory cards. Hell
, for that matter, once he uploaded them, he could have
erased the memory cards. I actually found a bunch of
them in his desk. They were all empty.”

I thought
about this for a couple seconds. “Why don’t you
start going through those services and seeing if Leonard had
an account?” I paused, then said, “If you find one
, can you get into it?”

He shook his head. “Doubtful
. Matter of fact, I might not even be able to
find out if he had an account without Gloria’s
authorization.”

“We’ll call her after the meeting,” I said
. “She’ll help.”

“Meanwhile, though,” Richard said, “we’re left
with Gloria’s brother and the hope that Leonard left
him something.”

I nodded. “That’s it. Hopefully, he’ll
call Gloria back.”

“So what you’re saying,” Richard said
, “is that, at least for the moment anyway, there might
be a smoking gun in this case in the form
of the pictures. But at this particular moment, all we
have is just the smoke—not the gun?”

“Or the
pictures,” Doc added.

I smiled. “Yeah, I s’pose you
could put it that way.”

“Just a hint of a
suspicion, a whiff of smoke, really,” Toni said.

I nodded
. “I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. That
being the way of it, it’d be crazy for
us to pin all our hopes on that.” I turned
to Doc. “Where are we with those financial reports?”

Doc
opened a file in front of him. “We’re getting
there—David and George are partway through with the extended
financials, but not finished yet. I’ve got ’em looking
at about fifty people—everyone at the Foundation plus all
the friends and family. They’re making progress, but they
don’t have anything at all yet on any of
the Brits: Sophie Thoms or Nicki Thoms, Oliver and Cecilia
Ward, or Jacob and Allesandra Thoms. David knows a guy
in Scotland Yard, and they’re helping get the information
put together, but it isn’t here yet. David says
he thinks he’ll have it on Monday or Tuesday
.”

“The financials that SPD gave us were no help?” Toni
said.

Doc shook his head. “No. They’re pretty generic
. More like a little one-paragraph narrative—the type you
’d get off the web. We’re trying to get
full-on financial reports: credit, payables, balance sheet, bank information
—the whole nine yards.”

“And the people you already have
?” I asked.

“So far, seems like nothing out of the
ordinary.”

“Nothing at all? Nothing suspicious?”

“Not really. Eric Gaston
? Not all the way done with him yet, but what
we have so far, guy’s apparently loaded: nice house
, nice cars, nice sailboat, all the toys. David and George
are still digging on him. No one else at the
Foundation looks to have any significant money, not counting the
Brits, of course.”

“Back to Gaston,” I said. “Where’d
he get all his money? Is it new? Guy’s
been an employee of one nonprofit or another ever since
he graduated. Can’t pay all that well. It’s
not like he’s CEO of a major corporation. What
kind of money does he get paid, anyway?”

Doc shook
his head. “Whoa! Slow down, dude. We don’t know
where his money is from, yet—still lookin’. But I
think I remember seeing that his salary was in the
low one-hundreds. The Foundation has to file salary reports
to keep its IRS nonprofit status up to date.”

“Interesting
,” I said.

“Why don’t we just ask Oliver tomorrow
,” Toni said. We’d scheduled a wrap-up lunch with
Oliver and Gloria at the Wild Ginger downtown.

I nodded
. “We will. Meanwhile, today, we keep working. Kenny: keep looking
for the photos. Doc: stay on the financials. Richard, you
can help Doc. Toni? Me and you, we keep looking
for connections. We found one with McKenzie. There may be
others.”

“And just who is this fellow again?” Cecilia asked
, reaching for her napkin.

“His name is—was—Leonard McKenzie
,” I said. We were sitting with Cecilia and Oliver in
a booth at the Wild Ginger restaurant the next day
. I’d just finished giving the two of them a
quick briefing on the latest developments.

“And you’re saying
you think that there might be some sort of connection
between this man’s murder and Sophie?” Cecilia asked, somewhat
incredulously.

I nodded. “I’m saying we think it’s
a possibility.”

“Wait a minute,” Oliver said. “What you’re
saying is that the Foundation is the common denominator between
the two of them, some sort of a nexus. Are
you implying that something related to the Foundation is actually
behind this man’s death? Or worse, Sophie’s?”

“No
. We haven’t reached the ‘implying’ stage yet. All I
’m saying is that it’s possible there’s a
connection between the two murders. There was definitely a business
connection between the two people. As to their murders? If
you just look at the facts, there’s no choice
but to say it’s a possibility.”

The table was
quiet for a second as this sunk in. Then Cecilia
said, “You said this fellow McKenzie called Sophie after he
returned from a trip to Africa. Have you considered he
may have just simply been moved by what he saw
in Africa? Perhaps he decided he wanted to do more
. I’m told it can be a very emotional experience
, visiting those people, you know.”

Toni nodded. “I imagine it
must be. And yes, we have thought of that, and
we agree—what you’re saying is also possible.”

“And
then, as Mr. Logan points out, that would make Mr
. McKenzie’s death, while tragic, nothing more than an unfortunate
coincidence,” Cecilia said.

Toni nodded. “It would. That’s why
we’re presenting this as simply a possibility.”

“Humph,” Cecilia
said, leaning back from the table. She thought for a
moment, then shook her head. “I find all of this
quite disturbing.” She looked over at Oliver. “I thought the
case was over.”

“It may well be,” I said.

She
turned to Oliver. “You realize that if those photos prove
to be a ‘nexus,’ as you put it, between Sophie
’s death and the Foundation, perhaps via Mr. McKenzie, then
the implications as pertains to the Foundation itself are staggering
.”

Oliver stared at her. “You understand what you’re saying
, of course.”

Cecilia nodded. “I most certainly do. What I
’m saying is that it appears we may need to
consider the possibility that something—or someone—connected with the
Foundation’s work in Africa may not be as we
’d thought. In fact, the Foundation itself may be compromised
.”

Oliver looked completely stunned. “Compromised? The Foundation? That’s nonsense
. I don’t think it’s prudent to jump right
off to conclusions—”

“I am
not
jumping to conclusions, Oliver
,” Cecilia said sharply. “I’m merely stating a potential scenario
. An ugly one, I’ll grant you, but a possibility
nonetheless and one we must prepare ourselves for.”

“May I
interrupt and ask a question?” I said.

They both turned
to me. “Go ahead,” Cecilia said.

“Along these lines, part
of the procedure we normally follow is to have a
look at the financial records of anyone who might have
been even remotely involved in this. We’ve done this
with the information provided by the police, but we’ve
been digging a little harder. Everyone so far checks out
more or less as we’d have expected with maybe
one possible question. Something’s turned up that you might
have a little insight on.”