Executive Perks (20 page)

Aaron reached into his pocket for his phone and started to dial, either for show or signaling it was no longer dead.

“Hold on, Mr. Winston,” the other cop said, apparently the good cop in this duo. “A homicide detective should be here any minute. Why don’t we not blow this out of proportion? I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for all this. He can get your full statement.”

Virginia felt completely out of her depth. A lawyer? A criminal lawyer?

But Aaron put the phone away.

The men from the coroner’s office came first. Then more cops, plainclothes this time, walking around, taking notes on who knew what. Nobody asked them anything until a heavyset bald guy in a trench coat right out of Columbo showed up. He nodded to them and then proceeded into the other room to examine the body. After a minute or two, he came back in.

She and Aaron started to get up, but he waved them down, shaking hands with each as they introduced themselves.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m Detective Baker. We know who you are, we know who I am and we got a dead girl in the other room, her head smashed in with something heavy, a rock, a hammer, who knows. What can you tell me?”

“Well, it’s rather bizarre,” she began.

“You’re telling me. And we haven’t even gotten to the fact that this is some kind of abandoned funeral home. I don’t get many like this, folks.”

She was glad this Baker fellow was having so much fun. “As I said, it’s rather bizarre. Mr. Winston here and I are…” She hesitated.

“Friends.”

“Business associates.”

She and Aaron had filled in the blank at the same time, leaving Baker watching them skeptically. He nodded to one of the uniforms. “Scare me up a Coke, would you, buddy? Want anything?” he asked the two of them politely and when they shook their heads no, said to the officer, “Just one Coke. Thanks.”

When he turned back to them, she wasn’t quite sure whether it was she or Aaron who should continue.

“Friends, business associates, whatever,” Baker prompted. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Aaron took over the narrative, giving it to him succinctly—the first part of it, anyway.

When he was done, Baker nodded and responded, deadpan, “So let me get this straight. Some kind of spooky email comes to you each telling you the other one wants to meet you here. Have I got that right?”

“Yes.”

“Can I see the email?”

She and Aaron exchanged glances.

“It disappeared,” he said. “Both of the emails disappeared, I mean.”

“Right. Okay. So then you get here and what?” He glanced at Aaron’s bare feet and the bundle she was not so inconspicuously still trying to hide. “You make yourselves at home in a deserted funeral parlor? Kind of kinky, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Aaron kept his cool, even while her face heated and she restrained herself from strangling the guy. “Actually, what happened next is that someone apparently locked us in.”

Aaron bent to put on his socks and shoes. She wished she could get her underwear on with such casual ease, but no chance of that.

A pause. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” He was done with his socks and shoes now and crossed his legs, straightening a pleat down the leg of his pants. “We heard a door slamming and as the officers who showed up later can attest, the door was apparently padlocked. We couldn’t open it from the inside and so we checked to see if there were any other ways out.”

“And I take it there weren’t.”

“No. We checked the windows and they were all boarded up with steel. There was no way out from the basement. So we just sat down, in this room as a matter of fact. We were probably in here for a couple of hours.”

“The lights went out too and our cell phones wouldn’t work,” Virginia added.

“So you just made yourselves at home, I see.”

Winston’s face was impassive as he continued the narrative, leaving out extraneous facts that were none of the police department’s business, like the hot sex. “Then a few hours later, we heard a thump or a crash from the other room and when we went to investigate, we found the body.”

“Uh huh.”

“Miss Beckett screamed, understandably.”

“Understandably.” Baker’s hands were in the pockets of his raincoat all this time, not taking any notes. They only came out for the Coke the cop brought him. He popped it open, took a noisy slurp, and then waited.

Aaron went on. “Then the police came knocking at that door almost the exact some time. That’s it. That’s all we know.”

“Seems you may be leaving a little bit out, Mr. Winston.” Baker took another slurp while she moved to farther shield her crumbled pile of underwear.

“Nothing that has anything to do with this,” Aaron said.

She had the horrible feeling her panties and bra were about to be shared with a room full of skeptical cops.

“No? So how do you explain this?” The detective whipped a card out of his side pocket with the hand that wasn’t gripping the Coke and handed it to Aaron.

He glanced at it. “It’s a business card from my office. So what?”

Virginia was too relieved that none of this involved her underwear to be concerned about the production of Aaron’s business card.

“So it was in the dead girl’s pocket. Are you still claiming you don’t know her?”

“I don’t.”

Virginia shot him a surprised look. She couldn’t help herself.

“You got something to add there, Miss Beckett?”

She almost wished he had focused on her underwear. She didn’t like the direction he was taking. “No, of course not. I don’t know her.”

“You sure? You take a good look at her?”

“She was dead, Detective! I didn’t exactly do an examination.”

“No? Well, how’s about we take a closer look?” Baker put his Coke down on a side table and pointed toward the other room. Virginia looked that way uncertainly. She’d offer up her underwear if it’d get her out of examining a dead body.

Neither she nor Aaron got up.

“Is this necessary?” Aaron asked.

“I think Miss Beckett might find it enlightening.”

“Enlightening? Why would I find it enlightening?”

“Please, I insist,” Detective Baker said, holding his arms out in the direction of the body.

Reluctantly, they both got up and walked across the hall. At the last minute, Baker held up a hand to stop them right at the entrance to the room. “No need to come any further. We don’t want to contaminate the crime scene and you can see what I need you to from there.”

A crowd of technicians of one kind or another hovered around the poor girl, who was defenseless in her state. They were measuring and snapping photos and prodding with latex-encased digits. Virginia felt her stomach turn.

Then Aaron’s hand was at her elbow, poised to give whatever support she needed, or at least that’s how she interpreted it. She looked at him uncertainly and he nodded.

“Give me some gloves,” the detective barked to one of the throng and somebody handed him a pair. When he slipped them on, he added, “And some booties. Then move away from the body everybody. Just for a minute.”

After putting on the protective foot covering, the detective entered the room as the other members of the team backed away. He crouched beside the body, not touching her, but pointing to her face. The girl’s features were clearly visible in the bright light of the room as they had not been before. Virginia looked right at her. And gasped.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Baker said, standing up. “Seen enough?” He peeled the gloves off and slipped them in his pocket, reaching down to remove the booties.

At the green tint she was sure must be seeping into her complexion, he spoke to Aaron gruffly, “Take her back in there.”

Aaron steered her back to the other room and the couch and she sank back down into it. She felt as though she might be sick.

“She looks like me,” she whispered.

“Yeah, she does,” Baker said. The detective had followed them back as well. “It’s the first thing I noticed when I looked at the body. Who is she, Miss Beckett?”

Her head shot up. “How would I know?”

“Not a sister? A cousin? What?”

“Christ, if she knew her,” Aaron said, “she’d say so, Detective.”

It was as if Aaron had drawn the fire away from her. Baker honed in on him instead. “But you, you weren’t so sure, were you, Winston?”

“I told you I didn’t know her,” Aaron maintained.

“You weren’t sure whether Miss Beckett here did, though, were you? Not until just now when she said she didn’t.”

“The girl does—did—look a great deal like her. I thought there might be a chance they were related. I didn’t know.”

“Got a closer look at the body than Miss Beckett did, is that right?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Only that until we went in there just now, she hadn’t seen the resemblance. It surprised her, unless she’s a hell of an actress.” Baker fixed a hard stare on her for a second. “Which I ain’t saying she ain’t.” He turned back to Aaron. “But you didn’t bat an eye. You knew she could be Miss Beckett’s twin, didn’t you?”

Aaron hesitated, then admitted, “Yes, I did. I wasn’t completely candid with you before, Detective.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Baker muttered. “Like
that
never happens to me.”

“I don’t know who she was, but I had seen her before. I was in the Guggenheim this afternoon, before I got the text from, er, before I got the text. I saw her then. I thought she was Miss Beckett at first and I approached her. We spoke for a second and then I left.”

“So that’s when you gave her your card?”

Aaron’s brow furrowed. “No, I didn’t.”

“So how did she get it?”

“I give my card to a lot of people, Detective. It’s not exactly hard to get a hold of one. It doesn’t have any private information on it. Just my office address and phone. I’m assuming she… Well, actually, I have no idea.”

The detective still wasn’t taking notes, but she noticed for the first time that one of the uniformed officers to the side, the one who’d held the gun on them at first, was.

“Fine, so what did you talk about when you spoke to her? Did she tell you her name?”

“I said that she looked like a friend and she said something, I don’t know, flirty, I guess.”

“She flirted with you?”

Aaron flashed Virginia a wary look. “You may find this hard to believe, Detective, but a lot of women flirt with me.”

“Yeah, I get it, you’re rich.”

The dismissive nature of the observation caused Virginia to smile for the first time since she’d heard that thud what seemed like hours ago.

“Did she tell you her name?” Baker continued with the interrogation, or she supposed it was starting to sound like an interrogation.

“Yes, it was something like Amanda, Samantha, something like that.”

“Did you make arrangements to meet her later?”

The wary look was back. “No. I told you, I only approached her because she looked so much like Miss Beckett. I thought it was her at first.”

“Quite a coincidence, this woman showing up here dead then, I’d say.”

Aaron said nothing.

“Did you come right here after the museum? Could she have followed you?”

“I suppose so. I did come right here. But then what? Are you saying she’s the one that locked us in?”

“I’m not saying anything…except maybe are you sure this is the story you’re going with? Because it doesn’t really hold together. What makes more sense is maybe this woman is somebody you got on the side. You obviously like a certain type,” he said as an aside. “You’re with her when you arrange to meet with Miss Beckett here. She follows you in a jealous rage, sees you, er, doing whatever it is you were doing…”

Virginia’s lips thinned at the casual assumption as to what they’d been doing, even though it was true.

“Goes ballistic and attacks you. It was probably more of an accident, really, wasn’t it, Mr. Winston? You were just defending yourself. And the whole funeral home thing, well, I don’t know whose idea that was, but to each his
or her
own, I always say.”

“What about the fact we were locked in from the outside?” Virginia pointed out. “We couldn’t have done that and…and…she…the girl, I mean, couldn’t have either.”

“Yeah, about that. I took a look at that lock as I came in. Pretty fancy for a broken-down funeral home. And it had a mechanism on it that looked like a remote control if you ask me. We’ll check it out, but from what I can tell, that lock could have been activated from anywhere. Even inside here. Pretty nifty. The only thing you got going for you is there’s not enough blood for the girl to have been killed here. So there’s that.”

Aaron listened calmly, then stood up and held his hand out for Virginia. She took it, standing up herself, and his arm came casually around her waist. “Are we under arrest, Detective?”

“Settle down. Don’t get your undies all twisted up…if you still got them on, that is.”

Virginia didn’t bother to grab her underclothes from where she’d stuffed them in between the couch cushions and toward which Detective Baker had just belligerently darted a glance. They were probably evidence now anyway.

“Are we under arrest, Detective?” Aaron asked again.

Baker shook his head no.

“Fine, then we’ll be leaving.”

“We’ll be in touch.”

They’d made it to the door, when Baker called out, “And it wasn’t Miss Beckett’s screams that brought the cops to the door. It was a phone call. Somebody called it in, anonymously, five minutes before. Said he’d heard screams coming from here.”