Next of Kin (2 page)

Within twenty minutes there was a knock on the door. Beth was sitting at the dining room table with her head down, concentrating on her sketch pad.

Sarah peered through the security port and saw two men holding up their badges.

“It’s them,” she hissed, then opened the door to two plainclothes detectives flashing LAPD badges.

“Sarah Steinman?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Detective Burroughs, and this is my partner, Detective Franklin. May we come in?”

Sarah stepped aside as they entered the apartment, then realized the sofa was still set up as Beth’s makeshift bed. “Sorry for the mess,” she said, as she hurried to move the bedding aside. “My friend Beth is spending the night.”

Beth looked up briefly, as Sarah wrapped her arms around her waist to keep from shaking and asked, “Was there really a murder?”

They nodded.

“Oh, my God,” Sarah said. “Beth is the one who actually witnessed it. I just made the call.”

Burroughs eyed Beth curiously. “You don’t live here?”

Beth paused. “No, sir. I live about thirty minutes south. My apartment had a gas leak earlier today. They evacuated all the residents while it’s being repaired. I begged a bed from Sarah for the night.”

Detective Franklin had already spotted the telescope and was looking through it. “Is this how you witnessed the murder?”

Beth nodded. “I couldn’t sleep.” She got up from her chair and walked back to the window, then hugged herself to keep from shuddering. The memory of what she’d seen was horrifying. “I’d been up for a while when I saw the telescope and tried it out. That’s when I saw the couple fighting in the apartment directly across the street.”

She pointed to the brightly lit apartment across the way, where a large number of people were now moving about. “The man was older and bigger, but the woman was in his face screaming right back at him. He pushed her. She slapped him. Then all of a sudden he pulled a knife and slit her throat so fast I wasn’t sure what he’d done until I saw blood spray across the window. That’s when I screamed.”

“Her screams woke me up,” Sarah said. “I nearly fell getting out of bed, I was so scared, and when I got in here, Beth was telling me to call 911, so I did.”

“Did you see him, too?” Burroughs asked.

Sarah shook her head. “By the time I looked, he was walking out the door. All I saw was the back of a bald-headed man in a dark suit. But we both saw a black sports car come out of the alley a few minutes later and drive away really fast. It went south as the police came in from the north.”

Both detectives were making notes as the women kept talking.

“Did either of you know the woman in the other apartment?” Burroughs asked.

“No,” Beth said. “I’ve never been here before.”

“I don’t even know my neighbor across the hall,” Sarah said.

Burroughs eyed Beth. “Do you think you could identify him if you saw him again?”

“Yes.”

“Would you be willing to come down to headquarters and go through some mug shots?”

“I can do better than that,” Beth said, and hurried back to the table. She tore the top sheet off her sketch pad and gave it to Burroughs. “I’m an illustrator.”

“This is amazing,” Burroughs said. He was eyeing the drawing she’d made when a frown suddenly furrowed his forehead. “He looks familiar.”

Franklin glanced over his partner’s shoulder at the drawing Beth had made, his eyes widening at her attention to detail. She’d even added a small puckered scar between the man’s nose and upper lip. “The LAPD could use someone as skilled as you.”

Beth shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ll stick to illustrating children’s books.”

Burroughs rolled up the drawing and dropped his notebook in his pocket. “We’re going to need you to come down to headquarters to give an official statement.”

And so it begins,
Beth thought. Like it or not, she was now a witness in a murder investigation.

“Let me get my purse and jacket.”

Sarah shivered. “Do I have to go, too?”

“No, ma’am. Your testimony would be secondhand, since you didn’t actually witness anything.”

The relief on Sarah’s face was obvious. She gave Beth an apologetic look and then hugged her. “When you’ve finished there, come back. Tomorrow is my day off, so even if you’re not back till morning, I’ll still be here, and you’ll need a place to shower before you go in for that meeting you said you had.”

Beth hugged her. “I’m sorry for causing so much trouble for you.”

“You didn’t cause anything,” Sarah said, and then ran to her hall table, opened a drawer and took out a key. “This is an extra key to the front door. I’ll probably still be asleep.”

“See you later,” Beth said.

Sarah waved goodbye and locked the door behind them.

Ike Pappas had wasted no time as he strode out of the elevator into the underground parking of his ex-wife’s apartment building. He’d glanced at the security cameras, confident that they were all still off, and jumped into his Aston Martin. As soon as he cleared the alley and got back in traffic, he’d looked up in the rearview mirror and flexed his jaw, which was still stinging.

His eyes narrowed angrily. He couldn’t believe Lorena had flipped out like that. Granted, he’d once been married to her, which he supposed gave her a sense of false security, but she’d been wrong—very wrong—to threaten him. He’d expected her to be pissed because he’d finally taken their son into the business, but he’d underestimated her anger. She kept screaming that he’d reneged on his promise—the one he’d made to her years ago that he would keep their son, Adam, out of organized crime—and she was going to make him pay. She’d said she would rather see Adam in prison than turn into a killer like Ike.

What Lorena hadn’t given him time to explain was that Adam had plans of his own. He had been grooming himself to step into his father’s shoes and wouldn’t be dissuaded. Ike had to admit he was proud of his son’s ambitions. What man wouldn’t want his son to follow in his footsteps? In Ike’s case, very lucrative footsteps.

He knew the law would be calling once her identity was known, and he knew they would find his DNA and prints all over the place, but he wasn’t worried. He owned the building. Once Lorena was dead, he’d gone straight to the security room, killed the guard on duty, then scrubbed the past twelve hours of security footage before disabling all the cameras, making sure there was nothing to tie him to the scene.

He’d set her up in the apartment years ago, and he and Adam visited regularly, often for a meal. She was, after all, the mother of his only child, and family was important—to be revered. But after screaming at him that she was going to the Feds, she’d given him no choice.

It wasn’t until Ike had driven back through the iron gates marking the entrance to his estate that he began to relax. The guard at the gates wasn’t on duty at night. The gates automatically swung shut behind him as he drove onto the grounds.

The mansion in which he lived was more like a castle, minus the moat, standing three stories tall at the center, with two-story wings spreading out on either side and sprawled over three acres of land, with ten more acres surrounding it. It was built like a fortress for a reason. Ike Pappas had made many enemies during his rise through the ranks of organized crime. There was always someone interested in taking down the kingpin of a syndicate like his.

He turned off the headlights as he neared the house and quickly drove into the garage under cover of darkness. Once inside, he made a sweep through his own security footage and deleted the few minutes that showed him leaving in his car earlier, then reappearing later.

He took the back stairs up to his suite so he wouldn’t pass Adam’s bedroom to get to his own. Once inside, he stripped out of his clothes, underwear and shoes included, rolled them up and stuffed them into a garbage bag, then left the bag in the middle of his bedroom floor as he headed for the shower.

The hot water sluicing down his body washed away the last remnants of his ex-wife’s blood in a swath of soap and heat. He scrubbed until his skin was stinging, then took a nailbrush to his fingers, making sure there was no evidence of her DNA left behind.

Once he was out, he dressed in a pair of navy silk pajamas and black Gucci lounge shoes, and carried the plastic bag down to the basement. He entered a closet housing a dozen electrical panels that controlled the entire property, turned on a light and walked in, closing the door behind him. Once inside, he pressed on a hidden panel. Another door opened, swinging inward on silent hinges. He tossed the bag inside, then quickly shut the door. It wasn’t the first evidence that could send him to prison he’d stowed in there, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but it was as safe in there as anywhere on earth. No one—not even Adam—knew about the existence of the room he’d added to the house after he’d bought it, seeing as the man who’d designed and built it was no longer alive to tell the tale.

Ike exited the closet and went back to the main floor, then into the library, where he poured himself a stiff drink. If Adam caught him up at this hour of the morning, all he had to say was that he’d been unable to sleep and had gone down to get a drink. A little ouzo should serve his purposes and help him unwind.

He was pouring his second drink when the phone on the desk began to ring. It was a dedicated line and only rang in this room. The only people who had the number were his snitches. He emptied the glass, then answered on the second ring.

“Pappas.”

“Mr. Pappas…this is Donny Franco.”

Ike frowned. He had people everywhere, including the LAPD. Nothing happened in the city that he didn’t know about—certainly nothing that mattered to him.

“It’s late,” he said shortly.

“They brought a woman into headquarters tonight who’s claiming she witnessed the murder of your ex-wife.”

Ike’s heart skipped a beat.
How the hell?
But he wasn’t giving himself away to anyone, especially to a cop on the take. He injected a note of incredulity into his voice.

“Is this true? Is my ex-wife really dead?”

“Yes, sir. A woman named Sarah Steinman, who lives in the building across the street, called the police. Apparently she witnessed it through a telescope from her apartment. Apartment 9B.”

“I see. Thank you for the information.”

“Uh…Mr. Pappas?”

“Yes?”

“That’s not all. They have a sketch of the killer—a very good sketch. I thought you’d want to know.”

“I always appreciate information and reward it accordingly.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ike ignored the excitement in Franco’s voice and hung up. He went to his desk and pulled out a throwaway. There was only one number programmed into the phone, and once it had served its purpose, it would disappear like his clothes.

He made the connection, knowing Pacheco would answer by the second ring.