The Color of Death (8 page)

Glendale

Wednesday

12:05
A.M
.

Sam leaned against the
kitchen doorway, sipping coffee and listening to Kate’s half of the conversation. He’d guessed after the first few moments that it was good old honorary Uncle Gavin calling to tell Kate that the Feds were sniffing after her.

“No, really, it’s all right,” she said for the third time. “I’d have done the same thing.”
Before Lee disappeared, but not after.
“Sure. Give Missy a kiss for me when you get home. And stop worrying. I’m fine.”

She hung up and gave Sam a look that could have been amused or irritated or both. Underneath those emotions was the sadness that had begun five months ago and the fear that had started with the blind phone call threatening death unless she stopped asking questions.

She hadn’t stopped, but she’d been a lot more careful about who and what she asked.

“Have fun listening?” she said.

“Yeah. It was a stitch and a half. I take it Gavin Greenfield lay awake thinking about our chat and finally just had to call you.”

“He’s a good, decent man.”

“Damn few of us left,” Sam said, watching her over the rim of his mug. “What relation is he to Lee Mandel?”

“Gavin is Lee’s godfather.”

“Are they close?”

“Not for the last five months.” Kate clenched her hands together, then forced herself to let go. “You recognized Lee’s name.”

Sam didn’t hesitate. He’d already decided what he’d tell her and what he wouldn’t. Not that there was much to tell. The Bureau grapevine had already tagged the McCloud case as a career disaster that no one wanted to touch, much less request the file and go on record as having read all about it. Sam had done his best to duck that whole aspect of the crime strike force’s brief—he was afraid Kennedy would tie the McCloud case to Sam’s career and sink him without a trace.

“Lee Mandel,” Sam said, “is a courier who went missing with a package that cost Mandel Inc.’s insurer seven figures to make good.”

Lee was also the final straw that had set the crime strike force into being a few months later. Arthur McCloud, the man who’d lost the sapphires, was a friend of the governor of Florida and a brother-in-law of the president of the United States, but Sam didn’t figure Kate needed to know that. Neither did she need to know that the McCloud case had been a woofer for everyone involved. Once Kennedy had seen where it was going, he delegated the case to the Miami office and ran away like the politically savvy coyote he was. By then, the crime strike force had developed a momentum of its own independent of McCloud.

Thank God.

Not that the president’s wife didn’t make inquiries from time to time, scaring the hell out of the Bureau director. It would have been funny if the director hadn’t passed the fear down the line as fast as he could. Even the name McCloud could make grown men turn pale.

“What’s your connection to Mandel Inc.?” Sam asked.

Kate didn’t answer. She was too busy telling herself that Sam wasn’t the kind of man that appealed to her. He was too cold, too controlled, just one more federal robot mucking up her life. Yes, he was intelligent, but she needed more than that. She demanded a sense of humor in a man. She doubted if Sam had one worth mentioning.

He gave her a long look. “Anything that’s public knowledge about you—and a lot that isn’t—will be mine before the sun rises. Same for Mandel Inc. Save your energy for a fight you can win.”

“My stepfather owns Mandel Inc.”

“There. That didn’t hurt, did it?”

She gave Sam a look that could have blistered paint.

He smiled thinly. “You’re not stupid, Ms. Chandler. Don’t act like it and I won’t act like you are.” He took a sip of his cooling coffee. “Lee Mandel, son of your stepfather and your mother…” He waited, silently asking a question.

“Yes,” Kate said tightly. “He’s my brother. Half brother, actually, but Mom was helping Dad begin Mandel Inc., so I practically raised him. He was such a fun baby, always laughing and making sweet sounds.”

“How old were you?”

“Eight when he was born.”

Sam nodded, trying to think of a gentle way to tell Kate that her sweet little half brother had grown up into something sour.

To hell with it. There isn’t a kind and gentle way to say it.

“From what I remember of the file,” Sam said, “Lee Mandel is believed to be living the high life in Aruba with his big-boobed blonde squeeze.”

Kate’s face tightened until she looked like she felt—hard and angry. “So the FBI says. I don’t believe it. I know him. He wouldn’t do that to his family!”

“Local law enforcement disagrees.”

“Local law enforcement couldn’t find a clue unless it was in a box of doughnuts.”

“Ouch. You’re really down on cops, aren’t you?”

“For good reason.”

“I’m listening.”

“Why?” she asked bitterly. “They didn’t.”

“They didn’t see you make a switch under a lecher’s twitching nose.”

She laughed without meaning to. “It did twitch, didn’t it?”

“Like a rabbit’s.”

Her smiled faded. “Even if Lee has some issues with Dad—and what son doesn’t?—Lee and I are very close. He’d never just disappear without saying anything to me. He’d call or write or e-mail or—something.”

“Has he?”

“No.”

“What do you think happened?”

She closed her eyes and said in a raw voice what she really didn’t want to believe. “I’m afraid Lee’s dead.”

“Robbery?”

She nodded jerkily.

“Then why was his rental car turned in at the airport?” Sam asked.

“If the keys and the papers were in it, anybody could have turned it in instead of him. You’ve seen the lines of cars waiting to be checked in. Lots of people leave the keys and the rental contract, and run for their planes without the check-in drones ever seeing their face.”

“Okay,” Sam said, watching her intently, “someone else could have turned in Lee’s rental. Why would they?”

“To frame him and throw everyone off the trail. And it sure did the job. No one is really working on the case. Everyone believes Lee is a crook who got away with it. End of story.”

Carefully, Sam took a sip of coffee. The stubborn look on Kate’s face was at odds with her tousled hair, but he didn’t doubt her determination.
Tread carefully, boy, or you’ll blow every bit of the progress you’ve made.

But tiptoeing around things was also a good way to blow a case. People revealed more when they were off balance than when they were relaxed.

“Assuming a frame job and murder, where is Lee’s body?” Sam asked neutrally.

“Have you ever been to Sanibel Island?” Kate asked. “It’s on the way to Captiva, one of Lee’s favorite places. If he stopped anywhere, he stopped there.”

“I don’t know either island, but I’ve done time in Florida.”

“Most of Sanibel is a mangrove wildlife preserve. It wouldn’t be hard to…” She gestured futilely.

“Hide a body?” Sam finished.

Kate flinched but didn’t disagree. “At low tide a lot of Sanibel is a maze of mangrove roots sticking up from the mudflats and branches coming down. It looks like small caves made of twisted wood. If someone anchored a…body out of sight, the crabs would take care of the rest. Or the alligators in the swamps. Or chain and weights wrapped around the body. Or…hell, you’re the federal cop. Fill in your own blanks.”

“So, we have a returned rental car and a missing, possibly murdered, Mandel Inc. courier who was carrying something valuable and portable. Go on.”

She grimaced. “There’s no place to go.”

“How close were you and Lee?”

“As close as siblings can get. Maybe closer. I really was more like a mother to him than a sister, especially when he became an obnoxious teenage male.”

Sam hesitated, sipped coffee, and asked, “Half siblings have been known to be sexually involved.”

Kate stared at him. “Do they teach you to be revolting or is it a natural talent?”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“Take it as a hell no!”

“Okay, you were his half sister and semi-mother. Kids hide stuff from their family all the time. What makes you so sure Lee didn’t take off to Aruba with the loot and a blonde?”

“The blonde with the famous boobs?”

“Yeah.”

Kate hesitated, laced her fingers together, freed them, and said, “I don’t want to do this. If Lee is still alive, he’ll be furious.”

“Do you think he’s still alive?”

Tears shimmered and didn’t fall. “No,” she whispered. “He would have gotten in touch. Even if he didn’t want to talk to Mom or Dad, he’d talk to me.”
Or to Norm.

“Maybe Lee didn’t want you to know about the blonde. Brothers don’t want sisters to know how bad their taste is when they’re thinking with their dicks.”

Kate smiled wanly. “Lee is gay. No blonde women in his bed.”

Sam’s left eyebrow lifted. “Nothing about that was in the report.”

“The cops didn’t ask me.”

“And you didn’t offer.”

“I’d promised Lee.”

“No one else close to Lee mentioned it either.”

“He didn’t tell our parents,” Kate said. “He didn’t want to hurt them. He never told anybody from his childhood but me.”

“How about the people he worked with?”

“Mandel Inc. wouldn’t have cared, once Dad got past the shock of his only son being gay. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for some of the other courier services he freelanced for, especially Ted Sizemore’s operation. Sizemore has the reputation of wanting only heterosexual white males and just enough ethnic females to keep the government off his back. So does Global Runner, for that matter, and Lee also did a lot of work for them.”

“So, other than anonymous lovers, you’re the only one in the world who knew that Lee was gay?”

Her eyes narrowed at the neutral expression Sam wore and the cynicism in his cold blue eyes. “You don’t believe me.”

“I’m trying to figure out why Lee told you his deepest secret. You have any guesses?”

She hesitated, then decided it probably wouldn’t matter; Lee needed justice, not old secrets. “I knew before he did. Girls loved him, and he loved them, but it was the same way he loved me. Affection. No sparks. The night he came back from the senior prom, I was there because I’d come home for Lee’s graduation.”

When Kate hesitated, Sam sipped coffee and waited.

She closed her eyes, remembering. And in remembering, knowing all over again how much she loved and missed her baby brother. Since she couldn’t pace in the small kitchen, she began making a sandwich even though she wasn’t hungry.

“Lee tapped on my door and asked if we could talk,” Kate said as she opened the refrigerator. “The moment he came in the room I could tell he’d been drinking. He sat on the floor by my bed and started talking about his girlfriend. He’d broken up with her.”

“Why?”

“She wanted sex. He couldn’t. Not with her. Her brother, however, turned Lee on big time, but he couldn’t say that to her, didn’t even want to admit it to himself.” Tears magnified Kate’s dark eyes. “Lee said he’d tried to kill himself on the way home but yanked the wheel aside at the last instant. He sat on the floor and sobbed about how worthless he was, what a disappointment to his father.”

The refrigerator door slammed. Blindly, Kate went to work slicing the leftover turkey she’d found.

“I grabbed him and hugged him and told him that he wasn’t worthless,” she said, “that he was bright and funny and handsome and kind and an all-around wonderful pain in the ass, and if he ever tried anything so stupid again I’d kill him myself.”

Sam would have smiled but the pain Kate was feeling was too real.

“We talked for a long time, long enough for him to get sober. He said if I promised not to tell anyone that he was gay, he wouldn’t try killing himself ever again.” She ignored the tears sliding down her cheeks. “I promised. He went away to college and neither of us mentioned that night again. But he never dated. Women, that is.”

Sam watched Kate slice turkey and then tomatoes with a knife he could have used for shaving.

“The report I read was real specific about the blonde,” Sam said neutrally. “She wasn’t the first either. The impression from observers and acquaintances and family is that Lee likes women.”

“He does. He just doesn’t want sex with them. He is everyone’s best friend and nobody’s lover. Female, that is.” Kate stacked a second
piece of bread on the sandwich and sliced through with a slashing motion of the blade. “He is a good, kind, loving man. He had a lot to offer someone, and he’d finally found a man he wanted to settle down with and—damn!”

With the back of her right hand, Kate swiped at the tears that wouldn’t stop. The knife blade flashed near her face. She ignored it.

Sam gently pried the wicked blade free. “Easy, now. That thing could shave steel.”

Her fist hit the counter. “I hate sniveling.”

“So do I. You’re crying because you’ve lost someone you love. Big difference.”

She shuddered and fought for control. “Then you believe me?”

“Yes.”
Until I catch you lying.

“They didn’t.”

“Who?”

“The damned FBI agents I went back to again and again whenever I turned up something I thought would make them take an interest in going to work on Lee’s disappearance.”

“Did they?”

She made a disgusted sound. “They patted me on the head, said something about giving false information to federal agents, and sent me out the door.”

Sam’s eyebrow went up. That too hadn’t been in the report. “Yeah, well, the stuff that doesn’t agree with official theories often gets left out. Simple fact of bureaucratic life.”

Kate watched him with tear-drenched, determined eyes. “Voice of experience?”

He smiled sardonically and wondered why he felt more kinship with this sad little con artist than he did with ninety-five percent of the people he worked with.

“Do you know what car rental agency Lee preferred?” Sam asked.

“FirstCall. My father’s company has a deal with them.”

“Which airport would Lee have used that day?”