The Harry Starke Series: Books 1-3: The Harry Starke Series Boxset Page 40

  I went home. It was just after two o’clock that afternoon when I flopped down on the sofa to nap. I set the alarm on my iPhone for four o’clock, and then the next thing I knew was an unearthly chiming when it woke me up. The two hours, so it seemed, had gone by in a blink.

  I stripped, showered, shaved, dressed in what Kate called my “bad boy gear”, black T-shirt, black jeans, black Bruno Magli Ernelio sneakers. It was then I realized I didn’t have a gun. Chattanooga PD had all three. I called Kate and asked for at least one of them to be released. She said she’d do her best, and that if she could, she’d bring it with her.

  That, my girl, is just not good enough. I ain’t going on a jaunt like this naked.

  I looked at my watch. It was 4:45. Damn! I grabbed the rest of my gear and ran down the stairs to the garage. If the traffic was light, I might just have time....

  It was, but I made a call to Carter’s to get the paperwork started and that I was on my way. When I got there, the weapon and the paperwork were ready for me. I was in there less than twenty minutes, and only ten minutes late to the office.

  We wasted no time. I gathered the crew together: Kate, Lonnie, Bob, and I had Mike drive us all over to Royal Mountain Drive in Bob’s Pathfinder. It was a bit of a squeeze, but we made it. When everyone was inside the house, I had Mike drive three blocks and park, as far away from the Sattler family residence as he could but still be handy if we needed him.

  I walked into the house and the stink hit me like a solid wall. The air was still off and the rot had continued. I hoped Amanda’s broadcast would stir the pot, and that the killer would move quickly. If not, we were in for a long and nauseating night.

  We sat in the kitchen, around the breakfast table and watched the Channel 7 News at Six on our iPads. I was beginning to think it was a bust. At 6:15, Amanda still had not appeared. Finally, at 6:25, they showed her outside the house, mike in hand, and she made her pitch. It wasn’t quite what we’d discussed in my office, but it was close enough, and she was damned good. Even I believed her.

  I looked out of one of the front windows, but there was no sign of her or her Channel 7 car. They must have recorded the piece earlier.

  Great job, Amanda.

  And we settled down to wait, talking almost in whispers, though there was no reason why we should. I didn’t expect anything to happen until well after dark, and it didn’t, and so we waited, and we waited.

  Everyone had taken cover, hiding in other rooms. I was just inside the den, just off the hallway that led from the living room to the master bedroom. Kate and Lonnie were on the floor in the kitchen, behind the counter, seated on cushions from the sofa in the living room. Bob was at the top of the stairs on the landing.

  Finally, after several calls from Mike and Amanda, I turned on my iPad and we watched the clip again on News at Eleven. This time, it was the first thing up.

  Thank you, Amanda.

  It was well after midnight. I was sitting there in the den, in the dark, eyes closed, daydreaming, going over what we’d learned during the past two weeks, when it hit me. Suddenly, I thought I knew who the killer was.

  Oh... my... God. No. It can’t be....

  It was at that moment when I heard a noise outside the French doors in the living room, and I was immediately drawn back into the land of the living. It must have been the sound of a key in the lock that I heard. Then I heard the door open. I crept out of the den on my hands and knees. Slowly, I crossed the couple of yards into the foyer where I had an uninterrupted view of the big room.

  Shrouded in darkness, I could just make out a shadowy figure, obviously dressed from head to toe in black. Whoever it was, was on one knee, scanning the books in the right-hand shelf with a tiny LED flashlight. Finally, it found what it was looking for, pulled the book from the shelf, opened it, nodded, closed it, and turned toward the open French door.

  “Hello, Wendy,” I said, rising to my feet and turning on my flashlight. “Find what you were looking for?”

  She gasped, turned, and ran straight out of the open door. I didn’t have time to react before Kate hurtled past me. The girl was no match for the long-legged, ultra-fit cop. She caught her in the middle of the lawn, less than a dozen yards from the house, and brought her down with a flying tackle that Aaron Donald would have been proud of. She dragged her to her feet, snapped the cuffs over her wrists and steered her back inside.

  Surrounded by a ring of flashlights, Kate dragged the ski-mask off the girl’s head. Even then, I still wasn’t sure who was under that mask, but I had a good idea. It came to me while I was sitting there in the dark, in Tom’s den. Up until that moment, I’d thought it was probably Stephanie Sattler.

  Well, I’ll be damned. I was right. Wendy Brewer. Shit. This girl has no motive....

  But she did.

  Kate called for backup and within minutes a half-dozen cruisers arrived, lights flashing and sirens howling.

  Why do they do that?

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to attend her interrogation, but the upshot of it all was that Wendy was charged with second-degree murder. There would be a plea, of course, but for now, Wendy Brewer was a guest of the State of Tennessee, and would be for many years to come.

  I didn’t get home until after four o’clock that morning. Mike dropped us all at the office, and I left a note for Jacque telling her I wouldn’t be in until after lunch, and that I wasn’t to be disturbed, by anyone, for any reason. Then I drove home and went to bed.

  I must have died, because the next thing I knew it was almost seven o’clock, and I wouldn’t have woken even then if it hadn’t been for the warm, naked body that slipped under the covers and spooned me.

  “Kate, I’m gonna have to get that key back from you one of these days.”

  “Not a chance, big fella,” she said, sliding her hand down my belly. “Ummm, nice. You really are a big boy. Can I have some, please?”

  She could, and she did. In fact, she had a lot, and so did I.

  -----

  We didn’t go in to work at all that day. We lay in bed until well after noon. It was the most pleasant of mornings I’d experienced in many a long month. I think Kate must have enjoyed it, too, because she made no effort to leave.

  Finally, after we’d showered together, and... well... we got around to talking about Wendy Brewer.

  “I always liked her for it,” Kate said, as she sipped her third cup of coffee and gazed out over the river. We were seated on loungers on the patio, enjoying what probably would be the last of the summer sunshine. I was wearing boxers, she only her bra and panties.

  “Oh, bull,” I said. “You had no more idea who it was than I did. Hell, I didn’t figure it out myself until a few minutes before she arrived.”

  She laughed. It was that throaty gurgling laugh that turned my stomach inside out, and that was not all it did.

  Geez, how I’d missed that laugh.

  “No,” she said, “I didn’t. I thought for sure it was Stephanie. She had the motive. I’m certain Sattler had been screwing her for years. She also had access to the gun, so she had the means, and she lived less than two hundred yards away, so she had the opportunity. I didn’t think Brewer had any of those.”

  “So, you conducted Brewer’s interview, right?”

  She nodded.

  “So did she confess? Why did she do it?”

  “She did. She’s a whole lot smarter than we gave her credit for. She caught him with his pants down, literally. She said she had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon, and she did, but she got back early and saw that Cassell’s and Jessica Steiner’s cars were still in Sattler’s drive.”

  She took another sip of coffee.

  “She left without going into the house, but she came back later that afternoon, much later and found Cassell’s car was gone, but Steiner’s was still there. She drove around the block, parked the car, came back to the house through the backyard, just as she did last night, and let herself in the French door. She had key
s to all the doors. She saw Tom and Steiner doing the nasty in the master bedroom, and she left again without them seeing her.

  “She came back later. Steiner was gone. Tom was alone. There was a confrontation. She grabbed the gun out of the desk drawer, made him get down on his knees, and she shot him, then she realized what she’d done. In a panic, she wiped the gun, put it in Tom’s hand, then she grabbed a book from the bookshelf and fired a second shot into it, leaving gunshot residue on his hand, and put it back on the shelf. I asked her why she didn’t take it with her. She said she didn’t know; just didn’t think to do it. Her final act was to replace one of the two empty casings with a live one from the desk drawer, leaving only one spent cartridge in the cylinder. She was even smart enough to make sure the empty was in the firing position.”

  She paused and took a sip from the glass of iced tea.

  “The perfect suicide,” Kate continued. “At least it would have been, if she hadn’t done it on the spur of the moment, and without thinking. If she’d taken her time, given it a little thought, shot him in the temple instead of behind his ear, we never would have known.

  “She wasn’t worried about prints or any other forms of trace. Shit, Harry, they all watch too much CSI on TV these days. She knew her prints, hair, skin cells, whatever, were all over the house, and couldn’t be used as evidence, even if they were on the book, because she’d been virtually living there for the past ten years. She opened the book and fired into the pages, thinking it would never be found, and she was right. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d never would have found it.”

  She took another sip of the drink.

  “When she heard that broadcast, that we could accurately age fingerprints, she panicked. She knew she’d handled the book less than two minutes after she’d killed him. So she figured she had to do something about it, just as you said. Now then, smart-ass. You tell me how you figured it was her.”

  “Oh, that was easy. All I had to do was think it through. The problem was, before I was able to relax, in the dark, in Sattler’s den, I couldn’t think straight at all. I had too many other things on my mind.”

  She grinned, impishly. “And that would have been?”

  “You know what it was.... Oh forget it.”

  If you think I’m going to admit that it was you I was thinking about....

  “How did I figure it out? I realized when I was sitting in the dark back there, that Brewer had told me during her first interview that she left Sattler’s place at around one o’clock that afternoon, and that was the last time she saw him. She said she had a doctor’s appointment, and she did. I checked the same day as the interview, made a note of it, and then filed it away somewhere in the back of my mind and forgot about it.

  “Last night, however, daydreaming in the dark, I realized that her cell phone records put her back at Sattler’s home from just after four-thirty that afternoon until almost five. I realized then that she had lied to me. Why would she do that? When I thought about it, the answer was obvious. She did it because she caught Sattler screwing Steiner; she saw them. What almost threw me off was that her cell records didn’t place her there at the time of Sattler’s death. Then I remembered what I’d said to Mike. Do you remember?

  “I do,” she said. “You told him something to the effect that the cell phone records only tell us when someone was there; not when they weren’t, right?”

  “Yeah, and that’s the way it was. She was smart enough to know that cell phones can be tracked. So she left hers at home that night. I checked....”

  For several moments, we both sat quietly, staring out into space, and then Kate said, quietly, “You do know it’s not yet over, right?”

  “Right... the money. She didn’t do it, did she? How do you feel about a little action?”

  “Fine. Why?”

  “Trust me. Get dressed. We can come back here later, if you want to.” I dressed in a pair of lightweight tan slacks, a black shirt, and loafers. Two minutes later, Kate walked out of the bedroom. Her hair was swept back in a ponytail, and she was wearing skin-tight jeans, flip flops, and a gaudy, Tennessee Orange tank. Hardly work-related attire, but what the hell; she looked fantastic.

  “Grab your clutch,” I said. “It has your cuffs and Glock in it, right?”

  “Harry, I can’t arrest someone dressed like this, like a hooker.”

  Wow, some hooker.

  “Hooker? I hardly think so, but why not? You look great to me.”

  “Yeah, right. Now I feel so much better. Where are we going?”

  “Patience, girl. You’ll see.”

  Chapter 35

  We arrived outside the Sattler home on Stony Mountain Drive at two o’clock.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Kate said.

  “No, I’m not kidding.”

  “Momma Sattler? Stephanie? I don’t think so.”

  “Bear with me, Kate. Just stay quiet, and follow my lead, okay?”

  She nodded. We got out of the car and walked to the front door. I thumbed the bell push, and we waited.

  Gloria Sattler was dressed to kill. That is, to kill any chance of arousing even a hint of desire. Her hair was a mess. She wore no makeup. Her backside and thighs strained against the dirty, light-gray spandex yoga sweats over which she wore a similarly colored sweat shirt, several sizes too big. Both bore the stains of housework and at least one meal and were in dire need of laundering.

  “Lieutenant Gazzara, Mr. Starke. What do you want?”

  “We’d like a word with you and Stephanie. Is she in?”

  “Yes, she is. Come in.”

  Stephanie Sattler was a completely different story. She came downstairs, stepping slowly, her right hand on the rail, reminding me of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She was barefoot, wearing a short, gray leather skirt, and a white blouse; simple, sophisticated.

  “Please, sit down,” Gloria said, waving her hand at the chairs around the breakfast table. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Tea?”

  We declined and sat down together at the table. The two Sattlers did likewise, on the opposite side.

  “So,” Stephanie said, as she looked at Kate. “What is it you want to talk to us about? You caught the killer. It was Wendy. So it’s over, right?”

  Kate looked sideways at me, nodded, and said, “Go ahead. It’s your party.”

  “No, Miss Sattler,” I said. “It’s not over. Not yet. We still have to find out what happened to the money.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” she replied. “It had to be one of the partners.”

  I stared hard at her. She held my gaze, her face expressionless. We must have sat looking at each other like that for thirty seconds or more, neither one of us blinking.

  “You want to tell us about it, Stephanie?”

  “What?” Gloria exploded, and started to rise from her seat.

  Stephanie put a hand on her mother’s arm, pulled her down, and sighed, resignedly.

  “It’s okay, Mom. They know.”

  She sat with her head down, looking at the table top, her hands clasped together in front of her.

  “I went to see my father that Tuesday afternoon. I wanted his laptop. He was there. So was Jessica Steiner. They were together in his bedroom, screwing like a couple of dogs, literally; it was fascinating to watch.” She was staring off into space, as if she was replaying it again in her mind.

  “Please, Stephanie. Don’t do this. They’ll lock you up....” Her mother was now sobbing quietly.

  Stephanie sat back in her chair, ran her fingers through her hair and looked sideways at her mother, then back at me. There were tears welling up in her eyes. I couldn’t help it. I felt sorry for her.

  “I wanted him dead,” she said. “I wanted to kill him myself. In fact, I made up my mind to do it months ago, when I saw how he was looking at Nicola, but I didn’t; I couldn’t. I tried once. I took Mom’s Glock, but when it came to it, I just couldn’t pull the trigger.”

 
; She sniffed, got up from the table, grabbed a box of tissues from the breakfast bar, and sat down again, wiped her eyes and nose, sighed heavily, and continued.

  “He’d been abusing me for years, since my eleventh birthday. He was screwing Wendy at the same time, since she was fifteen. She liked it, the little bitch; she thought she owned him. For some reason, I don’t know what it was, he never bothered with Julie, but Nicola: oh yeah, I saw it coming. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at her, and I couldn’t allow it. She’s almost eleven; the same age as I was when he started molesting me. He was about to dump Wendy, I could tell, and he’d been fooling around with the Steiner woman for a couple of months, but I knew by the way he watched Nicola it wouldn’t last. The filthy bastard.” She was crying now. “He destroyed me, turned me off men, forever. I can’t stand to be touched.”

  “Why didn’t you tell someone?” Kate said.

  “Oh I did... I did.” She looked sideways at her mother, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I told you, didn’t I, Mother? But you didn’t, you wouldn’t, believe me. But you did in the end, didn’t you? You caught him, screwing me. You caught him in my bed, naked, on top of me.”

  She got up from the table again, went to the kitchen sink, poured herself a glass of water, drank deeply, and then returned to her seat.

  “That’s when she divorced him, screwed every damned dollar out of him she could. But it didn’t stop, even then, and she wouldn’t do anything about it. She just looked the other way and pretended it wasn’t happening. Finally, it just stopped. He never said a word; never said why; nothing. He just stopped. I guess he decided he’d had enough of me. I was too old. He was still screwing Wendy, but not me. I thought it was all over, and for me it was, but by then I hated all men, and him in particular.... If he’d have laid a finger on Nicola, I don’t know what I’d have done. I guess I would have had to go through with it and shoot his sorry ass.”