Simon Says_. Walk (Kate Morgan #6)(31)
Author: Dale Mayer
As she parked at the station, she hopped out and realized that she’d put her phone on Silent and had missed a call. It was Simon. She quickly called him back, as she walked in the station.
“Hey, how bad is it?” he asked her.
“It’s bad,” she replied succinctly, “as in, it’s big bad.”
“I don’t even want to know what that means.” He groaned.
“What would be your worst nightmare right now?” she asked curiously.
“That it’s another one of this asshole’s victims,” he replied immediately, “but then the note on Luca’s body already made that clear. Yet I didn’t even know Luca.”
“But he worked for you, and maybe all this killer needed was somebody close enough to you that he could hate enough to do this to,” she suggested casually. “I don’t see a rational mind in all this, but I do see very rational thinking in working out this plan. However, the motive behind it? … I don’t get it …yet. Still, somebody went to a great deal of effort to take somebody in your sphere and torture and kill them.”
“But we don’t know that, or do you?” he asked immediately.
“Luca’s feet were torn to ribbons. I’ve asked the coroner to compare his injuries to Patricia’s.”
She heard Simon suck back a breath, as he realized the implication. “Jesus.”
“I won’t get any forensics back today, or tomorrow, although I could try and push them, yet that’ll put me in hot water too.”
“No, I understand,” Simon acknowledged. “You know that I never wanted this to happen, right?”
“Both victims would agree with you,” she replied. “And this Luca guy was supposed to be home with his wife. However, she had no in-person contact for the last four days.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that he’s been gambling at the pool hall and staying away from home these previous four days now. A weakness which our killer then likely used to connect with Luca, then exploit. Maybe the gambling and the drinking made Luca a good victim,” she noted, with a long sigh.
She stopped in the lobby and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m back at the station. Luca’s wife is pretty broken up about him. However, I think the anger about Luca staying at the hotel instead of at home is hiding a certain amount of fear. Then, when I told her that Luca had been spending a lot of time in the pool hall again, she got quite irate.”
“In other words, he was supposed to have stopped, and this proves that he’s been lying to her.”
“Yeah, more or less,” she confirmed. “Yet she didn’t know anybody who would hate Luca, and, as far as she knew, he didn’t really know you either.”
“Did you ask her about his reputation?”
“Yeah,” Kate said, with a note of humor. “She says that he’s a great guy, and he deserves a second chance, and that’s why she pushed her brother to give the job to him.”
“Yeah, and her brother is already in hot water over that because he didn’t clear it with me, and he hired somebody that’s family, which I’m against, unless I know full well what’s going on. Plus I lost a lot of good people over this because of Joe and Luca, which is causing all kinds of backups in my rehabs.”
“So, in a sense, the killer did screw up your life over this.”
“Yep, a mess to clean up.”
She checked her watch, realizing how late it was. She picked up her pace.
“Hang on a minute. You’re thinking that’s what this is ultimately about, for the killer to mess up my business world?”
“I would hope there’s a whole lot more behind it to motivate these murders,” she replied, “and that we’re not dealing with somebody operating on such a superficial level, but the essence is that this brother-in-law of your foreman, by hiring him, messed up your life because he screwed up a lot of your solid employees, and they quit on you. Now, by killing Luca, the investigation will land on you.”
“I don’t see that so much,” Simon countered.
“Hey, I had another thought. Is there …” She took a deep breath, “You won’t like this question, but is there anything in your life that you don’t want investigated. See? I’m not making myself very clear, but considering that now we have an active investigation, where we will potentially dig deeper into your life—and I know how you feel about that, but we don’t really have a choice. Anyway, so my point is, was this what the killer wanted? As if he’s thinking that you got away with something, and any investigation into your personal and professional life would bring it to the surface, maybe even implicate you in something else?”
“I have no idea what that could be,” he said in frustration. “I can’t think of anything that would fit that line of thought, but that doesn’t mean that somewhere along the line someone got their feelings hurt, with no malice on my part,” he shared in a resigned tone. “People take inferences and insults where none were intended.”
“That’s very true, but to kill certain people and to torture them, … as this killer’s doing, there must be a whole lot more than … curiosity involved. Something much deeper under the surface would have this much stink.”
“Maybe, or maybe not. Maybe it’s a classic case of an asshole looking for an excuse to hurt people. I don’t know. I’ll talk to you later.” And, with that, he disconnected abruptly.
He was rattled. Yet she understood his response.
Wincing, she finished the short trip to her desk and sat down, opened up her notes, and proceeded to document both conversations—with Luca’s wife and with Simon. When a shadow fell across her desk, she looked up to see her sergeant, standing there, glaring. “Can I help you?” she asked Colby.
“I don’t know. You tell me. How is it going?”
“It sucks,” she said in a light tone. “We’ve got another death, quite likely the same thing as happened with Patricia. I’m waiting for forensics for that confirmation though.” She shrugged. “It seems Patricia’s killer went after an employee who worked at Simon’s company—a construction worker on one of the rehab houses he’s got underway.”
“What would be a motivation for that?” Colby asked, puzzled. “Particularly considering Simon hires how many workers? He has multiple rehabs up and running, from what we know.”