She set down her cleaning caddies and took a few steps inside, then shut the door and looked around. “Señor? Señor Gallagher, you home?”
No answer.
“Señor?”
Out of town, she decided, then got to work tidying the kitchen. There really wasn’t much to do—the sinks were empty and still polished from her visit last week, the granite countertops dust-free and uncluttered. The only things in the dishwasher were two dirty wine glasses; maybe he’d had a date. Señor Gallagher had money and he was good-looking, too. He probably got a lot of dates.
Two glasses were certainly not enough to run a load, so she washed and dried them by hand, then carefully slid them into place in the rack above the center island where dozens of other wine glasses of different shapes and sizes hung. Who needed so many glasses? Especially somebody who was never home.
The kitchen trash was empty and didn’t seem to be the source of the off-smell, but she sprayed disinfectant in it for good measure. Sometimes rotting fruit or vegetables or meat juices seeped through the liner and got into the bin. Nothing a good bleach and scour wouldn’t take care of if it came to that.
Satisfied with the kitchen, she went through the apartment room by room, dusting and polishing and vacuuming. The powder room was as tidy as the rest of the apartment, except for a vial of cocaine sitting on the vanity. Maybe that’s why Americans called them powder rooms, she chuckled to herself, pleased that her English was getting good enough to make jokes.
It wasn’t the first time Señor Gallagher had forgotten to put away his drugs, but at least he never left used condoms on his bedside table, and for that she was grateful. Some people left embarrassing messes to clean, messes that made her blush or made her sick to her stomach. And she’d caught people in … situations. But they didn’t care what she saw or what she thought. She was as good as invisible, no more important than a picture hanging on the wall. Much less important than some pictures hanging in the houses she cleaned, she was sure.
But she was discreet, which was why she had a salary and a nice place to live with enough free time to take on other good-paying clients who valued her silence. No matter how loco they were, she kept her head down, didn’t touch anything that shouldn’t be touched, and did the job she was paid to do.
The guest room hadn’t ever been slept in as far as she could tell, so she left the bed made, dusted, then walked down the hall to his office. The door was open just a crack. She paused, thought about knocking, and then it hit her nose. That smell. Trash that hadn’t been taken out.
She fingered the cross around her neck, pushed open the door, and started screaming.
* * *
Nolan and Crawford stood over the body of Ryan Gallagher, laying faceup on the floor of his home office, lodged between a Herman Miller chair and a chrome and glass desk. One flat, sightless eye was fixed on the ceiling, the other obliterated by a close-range bullet. There wasn’t much blood. Small caliber, minimal gore; the slug probably hadn’t made it out of his skull. His nose was pulped and it wasn’t from the gunshot.
“He pissed off the wrong guy,” Crawford commented. “Argument, broken nose, the gun comes out and Gallagher’s dead. Someone had to have heard something. Even if he got shot with a silenced .22, that still makes some noise. So does an argument.”
“Not enough noise. He’s been dead a while and nobody called it in. If you live anywhere central in this city, you stop hearing things.” Nolan knew this from her own experience living in loud, scruffy Echo Park. Even as a cop, she’d learned to block out the voices raised in anger and the pops that might be the discharge of a weapon. More often than not, the arguments didn’t go anywhere, and the pops were either vehicular backfire or asshole kids with cherry bombs or Black Cats.
She looked around the tidy, organized office. No cameras, but not a big surprise. This was a high-dollar security building where most people owned their units. There was a gate and a guard and if you got past those obstacles, there was a twenty-four-hour desk attended by another guard. The guest log, the guards, and the lobby cameras might tell them everything they needed to know, at least if the killer had been stupid enough to run the security gauntlet as a registered guest. Highly unlikely.
On the walls, there were framed posters of bands and several photos of the deceased in a tuxedo on a red carpet somewhere, looking chummy with rockers she didn’t recognize, and old men, also in tuxedoes—the widely varied fauna omnipresent at all award ceremonies. “His phone and computer are still here. No signs of robbery, struggle, or B and E. He knew his killer.”
Crawford tipped his head and nodded. “Seems to me he knew his killer well enough that he or she had a key. The housekeeper said the deadbolt was locked when she arrived, and the only way you can engage one of those is either from inside or from the outside with a key. Gallagher sure as hell didn’t lock it, and the killer sure as hell didn’t jump out a fourteenth-floor window.”
“They could have stolen his keys.”
Crawford slipped on gloves, patted down the corpse, and withdrew a loaded BMW key chain from the pocket of his cargo shorts. “Nope.”
Nolan sighed. “If the killer came with a silenced weapon, it was premeditated.”
“Maybe a music industry beef. Not to sound cynical about the entertainment biz, but in the photos he’s wearing a tux, so he’s an exec, which means he’s probably screwed a lot of people over.”
“I wouldn’t give somebody I’d screwed over the key to my apartment.”
“Girlfriend could make sense. Sometimes guys are too dense to know they’ve screwed over their girlfriends.” Crawford gestured to the brown vial filled with powder that sat on the glass desktop. “Or maybe he just had some unpaid bills.”
“I wouldn’t give a drug dealer a key to my apartment, either.”
“Girlfriend or relative makes the most sense. The housekeeper has a key, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say she didn’t do it. We’ve got another problem, Mags. She cleaned most of the place before she got to the office and found him. She could have vacuumed up a shitload of evidence.”
“We’ve got the bag.”
“Crime Scene’s going to love that.”
“They’ve dealt with worse.”
“I know they have, but they’re going to throw an epic tantrum and so is the lab. Take my advice. Drop it off, turn, and run like hell, especially if you see Sweet Genevieve. They’ll get the job done, but they won’t ever forget it.”
“Then I’ll let you drop it off.”
“Sorry, sweet pea, but you’re on your own. Continuing education and all that. You won’t be a real detective until you piss off the lab.”
Nolan gave the body wide berth and walked to the other side of the desk where there was a thin stack of papers. It was a collection of bills, contracts, and what appeared to be gig lists with cities and dates. And at the bottom, a complaint and summons. “He was being sued.”
Crawford scratched at a missed patch of whiskers on his jaw. “Huh. If this guy was the one doing the suing, we’d have a slam dunk.”
Chapter Eighteen