Let Justice Descend

Book 5: Gardiner and Renner Novel

by Lisa Black

Genres: Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Three days before a key election, U.S. Senator Diane Cragin is electrocuted on her own doorstep—a shocking twist in an already brutal political race. Cragin’s chief of staff is quick to blame rival Joey Green, a city development director who’s had his hand in every till in town for over twenty years. Maggie and Jack have their own theories, especially after discovering a fortune in cash in the senator’s safe. But as they follow the money through the treacherous landscape of Cleveland politics, they find many more millions in play—and more suspects. As Jack says, “Anyone can be dangerous, when they have what they think is a good reason.” He should know. Now a Herald reporter is perilously close to discovering the truth about Jack’s penchant for acting as both detective and executioner. With each passing hour, the stresses of the impending election expose new fractures and corruption at the city’s highest levels. And as one murder leads to another, and another, Maggie and Jack’s only hope of stopping a killer is an alliance that’s growing ever more fragile.

Release date: October 29, 2019

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

“Well. That’s not something you see every day,” Maggie said.

The woman’s body stretched along the walkway to her door, her feet, still in stylish heels, on the concrete slab and her back along the flagstones. Dead eyes stared up at the gray November sky, and a few colored leaves had fallen onto the neatly buttoned but damp suit coat. A briefcase and an overstuffed tote bag had fallen from her left hand, and her right clutched a knot of keys. No blood dried in the crisp air, no struggle had mussed her perfectly curled hair, nothing about her gave the slightest clue to her demise—save for the black streak on her right hand.

“First time I’ve ever seen something like this,” Riley agreed, gazing not at the woman but at her front door.

Jack, as usual, said nothing.

Maggie Gardiner had already taken her “overall” photos—the yard, the exterior wall of the house, the body—and now turned to what had killed the woman. The front door to the woman’s house had a heavy metal screen door with a design of curlicues and latticework, made to fit its surroundings, a brick century home. Its front yard seemed more like a courtyard, ringed by an eight-foot-high brick wall with a matching gate that led to the street, where the victim had parked her car. No driveway, no garage, but only one street from the lake and surrounded by other old-money homes on the edge of Cleveland’s city limits. The cute courtyard, with a few wrought-iron bistro tables, mini lights, and even a Beer Meister kegerator under the protection of the elms, gave Maggie and the homicide detectives the ability to work in isolation. The high wall kept the dead woman’s situation from both offending the delicate sensibilities and feeding the prurient interests of neighbors, media, and onlookers. A mourning dove sat in the branches above them, cooing a morose sigh to complement the scene.

From the woman’s ice-cold body and complete rigor, she had apparently lain there all night, unseen, until staff had arrived to escort her to her first appointment of the day and had found her.

The woman’s own home had killed her. Someone had cut the extralong cord to the squat kegerator, then peeled the wires inside the cord away from one another. A black-coated one had been snaked up the side of the metal screen door as far as it would reach, about three-quarters of the height. Its end had been stripped to the bare wire and wound firmly around one of the curlicues—quite visible in the daylight but tough to see in the dark, and Maggie assumed it would have been dark. The clothing told her the woman had come from work or some professional event, and the days had grown short. Tired, approaching her own door in the night, she would not have noticed the black wire.

Maggie noted the motion-sensor floodlight over the door, but it either wasn’t functioning or had a light sensor so that it didn’t come on during the day, because it didn’t light up now.

From this same plug cord, the killer had taken the white-coated wire and connected it to a metal grate with the proportions of an undersized welcome mat. This he placed on the concrete slab in front of the door.

Then all he had to do was plug the cord back into the wall . . . and wait.

Jack Renner, homicide detective with more secrets than most of his suspects, had materialized at her elbow without a sound. It made her start, but not as much as it used to. Jack was tall, dark, decidedly not handsome, and a killer. She knew that and yet told no one, a fact that, even after six months, still astounded her when she woke to it each morning. “I get it,” he said aloud. “When she stepped on the grounded plate and then touched the handle, her body completed the circuit.”

His partner, Thomas Riley, stared down at the body. “I’d expect more . . . more. Wouldn’t she, like, burst into flames?” Maggie raised one eyebrow at him, and his fair skin colored until he protested: “Well, we had a guy on a construction site who got tangled in a live wire, and he wound up practically cut in half.”

“She’s got the mark on her hand, and she’ll probably have a similar scorch on one or both of her feet,” Maggie said. They couldn’t move or examine the body until an investigator from the Medical Examiner’s office arrived. “That’s fairly typical. Electrocutions can vary quite a bit, depending on how much power and where it goes. Frankly, it seems like an iffy method of murder.”

Jack said, “Maybe. Wearing those probably helped.” He gestured to the woman’s fashionable shoes. “Thin soles, no rubber. Plus it rained last night.”

Maggie examined the grate and the concrete slab without touching it, though the fire department had already pulled the plug from the outlet. The surface had sagged over the years, caving until grime accumulated in its shallow depth, providing the perfect resting spot for the grate. “It was already dirty, so she didn’t notice the grate against the dark area. He could have even brushed some leaves over to disguise it. But wouldn’t it have been, like, humming? How did it not set the house on fire?”

“They’re not touching—the screen door and the grate.” Riley stepped closer and pointed to the door’s sill, two inches above the ground. “Each one alone is static, perfectly safe until—”

“Until she grabs the screen door handle and completes the circuit.”

“Exactly. Then she dies, gravity takes over, her body falls back, her hand pulls away. The circuit is broken, and the door goes back to being a mere door. No fire, no sparking, no wildly zinging electric meter. Kind of ingenious, really.” He caught her look. “Don’t glare. It’s, um, definitely different. Iffy, like you said. If that light worked and she noticed the wires. If the leaves blew away so she wondered why there was a metal grate in front of her door. If she had been wearing tennis shoes, or felt some static just before she touched the latch, or if some unlucky UPS guy came to drop off a package—assuming she left the outer gate unlocked during the day, anyone could have wandered in here—or if the outlet had a ground fault interrupter, it might not have worked.”

Maggie glanced toward the covered outlet under which the cord lay among the scattered leaves. After nearly being blown up a few weeks earlier, she knew everything she had ever wanted to know about ground fault interrupters. “Frost-free refrigerators don’t plug into outlets with GFIs because of the freezing-warming cycles. And aren’t they two-twenty?”

“A small one like that, I don’t know,” Riley said. “Even one-ten could have killed her, what with the wetness, thin shoes, no gloves, and at her age her heart might not be that great any more. She’s sixty-two, eight years older than me, and my doc’s already giving me a hard time about cholesterol and coronary arteries. So electrocution might have seemed a pretty safe bet, as methods of murder go.”

“Please don’t sound so admiring,” Maggie said without meaning it. By now, she knew Thomas Riley better than that.

He continued as if she hadn’t spoken, still thinking the scenario through. “Even if it didn’t work, he wasn’t out a lot of work or effort. He didn’t have to enter the house or bring anything with him except wire strippers and this metal grate, which—correct me if I’m wrong, Miss CSI—doesn’t seem to have a spot on it wide enough to get a decent print from.”

Maggie looked again at the latticework of metal strips, none more than perhaps an eighth inch wide. “Probably not, no, especially after the rain.”

“Or the plug?”

“Rubber covered and exposed to the elements? Unlikely. I’ll swab for contact DNA, but if he wore gloves—”

“And he’s an idiot if he didn’t. So he doesn’t set up a slam dunk but then he doesn’t leave us any clues, either. Unless our dead lady has surveillance cameras set up, and I don’t see any. Or if the neighbors saw someone dipping into this yard, and they haven’t even poked their heads out to see what all the cop cars are for, so I’m not too optimistic.”

“The perfect murder?” Maggie wondered.

“There’s no such thing,” Jack said. And he, of course, would know.

Within a half hour both the ME investigators and the search warrant arrived. It never ceased to amaze Maggie how finding a dead body on the stoop was not considered sufficient probable cause to enter a home, but there it was, and in any case she had been too busy with the scene to be in much of a hurry.

The kegerator fridge did not yield any fingerprints, not even with superglue—only a lot of water marks and dirt. Ditto for the outlet and the decorative grill of the screen door, where the black wire had been attached. The white one had been snaked along the edge of the house in the crack between the foundation and the concrete stoop, and accumulated dirt in the crack helped hide the white rubber coating. In terms of fingerprints, the dirt scarcely mattered, since the wires were too narrow for any usable latents, but she collected the length anyway, planning to take a much closer look at it in her lab. She did the same with the metal grate. The blanket of leaves, charming in their reds and browns and golds, made her nervous. The killer could have dropped his glove or his wallet or his business card on his way out and they might miss it in all that debris. But she didn’t particularly want to rake the entire yard, either.

Meanwhile the detectives took the keys from the dead woman’s hand and confirmed that the fob did, indeed, unlock a newish sedan parked at the curb. The front seats were tidy, but the rear ones held a variety of papers, folders, and brochures, all having slid around willy-nilly until no order could be detected. Three empty paper coffee cups, each rimmed with the same dark red lipstick as on the face of the victim, sat on the floorboard in front of the passenger’s seat. The trunk held only a spare tire and an unopened set of jumper cables. Maggie photographed all of this but left it in place until they could decide what might be of significance.

In the grass behind the large oak, she found a black rubber mat with an open weave design—obviously what had been the victim’s welcome mat. The mat was larger and thicker than the metal grate, but what with the leaves, the dark, perhaps hurrying through the rain, the victim did not notice the difference. She would have felt it with that last step, but in that instance it became too late, her hand already on the electrified door handle.

On a whim Maggie looked inside the small refrigerator, but it didn’t seem to be missing a black wire shelf. It held a pony keg, shiny and secure and—she shook the entire unit—apparently empty. The fridge had probably been unplugged now that the season for outdoor parties had faded, but Maggie wondered why the owner would leave it outside. But then she didn’t have a garage and would have needed help to lug the thing inside or down to a basement, or maybe Diane Cragin simply hadn’t gotten around to it. Diane Cragin had been very busy and spent a great deal of time out of town, because Diane Cragin was a sitting U.S. senator, R–Ohio.

And that meant, Riley informed her as if Maggie hadn’t already figured that out for herself, that this case was going to be a snafu of epic proportions.

“She had enemies?” Maggie asked.

“She’s a politician. Would you like enemies listed alphabetically or in order of importance?”

He seemed to have paid more attention to politics than either Jack or Maggie, so he filled them in on what he could as the ME investigator, and Maggie examined the body. Diane Cragin had been the duly elected senator from Ohio for twelve years.

Diane Cragin had been campaigning on the usual issues of bringing jobs back to the rust belt and cleaning up food stamp requirements, didn’t hire any tax-free domestic help, didn’t sleep with her interns, and hadn’t created any major scandals that Riley could remember, but . . .

Maggie looked up as the ME investigator removed the senator’s shoes. “But?”

“A Cleveland guy has been running for her seat, Green. He’s head of economic development or something like that. It’s been a pretty nasty campaign—par for the course these days—and he’s accused her of taking kickbacks, promising Ohio one thing and then flying to DC to agitate for the complete opposite, being paid under the table to lobby for the pharmaceuticals with the large hospitals, trading jobs for votes, basically all the same things she accuses him of doing. Politics as usual, in other words.”

“You’re a cynic,” Maggie said.

“Impossible not to be these days.”

Riley told her the unhappy man standing outside the courtyard had been Cragin’s assigned Secret Service agent for this week. He had dropped her off still breathing the night before and had told anyone who would listen that escorting her only as far as the courtyard had been standard procedure for a senator who put a premium on her privacy and, after two terms in office, was accustomed to getting her own way. She had earned a reputation as an uncooperative client, and it got worse during stressful periods—such as these crazy days before Tuesday’s election. So he had left her alive and inside the gate the night before, then saw the body that morning and had to break the gate door to get in.

“Is that it?” Riley asked Maggie.

“That’s it.” A scorch mark along the bottom of the woman’s right foot had burned through her nylons and peeled a small amount of skin, with only a single round burn on the sole of the shoe.

The ME investigator, a young woman with dark skin and dimples, told them, “It doesn’t take much, especially with AC power. Hey, bird,” she said to the dove in the tree, which had been heaving its heavy sighs nonstop, “knock it off.”

Sudden silence, save for the rustle of leaves in the breeze.

“We’ll see if she had any medical conditions that made her more vulnerable. Do we have doctor information?”

“Not yet. We haven’t been inside or done any notifications,” Riley said.

“She’s wearing nylons,” the investigator said, as if she found this more perplexing than using a screen door as a murder weapon. Nylons and pantyhose had been out of style for years. Women now left their legs bare, cutting industry sales by more than half until nylons were rebranded as lingerie or “sheer tights.” Or worn by older women like Diane Cragin, who wished to wear skirts without exposing every age spot, scar, and mole to the public, always so harsh on women’s looks once they passed twenty-five or so.

“It’s gotten chilly,” Maggie pointed out.

The investigator, who had yet to see an age spot mar her perfect skin, shrugged and put Tyvek bags over the late senator’s hands, pulling the drawstring tight to keep them from slipping off. The manicured fingernails would be scraped for trace evidence, not that anyone expected to find it—there had clearly not been a struggle or physical confrontation. She and Maggie turned the body to one side, but nothing waited underneath it except more dead leaves.

“That’s it, then,” the investigator said, pulling off her latex gloves with a definite snap as the body snatchers moved in to load up the earthly remains of Diane Cragin. “You have a fun Halloween? I wanted to wear my sexy vampire costume all last Wednesday, but my supervisor said such frivolity wouldn’t be in good taste.”

Maggie said, “That’s a pity. One does hate to see a good sexy vampire costume go to waste. To be honest, I can’t remember the last time I dressed for Halloween.”

“That’s sad,” the investigator said, and Maggie agreed that, yes, it was. But her life had changed that year, and perhaps such frivolity was no longer in good taste. Either that or she no longer had the taste for it.

She went to photograph the interior of the house with Jack and Riley.

Uniformed officers, armed with guns and the usual strict instructions not to touch anything (except doorknobs, as needed), had used the dead woman’s keys to go inside and “clear” the house. The knob and keyed deadbolt had been securely latched. No one waited there, not family members, pets, or the killer. So the detectives walked behind Maggie as she entered, camera at the ready, hoping that Senator Cragin had left them some clue as to who had wanted her dead.

The bird started up again.

The house had been built one hundred years before but lovingly preserved, and kept clean if not neat. The wool carpets were barely worn, the heavy windows sparkled, and the hardwood floors gleamed despite minor scars. It smelled of dust and ammonia and stale takeout. The entryway presented them with a staircase, a pristine living or sitting room on the right, and a cluttered office/dining room/reception area on the left. Maggie clicked a few overall shots of the pristine side, then ignored it to turn to the messy office. Cardboard boxes held printed brochures with Diane Cragin’s face prominently displayed above the phrase BRINGING JOBS BACK TO OHIO, and Maggie took a moment to study what her victim had looked like when alive. Not really much different than she did when dead, it seemed, though happier, with blond hair and blue eyes and the figure of a middle-aged woman who watched her weight. She formed the perfect, neutral picture of a strong and competent woman. Only her smile kept her from appearing generic: a wide, almost impish grin, as if she knew something that no one else did and had every intention of keeping it that way.

The dining table, which served as a desk or perhaps merely a staging area, also held myriad papers, newspapers, and a list of voting precincts and their captains. Maggie said, “There’s a lot here about polls.”

Riley poked one with a finger. “‘Getting out the likes campaign.’ What does that mean?”

“Facebook,” she told him.

“Ye gods. Hydrocarbon forecast?”

Jack said, “EPA business.”

Riley continued. “Here’s ‘Green hammer points.’ Not green as in environmental, green as in Joe Green. If they’re running against each other, that makes him suspect number one, but isn’t that too . . . what’s the word?”

“Cliché?” Maggie said.

“Easy,” Jack suggested.

“Yeah. Besides, I don’t think politicians assassinate each other as often as they would like. Hell, if they ever shot anything more than rhetoric at each other, the streets would run red and we’d have all the overtime we could handle.”

Just then, one of Maggie’s paper bags started ringing. She had put Diane Cragin’s purse and briefcase into paper bags and left them in the foyer to get them out of the elements, and now the victim’s cell phone rang. No song or cutesy voice, only an insistent beep beep beep like a kitchen timer.

It stopped by the time Maggie pulled on latex gloves and retrieved it from the purse, holding it up for the detectives to see. The screen read “Kelly” with a thumbnail of a young woman with chopped black hair. Automatic screen alerts told them that she had already called twice that morning, at 7:15 and 8:10. It was now coming up on nine a.m. and Kelly had grown impatient, hanging up and then immediately calling a fourth time.

They let this call go to voice mail as well and kept moving through the house. The kitchen had butcher block counters, antique linoleum flooring, and not much food in the fridge among the cans of Red Bull and Mountain Dew. “She likes caffeine,” Maggie commented.

Riley peeked at the shelves. “That stuff will kill you even without two-twenty.”

A modern laundry room at the back of the house had no clothes in the washer or dryer and a door leading to a sort of alley without a yard or a parking space. The back door had both a chain and a deadbolt, both fastened from the inside. Nearby steps led to a cellar with a dirt floor and a set of folding chairs, covered in dust. Aside from that and a number of cardboard boxes of Christmas decorations, it did not appear to be used for anything. Maggie did not think the killer had found the metal grate in the victim’s cellar. Nothing similar to it seemed to be around, nor were there any rectangular-shaped gaps in the dust.

They made their way to the second floor.

“I’m guessing she’s not married,” Maggie said. No one had mentioned family, and she saw no sign of male clothing in the small bedroom.

“Don’t know, actually,” Riley said. “She has two kids, grown now. I only know that because according to Green, they’re both the big corporate types who walk over the little guys she’s supposed to be working for.”

Her paperwork might be messy, but the woman took good care of her clothes. Each item either hung in the closet or sat folded in a drawer, with a few pieces resting in a plastic laundry basket. Cosmetics and creams covered half of the bathroom counter, with two empty coffee cups and a box of tissues on the other side. Maggie had the impression that Diane Cragin spent most of her time in Washington; her local possessions seemed sparse and impersonal. Drawers and cabinets held only aspirin, decongestant, and an expired bottle of lisinopril, 10 mg.

“What’s that for?” Jack asked, crowding into the tiny bathroom with her. His proximity didn’t unsettle her as much as it used to, despite knowing how many criminals he had murdered without benefit of due process.

Perhaps how many, she corrected herself. She probably didn’t know about them all. Jack had been a little fuzzy on details, but then, she hadn’t pressed. The more she knew, the less she could justify her complicity in her own mind.

Best not to ask. Best to focus on the task at hand. And he had abandoned that habit now . . . or so he said.

She told him, “High blood pressure. A mild dose, and high blood pressure doesn’t mean you have a weak heart. I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think it would make her any easier to kill—with electricity, I mean.”

Riley poked his head into the small bathroom. “Anything interesting?”

“BP meds and aspirin,” she said.

“No cocaine? What kind of a senator was she?”

“This whole house feels empty to me. Of course, it’s not that big.”

“She played that up—not living high on the taxpayer’s hogs—but Green says it’s because she spent as little time here as possible,” Riley said. “I guess they rank our representatives every year for how much time they spend with their own constituents, and she’d always be near the bottom.”

“You pay pretty close attention—” Maggie began as she opened a tall, narrow cabinet and promptly forgot what she’d been about to say. Because instead of bath towels and shampoo, she now stared at a tall, narrow safe. “Okay, now we got something a little more interesting.”

Both detectives crowded against her to see—not that they could help it; the room had only about ten square feet of floor space, and the open cabinet door blocked the entryway.

The safe might have been custom built to fit the cabinet, as it cleared the six-by-three-foot interior by millimeters. The logo read PATRIOT SAFE COMPANY, and though it had an oversized combination dial and a heavy handle, it seemed much too shiny to have come with the house.

“That is interesting,” Riley said.

“Nothing strange about having a safe, though,” Jack said. “There’s no one here most of the time. Anyone could look up her schedule online and know the house would be empty.”

His partner said, “But in the bathroom? Why not behind the picture of some ancestor in the living room like it’s supposed to be?”

“Did you watch a lot of Scooby-Doo when you were a kid?” Maggie asked.

“Why do you think I became a cop? Besides, what’s she got to keep in a safe? There’s barely any personal property around. I doubt we’ll find her mother’s pearls on the top shelf.”

Jack ignored these asides. “The search warrant covers this, right?”

“Don’t touch it!” Maggie said. “Let me process for prints first . . . though I doubt I’ll get anything. Why people make safes with a textured finish when that’s the one place you’re really going to want a fingerprint to show—” she grumbled, but the men had already turned away. Raised voices could be heard outside, and Riley crossed the bedroom to look out the window.

“What is it?” Jack asked.

Riley turned to say, “I think it’s Kelly.”

Kelly Henessey turned out to be a slender woman in her late twenties in carefully conservative slacks; athletic shoes carefully designed to look like dress shoes; and short, swingy hair carefully designed to look as if it had been cut with a pair of garden shears. “I’m Diane’s chief of staff. I handle her schedule, delegate the tasks she needs done, do research, fend off lobbyists, and issue press releases. Basically every single thing she does in a day, I either start it or finish it.” She paused in her agitated pacing along the flagstones—the detectives weren’t ready to let her into the house, even though the killer most likely never went inside and they weren’t sure what clues they were even looking for, anyway. But Kelly Henessey didn’t seem to care or even notice the dead leaves crunching under her feet. “I’m sorry, that sounds really egotistical. I don’t mean that I was, like, the power behind the throne or anything . . . Basically I’m a secretary-slash-gofer, but that’s what I’m supposed to be, and it was well worth it to work with Diane. I’m learning everything from her. Learned.” She paused long enough to face them, her eyes blank and uncomprehending. “Is she really dead?”

“I’m afraid so,” Riley said.

Jack studied the woman, blocking the front door and keeping a close eye on her travels. He didn’t want her near where the wires had been, though all the evidence had been removed and Maggie had done all she could with the screen door. They had left Maggie upstairs, working on the safe, but he doubted she would find anything. The entire house had been locked up tight, so if Diane Cragin had been killed for the contents of her safe, and if those contents had since been removed, it had been done by someone who had access to the house, had the combination to the safe, and knew exactly what they were looking for.

Perhaps someone, he thought, like Kelly Henessey. He watched her eyes to see if they would flicker to the outlet, the kegerator, the stoop where the metal plate had lain. Nothing.

“But sh. . .