‘Shockley’s treat,’ said Cleary.
‘That’s a first,’ said Hughes. ‘He must like you guys.’ Hughes took his food and left. Tasco came in.
‘Shockley still here?’ asked McCabe.
‘No. He just left. So did Fortier,’ said Cleary.
‘Anything else going on?’
‘You mean other than your frozen corpse?’
‘Yeah. Other than her.’
‘A couple of assholes decided to ring in the new year by beating the shit out of a homeless guy over on Preble Street.’
‘Just for the fun of it?’
‘Looks that way. Though it may have been racial. The vic was black and he didn’t have anything worth stealing. Bill ’n’ Will are checking it out now.’ Detectives Bill Bacon and Will Messing had been universally known by their rhyming first names since McCabe teamed them up three years earlier.
‘We know who did it?’
‘Not yet, but the vic’s in the ICU at Cumberland. Might not make it.’
Detective Carl Sturgis stuck his head in the door. ‘This a private party, or can anyone play?’
‘C’mon in, Carl,’ said McCabe. ‘Where’s Eddie?’
‘At a school play. Peter Pan. His daughter’s playin’ the head fairy.’
‘Tinker Bell?’ Maggie smiled.
‘Yeah. Tinker Bell. Probably over by now,’ said Sturgis, checking his watch. He helped himself to a slice of the pizza and a Coke and sat down.
McCabe signaled Maggie, who nodded and flipped open her cell. ‘Hey, Eddie, it’s Maggie.’ Pause. ‘Sorry to call you at home, but if the play’s over we need you to come in tonight.’ Pause. ‘Yeah. A murder. Plan on a long night.’ Pause. ‘No. Wait till the star’s tucked in. We can manage till then. Hope she brought the house down.’
‘By the way, some oversized uniform named Vodnick just deposited a witness in the small interview room,’ said Sturgis. ‘Guy named Hester?’
‘Hester can sit for a minute,’ said McCabe.
Tasco came in and handed everyone a set of color photos. Three shots of the same woman. ‘Elaine Goff?’ asked Maggie.
‘Yup,’ said Tasco. ‘Elaine Elizabeth Goff, attorney at law and, as you all know, the owner of a brand-new BMW 325i convertible. I assume this is your corpse?’
McCabe spread his set of pictures on the table one after the other. The resemblance to Sandy was even more startling in the photographs than it had been with the dead and frozen woman in the trunk. ‘Yeah,’ he said finally, ‘that’s her. Where’d you get the pics?’
‘Google Images. Amazing the stuff you can find there.’
McCabe studied each picture in turn. The first was a business headshot in black and white. A formal Fabian Bachrach kind of thing. The second must have come from someone’s vacation blog. It showed Goff by a pool, wearing a skimpy bikini. Palm trees in the background. She was looking straight into the camera and sipping what looked like a piña colada. In this shot she looked more like Sandy than in either of the others. Sure as hell more than she did lying dead in the back of a Beemer. It wasn’t just the setting or the bikini that made the resemblance startling. It was the attitude. The same half smile, half smirk he’d seen a thousand times. The one that said, Eat your heart out, asshole, I’m way too hot for the likes of you. It gave him the feeling he knew everything there was to know about Elaine Elizabeth Goff. Even though they weren’t the same woman. Even though there had to be differences. It was a feeling he had to be careful of.
In the last of the pictures Goff was wearing a strapless black evening dress at some kind of function. Looked like the kind of shot a press photographer might take at a fancy charity event. The Press Herald ran that stuff all the time. She was standing in a small group with another young woman, an attractive freckle-faced blonde, and three guys in black tie. Two of them were gray-haired and probably in their fifties. The third, the one to Lainie’s right, was maybe ten years younger. He was looking straight into the camera with intense dark blue eyes. He had a thin face, a crooked nose, and longish dark hair. McCabe wouldn’t have called him handsome, but there was something in those eyes that drew attention. Star quality. Charisma. Call it what you will, but even in competition with a beauty like Lainie Goff, one’s eyes might well go to him first – and stay with him the longest.
‘Who’s the guy with the violet eyes?’ asked McCabe.
‘Name’s John Kelly,’ said Tasco. ‘He’s executive director of a small nonprofit called Sanctuary House. Shelter for runaway kids located off Longfellow Square. Doesn’t seem like a black-tie kind of guy, so I figure the party must have been a fund-raiser for them.’
‘Who’s the woman and the other two guys standing with Goff?’
‘Don’t know yet,’ said Tasco. ‘That’s something we have to track down.’
McCabe slipped his set of pictures into the breast pocket of his jacket.
Tasco passed another printout around the table. ‘Elaine Goff’s bio page from the Palmer Milliken Web site.’
Elaine E. Goff
Associate
Direct Dial: 207.555.1041
Elaine Goff joined Palmer Milliken as an associate in the firm’s Mergers & Acquisitions Practice Group in 2000. Prior to joining the firm, Lainie served as law clerk to United States District Court Judge Edward Mellman.
Education
Lainie earned a B.A. from Colby College (1997) and a J.D., magna cum laude, at the Cornell University School of Law (2000). At Cornell, she was a member of the Cornell Law Review and served as articles editor her final year.
Bar Admissions
Lainie is admitted to practice in Maine.
‘Hell of a waste of a fine-looking woman, is all I can say.’ It was Brian Cleary. He was still gazing at Goff in her bikini. ‘Looks like that actress. You know. What’s her name? The one who played the math guy’s wife in A Beautiful Mind?’
‘Jennifer Connelly,’ said McCabe.
‘Yeah. Jennifer Connelly. Like her.’ Cleary shook his head in admiration. ‘Man, I don’t know why a hottie like this ever bothered going to law school. She coulda been a model, an actress, anything.’
‘A hottie? Gee, Brian, that’s not what I heard. I heard this babe’s ice cold.’ Sturgis guffawed at his own wit.
‘Oh, for chrissakes,’ said Maggie. ‘Brian, why don’t you do us all a favor and stop drooling over that picture like a horny twelve-year-old. The woman’s dead. And Carl, can the jokes, alright? They’re not funny.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Gee. Okay . . . Sorry, Mag,’ said Cleary, his normally red face turning even redder.
Sturgis just glared. He didn’t like being rebuked by a woman. Especially a younger woman who outranked him in spite of serving fewer years in the department. There was a short, embarrassed silence around the table.
McCabe broke it. ‘Okay, enough,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back to work. Maggie, would you go talk to Hester? He’s been cooling his heels long enough. Any longer, he’ll take a walk.’ If Hester was hiding anything, Maggie was the one to find it. She was as good as anybody McCabe had ever seen at ferreting information from reluctant witnesses. He’d seen her go from sympathetic to tough to friendly to threatening in the blink of an eye, all without pissing witnesses off or closing them down. Most never knew what hit them. ‘Meantime, I’ll brief these guys on what we saw on the pier.’
Maggie nodded, collected her copies of the printouts, and left. McCabe spent the next fifteen minutes going over what they’d found, including the frozen note pried from Goff’s mouth and Terri’s opinion on the cause of death.
‘She was pithed, huh? Somebody stuck a knife in my neck, I guess I’d be pretty pithed, too,’ said Sturgis, again chortling at his own wit.
McCabe threw him a warning look. ‘All right, Carl, like Maggie said, it’s time for you to stop with the humor. A woman’s been murdered, and if you or any of you other guys think that’s funny, trust me, I can have you out of this unit and back in a uniform before you even stop laughing.’