‘Are you shitting me?’ Collier had sneaked up on them. ‘We can’t use the stairs?’ He was warily eyeing the scissor lift, which was a hydraulic machine that lifted a platform straight into the air, kind of like a very shaky open-air elevator with nothing but a thin safety rail between you and certain death.
Amanda asked Will, ‘Do you know how to operate that thing?’
‘I can figure it out.’ The machine was already plugged in. Will found the key hidden inside the auxiliary battery box. He used the tip of the key to press the tiny reset button on the bottom. The scissor lift stuttered a quick up-and-down and they were in business.
Will grabbed the safety rail and climbed up the two steps by the motor. Amanda reached for his hand so she could follow. Her movements looked effortless, mostly because Will did all the lifting. She was light, less than the weight of a boxing heavy bag.
They both turned around and waited for Collier. He glanced at the fang-like stairs.
Amanda tapped her watch. ‘You’ve got two seconds, Detective Collier.’
Collier took a deep breath. He grabbed the yellow hard hat off the floor. He clamped it down on his head and scampered up the platform like a frightened baby monkey.
Will turned the key to start the motor. In truth, he had worked construction jobs during his college years and he could operate just about any machine on a work site. Still, he stuttered the platform a bit just for the pleasure of watching Collier white-knuckle the safety rail.
The motor made a grinding noise as they started their ascent. Sara was on the stairs helping one of the techs collect evidence. She was wearing khakis and a fitted navy-blue GBI T-shirt that flattered her in more ways than two. Her hair was still pulled back, but some of the strands had come loose. She’d put on her glasses. He liked the way she looked in her glasses.
Will had known Sara Linton for eighteen months, which was roughly seventeen months and twenty-six days longer than any other period of sustained happiness in his life. He practically lived at her apartment. Their dogs got along. He liked her sister. He understood her mother. He was scared of her father. She had officially joined the GBI two weeks ago. This was their first case together. He was embarrassed by how excited he was to see her.
Which is why Will made himself look away, because mooning over your girlfriend at a grisly crime scene was probably how serial killers got their start.
Or maybe he would just be a regular murderer, because Collier had decided to take his mind off his vertigo by staring at Sara’s ass while she bent over to help the tech.
Will shifted his weight again. The platform shook. Collier made a noise halfway between a gag and a yelp.
Amanda gave Will one of her rare smiles. ‘My first rollout was for a guy who fell off the top of a scaffolding. This was back before Hazmat and all those silly safety regulations. There wasn’t much for the coroner. We hosed his brains off the sidewalk and into the gutter.’
Collier leaned over so he could use his arm to wipe the sweat from his face and still hold on to the railing.
The lift shook of its own accord as Will stopped the platform a few inches below the concrete balcony. The wooden railing had been pulled away. Across from the opening, half-inch slabs of moldy four-by-sixteen drywall were stacked chest-high. The thick layer of dust on the buckets of joint compound indicated they had been there since construction stopped six months ago. Graffiti dripped lazily across everything—the floor, the walls, the construction materials—with two more ubiquitous rainbow-eyed unicorns standing sentry at the top of each stairway.
Heavy wooden doors lined what Will assumed were the VIP rooms. The custom-carved mahogany had been stained a rich espresso, probably at the factory, but the graffiti artists had done their best to black out the finish. Yellow numbered crime scene markers dotted the entire span of the balcony, from one set of stairs to the other. Several Tyvek-clad techs were photographing and collecting evidence. Some of the VIP rooms were being sprayed down with luminol, a chemical that made body fluids glow an otherworldly blue when exposed to a black light.
Will didn’t want to think about all the body fluids they’d find.
Faith stood at the far end of the balcony, her head back as she drank from a bottle of water. She was wearing a white Tyvek suit. The zip was undone. The arms were tied around her waist. She had obviously passed herself off as a tech so she could get up to the crime scene without having to wait for the scissor lift. Sealed evidence bags were piled in front of her, alongside neatly stacked boxes of gloves, evidence bags and protective clothing. The murder room was a few feet away, the wooden door opened out. Light strobed as the position and state of the body were documented by the crime scene photographer. They wouldn’t be allowed inside until every inch was recorded.
Amanda pulled out her phone and read her new messages as she walked toward the kill room. ‘CNN is here. I’m going to have to update the governor and the mayor. Will, you’ll take point on this while I’m hand-holding. Collier, I need you to see if Harding has any family. My recollection is that there’s an aunt on the father’s side.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Collier’s shoulder rubbed the wall as he followed at a distance.
‘Take off that hard hat. You look like one of the Village People.’ She checked her phone again. Obviously a new piece of information had come in. ‘Harding has four ex-wives. Two are still on the force, both in records. Track them down and find out if there’s a bookie or pimp whose name kept coming up.’
Collier stumbled to keep up as he left the hat on the floor. ‘You think his exes were still talking to him?’
‘Am I really getting that question from you?’ Her words obviously hit their mark because Collier responded with a quick nod. She dropped her phone back into her pocket. ‘Faith, run it down for me.’
‘Doorknob to the neck.’ Faith pointed to the side of her own neck. ‘It matches the other doorknobs up here, so we can assume the killer didn’t bring it for the purpose of murder. They found a G43 by the car. The action is jammed, but at least one round was fired. Charlie is running the serial number through the system right now.’
‘That’s the new Glock,’ Collier said. ‘What’s it look like?’
‘Lightweight, slim profile. The grip is rough, but it’s pretty impressive for concealed carry.’
Collier asked another question about the gun, which was manufactured specifically for government use. Will tuned him out. The gun wasn’t going to solve this case.
He stepped around some marked bloody shoeprints and bent down to get a closer look at the lockset in the door. The backplate was rectangular, about three-by-six inches and screwed to the door. It was cast, plated in polished brass with a heavily detailed raised design featuring a cursive R at the center. Rippy’s logo. Will had seen it all over the man’s house. He squinted at the latchbolt, the long metal cylinder that kept the door closed or, when turned, allowed it to open. He saw scrapes around the hollow square where the doorknob spindle was supposed to go. And then he looked down at the floor and saw the long screwdriver with the numbered yellow card beside it.
Someone had been shut inside the room, and someone else had used the screwdriver to gain entry.
Will stood back up to look at the kill scene. The photographer stepped across the body, trying not to slip in the blood.