High Country Nocturne - [45]

A more thorough sweep of the office revealed nothing special, certainly not safes containing stolen diamonds for wholesale.

I slipped on the latex gloves and locked the door from the office to the hallway. Then I went back into the private office.

The corpse’s wallet contained credit cards, a health-insurance card-little late for that now-two twenties, and a few business cards that only gave his name and phone numbers. Stuck to a credit card was a driver’s license. I disentangled them and held it up to the ambient light. The license was issued to Matt Pennington. He was forty-five and showed a Scottsdale address.

“Find Matt Pennington,” Peralta had written to me. Here he was.

Using the memo app on my iPhone, I wrote down the information. Then I slid the wallet back and went through his front slacks’ pockets with more difficulty. His bladder had emptied and, surprisingly in the dry climate, the pants had not dried. Keys in one pocket. A pack of cigarettes in another.

No cell phone. I ran my hand around his belt, and there was no phone case on it, either.

I went back to the pack of smokes, reached in, and pulled the box out.

It was the distinctive blue hardpack of Gauloises Blondes, the same brand Lindsey sometimes smoked. She bought them online because they weren’t imported into the country anymore.

The health warning was inscribed in French at the bottom of the azure front panel.

“No kidding.” I muttered quietly. Talking to dead people was something I had learned as a young deputy, the black humor that saved us. Tom Frazier and his fellow EMTs probably did the same thing. Always out of earshot of civilians, of course.

The pack had been unwrapped and I opened it. Half the cigarettes had been smoked and a matchbook was inside. I dug it out, hoping it advertised a bar or restaurant where Pennington might have been a regular. It was blank.

But not on the inside.

In blue ink, someone had written a phone number. I copied it on the iPhone and replaced the cigarettes in his damp pocket.

Down on one knee, I could see his face. “What the hell did you have this for?”

I asked. The face, purple from lividity, blood collecting after the heart stopped, did not answer.

Chapter Nineteen

The air conditioning switched off and the rooms grew very quiet as I studied the scene. There’s no easy way to die but this was particularly…I searched for the right word. Something between “gutsy,” the ability to hang yourself from a doorknob and not stop when all you had to do was lower your arms and hands and take the pressure off your neck, because this would not be a fast way to kill oneself.

That, and “preposterous.” If you wanted to kill yourself and you are on the eighteenth floor of an office tower, why not leap through the window, or toss a chair through first and follow it down to the pavement? This building was a creation of the 1980s and I doubted the windows were that strong, particularly since it was thrown up on the cheap during the years of the savings-and-loan racket.

Unless you didn’t kill yourself but had help.

You were “suicided.”

I was very conscious of the sound of my breathing as I checked his wrists.

Pennington looked a little under six feet and in good shape, easily strong enough to fight back against a five-five woman. Unless she had a gun on him.

What if he had been handcuffed from behind and left to slowly strangle? Or tortured for information, a little bit of pressure applied from the back, as he slowly suffocated from the neckties. He would have held out hope until the darkness closed around him and slammed shut for the last time.

His pale, stiff wrists showed no cuts from being handcuffed. But there were ways around this, such as putting something like a washcloth between the skin and the hard metal of the cuffs. That way, any evidence the person had been shackled from behind as he slowly suffocated and struggled would be more difficult to detect.

Plastic Flexcuffs were another option. Use a gun to intimidate, make him get on his knees, restrain him, put the ties around his neck, start asking questions.

Strawberry Death probably had better tricks than that.

My tricks were limited by time, by who might be expecting Pennington’s office to be open. I quickly went through his desk drawers, the most interesting item being a nine-millimeter pistol in the top right-hand drawer, for all the good it did him. Or, if he really wished to kill himself, why not use that?

I did a quick study of his desk. The top was cleared of everything but a blotter and a telephone. Not even a laptop. In fact, there was no computer in the office, although there was a charging cord and a T1 cable. Strawberry Death took his laptop.

If it was her. Historians are warned against something called confirmation bias, where every piece of information backs up your existing hypothesis. It’s a big no-no. Pennington might have made many enemies. But she was the killer at-large whom I knew.

There was something else: besides the faint but growing odor of death from Pennington’s corpse, I detected traces of Chanel Number Five.