Ali turned the doorknob and gave the door a little shove. It opened and she stepped inside.
Shirley Chan looked up, startled, trying to put it together.
Why was this woman in her house?
“Hey,” she said. “Are you a reporter? Because you have a lot of nerve. Get out of here now. Or I’ll call the police.”
“Shirley, don’t worry, I’m not with the press. I swear.”
“What is it? What do you want?”
“Calm down, please, please. I’m Ali Muller. I knew your husband, and I’m so sorry to hear about his death. We were working on a project together. Michael may have spoken of me. He told me that if anything ever happened to him, to give you this letter.”
Shirley Chan told her daughter to go get dressed. The little girl complained that the dog was still outside and Shirley said, “I’ll bring him in in a minute. Now, scoot.”
“Have a seat,” she said to the composed and well-dressed woman in her kitchen. “I only have a few minutes, but tell me how you like your coffee, and please—let me have that letter.”
“Yes, of course,” said Ali Muller. She put her bag on the floor and bent to open the closure.
Shirley went to the coffeemaker. “How do you like your coffee?” she asked again.
“With a splash of milk, if you don’t mind.”
“Don’t mind at all,” Shirley said.
She poured coffee into two blue earthenware mugs, filled the creamer with milk, and said to Ali Muller, “The police tell me you were the last person to see my husband alive. Is that true?”
She turned to look at the woman sitting at her table.
Ali Muller had the gun in her hand. She aimed. She fired. The bullets were silenced by the suppressor, making only two soft sounds, pffft-pffft, piercing Shirley Chan’s forehead.
Michael Chan’s widow fell dead to the kitchen floor.
CHAPTER 31
I GOT HOME as the Late Late Show was starting. Martha barreled toward me and Mrs. Rose swung her feet down off the sofa. While she searched for her shoes and straightened her clothes, she said, “Lindsay, the baby’s fine. Joe stopped by.”
“Joe was here? When?”
Mrs. Rose said, “He left an hour ago. He said that he got pulled into the crash investigation full-time and he doesn’t know when he’ll be home again.”
Mrs. Rose took a breath, put on her shoes, then continued. “He said to tell you he’s sorry he hasn’t called.”
“Was he okay?”
“He looked tired. I gave him a beer and he sat with Julie for maybe ten minutes. Then he changed his clothes and left. He said he had to get back. He was in a big hurry, Lindsay.”
“Did he say he was going to call later?”
Mrs. Rose said, “I’m sure he will. Of course, he will.”
I was still in stunned disbelief when Mrs. Rose said good night to me at the door.
I hardly slept.
My mind had writhed all night with all-too-realistic images of crash victims and other unsolved mysteries from both the job and personal fronts.
I was at my desk in the squad room at eight and ready to ambush Brady when he came through the gate an hour later. He waved me into his office and gave me the welcome news that Homicide was off airliner crash duty—the Feds were in charge—and we were back to solving homicides.
The Four Seasons murders in particular.
He said, “Yesterday morning we were talking about Joe. Have you seen him?”
“Yes. I mean, no. According to our nanny, he came home last night while I was still working. He changed his clothes, and he left me a phone message saying he’d been swept into the WW 888 investigation. That he was up to his eyebrows in it.”
Brady threw me a skeptical look.
“He’s an airport security consultant,” I said emphatically. “Formerly with Homeland Security.”
“I know that.”
“Listen, Brady, he’s not a fugitive. He will contact me again. And right now, we’ve got a new, very weird angle on the Michael Chan murder.”
I had Brady’s attention on Michael Chan, version 2.0.
I said, “Metropolitan’s head pathologist has misplaced this Michael Chan’s body. She could find him later today or sometime next week. She said she’d call when his body turns up. So I called Shirley Chan a little while ago. There was no answer at home or at her office, but I’ll try again. I want to talk to her again. Find out more about her marriage. Their financial situation. Anything odd about his behavior. She was in no condition to answer—”
“Go,” Brady said. “Go now.”
Thirty miles and forty minutes later, Conklin and I pulled up to the green house on Waverley. The old one-and-a-half story house was set squarely on its lot, everything neat except for the trike on the walk and a beagle-dachshund mix lying across the front steps. When the dog heard our car doors close, he got to his feet and set up a howl.
“Dogs love me,” I said. “Watch.”