I try to manage a smile but can’t. No sense putting lipstick on this pig.
“It’s been a rough week,” I say. “A friend of mine died. I think she was murdered. And since then, somebody’s been trying to kill me, too, starting with—”
Ellis raises a hand to calm me. He’s tall and wide, an African American guy who grew up in Boston when it wasn’t so easy for a black man to become a police officer. He looks thinner than the last time I saw him in person, more than a year ago. Maybe a diet, maybe illness.
“One step at a time,” he says. “Start from the beginning. Tell me about this friend of yours.”
I blow out a sigh. “Okay. My friend works as a staffer for the CIA. She lives in Georgetown and someone pushed her, I think, off her balcony—”
Ellis cocks his head. Recognition dawns all over his face.
“—and I was there, in her apartment, just be—”
“Stop.” Ellis scoots his chair back. “You’re talking about Hotchchild, or Hotch-something—”
“Hotchkiss. Diana Hotchkiss.”
He nods his head. “Diana Hotchkiss.”
“You know the case, I gather.”
He studies me for a moment. “That’s not a case you want to be connected with. There could be some trouble for you, Ben.”
You don’t say.
“This is a case you’re working on?” I ask.
He gets up from the table and paces. “I wasn’t the lead, but we had it here in the Second.”
I pick up on the use of the past tense. “Not anymore?”
He laughs without humor. “Couple days ago, the CIA comes waltzing in here. They announce that the Diana Hotchkiss case is a matter of national security and they’re taking over. They demanded all our files, right there on the spot. I mean, they literally carted everything off. Over twenty years on the job, I’ve never seen it handled that way.”
This is getting stranger by the minute. The feds are all over this case now. The president of the United States mentions Diana in his weekly press conference. The Chinese haul me in for a friendly off-the-record inquisition.
What the hell is going on?
“If I were you,” says Ellis, “I’d take some of that money you inherited and fly to some remote island for a month or two.”
Probably good advice. “I’m not going anywhere, Ellis. I need some kind of a lead. Something. Anything. The CIA took everything from you?”
Ellis stares at me for a long, sober moment before his expression breaks.
“Maybe not quite everything,” he says.
Chapter 31
Ellis returns to the interrogation room with a thin file containing glossy photographs. “Crime scene shots,” he says. “And a few witness statements. I might have forgotten to give every copy to the feds.”
I recoil as he drops the file down on the table and a few photographs spill out. I’m not really in the mood to see photos of Diana’s crushed face and body. “Anything from the witness statements?” I ask.
“Not much.” Ellis shakes his head. “Except that the first people to attend to the victim were also the first ones to leave.”
I think back before I realize he’s talking, in part, about me.
“Two women got to her first,” Ellis recites from memory. “They were parked in some kind of a blue compact car by the building. They apparently reached her, and it seemed like they were checking her vitals, that kind of thing. But they got in their car and left before the ambulance arrived.”
I remember the first part of that, the two women getting out of the car. What happened to them afterward I have no idea.
Ellis looks squarely at me. “Then there was a man who was talking with some people across the street about his motorcycle. He was second to reach the victim. After a few minutes, he staggered back into the street and puked his guts out. Then he jumped on his motorcycle and left before the authorities arrived.” Ellis shrugs his shoulders. “Any idea who rides a 2009 Triumph America with…let me see…” He looks down at some notes and then back up at me. “Metzeler ME80 tires?”
“No—880s,” I say, correcting him.
“Right. ME880s.” He smirks at me.
“Apparently those witnesses knew their motorcycles,” I say.
“So did the guy who owned the bike. They said he was a real nice guy. Real friendly.”
“Handsome, too,” I add.
“Yeah, they said he looked like…Skeet…Ulrich, whoever that is.”
I let that wash over me. This is, to say the least, an unwelcome development. Skeet Ulrich? Diana said I looked like Johnny Depp. I mean, I loved Skeet in the original Scream and thought they should have kept him on that new Law & Order series, but Depp was Donnie freakin’ Brasco, for God’s sake. In one week I go from Johnny Depp to Skeet Ulrich? What’s next—Ralph Macchio?