Threads of Suspicion(77)

“Good enough.” The captain nodded to the group off to their left. “Detective Jenkins will coordinate getting you anything you need. He’ll be running point for both of us.”

“Thanks, Captain.” David stepped over and swapped business cards with Jenkins.

The detective said, “I’ll stay on the body and scene recovery. Once we wrap up here, I’ll find you so you can fill me in on the case details.”

David nodded. “That works. Who was first on scene?”

“That would be me.” An officer stepped away from the watching group of cops to offer a hand. “Frank Taft, my partner Owen Nevins. We took the dispatch call.”

“Who found the body?”

The officer pointed down an intersecting corridor. A woman was sitting at a makeshift plywood table set up near the other end of the building. “Lori Nesbitt. The man pacing around is her boss, Nathan Lewis. He owns the building. Lori says she found the body, called 911, called building security, then her boss. Time on her call to us was 5:38 a.m. She was standing with a security guard at the first-floor doorway when we pulled up. Her boss arrived about twenty minutes behind us. We found that wall mostly intact. She’d punched a large hole in it with a hammer, and the skull was visible if you looked in with a flashlight. It was still a functioning bathroom then; construction workers didn’t start to dismantle it until crime-scene guys directed what they wanted done.”

“Okay, thanks,” David said.

Evie’s attention had spiked at the mention of Nathan Lewis, and she saw David’s had as well. Saul had been working for Nathan Lewis, looking into his wife’s murder. And Ann had said someone was working inside The Lewis Group right now and pursuing the same question.

Evie followed David as he headed down the corridor toward the two. Rob had done business with Nathan on occasion, admired him, while Evie had never had an opportunity to meet him.

It was quieter at this end of the building, the echo of voices subdued. “Ms. Nesbitt, Mr. Lewis, I’m Detective David Marshal. This is my partner, Lieutenant Evie Blackwell. It’s been an interesting morning for you, I take it.”

The woman gave a ghost of a smile. “That’s one way to describe it.”

Evie caught Nathan’s surprised look in her direction, gave him a brief smile but didn’t extend the introduction by mentioning either Rob or Ann as common friends.

David turned to Nathan as he got out his notebook. “How long have you owned the building?”

“Maybe thirty-seven days? Around there. I doubt the contract lets me void the deal for including a crime scene.”

“We’ll be looking into all prior owners,” David assured him.

“Between 2008 and 2012, it would have been RB Electric,” the woman interjected. David gave her an attentive look. “The officer gave me the date on the recovered driver’s license. I was rather insistent they tell me something. Had I uncovered a man or woman, dead a year or a decade?”

She offered without being asked, “I know the data on the building because I helped research the property before it was purchased. RB Electric went bankrupt in 2013. A lighting company based out of the Netherlands bought the building from the bankruptcy court to use as warehouse space for their US division. They added the fencing, updated the security, but then their needs changed and the building has sat unused. The Lewis Group bought the building from them in late December.”

“You found the remains, Ms. Nesbitt?” David asked.

“Yes. And please, call me Lori.”

He nodded. “No one else was in the building?”

“Security was downstairs. They’d let me in around five this morning. I had a meeting with the site foreman scheduled for six to prioritize today’s work—multiple crews would have started at seven.”

David perched on the edge of a tall stool. “Okay. Lori, what were you doing with a hammer slamming into drywall at five this morning?”

She gave him a faint smile. “Curiosity is a stubborn trait.” She glanced at Nathan, than back to David. “I’m new on this job—I’ve worked for The Lewis Group since mid-November. It’s my first community rehab, and a lot of buildings in these four blocks are now ours . . . I mean, his. It’s rather interesting work, and Nathan, for some reason he didn’t explain, has put me in charge of this building, made me the arbiter between the architect and the foreman. I was here early, putting in some of my own time working on the details.

“It’s been bugging me, that lady’s washroom, every time I used it. It felt awfully cramped, certainly not wheelchair-accessible. I’d seen the schematics of the building, and there were no heating or cooling ducts running through that area to explain why the dimensions were so tight. I figured the building had been remodeled so many times that there might be an old staircase or something back there. It paced off about that amount of offset. If that was the case, we needed crews focused there today since it would be significantly more demo work than we’d originally anticipated.