Threads of Suspicion(80)

A good-sized building, she thought. A night of gambling, with booze and music and women, could have been hosted here when Saul came around with his camera. Saul could easily have gotten himself killed for interrupting a moneymaking enterprise. No panic, just kill him, cover it up, and go on with business.

“Standing out here in the cold?” David asked as he joined her.

“Watching interesting dynamics,” Evie replied in verbal shorthand. She nodded to where Nathan was holding a passenger door open for Lori. “You missed most of it. When Nathan Lewis stepped outside with Lori, between the press hollering for a statement and his own people wanting to be recognized as the most helpful employee, there was a near stampede.”

David smiled. “Sorry I missed it.”

“He’s not letting her drive herself back to the office. So she finally passed the keys to her car to the site foreman and suggested Nathan should buy her breakfast then, but she has to be at the office for a scheduled ten o’clock call with someone whose name I didn’t catch. I think Lori protested mostly so he could have a polite fight with someone.”

David laughed. “I’m going to lay odds you just told me all that just so I’d have a reason to be distracted too.”

With a smile, Evie said, “We all need a little levity after such a grim morning. I know it’s hard on you finding Saul this way, knowing he got zero dignity in death.”

“It is.”

“Let’s go figure out who murdered him. We can give this case the day, get the details sorted out for homicide, who’ll be taking it over.” Evie considered him. “But breakfast first. I’m thinking silver-dollar pancakes.”

“Enough maple syrup, I’ll eat twenty dollars’ worth.”

“How about that local version of the Pancake House over by the hotel?”

“Works for me.”

She waited until they were in the car and David had maneuvered back onto the open street before she said, “Ann has someone working at The Lewis Group. I’m thinking we just met her.”

David nodded. “Lori Nesbitt. I’ve been wondering the same thing. Did you read ‘cop’ in her demeanor?”

“Something more interesting. She knew where the body was.”

David drove in silence for a block. “I didn’t want to go there. She’s a forty-something woman in an expensive suit, working for the last decade in Houston. How does she know where a private investigator gets buried six years ago in Chicago?”

“I’ve got a few thoughts on that.” Evie figured her idea would go down better over food, when David was occupied and had to hear her out. “But we need coffee first.”

David glanced her way, amused. “All right. Then we’ll shift the subject for a minute. What happened last night? If you slept, it wasn’t much.”

“Let’s not go there either.” She turned on the radio. “We’ll find the local news or something.”

“You’re just stacking up questions for me to come back to later.”

“Women like to be mysteries.”

He laughed. “Point taken. We’ll eat first.”



“So what’s your theory on Lori Nesbitt and Saul’s remains?” David asked as he cut into a stack of pancakes.

Evie set down her second cup of coffee, considered how to word her speculation. “Lori buys seventeen buildings, including this one? She’s the one who finds the body? She knew there was a body there. Either someone told her the body was there, or she heard a secondhand rumor that he was. She opened up that wall intentionally. It’s easy enough to realistically scream, it would still have been a startling sight.”

“I’ll concede her reason for taking a hammer to the wall at five a.m. was unusual, but it’s the odd kind of truth that often is exactly what really happened.”

“David . . . work with me here. She found a body. Whack whack with a hammer and there’s a skull looking at her. Come on. You’re not wondering?”

He considered the problem. “She said she worked at Estate Services in Houston, and I’m fairly sure she wasn’t lying about that. Easy enough to check it out. Maybe a client says, ‘Hey, want to know a secret? I’m dying, so it doesn’t matter if I tell it. I buried a guy in a wall in Englewood, Illinois, six years ago.’ Or maybe, ‘I heard about a corpse that’s hidden in a wall in Englewood.’”

“If her job connects her up with information like that, she picks up the phone and calls the cops to check it out,” Evie replied.

David thought about it, nodded. “What are the odds she was in fact an attorney at that firm, not simply a staff executor of somebody’s will? She handled seventeen building purchases without breaking a sweat—sounds like a full-blown attorney to me. You know Ann and the friends she tends to collect. Stands to reason Lori is more than she appears. She knows something but she can’t legally tell anyone, so instead she uses the information and gives cops the body.”