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“Why not? He must not have been friendly.”
“He don’t like blacks. He tolerated me. I own this building.” She winked, then took another step and leaned against Sean. Her hand was tight with arthritis.
“Doesn’t the grocery deliver?”
She laughed. “Here? Naw. I go out once a week, and my granddaughter comes by every Wednesday to take me to bingo and brings my medicine and groceries. But sometimes I need a few other things. Look in the bag.”
Sean did. There was a fifth of Scotch—good stuff, too, not the cheap rotgut—and a pack of Marlboro Lights, along with a small steak.
“Missy won’t buy me liquor.” She shook her head in disgust. “It’s not like I’m an alcoholic—one shot a night. And she won’t buy me steak, neither. Says it’s not good for my arteries. And don’t get me started on the cigarettes. I’m eighty-nine years old, dammit, and I don’t much care if I see ninety. I don’t think one damn cigarette a day is going to kill me.”
“I’m Sean Rogan,” he said as he helped her onto the final step. “I’m a private investigator, and very pleased to meet you, Mrs.—”
“Tessie. Call me Tessie, everyone does. You have questions about Robbie?”
“I do, in fact.”
He held open the door that led to the small lobby of the row house. She walked to the door with 1A painted in white.
“Who’s upstairs? I didn’t see any police cars.”
“The FBI.”
She turned and craned her neck up to look at him, eyes wide. “The FBI? Well, Robbie did get himself into a little situation, didn’t he? Was he playing both sides?”
“Both sides?”
Tessie laughed. “He was an informant, you know. Used to be, anyhow. Come on in, I’ll tell you all about him. Did you know he used to be a pimp? Yep, I’ve lived here forty-six years, Robbie moved in—oh, nineteen ninety-three. Four? Was in prison once, but paid his rent so I aired out his place once a week.”
“He paid his rent from prison?”
She shrugged. “His cop did.”
His cop. Sean was very interested in who this cop was, and what kind of information Ralston gave him that paid the rent on a place for however many months Ralston was in prison.
Tessie continued as she pushed open the door. “He’d get drunk and blah blah blah. Didn’t know what to believe, but after a while I learned to tell his bullshit from the truth.”
Sean stepped into her immaculate but overheated apartment. He’d hit the jackpot with information and hoped Agent Armstrong didn’t get his panties in a wad about him talking to a potential witness. But one thing Sean knew about Feds is that they didn’t share information, and if he was going to help Lucy he needed to know everything they knew.
Noah walked upstairs to Ralston’s third-floor apartment and met Agent Dale Jarvis, the head of the ERT unit. “What have you learned?” Noah asked as he assessed the apartment.
Jarvis walked Noah through the scene. “No sign of forced entry. As you can see, the computer is destroyed. The UNSUB removed the hard drive from the box and smashed it. We’ve collected all the pieces, but most of the circuits and chips are completely destroyed. There’s no salvaging it, but we’ll run it by our tech people. They’ve been known to perform miracles, on occasion.”
“I’ll get a warrant for his ISP to check browsing history and any external storage sites he might have.”
Jarvis looked around the room. “And the place was searched, but not extensively. Possibly the killer was looking for something and found it.” He walked down the short, narrow hall to the small bedroom. Ralston’s body was prone at the foot of the sagging double bed. A suitcase was open on it.
“He had a plane ticket for Miami he never used,” Noah said.
“No sign of defensive wounds, but my guess is he was pushed down.” Jarvis gestured toward the victim’s hands with a laser pen. “He fell or was pushed while holding something—and if you follow the likely trajectory…”
Noah followed the thin red beam to the base of the open closet, where several bottles of pills had rolled to a stop. One had opened, spilling small, oval-shaped pills every which way. Jarvis pointed behind him. “The bathroom is there. The vic grabs his meds, comes back to the bedroom, walking toward the closet, is pushed down from behind. Drops the pills, is shot without hesitation.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The vic didn’t move his hands; they are laying as someone would fall.”
“Silencer? Wouldn’t someone in the building hear a gunshot?”
