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“Or,” Connor countered, “he was partnering with his killer, turning off the cameras so someone else could steal the coins, then he became a loose end that his partner needed to snip.”
“Very possible,” Kit agreed. “We don’t know yet.”
“Frank Wilson must have figured it out,” the assistant chief murmured. “That’s what got him killed.”
“Again,” Kit said, “very possible. We’re partnering with Detective Goddard to trace the stolen coins. If we find the coins, we might find the thief, which might lead to the killer. Lots of mights, but right now, that’s what we have.” She nodded in Goddard’s direction. “What are the odds we’ll find them?”
Robbery Detective Bruce Goddard was in his early forties but looked fifteen years younger. His slow Southern drawl made him a real charmer with the ladies. Or so Kit had heard. She liked Goddard, but he was not her type.
Your type, her inner voice said slyly, is sitting on the other side of the table wearing nerdy Clark Kent glasses.
Which was true, but Kit still cursed that little voice while forcing herself to focus on Detective Goddard.
“Not great,” Goddard said. “There was a single coin in the collection worth a cool million—a gold coin from the Roman era. It alone is enough to make the right collector go crazy with want. The remaining three mil is tied up in ten other coins, half of which are antiquities from Greece, Rome, and the Middle East. They’re worth about two million. The other half are early American coins and they’re worth about a million all together.”
“For coins,” the captain murmured. “Good God.”
“I know,” Goddard said with a rueful shrug. “The thieves won’t pawn the coins and they won’t try to sell them on the legitimate market. These kinds of items tend to go to private auctions where the buyer might not care if the items are stolen. If they sell them within the continental United States, they can even deliver them in a car, bypassing any airport security. We’re always monitoring online chatter for stolen artifacts and high-value collections, and we haven’t seen anything about the coins, but we’ve doubled our coverage. And we’re checking with our sources in the private auction industry. If they come up for sale, we might hear about it.”
“Odds don’t sound good,” Navarro grumbled. “What new information do we know about the homicides? Have we conclusively ruled that Crawford was not a suicide?”
“We know that he was definitely holding the gun in his nondominant hand,” Kit said. “His wife confirmed that he fired with his right hand. He had a broken finger on his left hand that made pulling a trigger impossible. Dr. Batra has confirmed that.”
“And he had benzodiazepines in his system,” Alicia added. “He’d also ingested some alcohol. The combination of the benzos and booze would have knocked him out, making it easy for a killer to put the gun in his mouth.”
“He could have drugged himself,” Ryland added, “but there was no evidence of any medication left in the room. Not even Tylenol. There were no bottles or baggies that he could have used to carry any meds. The gun was wiped clean except for one set of his prints. I don’t know why he would have wiped his old prints if he was planning to kill himself. Plus, someone was in his room afterward because items are missing, like his laptop and cell phone.”
“Some of his clothes and two pairs of shoes were taken, too,” Kit added. “He or whoever killed him was wearing them at four fifteen on Saturday morning when they stole the Dreyfus coins.”
“So we have at least two murders,” Connor said. “Maybe three, if Benny Dreyfus didn’t die of a heart attack. Alicia, do you have the blood tests back yet?”
“No. Those will take at least until Thursday morning.” Alicia winced when everyone frowned at her. “That’s how long that test takes. I’ve moved it up to the front of the line. That’s the best I can do. All we know is that Crawford couldn’t have killed Flynn, because Crawford had already been dead for at least a day by the time Flynn was stabbed. Crawford died sometime on Saturday morning. We know Flynn was killed sometime after ten a.m. on Sunday because he’d pulled the cord Sunday morning. The exact time is hard to determine because the apartment was like an icebox. Someone had cranked the A/C down to sixty, so the body temp was affected. He’d completed rigor, though, so TOD had to have been close to ten a.m. on Sunday.”
“What else do we know about Frank’s death?” the captain asked.
“He was killed by a stiletto blade,” Alicia said, “then someone went over the original wound with a butcher knife to make it look like a different weapon was used.”
Sam Reeves gasped quietly and Kit wished she’d told him before the meeting. It wasn’t fair to blindside him. She sent him an apologetic glance and he nodded numbly.
The two brass looked stunned. “What?” they asked in unison. “Why?”
“We’re not sure why yet,” Kit said. “But we know that the knife came from his next-door neighbor’s knife block. Georgia Shearer doesn’t know when the knife disappeared. She hadn’t used her kitchen in several days, even before Mr. Flynn was killed. And unless she’s a lot stronger than she looks, she did not kill Mr. Flynn.”
“We also know,” Alicia went on, “that Mr. Flynn had duck confit a few hours before he died. Could he have eaten it for breakfast or lunch on Sunday?”
Sam sat up straighter. “Excuse me, Doctor. Did you say duck confit?”
The room turned to look at him. “Yes,” Alicia said warily. “Why?”
“Because that was dinner on Saturday. I was there. It was Miss Eloise’s birthday and she’d invited me to her dinner party. The cook made the duck because it’s Eloise’s favorite. Frankie attended the party, too.”
“Maybe he took leftovers to his room,” Kit said.
Sam shook his head. “There wasn’t anything left. There never is when Cook makes duck confit. I wanted a second helping and it was all gone. Everyone grumbled, except Frankie. He wasn’t a huge duck fan. He only ate a little. It was a small private party, about twenty people. The rest of the residents had already had their dinner and the main kitchen was closed, and Frankie was irritated because he couldn’t get anything else to eat downstairs.”
“What time was dinner?” Kit asked, her mind already building a new scenario. “Did Mr. Dreyfus observe the Sabbath?”
“He did,” Sam confirmed. “Sunset was just before six, so we had dinner at six thirty. Normally dinner is at five, but Eloise wanted Benny to be able to join in. He couldn’t eat until an hour after sunset, so he ate at seven, but Frankie ate with us at six thirty.”
