the man.
Pine produced her FBI shield. “Go down and tell the concierge to come up here right now with a key. Go!”
The startled man raced off down the hall. They heard the elevator ding seconds later.
The concierge and the man came back up a minute later. The former was holding a key.
“What’s wrong?”
Pine said, “We have it on good authority that Ms. Clemmons is home but she’s not answering our knocks. We’re concerned for her welfare. We need you to open this door right now.”
The concierge paled, hurried forward, and unlocked the door. Pine took out her gun and motioned the three of them to stay right where they were.
She moved into the darkened apartment, her gun and gaze sweeping the areas in front of her. “Ms. Clemmons?” she called out. “Beth? It’s Agent Pine with the FBI. Are you in here?”
There was no answer, and Pine could hear no movement. She cleared the front rooms and the kitchen and made her way down the hall to the bedrooms. She went through Clemmons’s bedroom.
It was empty.
But there were some clothes on the floor of Clemmons’s closet. And her purse with her phone in it was on the nightstand.
She’s here, or at least she was.
The door of the attached bathroom stood open; the light was on.
Pine braced herself. She first got down on her knees and checked for a pair of feet showing from underneath the bathroom door. No one was hiding behind it. She quickly moved into the space, her pistol making arcs in the air.
The bathroom was huge, with a clawfoot bathtub set inside the walk-in shower.
From here she could see water right up to the top of the tub.
Shit.
She feared that the woman had overdosed while in the water, and then drowned.
She slowly entered the shower area and looked down.
This was not what she had been expecting. The tub was empty except for the water.
Confused, she stepped back out and checked the large cabinets lining the walls. There was nobody stuffed into any of them. Well, the full tub was perplexing. But there was still Hanna Rebane’s bedroom left. But she couldn’t understand why Clemmons would be in there when the bath was drawn in here.
She approached the door to leave the room and froze as she fixed on the crevice between the door and the wall.
She edged it farther open. Beth Clemmons was hanging from a hook on the back of the bathroom door, a ligature around her neck and a plastic bag over her head.
Chapter 39
THE QUIET, UPSCALE residential building was now full of police activity.
A lot of moving parts and absolutely no traction.
Or so this was Pine’s take on things.
While the local police were examining the body and searching Clemmons’s apartment, Pine and Blum were across the hall talking to the neighbor who had called out to them.
He sat on his costly couch in his fashionably decorated condo looking like he might throw up on his expensive Oriental rug.
“I…I might have been the last person to see her alive,” said the man, who had identified himself as Gene Martin. He was in his early thirties and obviously did something for a living that paid handsomely.
“Other than the person who killed her,” remarked Blum, causing Martin to stare bug-eyed at her.
“What, yes, of course.” He looked at the stoic Pine. “Wait, you can’t think? I…I had nothing to do with what happened.” He jumped to his feet. “Jesus, I would never kill anybody. I’m…I’m a CPA. The only way I’ve ever ‘hurt’ someone is by disallowing a deduction.”
“I don’t think you killed her, Mr. Martin. I’m much more interested in what you might have seen or heard.”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“Take a moment to calm down, sit back down, clear your head, and think back. Take it one step at a time. You said you were reading. You had earlier seen Clemmons. She was going to take a bath and relax for the evening. She went inside her place and you went inside yours. Take it from there starting with what time that was.”
Martin sat back down, took off his glasses, cleaned the lenses with a handkerchief clutched in a shaky hand, and put them back on.
“Okay, I spoke with Beth and then came in here. I remember looking at my watch. It was a couple minutes past four.”
“Okay, so you had seen her a few minutes before that?”
“Yes.”
“Was that the only time you saw her today?”
“Yes.”
“Why were you home at that time of day?” asked