“That would mean premeditation if she brought it with her,” Bree said.
Prough was puzzled by that but then shrugged again. “I don’t know.”
“How many times had you seen her before that night?”
“More than once,” Prough said.
“She talk to you?” Bree asked.
“She didn’t know I was there, ever,” Prough said. “I don’t like people.”
“But you spy on them?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted.
“You’re willing to testify to what you saw?” I asked.
He hesitated, nodded, said, “If that’s what it takes.”
I had recorded most of our conversation. But we were taking Prough downtown to make a sworn statement. We put him in the backseat and had to roll the windows down, he smelled so bad. I started the car, feeling numbed by the idea that the shy girl who’d lived under our roof for so long might have run away, gotten caught up in the world of street drugs, murdered another girl, and then desecrated her body.
My cell rang before I’d driven a block. Sampson. I answered, said, “John?”
“Alex, Timmy Jackson was just found dead at the Mandarin Oriental.”
Chapter
32
Mandy Lee Francones’s attorney lay sprawled at the foot of the king-size bed. A coffee cup was spilled beside him. The attorney’s eyes were severely bloodshot and looked buggy. His mouth was open as if gasping.
“First glance, I’d say a massive heart attack, Detectives,” said Tony Bracket, the ME on the scene.
“This guy’s like thirty-four,” Sampson said. “And he’s built like a bull.”
“Bulls need bull hearts,” Bracket said. “He under a lot of stress?”
“You could say that,” I replied. I’d left Bree to take Prough in to make his statement and had taken a cab straight to the hotel.
I scanned the room now. Coffee carafe on the table. Ripped and empty raw sugar packet. Used creamers. The pants and jacket of the suit we’d seen the attorney wearing. Using latex gloves, I picked up the pieces of the suit, saw the smear of something on the leg right away.
“That’s fresh,” I said, handing it to a tech for bagging.
Then I picked up the creamer containers and the sugar packet. I tasted them. Nothing. When I twisted the carafe open and sniffed the contents, I smelled only coffee. I almost stuck my finger in it, but the sudden racing of my heart stopped me.
Dizzy, I set the carafe down and had to hold on to the table a moment before my heart slowed and that upended feeling went away.
“Sorry, Doc,” I said to Bracket, who was taking the corpse’s temperature. “We’re treating this as a murder until proved otherwise.”
“Why?” asked Sampson, who was going through the closets.
I gestured at the coffee carafe. “I’m not going near that again without a gas mask, but either I just had a coincidental heart arrhythmia or the coffee was laced with something mucho bad.”
“Where’d he get the coffee?” Sampson asked, coming over and looking at the carafe as if it smelled gross.
“Exactly,” I said.
From digital records provided by the security staff at the Mandarin Oriental, we knew almost immediately that Jackson’s hotel room door was opened at 5:25 a.m., and again at 5:29, about an hour and eighteen minutes before room service discovered the body.