Slow Burn

Chapter Thirty-five

Roger Mackenna's apartment smelled like forgotten garbage. Roger smelled like he'd rolled around in it before he killed himself. He was lying on the floor in the living room, flat on his back, the gun still clutched in his hand. Blood had pooled around his head and upper shoulders and had formed what appeared to be a perfect black chalk outline. Death had captured his expression of despair. One eye was closed, the other was somewhere in the back of his skull.

He wasn't a pretty sight.

The FBI was there in force, and the agent in charge, Joel Kline, turned out to be surprisingly accommodating. He was about Dylan's age, but he already had deep creases at the corners of his mouth. His tall, thin frame was hunched at the shoulders as though permanently bent from stooping over too many crime scenes.

Once Dylan had diplomatically let him know that he was in no way interested in usurping his position, Kline handed him a pair of gloves and told him to have a look around. He'd be happy to get his input.

The medical examiner was a middle-aged man named Dr. Luke Parrish. He was kneeling beside the body. Dylan squatted next to him, introduced himself, and showed him his badge.

Parrish liked to chat. "I used to live near Silver Springs," he said. "Real nice area. Not enough homicides to keep me busy or interested, so I moved here. Savannah's real nice, too," he added. "With that accent of yours I'd say you're from the northeast. Am I right?"

"Yes," he said. "Boston."

"You relocating?"

"No, this is a temporary job."

They both turned to look at the body. "This one knew what he was doing," Parrish said. "One clean shot took care of it. Most of them don't know where to aim."

The weapon was a Glock. Parrish bagged it and handed it to a hovering agent. "Damn, he stinks. I don't think he ever took a shower. He hasn't been dead long. He had this stench on him when he was alive. How could anyone live like this? Look around. The place is a pit. You'd think anybody who could afford expensive furniture like this might try a little to keep it nice. That leather sofa alone had to have cost a couple thousand."

Parrish wasn't exaggerating about the apartment. It was a pit. There were overflowing ashtrays on tables and chairs, and empty whiskey bottles scattered about. The sofa looked like it was ready to be carted off to the city dump. The cushions were all broken down, and there were cigarette holes along the arms.

The coffee table was the only clean surface in the apartment. The papers on top were organized.

"Did you find a suicide note?" Dylan asked.

Kline crossed the room to join him. "No, not yet. But he left us all these papers. I think he wanted to help us get Jackman."

"Is there enough to prosecute him?"

"We're not through looking."

In other words, no, Dylan thought. "Tell me what you do have."

"We've compared what we found here with the information we'd already gotten from Nate Hallinger. He's gonna love seeing all this evidence when he gets here.

"It looks like Roger knew just about everything there was to know about Kate MacKenna. He had all of her phone numbers, her work and home addresses, the make and model of her car, the license plate number, her business associates' phone numbers and addresses, her sisters' cell phone numbers. He even had Isabel MacKenna's ex-boyfriend's name and phone number."

"He had Reece Crowell's name?"

"And he'd underlined Carl Bertolli's address and had the date and time for the gallery party. He had the address for the warehouse, too."

"My God, he had it all, didn't he?"

"I'm just getting warmed up. We already bagged the calendar we found in the kitchen next to the phone. It was covered with prints. It looked like someone else besides Roger had made notes. There were two distinct handwritings. I sent it to the lab over an hour ago and put a rush on it. We should have a preliminary report any minute now. Besides times and places, there were flight numbers. Kate's flight numbers. He knew when she was going to Boston, and he knew when she was coming home."

Dylan was having a difficult time controlling his anger. How long had the son of a bitch been stalking Kate? Had he been inside her house? It would have been easy for him. She never locked the damned doors.

"Have you looked at his car yet?"

"Yes," Kline answered. "It's a white Ford with tinted windows. This has to be the car Kate described to Hallinger, the one that tried to run her down."

"Getting all this information took a lot of time and care." Dylan rubbed the back of his neck. "What else?"

"There were two dates heavily circled on the calendar."

"The dates of the explosions."

"That's right," Kline said. "Roger made a lot of notations. One was real interesting. 'Jackman got the baskets.' 'Two hundred thousand' was written next to it. That has to be the amount he paid for the explosives."

"Nate told me Jackman's been picked up."

"Yes," he replied. "Right now he's sitting in an interrogation room in Vegas waiting for his attorney."

"Roger's notes aren't going to be enough to hold him long, and you still don't know who was behind the camera when Compton MacKenna filmed his farewell address."

"We know it wasn't one of the nephews because he didn't trust any of them, and he didn't want them to know what he was up to," he said. "That was real apparent in the video. There are a couple of people looking good to us, though. One's the housekeeper. We just found out she made a fat deposit in her account about six weeks ago. We're bringing her in to have a little talk." He added, "And we're also interested in Compton MacKenna's attorney. I'm not worried. We'll find whoever it was."

Dylan took his time walking around the apartment and studying the papers and the handwritten notes. Nice tidy package, he thought. Roger couldn't have been more accommodating if he'd tried. He'd left just enough hints to connect Jackman, but not hard evidence to nail him.

Something didn't compute. Dylan made a second examination of the information the agents had collected, but each time a question was answered, another one popped up. What was Reece's name doing in Roger's notes? Why did he leave information for them to find and yet leave no suicide note? Where did he get another gun so quickly? There was nothing orderly in Roger's life, so why was this so organized?

One perfect shot… knew just where to aim.

The paramedics had come in to bag the body. Agent Kline moved out of their way and noticed Dylan staring down at the papers, frowning. "Something bothering you?" he asked.

Dylan nodded. "This doesn't feel right. It isn't working for me."

They both watched the body being carted away. "What you've got here is a nice, tidy package," Dylan said.

Kline shrugged. "It can happen this way… all of it coming together…"

"Yeah? Since when does it happen this way? Everything laid out nice and easy for you? The only thing missing from the table are arrows pointing to the evidence on those papers." He shook his head. "I don't like nice and tidy, and do you know why? It makes me think that maybe all this was staged."