Page 35 of Go Alone

Kate finished the rest of her coffee and grinned at Marcus. “Screw you. But also thank you.”

“You can screw me to thank me,” he quipped.

Kate rolled her eyes and turned around to hide the flush that came to her cheeks. Before she could scold Marcus for being crass, her phone rang. Anita.

“Maybe she’s got something,” Marcus suggested. “Winters told me Anita called her directly to follow up on the Linus Varne angle. If she’s still that attached to it, then maybe she actually dug something up.”

“I’ll take anything at this point,” Kate replied.

She regretted her words the moment she answered the phone. Anita, in a tired, defeated voice, informed her, “We have another dead body.”

Kate’s smile vanished. Marcus saw it and realized what had happened. “Oh, damn it,” he whispered.

The energy Kate had just regained evaporated. She rubbed her left eye and asked, “Where?”

“Gahanna. It’s a city just north of the airport. I’ll pick you up in five minutes, and we’ll head there together. Gahanna PD is going to hold the scene for us.”

“All right,” Kate said. “We’ll see you soon.”

“Yep.” Anita’s stoicism was more toneless than laconic now.

Kate hung up and stared straight ahead. Marcus didn’t try to snap her out of it this time other than to refill her coffee cup and hand it carefully to her. She sipped it. It did little to warm her up.

They had failed. However Marcus wanted to spin it, they had failed. They were supposed to catch this guy before he killed again, and they had failed.

You still have a job to do, she reminded herself. Don’t give up. Don’t give Cox the satisfaction.

That thought brought enough motivation to get her dressed and downstairs to meet Anita.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The offices of Brannigan & Associates were located in a three-hundred-fifty-foot-tall office tower. That office tower was the only building of its kind for miles. Rather than being surrounded by other office buildings, it sat directly in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

That struck Kate as immediately suspicious, and when she saw the name Brannigan in fancy calligraphic script on the mailbox of the house nearest the office building, she grew more suspicious. God only knew what reason Brannigan would have had to build a twenty-two-story office tower in a neighborhood, but her alarm bells were ringing the moment she stepped out of the car.

They rang again when she saw the news vans parked in the lot. Gahanna PD was surrounding them, and a lieutenant had set up a little stage that pulled the reporters’ attention away from Kate and Marcus as they made their way to the entry, but that was a delaying tactic.

It worked this time, though. They reached the entry without incident and headed straight for the elevator. According to Anita, Brannigan had been found by one of his partners, dead in a conference room on the top floor of the tower, the floor which contained the offices of all the partners.

Kate looked at the board behind the reception desk in the lobby. Brannigan & Associates occupied floors eighteen through twenty-two. A dental office occupied the second floor. There were no other tenants.

Yeah, something was very screwy here.

Marcus breathed a sigh of relief when they were in the elevator and hadn’t been overrun by a horde of rapid reporters. “We need to avoid talking to them,” he told Kate. “I really hope those cops are running good enough interference.”

“I told Gahanna PD to make sure we weren’t interrupted and that no one got in the building," Anita said. "As far as issuing a statement, well, they're not going to pretend it's their case, so you're going to have to at least issue a press release. Hopefully, it can be something typed out and sanitized by your PR department before you release it into the wild."

Kate paid half-attention to this, but the wheels in her head were already turning. This was a very different place than a neighbor’s house. Why had the killer murdered Brannigan here? Why did this building exist in the first place? Why was Brannigan the only tenant other than a dental office?

“Anita, can you visit that dental office?” Kate asked.

Anita frowned. “You’re wondering why they’re the only other tenant,” she guessed.

“That and why this building is here in the first place,” Kate agreed. “This place doesn’t make sense.”

Anita nodded. “Yeah. It’s got a bit of a creepy feel to it, I’ll admit. Like they built it over a native burial ground or something.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if they built it over some sort of body,” Kate said. “Or bodies. Marcus, see if you can follow up on that while I look at the scene.”