The Private Concierge. Suzanne Forster

heartsick about what had happened to her clients, including Ned. She knew them all as good men who couldn’t have done what they were accused of, but sadly there didn’t seem to be anything she could do to protect them. The problems were escalating, and Lane had to think of herself, as well. A concierge service was its clients. If the clients went down, the service went down with them.

      She opened the drawer of her desk and pulled out Ned’s application. She hadn’t given it to anyone yet to process, and she’d handled the credit-card transaction herself. Her receptionist and assistant, Mary, had been out on a break, and Lane had been watching the desk. So, no one knew about Ned Talbert but her. And no one could know.

      4

      Rick prowled the darkened house using only a penlight. He wore latex gloves and slipcovers over his shoes the way evidence technicians did to avoid contamination. He was familiar enough with the place to find his way around in the dark, but didn’t want to chance disturbing the crime scene evidence and signaling that someone had been here.

      Not that anyone would notice, he suspected. It was just after midnight, and the guard had changed. The rookie had been replaced by a retiree. Sound asleep in a chair by the house’s front entrance, the night-shift guy was doing a good imitation of a rusty buzz saw.

      Rick had parked on a side street, walked over and let himself in through the back way, using a customized attachment on his pocketknife to jimmy the lock, rather than touch the knob, which should have been dusted for prints but didn’t appear to have been. He was here to check out the crime scene, but he was also looking for the package he’d passed off to Ned all those years ago for safekeeping. And maybe the darkness would help him focus on his mission, instead of the countless reminders of his friend.

      He’d identified the body at the morgue today. It was Ned without question. Rick saw the faded scar on his friend’s chin even before he saw the bullet hole. When they were kids, he and Ned had believed they could do anything—jump off roofs and fly, walk on water—and they had the scars to prove it. Nothing daunted them, even when Ned missed a branch playing Tarzan, fell to the earth and split open his chin. They’d been eight at the time.

      Rick turned off the light and stopped, needing a moment to deal with all of it, to breathe against the suffocating weight in his chest. He’d gone numb after his visit to the morgue, and he wished to hell he could stay that way. Scarred or not, the face he’d seen on the concrete slab wasn’t his friend. It was a death mask with Ned’s features. The body that had housed his larger-than-life spirit was an empty shell. He was gone.

      Rick didn’t believe in heaven and hell. He couldn’t console himself with the belief that he would ever see his friend again. The Ned who’d been like a part of him had vanished, leaving Rick feeling as empty as the body in the morgue. He couldn’t even hold a clear picture of Ned in his mind without having it replaced by a corpse with a bullet through its brain. There was no comfort to be found, even in his memories. That was why he had to find out what had happened. At least then he wouldn’t be haunted by questions.

      When he left the morgue, he’d driven straight over to the West L.A. station to talk with his buddy, Don Cooper, in homicide, who wasn’t on the case but had confirmed that it was being handled by the big guns of the elite Robbery Homicide Division. Coop had heard unofficially that Ned’s celebrity status in the sports world warranted the high-level involvement, not because they believed it was anything other than a murder-suicide. Coop also confirmed that a suicide note had been found at the scene, but the contents had not been revealed.

      And then, for some reason, he’d volunteered the kind of gun Ned had used. None of this information should have been shared with an outsider, which was why Rick had come to Coop. He was a talker. One of these days Coop was going to talk himself right out of a job, Rick imagined.

      Rick beamed the light over the leather chair where Ned had been sitting when he pressed the barrel of a full-size 9 mm Glock to his right temple and pulled the trigger. The chalked outline showed him knocked to the left by the force of the discharge and slumped over the arm of the chair.

      Jesus, what had made him do that?

      Rick’s head swam with questions that were almost unbearable. Did Ned get that idea from him? Had the scene at the cabin triggered something in his friend? They’d done everything together as kids, and Rick had almost always been the leader, the instigator.

      But Rick couldn’t let himself believe that, despite the lacerating guilt he felt. Ned was an adult, his own man. He wouldn’t have copycatted a suicide. Rick needed to start thinking like an investigator. What was Ned doing with a Glock? He didn’t own a gun and had no use for them. He’d always said he could do more damage with a baseball bat. Rick wondered if anyone had checked to see if Ned had bought a gun recently or had a permit to carry the gun that was used. Or dusted the empty shell casings for prints.

      Rick flashed the beam from the chalked outline of Ned’s body to the woman’s on the floor at the foot of his chair. According to Coop, she’d died in a sexually degrading position while partially naked and restrained. The cause of death was suffocation. She’d had a cheap grocery-store plastic bag tied around her head.

      Rick had asked Coop if burn marks were found on her genitals. He’d looked at Rick funny but hadn’t asked any questions. He’d said he didn’t know, but she probably hadn’t died quickly. The condition of the plastic bag, plus the way the vessels in her eyes had hemorrhaged indicated the suffocation might have been interrupted several times, perhaps intentionally.

      Rick breathed a curse word. This was all wrong. He knew it to the depths of his being. This wasn’t a hero’s death. Suffocating a bound woman and then shooting yourself was cowardly. Ned wouldn’t have wanted to go out this way, or take her with him. He was trying to save Holly, not kill her.

      Ned was drawn to self-destructive women, probably because of his mother. Her heroin habit had driven her to extremes, including hooking to get money for drugs. She’d died of an overdose when Ned was really young, and like a lot of kids with parents who screw up, he’d felt responsible. He’d been picking questionable women ever since, maybe thinking he could fix whatever was wrong. Or maybe they’d picked him. Nice guys like Ned were easy targets.

      Rick looked from one chalked form to the other, trying to get a sense of the dominant emotion involved. Every crime scene had clues; the trick was to read them correctly. Murder was usually driven by fear or rage, but he didn’t pick up either here. There was a methodical feel to these crimes—and that wasn’t Ned. He’d said he was being blackmailed because of his sex practices, but he’d also said it was all lies. This crime scene said he was the liar. Only blind rage could have driven him to this. And why take his rage out on Holly? Unless he was being blackmailed by her.

      Rick had no answers as he slowly flashed the beam around the rest of the room. The blood and spatter patterns were typical of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, and according to Coop, there’d been no sign of forced entry. Rick saw nothing else that stood out, and with every passing second the risk of being discovered increased. But there was one last thing that had to be done.

      He moved silently to the hallway that led to the master bedroom. He passed a writing desk on the way, and the beam of his penlight struck something small and shiny. The desk drawer was partially open and a high-gloss business card was stuck in the sliding mechanism on the side. Rick could imagine a technician opening the drawer and finding the card, along with other things to be bagged as evidence, then unknowingly dropping the card while closing the drawer. Or it might have been something else entirely. Someone may have been in a great hurry to cover his tracks and grabbed for the card but dropped it. The killer perhaps?

      Rick fished the card out and held it under the light. The initials TPC were elegantly scrolled down the left side in gold leaf. Laddered across the card just as elegantly were the words The Private Concierge. On the bottom right was a woman’s name, a phone number and an e-mail address. Lane Chandler.

      The name was familiar, but Rick couldn’t place it. He turned the card over and found a one-word question scrawled in what looked like Ned’s handwriting: Extortion?

      Was