Chapter 40

FORTY

FEbrUARY 2023

Cincinnati

Several hours after the discovery of Edward Greenwood's body at his home, Lucas checked into a Days Inn on the southern edge of the airport and wondered what he could do with the rest of the evening, seeing as how his schedule had been thrown off and he seemed to be surplus to requirements in the CPD investigation of Greenwood's death. Mac promised they would call him with an update later on, but he wasn't holding his breath.

Did Greenwood's suicide mean he was guilty of his wife's murder? Mac certainly thought so. But Lucas knew there was a lot more to the story.

He took out his laptop and opened it up on the small, scuffed desk in the corner of the room.

The day before, Detective Anderson had showed him the security footage of what was almost certainly OliviaGreenwood's abduction from the Park Plaza hotel. He had asked her to send the link by email and had watched it several times now. The footage was of acceptable quality, but he could see how it would have been inconclusive enough for the investigation not to have been a priority.

The footage was time-stamped for the early hours of February 17th. The clip opened at 02:07:36 on an empty corridor that could have been from a million hotels across the world. Doors on both sides, a beige carpet, low lighting from wall lamps.

At 02:07:52, a moving, indistinct shadow appeared in the bottom of the frame. It was followed by two figures shuffling into view. A man and a woman. The man wore a long coat and a baseball cap. His hair was dark and looked like it was short. Using the doors in the corridor as a guide, he looked about five-ten. It was impossible to tell anything else about him. He could have been black or white, skinny or well-built, twenty years old or seventy.

The woman was a little easier to place. She had blonde hair that looked unkempt. She had a coat, but she wasn't wearing it; it was draped over her shoulders. Bare legs showed below it, and Lucas couldn't be sure, but it looked as though she was wearing slippers.

At 02:07:56, she glanced back down the corridor, as though she had forgotten something, and showed her face to the camera. On a freeze frame, despite the quality, it was clear it was Olivia Greenwood.

Then the man, without turning back, steered her back around and kept her walking down the corridor. Her gait was unsteady, like she was drunk or drugged, but the man walked steadily, guiding her with an arm across her shoulders.

They reached the elevators at the end of the corridor, and the man pushed the button. Lucas noticed that he kept his face away from the camera at all times, and positioned his body in front of Olivia's while they waited. Ten seconds later, the car appeared, the doors opening and casting a brighter wedge of light out onto the dimly lit corridor. The man guided the woman inside. The doors slid shut, cutting off the light, and that was it. The video clip ended at 02:08:49, and that, as far as anyone could tell, was the last sighting of Olivia Greenwood.

Edward Greenwood had said that wasn't his wife on the tape at the time, that he had been mistaken, and so the line of inquiry had been discarded. Piecing it together weeks later, the investigating cops had searched in vain for more footage of the couple on the 19th floor of the Park Plaza in the wee hours of February 17th.

The foyer had several cameras, but the elevator allowed access to the basement parking lot, which had only one operational camera that did not cover the elevator. The couple could have taken one of the cars parked there, or even climbed the ramp to the street on foot and gone from there. The only vehicle seen leaving the lot within an hour of the video was a black Nissan Frontier pickup truck. The Ohio license plate was visible. It hadn't been run at the time, since by the time the footage had been recovered, Edward Greenwood had called off the search. Now, a week later, it turned out the plate was stolen.

"We'll take a look at black Nissan Frontier, see if we can find anything," Mac had said, adding, "I'm betting there's a lot of them out there."

Lucas was thinking about that when his phone buzzed. To his surprise, he saw Anderson's number on the screen.

She was waiting for him in the foyer.

"Mac wanted to see you again before you go."

Lucas smiled. "And you didn't?"

She didn't return the smile, bounced her car keys in her palm. "He's downtown, you coming?"

Lucas asked if they could make one stop on the way: the Park Plaza. It was a twenty-story building that looked like it had gone up in the middle of the last century. The hotel manager, Philip Morgenstern, was expecting them and greeted them with the air of a funeral director welcoming the family.

Morgenstern was mid-fifties. Thin and on the short side, with a neatly trimmed goatee and a widow's peak that made him look like a vampire, especially when paired with the black suit and the bow tie. He ushered them into a large office behind reception.

"Detectives," Morgenstern said as he closed the door, so quietly it was almost a whisper. "It's good to see you again, and I'm so sorry it isn't under happier circumstances."

Anderson only rolled her eyes a little, then turned to introduce Lucas. "Sergeant Lucas has joined us from Whatcom County, where Mrs. Greenwood's body was recovered. He's liaising with us to get to the bottom of what happened."

Morgenstern's face took on a pained expression. "Such a tragedy. Mr. and Mrs. Greenwood were such dearly loved guests. Part of the Park Plaza family."

"Any idea who the guy who crashed this family party might have been?" Lucas asked.

Morgenstern shook his head. "We had every member of the staff on duty that night watch the video, none of them could identify him as a guest or anyone else who had business in the hotel. Though, of course, it's difficult to be certain with the coat and the hat."

Lucas glanced at Anderson, raising his eyebrows. An unspoken request for permission to ask a question. Anderson nodded.

"Forgive me, I know you've probably been through this already with the detectives, but did you speak to Mrs. Greenwood at any time during her stay?"

"I regret I did not see her this time. I'm told she spent most of the time in her room before she…"

"Before she disappeared."

"Yes."

"You ever have anything like this in the hotel before?"

Morgenstern's brow furrowed. "Anything like this? Detective, I'm sure I don't have to tell you that as a large hotel we occasionally have to deal with…delicate situations, but no, we've never had a kidnapping. It's unfortunate, the circumstances of this case. If we had known earlier…if Mr. Greenwood had not called off the search…"

Anderson sat back in her chair and blew a lock of hair out of the way of her eye, sharing his frustration. "I hear you."

They were all picking up the pieces more than a week after the event, and far too late to do any good.

They met Mac at a late-opening coffee shop four blocks from the hotel. It was one of those self-consciously hip places with lots of exposed brick and spiral-filament light bulbs. Mac was sitting at the back with a glass of iced tea.

"It's been too long," Mac said as the other two pulled up their chairs and joined him. "This case is so cold you could put up a couple of goals and play hockey on it."

"How does the Greenwood thing look?" Lucas asked. "Mr. Greenwood, that is."

"Definitely a suicide, crime scene guys say nobody else involved," Mac said.

"He leave a note?" Lucas asked.

Mac shook his head. "I guess he didn't need to."

"Can I ask you a question?" Anderson said, addressing Lucas.

"Fire away."

She held eye contact with him for a moment before asking. "You think he did it?"

There was a long silence. Lucas held Anderson's gaze, and he could feel Mac's expectant gaze on him from across the table. He realized why they had made the time to catch up with him. It wasn't just professional courtesy; they needed to hear from someone with a little distance from the department.

Eventually, Mac replied with his own question: "What do you think?"

The two Cincinnati cops exchanged glances. Lucas could tell they were reluctant to show their hand first. But after a minute, Anderson shrugged and jutted her thumb at her partner, "He does. I'm not so sure."

Mac gulped the last of his tea and slammed the glass down on the coaster like a judge banging his gavel. "Innocent men don't do the things Greenwood did." He held up his index finger. "One, he reports his wife missing, then says she showed up fine. Which we now know was a lie."

Middle finger next. Lucas was gratified he hadn't led with that one.

"Two: he says later the kidnappers told him to say that. How do we know? There's no note, no email, no goddamn carrier pigeon, nothing to tell us anyone else was involved but him. Just the finger, which he could have done himself."

Mac raised his ring finger. "And three: right after we find the body and work out he had a sidepiece, he kills himself. It's like an admission of guilt. He knew he was caught; he knew what he did."

"We didn't have anything concrete," Anderson said, examining her own drink in the glass.

"Sometimes you don't need anything concrete," Mac said. "You know what you know. And I have probability on my side too. Nine times out of ten, when a woman dies violently, the husband or the boyfriend did it."

Lucas held his gaze and, without even consciously thinking about it, said, "My wife died violently."

It was as though someone had hit the mute button on their conversation. Anderson's eyes widened. Mac's jaw hung open like he had just taken an unexpected punch to the gut. Perhaps it was just Lucas's imagination but he thought the chatter from other tables around them ceased immediately. Even the song playing on the speakers seemed to be quieter. Lucas felt the pulse thudding in his head. Why the hell had he said that out loud? But he held Mac's gaze, unblinking.

"Oh my god, seriously?" Mac said after a minute. "Jesus, I'm so sorry. What happened?"

Lucas cleared his throat, a little worried that his voice would catch, but the words came out sounding normal, matter of fact.

"She killed herself. Put my Glock to her temple and pulled the trigger. Right after she killed our daughter."

Anderson blinked. He saw her fingers tighten on her glass.

"Jesus," Mac said again. "When did it happen?"

Lucas made a decision. He had said what he had said, and there was no taking it back. But if he wanted to make any sort of progress with this investigation and with these two cops, he would have to start rowing back toward normality. So he lied.

"It's okay, it was a long time ago," he said. "It stays with you but eventually you learn to live with it."

Anderson nodded. She hadn't said a word since Lucas had dropped his bombshell, but he was grimly amused that her ever- present look of mild contempt had vanished for the first time. Perhaps his unplanned opening up might even pay dividends.

Lucas shrugged, leaning into the part of the trauma survivor who's made it through the worst. "And what helped me was the job. Helping other people. Finding the people who took the lives of others. I think it's made me a better cop."

"Right," Mac said.

"Enough about the past," Lucas said. "Talk me through the present. Why is Greenwood guilty?"

Mac looked grateful to be steered back to the conversation they were having before. He continued, though his voice still had a hint of the quiet, shellshocked tone with which he had pressed Lucas on his wife's death.

"Okay, so he lied to us and he killed himself, like I said. But there's more. We looked into his background. Turns out he was in a little bit of financial trouble. His wife had a two-million-dollar life insurance policy."

"Not out of the ordinary, for a couple that rich," Anderson said, speaking for the first time since the revelation. "Greenwood himself was insured for the same."

"Still," Mac said. "Being in deep financial shit is a motive. And that's not the only one. There's the girlfriend. Maybe the both of them cooked it up. Wouldn't be the first time."

"Doesn't sit right with me," Anderson said.

Lucas was interested. He thought Mac's explanation was a little too neat himself. "Why not?"

"We interviewed both of them. They were both in shock about what happened to his wife. But neither of them acted guilty; not in that way anyway. I could believe one of them could put on a good enough act to fool me, but both of them?"

"So maybe the girlfriend didn't know about it," Mac said. "Doesn't mean Greenwood didn't kill his wife."

"You're both talking hunches," Lucas said, realizing he was enjoying the unusual opportunity to critique someone else doing his job. He looked at Mac. "What do you have that's solid? Can you actually put Greenwood in the frame for the murder?" He turned to Anderson. "And can you rule him out?"

Anderson shook her head. "We have a decent, if incomplete, timeline of his movements from the night of the sixteenth until he killed himself. Some of that from our interview with him, the rest from his work calendar, social events, and so on. But we don't have a minute-to-minute account of his whereabouts over the last couple weeks, if that's what you want."

"Why was she dumped twenty-five hundred miles away?" Lucas asked. "Almost certainly she was held there; at least immediately before she was killed. You don't transport a body across seven or eight state lines for no reason. You find the nearest dump spot to you, and I'm guessing you know all the hot spots out here."

"This is the problem. We have Olivia going missing on the seventeenth, we have you finding her body three days ago, and we have Greenwood offing himself today. In between the first two events, it's a black hole, thanks to Greenwood."

"Or thanks to the kidnappers," Anderson said.

"If there really were kidnappers," Mac said. "There's no evidence of that either. No notes, no pictures, nothing."

"What about the call Greenwood took?" Lucas asked.

"There's a call from a burner to his phone around three o'clock the afternoon after Olivia was abducted," Anderson said. "That matches with Greenwood's story. Supposedly that's when they called him, told him they had his wife and that he had to tell the police she was safe at home."

"Any other calls from that burner?"

Anderson shook his head. "If he was telling the truth, they communicated by another burner after that."

Mac still looked skeptical. Lucas could see both points, but he wasn't sure who he agreed with. There was one thing that didn't add up though.

"If Greenwood killed his wife, or hired someone to do it, why did they take her so far away?"

"We were kind of hoping you could tell us that," Anderson said, after exchanging a glance with her partner.

Lucas thought about it.

"Do you have access to Greenwood's bank accounts, his business affairs?"

"We know the gist," Mac said. "There are forensic accountants going through the fine detail right now, but we know that he was a lot less solvent than he appeared to be. That's the motive."

"But no big transactions in the last couple of weeks?"

"He moved some money around, seemed like he was trying to free up some capital," Anderson said. "Nothing had come to fruition, certainly no large sums being withdrawn or transferred."

"Which would be consistent with a man trying to pay a ransom," Lucas said.

"Right," Anderson said.

"Or consistent with a guy making it look like he was trying to do that," Mac interjected. "Remember, if this went to plan, he would have to show his working after the fact."

"So unless there's something you haven't found yet, no ransom was paid."

"Because there never was a ransom," Mac said. "He made it look like a kidnapping and was going to cash in on the life insurance."

Lucas said nothing for a while, deep in thought. It didn't make sense. If Greenwood had killed his wife, or had her killed, why overcomplicate it like this? Why take her so far away, risking discovery? But if he was telling the truth, and Olivia Greenwood really had been kidnapped and ransomed, why had she been killed before he had a chance to pay? And where were the kidnappers now?