Secret Sanctuary

“Did you see anyone else in the foyer? In the hallway outside the solarium? Anyone lurking outside?”

“No. Maybe. I’m not sure.” She drew an unsteady breath and told him about the open door in the solarium and the yellow flash she’d seen beyond the terrace. “It might have been nothing more than a reflection. I can’t be sure. I certainly can’t say beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was a person.”

“If it was, we’re not going to find any footprints in this weather,” he said grimly.

Elizabeth’s fingers tightened around the fastener on her cloak. “I don’t think it very likely, but I suppose it’s possible someone could have been inside the room when I first entered, and then left through that door. I didn’t turn on a light.”

“Why not?”

“As I said, I slipped away from the party to be alone for a few minutes. I didn’t want anyone to see me.”

Cullen’s glance sharpened. “Were you afraid someone would follow you into the solarium?”

As if. “No. I just thought someone might see the light and become curious. And, also, it was easier to observe the storm in the darkness.”

“I see. When you went back to close the door, that’s when you saw the body?”

She nodded. “I lost my balance on the wet floor and fell. For some reason, I looked up and I saw her hanging from one of the steel supports….” Elizabeth broke off, shuddering in spite of herself.

She wasn’t unfamiliar with death. In her Criminal Investigations courses at Heathrow, she taught her students how to dissect crime scenes analytically and view murder victims objectively. As a graduate student, she’d interned with the Worcester Police Department in order to research her doctoral thesis, and just a few months ago, she’d attended a series of seminars conducted by an FBI profiler. She knew crime. She lived and breathed crime.

But when the victim was someone you knew…someone so young…

“I’ll need statements from all of you,” Cullen said to the Pierces who stood clustered behind Elizabeth. “For now, I want everyone to remain out here. We need to keep the crime scene as virgin as possible.”

Elizabeth winced. “I’m afraid…that is, the solarium may already have been compromised.”

“Someone besides you has been in there?” Cullen asked sharply.

“We rushed in without thinking when Elizabeth told us what she’d found,” Drew explained. “She tried to keep us out, but we couldn’t know for certain the girl was dead. We thought we might be able to help her.”

Cullen glanced at Elizabeth. “How many went inside?”

“All of them,” she admitted gloomily.

He shook his head in frustration. “We’ll have to cross-check fingerprints then. I’ll also need a copy of the guest list.” He turned to the uniformed officer who stood directly behind him. “Make sure guards remain at all the exits. No one leaves, no one gets in without my say-so. I don’t care who it is,” he said pointedly at the Pierces. “I don’t care what excuses they give you.”

“Surely you don’t expect everyone to wait around here indefinitely,” Geoffrey Pierce, Drew’s uncle, complained. “I have things to do.”

“At this hour?” Cullen gave him a speculative look. “What kind of things would they be?”

Geoffrey didn’t answer, just stood there looking unpleasant. A tall, slender man with thinning blond hair, he hadn’t managed the approach to middle age with quite the same grace as his older brother, William. And he didn’t seem to have William’s compassion. He was handsome, as all the Pierces were, but something about his expression, about the cruel set of his lips, made him seem at once sinister and weak.

Drew put a hand on the man’s arm. “Detective Ryan is right, Uncle Geoffrey. We screwed up. Let’s not make things worse.” To Cullen he said, “We’ll do everything we can to cooperate.”

“I’m counting on that.” Cullen took a pair of latex gloves from his overcoat pocket and snapped them on. He handed another pair to Elizabeth. “Show me the body, Elizabeth.”

THE FIRST THING Cullen noticed about the solarium was the temperature. The room was still frigid even though Elizabeth said she’d closed the outside door. He could feel the chill though his overcoat, but then, the heavy fabric was still damp from the rain.

He wondered now, as he followed Elizabeth toward the back of the solarium, if he might have been able to prevent the tragedy if he’d accepted the moonlighting job as a security guard for the Pierces. Probably not. So far, it appeared that the murderer had been able to slip in and out without being detected by any of the other guards or guests which suggested to Cullen that the suspect was someone familiar with the Pierce compound. Someone who had either come in the front gate as a guest, or through the back entrance with the hired help.

But that hardly narrowed the field. Party-goers had come from all over the state, and in Moriah’s Landing alone, half the population had either received invitations to the party or been hired to work in some capacity at the compound.

In short, the killer could be anyone, Cullen thought grimly as he tugged at the neckline of his sweater.

The solarium was crowded with plants. Some of the tree ferns grew all the way to the top of the dome while a maze of sinewy vines coiled around the rafters and crept downward, inching away from the sunlight. Hanging baskets trailed lacy fronds that brushed against Cullen’s shoulders, making him think of spiders. He found the atmosphere inside the solarium suffocating, as if the plants were sucking all the air from the room.

Elizabeth had stopped in front of him and was staring at him curiously. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” His tone was more clipped than he’d meant it to be.

She cocked her head, still regarding him. “It’s rather close in here, with all the plants. You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

He glanced at her warily. “Claustrophobic?”

“An abnormal dread of being in closed or narrow spaces.”

“I know what it means,” Cullen said dryly. “But only you would put it that way.”

“What way?”

“Only you would use the exact dictionary definition. Word for word, I’ll bet.”

She lifted her chin. “What’s wrong with being precise?”

“Nothing.” She wouldn’t understand even if he explained it to her. People with a high IQ seemed to live in their own little world. “I don’t have claustrophobia,” he said with an impatient shrug. “I just don’t care for all these damn plants.”

“Well, maybe you have botanophobia. Fear of plants.”

“What I don’t have is time,” he snapped. “Let’s get on with this.”

“Of course.” She gave him a cool glance as she turned and walked to the back of the solarium without another word.

Cullen hoped he hadn’t hurt her feelings, but, damn, she could be so annoying. There seemed to be no end to the trivia she’d stuffed inside that head of hers. She’d always been way too smart—and far too superior—for her own good in Cullen’s opinion. That was one of the reasons she’d had so much trouble in school. Bad enough she was such an Einstein, but did she have to rub people’s noses in it?

It was a shame, too, because she wasn’t a bad-looking girl. Cullen supposed that some might even consider her attractive, in a sisterly sort of way. Nice hair. Nice eyes. Slight build.

She’d matured since he’d left town six years ago, but she was still very young. He had a hard time thinking of her as anything other than the bratty little kid he’d tried to protect from the bullies who’d ragged on her in school. Although, to this day, he couldn’t figure out why he’d bothered. She’d made it clear from the first she didn’t want or need help from the likes of him.

Fair enough, he supposed. She wasn’t only brilliant, she was rich to boot. She came from the ritzy part of town, and Cullen had grown up down by the docks. Her parents were scientists; his old man had been a drunk. They didn’t exactly travel in the same social circles, he and Elizabeth.

She’d stopped in front of him again, her head tilted skyward. Cullen glanced up. The body dangled about ten feet from the floor from a steel girder that helped support the glass dome.

Cullen’s blood went cold with shock even though he’d had plenty of time to prepare himself. It didn’t matter how prepped he was or how many times he worked a crime scene, murder always got him in the gut.

Especially when the victim was very young.

She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. Someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. Snuffed out by a cold-blooded murderer who’d left her hanging there like a piece of meat in a butcher-shop freezer.