An Offer You Can't Refuse, Sal Bianchi [free ebook reader .TXT] 📗

Owens.” I smiled at her, barely bothering to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

I walked briskly past her before she could say anything else. As fun as it was to tease her, it would be mean to antagonize her too much, and I had a job to do right now. I decided to go straight to find Jase to see if he had any new information about the case.

When he saw me, he smiled and waved me over. “It’s about time you got here,” he said and then elbowed me casually in the side. “Come on, Flint has some information for us, and I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Sorry about that,” I said as we made our way to Flint’s office. “I had to bike over here, since I left my car at the club last night.”

“Oh,” Jase snickered. “I didn’t even think of that. How late did you and Erica end up staying out?”

“Late,” I replied as we stopped in front of Flint’s office door. As usual, the shutters were drawn closed, so I knocked on the door and waited to see if he was in there.

“Come in,” his gruff voice called from inside.

“Good morning, Officer Flint,” I said as I pushed the door open.

“It’s ‘director’ now, Nick,” he corrected me flatly.

“Right.” I smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, old habit.”

“Yeah, I know,” he replied, looking back at me a little sadly. “Anyway, now that you’re both here,” he nodded to Jase and me. “Let’s cut to the chase. We have something new on the case. Police were able to get samples of Ryan Rothschild’s fingerprints and DNA. We found matching prints in the victim’s home, but considering he was living there until recently, that doesn’t actually prove anything.”

“Well, yeah,” I shrugged. “Especially since we’ve established that it was most likely that woman who killed the senator.”

“Right,” Flint shrugged. “What’s more confusing is that we found his prints at the scene of a different crime.”

“What?” I exclaimed, shocked by the unexpected turn of events.

“About a month ago, a man named Carlisle Rutherford died under unusual circumstances,” Flint explained. “He was in his sixties, and his health was poor, so at the time, it was unclear whether his death was the result of natural causes or not. However, it was suspicious that he was found dead when he’d been just fine the day before. Even more suspicious were the fingerprints found on the window sill of his bedroom.”

“Didn’t the police conduct an investigation?” Jase asked.

“To an extent,” Flint nodded. “But aside from the unidentified fingerprints, there were no signs of foul play. None of the windows or doors had been tampered with, and there weren’t any signs of injury on the body. In the end, the police decided that the most likely cause was a heart attack or stroke.”

“But now we have this connection to Ryan Rothschild,” I mused aloud. This was so bizarre. It was pretty obvious that Ryan hadn’t killed his wife, at least not with his own two hands. Yet now we had evidence that he was at the scene of a different murder.

“There’s a bit more to it,” Flint continued. “Rutherford’s daughter, Marina Rutherford, never accepted the police’s determination. She insisted that her father had been murdered, and the person she suspected most was her own brother, Shane Rutherford.”

“Why would she think that?” I asked. I was getting more puzzled with every new detail that Flint divulged.

“According to her,” Flint explained, “Carlisle was about to write his son out of his will. She insisted that he must have killed their father in order to avoid losing his inheritance, but when the police looked into it, Shane had an airtight alibi.”

I felt a chill run down my spine at those words.

“So, it’s exactly the same situation,” I muttered. “Just like Ryan and Alexis Rothschild, the main suspect conveniently had a perfect alibi for the time of the murder.”

“That’s right.” Flint nodded seriously. “I also thought it was too much to just be a coincidence. For now, I’d like you two to go speak to the daughter and son and see what each has to say about the death of their father. There’s no doubt that this is somehow related to our current case. I’ll send their personal information to Agent Park’s work tablet.”

“All right,” I nodded as I moved to stand up. Flint just turned to the papers on his desk and began to get back to work. As long as I’d known him, he’d never been one for pleasantries or long goodbyes. Once the conversation finished, that was it. Some people might interpret it as rude, but I’d always thought it was his way of trying to be honest and efficient.

I left the office with Jase in tow and waited until the door was closed behind us to speak.

“So, who should we go see first?” I asked as we made our way toward the entrance of the office. “The daughter or the son?”

“Daughter,” he decided after a moment of pensive hesitation. “If Shane really is behind it, he’ll probably have come up with a million excuses by now. Getting the story from Marina first will give us more ammunition to approach him with.”

“Great, let’s go then,” I declared as we left the office and headed toward the elevator. I was relieved that Flint either hadn’t heard about my squabble with Domenico the previous night, or had chosen not to bring it up.

Since I didn’t actually work for the SDCT, he wasn’t my boss, but he could easily kick me off the case and bar me from consulting with them again. I knew that he was already going out on a limb even to allow me to work with them, so I tried not to do anything stupid that would reflect badly on him.

As we got into the car to head to the daughter’s address, I made a mental note to myself to avoid running into any of the other mafiosi for a while.

17

Nick

The house that the daughter,