The Red Queen Dies Page 9

  A cat jumped down in front of them, springing from the back of a chair by the door of the room they were about to pass. Gold and brown, tail raised straight up, he stared at them. The cat weighed at least twenty pounds.

  Both McCabe and Baxter stopped in their tracks.

  Rosalind, the robotic maid, said, “The cat is named Horatio. He is a Maine coon cat and a fine fellow. He will not bite or scratch unless threatened. Please let me know if you are allergic and require medication.”

  McCabe said, “Thank you, Rosalind. I don’t require medication.” She looked at Baxter. “You okay, Mike?”

  He shook his head, mouth twitching with laughter. “I’m just fine and dandy.”

  McCabe held her hand down to the cat. “Hello, Horatio.”

  Horatio strolled over, sniffed her hand, and then nudged her leg. She patted his head. He meowed and strolled off back into what seemed to be a library, where he jumped up onto an armchair and looked out at them from his golden eyes.

  Rosalind said, “Please follow me.”

  A rainbow of colors played along her metallic legs as they passed the cathedral windows in an empty stretch of hallway.

  They reached their destination: Ted Thornton’s own private gallery.

  McCabe turned to the left and right, looking around her. Thornton’s taste was eclectic, but the theme seemed to be transportation—from toy trains on an elevated track to a miniature balloon about to take off from a field. From sketches of flying machines that might have been done by da Vinci to scale models of spaceships, if it moved, Thornton seemed to have cataloged it, including a replica of the UFO from 2012.

  Rosalind said, “Mr. Thornton will be with you shortly.” She gestured toward the rear of the room. “Please help yourself to refreshments from the bar. Wine, beer, and nonalcoholic beverages, including coffee and tea, are available.”

  “Do we get a movie on this flight?” Baxter asked.

  “Movies are not shown in this room. However, I can activate a slide show of photographs.”

  “That’s okay. I was only—”

  He was too late. Rosalind had glided to a blank white wall. She waved her metallic hand and the slide show began. “Is there anything else you require?”

  McCabe said, “No, thank you, Rosalind. We’ll be fine until Mr. Thornton joins us.”

  “Please press the buzzer by the door if you should require my presence.”

  They watched her glide away, back the way they had come.

  “I wonder if she cooks and does laundry,” Baxter said. “I’d sure like to have one of those if she does.”

  “I don’t think you can afford her,” McCabe said. “Look at these photographs. They’re incredible.”

  The slide show on the wall moved from one image to another, shifting, changing shapes, zooming in and out. The photos were of people in action, caught at the moment of danger: a parachutist falling through the sky; a bungee jumper flinging himself from a bridge; a man scaling a skyscraper using only his bare hands and feet; a bullfighter facing a charging bull.

  “Amazing, aren’t they?”

  McCabe and Baxter turned at the sound of the voice that had become familiar to most Albany residents. It was deep, with a hint of amusement, a slight catch, sometimes a bit of a stammer.

  As McCabe had expected, Ted Thornton was wearing blue jeans, sneakers, and his most disarming smile—his “Oh shucks” smile, as one editorial writer had described it. The smile that his opponents had come to recognize before he pounced.

  In those few seconds before she had to respond, McCabe wondered if her superiors had reached the right conclusion during the meeting they’d held to discuss this interview. After considering the other options, once the commander had conferred with the chief and the chief had made a “courtesy call” to the mayor, it had been decided that she and Baxter should handle the initial interview. The reasoning had been that if anyone higher up in the food chain came to call, it would look as if too much was being made of the dinner plans Thornton and his fiancée had had with the victim. Better the primary investigators drop by for a routine visit. Better, too, in case the media got hold of it and declared Thornton had received special treatment by dealing with the brass instead of the lowly detectives working the case.

  So here they were. And personally, McCabe thought she and Baxter had been sent in first to see if they survived.

  “Yes, these photos really are amazing, Mr. Thornton,” McCabe said, smiling back. “Did you take them?”

  One of Ted Thornton’s dark, devilish brows went up, slanting over a wide brown eye. “Me? Oh, not me, Detective, I’m not a photographer. These were taken by Lisa Nichols, my … my very talented fiancée.”

  “What I particularly like is how she caught each subject in motion,” McCabe said, glancing a last time at the shifting display. Then she dug into her bag for her badge. “I’m sorry, I should introduce myself. I’m Detective Hannah McCabe, and this is my partner, Detective Mike Baxter.”

  Tall and gangly, Thornton stepped forward, his long-fingered hand extended. “Pleasure to meet you.” He grimaced, accentuating the brackets on each side of his mouth. “Although the circumstances are horrible, aren’t they? Vivian was a good friend. A dear friend.”

  McCabe shook his hand, noting the strength of his grip. “Yes, it is horrible. You have our sympathy, Mr. Thornton. We will do our best to find the person who killed Ms. Jessup.”

  “I’m sure you will. Sure of that,” Thornton said, moving on to shake Baxter’s hand. “Let’s sit.… Can I get you something from the bar? Or you can just go help yourselves. And then let’s sit down and talk.”

  “Thank you, we’re fine,” McCabe said.

  “No, no, please. Rosalind invited you to have something, didn’t she? What did you think of Rosalind?” That smile again. “But let’s get our drinks. Detective Baxter, please, help yourself. And would you bring me back a beer. Bottle’s fine. Detective McCabe?”

  “Just a water, please,” McCabe said.

  “Great. Got that, Detective Baxter? Need a hand?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Then let’s sit right over here, Detective McCabe.”

  He gestured toward the sofa and chairs in one corner of the room.

  McCabe, stalling for time, paused to look at a framed cartoon of a sheep, a duck, and a rooster in the basket of an ascending hot-air balloon.

  Thornton said, “September 1783, the first balloon flight. It lasted fifteen minutes and the … passengers survived.”

  McCabe nodded. “I saw your airship landing at the airport once. It’s really quite impressive.”

  “A fantasy I’ve had since I was a boy.” A flash of his smile. “The really cool part about having lots of money, Detective McCabe, is being able to spend it on anything you damn well please. Including things other people think are nuts.”

  “Since your airship flies, I guess it wasn’t as nutty an idea as some people thought.” McCabe sat down.

  Thornton sat down in a chair at an angle to hers.

  Mike, coming back with the drinks, was left to occupy the sofa.

  “Cheers,” Thornton said, tipping his beer bottle toward them.

  McCabe echoed his toast with her glass bottle of water. Mike did the same with his cola.

  “Getting to why we are here, Mr. Thornton—”

  “Ted, please, Hannah. Let’s not stand on formality. I want to do all I can to help.”

  “Then … and forgive me for being formal. We’re trained to do that. Cop thing. Then, Mr. Thornton, first, if we could ask you about Wednesday evening. Ms. Jessup mentioned to someone she spoke to that morning that she was planning to have dinner with you and your fiancée.”

  “Oh, now you see if I had known that was what you wanted to know about … You talked to Bruce, right?”

  “Yes, and he said if we wanted to drop by, you would be able to see us.”

  “Umm, and you … you didn’t ask him about the dinner on Wednesday evening?”


  “No, we thought it best to speak to you directly. We have some other questions, as well.”

  “I see. Well, about the dinner, Hannah—you don’t mind if I call you Hannah even if you won’t call me Ted?”

  “I actually prefer to be called Detective McCabe, Mr. Thornton.”

  “Pretty and feisty,” Ted Thornton said.

  McCabe decided to let that go. “About the dinner. You were—”

  “Yes, I’m afraid we didn’t.… I mean, it didn’t come off. Something came up and I had to get back down to the City. I spoke to Vivian around noon and asked if we could reschedule for the next evening.”

  “And did she agree?” McCabe asked.

  “She said that if I intended to come back to Albany, we would be crossing paths. She was planning to take the train down to the City on Thursday morning.”

  Confirming what she told Meredith Noel about her plans, McCabe thought.

  “So you went down to the City on Wednesday afternoon and came back—”

  “The next morning. Took the train down and then my fiancée and Bruce and I came back in the airship.”

  “So you all … your fiancée, Ms. Nichols, Mr. Ashby, and yourself … were here in Albany until what time on Wednesday?”

  “Oh, Bruce wasn’t here. He had some things to do for me down in the City. He alerted me to a situation that I needed to handle in person.”

  “And you went down to handle it?”

  “On the one-twenty train. We were on the way to the station when I spoke to Vivian.”

  “Was Ms. Jessup upset that you had to cancel dinner?”

  “We’re old friends. She understood.” Thornton took a sip of his beer. “Actually, she said she had some business of her own that she could get taken care of that evening.”

  “Business?” Baxter said. “Did she mention what this business was?”

  Thornton shook his head. “I wish to God she had. But someone knocked on her door.”

  “The door of her hotel room?” Baxter said.

  “Yes, that’s where she was when I reached her. She said, ‘That must be room service. I ordered lunch in so that I could get some work done.’ And I said, ‘Then go have your lunch. See you soon.’” He sighed. “That was the last time we spoke.”

  “The work Ms. Jessup mentioned,” McCabe said, sliding back into the conversation. “Do you know what she was working on?”

  “Her play. She was doing a rewrite of some dialogue between Henrietta and Booth. The argument before … before she tried to stab him. That was a pivotal scene in the play.”

  “So you had discussed the play quite a bit?”

  “Yes.” Another sip of beer. “She was excited about writing her first play. And I was interested because I have a deep and abiding love of the theater.” He smiled. “Been hooked ever since college, when I played Richard the Third.” He hunched his shoulders, raising one higher than the other. “‘Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.’” His brows rose. “How could you not love a villain like that?”

  “He’s always been one of my favorite villains,” McCabe said.

  Thornton’s gaze fastened on her. “But you come from a literary family, don’t you, Detective McCabe? I understand … understand that your father is Angus McCabe, the journalist and editor. And your mother was the poet Odell Vincent.”

  McCabe felt her stomach muscles tighten. “Do you normally investigate your visitors’ backgrounds, Mr. Thornton?”

  “Only the visitors who are investigating me,” he said.

  Baxter cleared his throat. “I’m feeling a little neglected over here, Mr. Thornton. Did you check me out, too?”

  “My people are thorough, Detective Baxter. You have a solid background, some family connections. But nothing as interesting as Detective McCabe.”

  Baxter grinned. “Gee, sorry to hear I’m so dull. But getting back to the reason we’re here…”

  Baxter flicked a glance in McCabe’s direction.

  “Yes, getting back to that,” McCabe said. “We understand Ms. Jessup hoped to eventually take her play to Broadway. This business she wanted to take care of, Mr. Thornton … do you think it could have had anything to do with that?”

  Thornton smiled. “Obviously, you already know that Vivian was hoping I would be her backer.”

  “We did hear that. Was it supposed to be a secret?”

  “Not at all. I wanted to wait until I saw the play in theater lab to commit. But this was Vivian Jessup.”

  “Meaning there was no reason Ms. Jessup would have felt she should be looking for another backer?”

  “None.”

  “Did Ms. Jessup happen to mention to you a collector who had contacted her?”

  Thornton took a sip from his beer bottle. “A collector of what?”

  “Now, that’s a good question. What we know is that this person claimed to have in his collection a Dalí edition of Alice in Wonderland and a stamp case designed by Lewis Carroll. Did she happen to mention that to you?”

  “No … I can’t recall that she did.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Thornton. While we’re here, could we speak to your fiancée, Ms. Nichols?”

  “Just routine, Mr. Thornton,” Baxter said.

  “No problem, Detectives. I understand. Let me see if Lisa is available.”

  A man walked in. Blond, wearing a tan sports jacket and slacks, he was as polished as Thornton was casual. “Ted, did I hear you mention Lisa? I was just coming to give you a message from her. She didn’t want to interrupt your meeting.”

  So she sent him to interrupt it? McCabe thought.

  “Bruce, I believe you spoke to Detective McCabe,” Thornton said.

  “Yes, I did. Excuse my abrupt entrance.” He came forward with his hand extended. “Bruce Ashby, Ted’s aide-de-camp.”

  Interesting description, McCabe thought as she stood to shake Ashby’s hand. Thornton had never been in the military. Had Ashby?

  She introduced Baxter, and the two exchanged handshakes.

  “What was the message from Lisa?” Thornton asked his aide.

  “That she decided to go out. She had some errands to run.” Ashby turned back to McCabe and Baxter. “I’m sure if she had known you might want to speak to her, she would have delayed her errands.”

  Thornton shrugged, hunching his shoulders. “Sorry. Afraid you’ll have to speak to Lisa some other time, Detective McCabe.”

  Ashby said, “It’s my fault, Ted.” Turning back to McCabe and Baxter he said, “I told Lisa that you had arrived. But it didn’t occur to me until she dashed off that I should have suggested she stay in case she was wanted.”

  “No problem.” McCabe said. “But we would like to speak to Ms. Nichols at her earliest convenience.” She took her card from her shoulder bag. “Would you ask her to give us a call, Mr. Thornton?”

  “Of course,” he said. He took the card, glanced at it, and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “By the way, I’ve invited Vivian’s daughter, Greer, to stay here. Much easier on her than running a media gauntlet at a hotel. You can talk to Lisa when you come to talk to Greer.” He raised an eyebrow. “I assume you will want to talk to Greer.”

  “Yes,” McCabe said. “She is going to contact us when she arrives. We’ll make arrangements for an interview then.”

  Thornton nodded. “Please consider my house your house. Anytime you need to pop by. I’ll leave those instructions with the guards.”

  “And with Rosalind?” Baxter said.

  Thornton laughed. “You liked Rosalind, did you? She’s a marvel of technology. Let me … let me call her to show you out.”

  He pressed the buzzer, then turned to Ashby. “Bruce, would you save the detectives some time and send over a copy of Lisa’s and my train reservations from Wednesday. And, of course, the flight plan for the airship on Thursday morning.”

  “I’ll see you receive both,” Ashby said to McCabe.

  “Thank you. We understand you
were in the City on Wednesday, Mr. Ashby. Did you have appointments?”

  “Back-to-back all day until Ted arrived that afternoon. Later, we had a working dinner. Would you like that information, as well?”

  “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” Baxter said.

  Rosalind glided in. “You called, sir,” she said, fixing her metallic gaze on her “boss.”

  “Yes, Rosalind. Would you show our guests out?”

  “This way, please.”

  McCabe turned in the doorway. “By the way, Mr. Thornton, the boat ramp where Ms. Jessup’s body was found. Would you happen to have used it recently?”

  Thornton raised an eyebrow. “That ramp … Let me see now.… I’ve only used it twice. The day that it opened … and the second time was…” He turned to Ashby. “Do you have that date, Bruce?”

  Ashby checked his calendar. “That would have been on Monday, September sixteenth.” Ashby turned to McCabe. “The mayor joined Ted for a short canoe excursion while they discussed her Albany initiative.”

  McCabe said, “That would be the ‘It Happened Here’ initiative?”

  Thornton said, “I’m a real supporter of that campaign. Albany’s history hasn’t been highlighted enough. The Dutch, the British, the Revolution.” He waved his hand. “The fur trade, the steamboat, the railroad. Everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian, had connections to this city. Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita … the man stopped here to hunt butterflies in the Pine Bush. We’ve got to get that history out there and get more people interested in coming here and spending money.” He smiled. “Don’t you agree, Detective?”

  “I’m sure that would be good for the city’s economy,” McCabe said. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Thornton.”

  “Anything I can do … anything to help find Vivian’s killer. Just call on me.”

  Rosalind said, “If you have concluded your conversation, please follow me.”

  McCabe and Baxter followed the maid back the way they had come.

  She opened the front door for them. “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” McCabe said.

  “See you later, Roz,” Baxter said.

  “My name is Rosalind,” she said, and closed the door.