Page 15 of Justice for Francesca

Calder’s surprise was evident. “How can you smell it over the blood and the mask?”

Cruz snorted. “Frankie’s got the nose of a bloodhound. Order a fancy coffee sometime, then ask her to name all the ingredients. She’s famous for that magic trick.”

She smiled apologetically. “You should know better than to wager against me. How many coffees do you owe me from over the last few years?”

“Twenty-six,” he grumbled. “Mickie teases me that I lose just so I can take you out for coffee. I hate to think how bad it wouldbe if you worked in our office. She calls you my coffee-wife, you know.”

Francesca rolled her eyes, then turned to Calder. “This particular CBD lubricant has a distinct scent of mint and pepper. There’s also a hint of chocolate. The essential oils stimulate blood flow, making the flesh it touches hypersensitive, as well as lubricated.” She stood up, ignoring the look between Cruz and Calder, turning her gloves inside out as she removed them and disposed of them with the trash.

“I don’t want to know how you know that,” Cruz mumbled.

Ignoring his remark, she pushed for background. “So… Mila Sequeira. Fill me in. I had no contact with her in regards to the Dallas case, so my research on her was cursory.”

He popped off the wall he’d been leaning on while watching Francesca work and stood just to the right of the body. “Daughter of Lucy and Santiago Sequeira, only daughter of the Sequeira don. Thirty-two. Owns a house here in San Antonio, but her primary residence is in Chicago, and she works there for her uncle’s real estate law firm. She serves as a liaison of sorts. Part commercial realtor, part paralegal, part personal assistant.”

“Affiliated?”

“The family controls most of Texas, including San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth, of which you are aware of after the past seven months. She doesn’t associate much with her family other than the big holidays. Lives in the same apartment building as her uncle back in Chicago. He isnotaffiliated, nor is she.”

“He doesn’t represent them?”

“Nope. Has turned them down flat every time he’s asked.”

She hesitated for a moment. “So there are family ties to Chicago. There’s a Sequeira brother also in New York City. How is he affiliated?” She held her breath. Could this be the connection she was looking for from her previous case?

“Laundering through his art gallery. He rarely comes up on our radar as he’s considered ‘small fish’ compared to the don.” He turned his gaze to Calder. “Ready?”

“Yep.” Calder’s assistant bustled into the room. She’d been dusting all the door handles and keypads, and now she helped him load the body onto the gurney and wheel it away.

Francesca began a circuit of the room, stopping every few feet, committing the layout of the room to her notebook. As she did so, she considered the information Cruz had given her on the Sequeira family and filed it away as confirmation of one of the rare possible pieces of information she’d found useful in her computer searches.

Cruz met Francesca at the halfway point of the room, where she was staring up at the ceiling, squinting. “What do you see now, Frankie?”

She looked down again at the space, moved to the center of the room, and did a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn of the circle. Puzzled, she looked at Cruz and asked, “How did he raise and lower the trapeze?”

“Near the actual mechanism?” He looked around. “Maybe it’s in a booth somewhere behind the scenes.”

“So does anything seem weird to you about that?”

Cruz looked around the walls again, noticing they were a solid octagon with no breaks, only corners. Then he looked up at the ceiling where the trapeze motor was. “The ability to raise and lower it isn’t here, so he had to do that from somewhere else. That means he had to know where to go. He had to know how to use the system.” He looked at Francesca. “Screams employee.”

“Or former employee. Or someone who’s familiar with the space. For all we know, it could be a simple up-down switch anyone could operate, but they would have to at least know where the control room was and how to get there in this maze.More importantly, though, the murderer couldn’t have been in two places at once.”

“Right. Awkward. Did he rig her to the trapeze somehow and then kill her? Or did he kill her and then rig her? Or did he kill her somewhere else and stage her here afterward?”

“First two would take time either way. He took his time with her, and he didn’t have enough time between two thirty and seven to get here, do all this, and get out, given the severity of the torture. Third would have been extra awkward moving her. She’s not a heavy girl, but dead weight is still dead weight. Might account for the lack of blood here at the scene.”

Francesca continued mapping the room, with Cruz following a few steps behind. He cleared his throat. “Frankie… there’s something you need to know.”

Without picking up her head from what she was doing, she asked, “What?”

“One of the employees. Michael Murphy?”

Still not looking up, she then turned to sketch what she remembered of the body’s position.

“You know him too.”

“Really? Undercover cop or something?” She turned her back to Cruz as she finished the sketch.

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