Chapter Twenty-Three
McGill hurried down the street toward the orchestra building. He had agreed to meet with the secretary, Linda Eggert, to go over Loreen Stenke’s electronic appointment book again and he was late. As he approached the building steps, his phone buzzed fiercely.
“Detective McGill!” came the frantic voice. “Someone’s here…in the building!”
McGill quickened his pace, leaping up the stairs two at a time. “Is that you, Ms. Eggert? Come down to the main lobby right now. I’ll meet you there in thirty seconds.”
“I can’t! I think he’s just around the corner! I’ve got to stay here.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside my office. You told me to meet you there.”
“Fine, stay there. I’ll be right up. It’s probably nothing.”
Within two minutes, McGill had arrived at the door to Eggert’s office on the second floor. “Okay now, what’s the problem?” McGill asked breathlessly.
“I heard a sound,” Eggert said, visibly relieved. “I knew that no one else was supposed to be in the building and it spooked me.”
McGill stopped briefly to listen. “I hear nothing. What made you think…?”
In that instant the quiet was interrupted by the metallic sound of closing doors and the rumble of a large motor.
“There! It’s the service elevator! Someone’s in the service elevator,” said Eggert, panic again creeping into her voice.
“I’ve got to check it out,” Sean said, moving down the hallway toward the service elevator at the back of the building.
“No! Don’t leave me! It might be a trick! Somebody’s pushing the buttons just to get you to go after the elevator.”
McGill shook his head. “Miss Eggert…I’ve got to…”
“No!” she screamed, reaching out and grabbing his arm. “It’s a trick! As soon as you’re gone, they’ll come at me.”
“No, Linda, I’m sure that won’t…”
“Please don’t leave me!” she yelled, pushing her face close to his.
Sean sighed. “Alright, Linda. Don’t be alarmed. I’m not going anywhere.”
They stood together for the next two minutes until the sound of the elevator stopped and several seconds of silence had passed.
“Look, Linda, I’m sure you’re going to be fine. I’ve got to get down there. If someone’s been hovering around this building illegally, I’ve got to know about it.”
“But…”
“I’ll be back in three minutes,” McGill said, moving swiftly toward the nearby stairwell. Picking up speed, he descended down the stairs and ran toward the service elevator at the back of the building. Arriving there a little over a minute later, he found the elevator door open but no sign of the intruder. He quickly stepped outside the back door and scanned the small parking lot in back. No people. No vehicles. McGill shook his head and started back upstairs.
“Did you see anyone?” asked Eggert, as he came quickly to meet her.
“No. I didn’t really expect to. If there was someone, they were long gone.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, again clutching his arm, “but I thought it might be a trick. I didn’t want to be the third murder victim.”
McGill smiled weakly. “Of course not. I can understand that. But we don’t know for sure that the intruder—whoever he was—has anything to do with the murders.”
“My God!” gasped Eggert. “Why would anyone else be here? The building’s been closed for three days! There’s police tape everywhere.”
“I know,” McGill said. “But people are sometimes peculiarly attracted to crime scenes. Look, it doesn’t matter. It’s over now. Let’s get to the business at hand.”
Eggert carefully unlocked her office and they stepped inside. “Remind me what it is you wanted to see again?”
“The schedule you kept for Loreen Stenke. Anybody who came to see her in the last few weeks and any phone calls if you log those.”
Eggert quickly went over to her computer and hit a few keys. “There, that’s all I’ve got,” she said, directing McGill’s attention toward the screen. “Not that many visitors as you can see. But you’ve got to remember that it was almost a month ago when she announced she was going to take the rest of the concert season off to have her baby. From that point on the number of appointments drop off dramatically.”
“Yes, I see,” said McGill, studying the screen. “Still, I’m surprised there are so few.”
“She was usually here in the mornings only and, after she announced her leave of absence, she only came in briefly for two or three days a week.”
“Hm, I don’t see any names that are really unexpected. I was hoping I might have missed some important information the last time you took me through this, but I’m beginning to think I probably didn’t. That’s too bad.”
“Of course you’ve got to remember that people making appointments didn’t always go through me.”
“What?”
“Loreen would sometimes make her own appointments. People would call her directly and make appointments with her. She wasn’t supposed to—she was always supposed to go through me—but she didn’t always do it.”
“Really? So she had her own appointment calendar? I don’t remember seeing that when I came here before and went through her papers.”
“You might have missed it. It wasn’t really a calendar. In fact she tended to write appointments down on odd scraps of paper that she left strewn all over her desk. She wasn’t particularly organized. And because of that, sometimes she’d forget all about some of the appointments she herself had made and miss them completely. Then people would blame me of course. I asked her again and again to always let me make her appointments. She’d always agree and then just keep doing it her way.”
“So she didn’t really have an organized system?”
“Not at all. Like I said before…odd scraps of paper. Sometimes they’d just fall off her desk and the janitor would throw them out with the trash.”
“Shall we go to her office to take another look at it? Now that I know what I’m looking for, I might have better luck.”
Eggert shrugged. “If you like. That place gives me the creeps now, but I’ll come with you if you want me to.”
Minutes later they stood at the door to Loreen Stenke’s office. One of the police tapes covering the door had been broken and dangled to the floor.
“What’s this?” McGill asked, picking up the length of yellow tape. “We may not be the first visitors tonight.”
As they entered the room slowly, Eggert made a slight gasping noise.
“Something wrong?” asked McGill.
She stared intently at a file cabinet to the right of the doorway. “That bust,” she said, pointing to a heavy, nine-inch metallic bust of Beethoven on top of the cabinet.
McGill turned to peer at the bust. “Has that not always been there?”
“No,” she said, her eyes searching the rest of the room. “There! It used to be over there,” she said, pointing to a coffee table standing in front of a small couch over to the left side of the room.
“Really? When was it moved?”
“I don’t know. I think it was always there on the coffee table. But now that you mention it, I don’t think that it was here at all the last time I was in the room. I came in here to examine the room with one of the uniformed officers a day after Loreen’s death because you said you wanted me to. Only I forgot about the Beethoven statue. I forgot about it completely, and now I think it wasn’t in the room that day.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m pretty sure. I know that the Beethoven bust has never been on the file cabinet, not until today anyway.”
McGill nodded his head and smiled. “Well, don’t touch it. I think we’ve just discovered the murder weapon.”