The drive out to Fontaine’s place on South Mapleton Drive went quickly. By the time they reached the front gate, Lena had managed to give Rhodes a detailed picture of where they stood and what they were probably about to face.
Like Ramira’s house, Fontaine’s mansion was the only one on the block with its lights out.
“I’m going over the wall,” he said. “When the gate opens, bring the car through.”
He took her flashlight, then hoisted himself up and over the other side. After a few minutes the gate opened, and Lena pulled the Crown Vic onto the property. Then they followed the drive up the hill to the back of the house.
Fontaine’s Mercedes was parked in front of the garage. She traded looks with Rhodes and caught the grim expression on his face. The only light she could see was coming from the hot tub on the terrace at the far end of the house. The only sound she heard came from the water bubbling and fizzing in the night.
Lena gazed at the mansion silhouetted against the clouds in the sky. The moon was trying to break through, but couldn’t. The air was raw and ice-cold. As they approached the back door, Rhodes switched the flashlight back on, shined the beam through the glass, and found the alarm on the inside wall.
“It’s not armed,” he said.
“Did you think it would be?”
He tried the doorknob. When it turned, he shook his head at her and gave the door a push. They were inside the house now. And Lena picked up on the silence again. The kind that went with a corpse. Rhodes hit the light switch on the wall.
“I guess it was just hope,” he said. “I thought he hired bodyguards.”
“Let’s go find him.”
It only took ten minutes to clear the first floor and work their way upstairs. Once they reached the landing, all they needed to do was follow the harsh odor down the hall into the study.
Lena switched on the desk lamp. From the condition of the body, it was obvious that Fontaine had been dead for at least twenty-four hours. He was slumped over the side of the chair and appeared to be melting into the arm. A.38 revolver lay on the floor to his right. On the desk she spotted two auto-injectors and read the labels.
Morphine. The Greek god of dreams.
Rhodes stepped over to the computer, eyed the screen saver, and gave the mouse a tap. When the computer woke up, a word processor was running that seemed to contain Joseph Fontaine’s last words. Lena joined Rhodes by the monitor and read the note.
“If they think we’re gonna buy this as a suicide,” he said, “they’re crazy.”
“It would’ve worked if we didn’t know who Jennifer Bloom really was.”
“It still might, Lena. If we’re out of the mix. What did Justin Tremell say to you in the interrogation room?”
She turned back to Fontaine and gazed at his corpse. “Jennifer McBride had met someone who wanted to help her. A client she called her personal patron. Someone from Beverly Hills who liked it kinky and made her dress up in a nurse’s costume.”
“A costume they bought and planted on their own,” he said. “It’s all there. They set Fontaine up and did everything except give you his name.”
Lena agreed. There was no doubt about the play or what Dean Tremell wanted them to think. Fontaine was their fall guy. Someone who talked to Ramira. Someone Dean Tremell wanted to get rid of just as much as Jennifer Bloom. And if they could turn her into a whore, then making Fontaine look like her client and victim was easy. The one who sent her the fifty thousand dollars and hired a hit man to take her out. A doctor with a guilty conscience who took his own life six days before Christmas.
“Let’s check the rest of the house,” Lena said.
“You think Greta Deitrich’s here?”
“Where else could she be?”
They searched the rooms on the second floor, then made a sweep through the third floor bedrooms and attic. The exercise proved fruitless and burned up almost half an hour. Returning to the kitchen, Rhodes located the door to the basement and they headed downstairs. The footprint seemed to mirror the exterior of the house and had been divided into separate rooms. They found a wood shop that didn’t look like it had been used in a long time. Three more rooms that probably once served as a home office, but which, like the wood shop, no one used anymore. Beside the utility room, a small greenhouse opened to the side of the house where the hill had been carved out. As they reached the end, they came to a storage room and found shelves packed with oversized items bought at Costco.
Greta Dietrich wasn’t here.
They headed back toward the steps. As they passed the laundry room, Lena noticed an alcove and paused. The shelves were lined with canned goods, bins of onions and potatoes, and bottles of olive oil. And that’s when she spotted the freezer in the corner. It wasn’t an upright. Instead, it opened like a chest and couldn’t have been more than a few years old.
She lifted the handle and pulled the door up, the frosty air rising into her face. As the mist cleared, she gazed into the ice box and tried to focus. She didn’t see what she expected to see. Not a single pizza was here. Not a frozen dinner or a bag of vegetables. The longer she stared at the contents, the more she thought she might be in a grocery store. There were at least a hundred small packages carefully stacked in three rows. Each package was approximately the same size and wrapped in plain white butcher’s paper. And each was labeled and dated by hand with a Sharpie.
No more than ten seconds had passed since she first opened the lid. It just felt longer because the realization was such a big step. Because she had to break through the uniformity of the packages to see the darkness and understand what she was really looking at.
Rhodes picked up a package and read the label. “Does this say what I think it does?”
Lena glanced at it. Greta Dietrich was here.