[2002] Knock Me Off My Feet by Susan Donovan

Author:Susan Donovan [Donovan, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Policemen, Contemporary, Suspense, Crime
ISBN: 9780312365394
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2002-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

Quinn knew they might never get the answers to these questions, because Helen Adams hadn't regained consciousness long enough to talk about the events of that night. The files said she managed a few words to her daughter on the way to surgery, then died.

Whatever those words were, they'd been enough to convince Audie that she owed her mother, big-time. One last guilt trip for the road, apparently.

Quinn sighed, twisting his own mother's claddagh ring around his left pinkie finger, thinking, thinking…

"Aside from the phone call, do you know what else really bothers me about this?" Quinn looked up at Kerr and McAffee, thinking out loud.

"I have a feeling you're going to tell us," Kerr said, returning to his chair.

"Yeah. I am." Quinn reached for the files again and gazed at the color postmortem photographs. "She was hit in the face. Not the first time, the second time." He ran his finger along the image of Helen Adams's brutalized cheek.

"First one to the back of the head—she's down. But that's not enough. Then one to the side of the face. Why? Wasn't her purse already on the ground? Why the extra hit?"

"And to the face," Stanny-O added. "Muggers don't usually go for the face."

"Exactly," Quinn said, turning to his partner with appreciation. "It's too personal. There's too much anger there for a random mugging, especially of an older female."

"What are you guys after?" Kerr rolled an unlit cigarette through his fingers like a miniature baton. "You saw the case files. We must have talked to half the city looking for someone with a grudge against that old bat."

Quinn grunted a little. What had Audie said the other day about her fame? "They love Homey Helen. They don't love me."

This homicide case may very well be about Helen Adams the person, not Helen Adams the public figure or Helen Adams the random mark.

As he'd wondered many times before, could the same person hate the mother and the daughter?

"But Andrew Adams was at the yacht club all night," Stanny-O said out loud, as if following Quinn's silent reasoning. "And there were about two hundred people to back him up on that, right?" He looked to the other detectives.

"Right," McAffee said. "And everybody else we talked to had an alibi as well, including Malcolm Milton, your girl Autumn, and the business partner, Marjorie Stoddard—about fifty people saw her at a dog obedience class that night."

"Which brings us exactly to slit, like we said." Kerr inserted the unlit cigarette between his lips and let it dangle there as he talked. "Which is exactly what you seem to have on your case, too. Which is why you're grabbing at straws trying to find a connection with her mother's case. But Helen Adams never received threats as far as we found."

"Nope. She didn't," Quinn said. "One of the first things we did was run an FBI database search for similar threats, and there wasn't anything, anywhere."

"DNA?" McAffee asked.

Stanny-O grunted. "Stamps were the peel-off kind. Water was used to seal the envelopes, not saliva.

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