Trust No One (Devlin & Falco), page 29
Falco nodded. “That’s a step in the right direction, but the problem is it’ll take even more time to get those phone records the usual way. It might be Monday or Tuesday before that happens.”
Kerri closed her eyes. “Damn it, Falco, tell me something new, will you?” Then she looked at her partner, hope daring to swell inside her. “You have a better option?”
“Cross can go a different route and have those cell phone records as early as tomorrow.”
Of course she could. Cross obviously didn’t play by the rules. At the moment, Kerri didn’t care how they got them as long as they got them. “Make it happen.”
“You got it.”
Kerri listened to the low rumble of Falco’s voice as he made the call. This morning she felt as if she were in a black tunnel and couldn’t find her way to the light. The murders at the Abbott home had taken place nine days ago, and they still had nothing concrete. No true suspects, though they did now have a plethora of persons of interest and fragments of information and leads that all appeared to circle around and come back to the same place.
Sela Rollins Abbott.
Kerri rubbed at her forehead. She’d gotten home really late last night, and she’d barely had a minute with Tori this morning. Her daughter had gone to breakfast with the family of a friend, and then they were heading to the mall. Kerri had watched out the window as her little girl had loaded up with Sarah Talley and her mother.
The good news was that Tori had completely understood Kerri’s need to ask a slew of questions. They had both watched how Amelia’s MIA status was affecting her parents. On top of that, Kerri’s attorney had called and said that the hearing regarding Tori’s custody was on Tuesday. Evidently, Nick was dead serious about going after primary custody. His own attorney had pulled some strings to get such an early date on a typically crowded docket.
Great. Just great. But Kerri wasn’t so worried about the hearing now. Tori wasn’t trying to escape her mother. She would speak the truth to the judge and with the innocent impartiality of a child who loved both her parents. As Kerri’s attorney had suggested, the whole thing was just a pain in the ass.
Her cell vibrated. She picked it up without even looking at the screen. “Devlin.”
“Detective, this is Officer John Brashier. We have a gunshot victim over here on Shades Crest Road. The victim is male, but I thought I should call you anyway because your card is in the man’s wallet. Name’s Joseph Keaton.”
“Is he alive?” Hope dared to make an appearance.
“No, ma’am. Looks like he’s been dead a little while.”
Son of a bitch! “I’ll be right there.”
His own call finished now, Falco looked to her. “Where we going?”
Kerri stood. “Shades Crest Road. Joey Keaton is dead.”
Well, now she understood why he hadn’t answered her calls.
Keaton’s red Porsche sat behind a long-closed gas station. He was in the driver’s seat, his body slumped forward. He had one bullet wound to the left temple. No exit wound. Probably a small-caliber pistol not unlike the one used on Ben Abbott and Jacqueline Rollins. The scene might have passed for a suicide except the weapon used was missing, and Joey Keaton had been right handed. She had watched him write out his statement the first time they met.
Kerri thought of the gun that had been hidden in the Abbott nursery and how it had disappeared on Sunday night.
“If Sela Abbott is still alive and we indulge the theory that she killed her husband and mother,” Kerri said to her partner, “this would seem to indicate she’s trying to tie up loose ends.”
Frankly, Kerri still had an issue with the idea of her killing her mother. Then again, maybe Sela was just tired of taking care of her. The ME’s call about finding no cancer or anything else wrong with the woman nudged Kerri. There was something more to that chapter in this story.
The same went for the husband. If he was helping Sela with her search for the truth, as Bellemont had suggested, why would she kill him?
“If that’s what’s going on, she’s a little behind the curve,” Falco commented as he surveyed the area around the defunct gas station. “Keaton gave us a heads-up about the car. Why kill him now?”
“Maybe he was blackmailing her for more money?” Kerri could see Keaton pushing the envelope that way.
There were no operating businesses on either side of the station or across the street. The chance that anyone had witnessed the shooting was about zero.
Kerri went around to the passenger side of the vehicle and opened the door. With her gloved fingers she picked up a key from the console. She held up the single key on the clasp, the Chrysler logo impossible to miss. “What you want to bet this belonged to the car flattened in that compactor?”
The car was now at the lab in hopes of finding some damned clue about what Sela Abbott had been doing while the vehicle was in her possession. The expectations for results were dim, but they had to try.
“That’s a bet you would win.”
“Let’s check his pockets.”
The two front pockets of his jeans had the usual. Loose change and a lighter. Nothing in the back pockets since Officer Brashier had already removed the wallet. Falco pulled a pack of Marlboros from the shirt pocket, tucked his fingers deeper inside.
“Wait. Got something here.”
He fished out what looked like a gold chain of some sort. He spread it in the palm of his gloved hand. “Bracelet.”
The S charm on the bracelet had Kerri’s anticipation climbing to the next level. There was dirt or something on part of the chain. “What’s that? Dirt or blood?”
They both looked closer.
“Looks like blood to me,” Falco said, confirming her suspicions.
While Falco bagged the bracelet, Kerri checked Keaton’s cell phone. He or the shooter had meticulously erased his call and text logs. She checked the map app in hopes it would give her something. Bingo.
“When he called me,” she said to her partner, “he had just taken a trip to this location.” She held the screen up where Falco could see it. “Maybe that’s where the Plymouth was picked up.”
She sure as hell didn’t believe the story the old men at the salvage yard had given her. Keaton would not have called to tell her about the car if he’d been trying to hide it.
“I say we take a ride, Devlin.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky.” She wasn’t holding her breath, but she could hope.
The crime scene investigator arrived and started his work. As soon as the ME—not Moore, but another of his associates—was on the scene, Kerri asked about time of death. He estimated time of death at between five and eight last evening, which meant he had taken the bullet not long after leaving that voice mail for Kerri.
Once the ME had taken the body away, she and Falco left the scene in the hands of Brashier and the forensic investigator.
They dropped the bracelet at the lab and headed for Canyon Lane. The shooter hadn’t bothered going very far to drop his victim. Shades Crest Road snaked its way up the mountain and right past Canyon Lane.
The address led to a cabin in the woods. The long narrow drive cut through the trees as if it had been designed to disappear. The cabin was not your run-of-the-mill rustic getaway either. This was a nice cabin.
Best of all, according to county records, the property belonged to one Lewis York. Kerri resisted the urge to jump for joy. That news was like Christmas and her birthday all rolled into one. They were getting closer.
Since no one was home, Kerri and her partner did some looking around. The doors were locked. The windows weren’t shuttered or curtained, making seeing inside as simple as pressing her face to the glass. Nothing inside looked suspicious, taking the possibility of exigent circumstances off the table.
There was a shed in back. It wasn’t locked, but there was nothing inside, not even a lawn mower. Odds were, York had a service that took care of that sort of thing.
“Keaton came here, looked around,” she said, “and that put him on York’s radar.”
“The question is”—Falco turned all the way around, surveying the yard—“unless York was home, how did he know Keaton was here?”
“There have to be cameras somewhere.”
A new search began. This one to find any sort of surveillance York might have installed.
It took a few minutes, but they found them. The cameras were well hidden—camouflaged, really.
It wasn’t until the air suddenly surged into her lungs that Kerri realized she had been holding her breath. She got it now. “He was here.” She turned to Falco.
“What do you mean? Who was here?”
“When Keaton called me, he said he would be waiting to hear from me.” She surveyed the property. “I thought he meant at the salvage yard, but I was wrong. He was waiting here. That’s how York got to him before I could respond to his voice mail. When he drove onto the property, York probably got some sort of notification on his cell or something.”
“I’ll check for a camera close to the road.” Falco hustled off down the driveway.
Kerri stared directly at the camera they’d found at the front of the house. She smiled and then mouthed two words: “Got you.”
Falco found the camera at the Canyon Lane end of the driveway. Kerri’s scenario for what had happened to Keaton was right, even if they couldn’t prove it.
When they loaded up in the Charger, Falco asked, “We going to see York or Thompson?”
“Both, but Thompson is first. He’s scheduled to do a lunch thing at his office, so we know he’ll be there. He’s too hard to catch to risk missing this opportunity to trap him.”
When they reached the end of the driveway, Falco stopped and fished his cell phone from his pocket. He checked the screen and then glanced at Kerri. “It’s Cross.”
“Put it on speaker.” Kerri hoped the woman was as good as Falco thought. They needed something that would push this investigation over the hurdle that had been stalling it for days.
“Hey, Cross, got you on speaker. Devlin is in the car with me, so be nice.”
The woman grumbled something unintelligible, then: “I heard back from my contact in Mexico City.”
Obviously Cross had contacts everywhere. Kerri couldn’t help wondering how she’d managed that feat.
“Did he find anything on Sela Rollins and her mother?”
“Oh yeah,” Cross said. “You were right about Sela taking her mother to Mexico for treatment. The clinic treating her in San Diego said there was nothing more they could do. Sent her home with a bagful of pain meds to die. Sela heard about this so-called miracle clinic, which, according to my contact, is just one of those places that takes money from desperate people.”
“The mother was terminal?” Kerri needed her to get to the point. Adrenaline was pumping through her heart with enough force to launch it out of her chest.
“Yeah,” Cross said. “She died six months later. I don’t know who got shot in the Abbott house, but it wasn’t Sela Rollins Abbott’s mother.”
Holy shit. Kerri asked, “Your contact confirmed this information?”
“I’m looking at the death certificate. He snapped pics of a bunch of records and sent them to me.”
“Damn, Cross, I really appreciate this.” Falco looked to Kerri. “I don’t see how we can view Sela Abbott as anything other than a straight-up suspect now.”
“That ain’t all, Falco.” Cross spoke up.
Kerri braced for more startling news.
“Your MIA vic went a little crazy after her mother died. Ended up spending a few months in a Mexican psychiatric hospital. While she was there, she became good friends with a guy named Oliver Wilmington. He was this big West Coast tech whiz who flamed out early in the game. Mental health issues—bipolar or some such shit. When she finished her gig in the crazy house,” Cross went on, “she moved in with this guy for a while before returning to California and going to work for a law firm.”
“Is there any way to get in touch with this tech wizard?” Falco asked the question on the tip of Kerri’s tongue.
“Nope. He was found dead the day after your missing vic’s departure. Apparently, he decided he couldn’t live without her and took a dive off the third-story balcony of his Mexican palace. The authorities ruled it a suicide, but the autopsy shows his time of death as the day before Sela left Mexico. So maybe he had a little help taking that dive.”
Falco was right. Sela Rollins Abbott couldn’t be called a victim anymore. But would she really kill her husband? The father of her child? Or a former lover? She might not be a victim, but somehow, she had set all this in motion.
The other glaring question was, Who the hell was the woman posing as her mother?
“Did you find anything on the property on Thirty-Third?” Falco asked.
“It’s your lucky day, Falco,” Cross said. “I found something I think your partner is going to love.”
A new wave of tension rolled through Kerri. “What’s that?” Maybe the house belonged to Thompson or York. That news she would love.
“Forty-two years ago Jacqueline Rollins lived in that house, only she wasn’t a Rollins then, and she went by Jackie. Her real last name was Carter. She changed her name to Stevens when she moved to California.”
“So this does go back to the mother.” Kerri wasn’t actually surprised. It made sense now. She had found that photo album that proved the mother had lived in Birmingham when she was young.
How was it that Ben Abbott knew about Janelle and her involvement with Theo Thompson and didn’t know the rest? Not logical. Why would Sela keep that from her husband?
“I’ll give you three guesses who she worked for, and the first two don’t count.”
Jesus Christ. Kerri offered, “The Thompsons.”
“And we have a winner. Jacqueline worked for Theo’s old man back when he was a young state senator. But she only worked for him a few months, and then she disappeared. Six months later she pops up in San Diego with a newborn baby girl. Five years later she married a Rollins, Sela’s father.”
Janelle was the baby girl. That could mean T. R. Thompson was Janelle’s father. But why would Janelle want to marry a man who could very well have been her own brother?
“So Old Man Thompson knocked her up,” Falco suggested, voicing Kerri’s thought, “and then sent her away.”
“Maybe,” Cross agreed. “But he isn’t the one who set her up in that house while she was working in Birmingham. The one that got torched, I mean.”
“Wait.” Anticipation zinged Kerri. “If it wasn’t Thompson, who was it?”
“DATACO.”
Falco turned to Kerri as she asked the question Cross had already answered. “Daniel Abbott set her up in the house?”
“The one and only. The property still belongs to his company. A year ago it was rented by an S. Carter. Still is.”
S. Carter. Sela had used her mother’s maiden name to rent the house.
And now they knew. “That’s where she’s been hiding.” Kerri drew in a tight breath.
Falco’s eyes told her he’d just realized the same thing. The vic pulled out of that burned house was likely Sela Abbott. Damn it! They needed some word back from the ME on that body.
Falco cleared his throat. “Anything else?”
“That’s it. You owe me big time, Falco.”
“Yeah, yeah. I got you covered, Cross.”
Falco ended the call and dropped his phone onto the console. “We need to talk to Daniel Abbott.”
“Oh yeah,” Kerri agreed. “Sela didn’t come here just looking for the truth about what happened to her sister. She had a second agenda. To get back at the man who got her mother pregnant and then threw her away. What better way than to marry his only son?”
“I have to give the lady credit,” Falco said. “That was a hell of a move.”
“Let’s just hope she didn’t kill him as part of that revenge.” Or that she didn’t burn in that fucking house.
Falco laughed a dry sound. “The best part in all this is that the bastard had to know it all along. He could see the woman posing as Sela’s mother was an imposter. How the hell many secrets have these people been keeping?”
“We’ll probably never know.”
Falco started his car. “I assume we’re heading to pay Abbott a visit now.”
“First, I have to go to that big luncheon Theo Thompson is hosting. It may be my only chance to catch him in a situation where he can’t ignore me. We’ll hit the Abbotts right after.” Kerri fastened her seat belt. “Daniel Abbott may have gotten Sela’s mother pregnant and sent her away, but Theo Thompson may have killed her sister.”
“Gotcha.” Falco pulled out onto the road. “Murder trumps being an asshole.”
53
12:15 p.m.
Thompson Building
Richard Arrington Boulevard
By the time Kerri arrived at the Thompson Building, the closed-door luncheon had already started in the main conference room. Though patience had never been one of her virtues, she had no choice but to sit it out.
The Thompson Building was actually the historic Harris Building built in 1910. T. R. Thompson had purchased it right out of college and decided this would be his primary business office—right downtown for all to see. The building had been in the family for half a century. This was in all likelihood where Sela Abbott’s mother had worked when she’d lived in Birmingham. Like some ill-fated legacy, her sister, Janelle, had worked here as well. Kerri wondered how many times Sela had walked these halls and considered those bizarre facts?
How had she sat at the table with Daniel Abbott for a family meal knowing how he had hurt her mother?
During the half hour or so that had passed since hearing from Cross, Kerri had mulled over the shocking information. No question the woman who’d died along with Ben Abbott was an imposter. Sela’s mother had died in Mexico. Based on the history of the Thirty-Third Avenue house, they were assuming Daniel Abbott had been involved with Sela’s mother, but it was possible they had jumped too quickly to that conclusion. Maybe he had been trying to help her. Maybe it was his buddy T. R. who’d gotten her pregnant.
