Lead Flying, page 16
It was also surmised that while Reginald had known the code for Tessa’s alarm, he hadn’t known the best spots to look for secrets hidden in her house, which is what had prompted the destructive and thorough nature of his search. And also explained why he’d missed the gun in his flurry. And why Simon—since they’d been married for fifteen years and had lived together for most of them—knew exactly where to go to find what Tessa valued second most. She’d already removed the items that were her primary concern.
Which brought us to the files. From the report of the team that executed the search warrant, Lew Roper was flabbergasted that he held something important to the case in his office. But the boxes contained just papers. Reams and reams of old papers. Which is why they’d blended in so well in their littered hiding spot, why Lew had paid them no additional attention once he’d parked them in the narrow gap near the door.
Vaughn took the unusual step of requesting Andrea Evans’ presence at his bedside. It was time for another—and hopefully final—interview. Since he wasn’t going to be in the office for the foreseeable future and couldn’t go to her, he sent an escort of patrol officers to fetch her from her house.
“Do you want me to leave?” I asked, stretching my arms over my head. It’d been a long day of sitting. A long day of answering reporters’ questions from the comfort of my email program and producing drafts of press releases for the Fidelity Police Department at Chief Monk’s request. He had a lot on his plate and no formal PIO to deal with the needs of the inquisitive public.
“Nope.” Vaughn cast a glance at me from under his furrowed brows. He was still absorbed in a CCTV video that was replaying on the laptop screen. “I’d like you to apply some of that truth serum that seems to be part of your aura on Andrea. If you don’t mind.”
The coffee from the hospital’s cafeteria was dreadful, bordering on toxic, but I was feeling the need for another cup anyway. That and a potty break. I pushed to standing. “I’m losing my vibes,” I replied playfully. “Give me ten minutes?”
He grunted in response, which I interpreted in the affirmative and quickly skipped out.
CHAPTER 20
I didn’t give much credence to Vaughn’s truth serum accusation, but I did suspect that Andrea was going to need another woman in the room. Shortly after lunch, Karleen had hefted herself to her feet and headed downtown for what promised to be hours of meetings. Which left me as the only other person in the near vicinity with a pair of X chromosomes to her name who didn’t also have a medical job to attend to.
And who needed to work some cramps out of her legs. I chose the stairwell in lieu of the elevator and clattered down the concrete steps until I hit the level that housed the cafeteria.
And took a moment to place a few phone calls of a personal nature. Willow was just out of school, and I wanted to catch her before she got absorbed in one of her near-future space-opera writing sessions. You know, one of those endeavors that are so much more valuable than doing homework.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Shocked beyond all sensibility,” was her quick retort. “Scarred for life. I feel like I was caught in the middle of a really awful B-movie action scene, what with the bullets zinging everywhere.”
“You were up on the riverbank,” I pointed out reasonably. “Completely out of harm’s way.”
“Well, the binoculars made it seem up close and personal.”
I groaned a little. The kid thrived on action—and was resiliency personified. But she wasn’t going to let me live down the fact that I had actually dragged her to a police shootout. What joy.
“But seriously,” she continued. “Is Vaughn okay?”
“He could be better,” I admitted. “Which is why I need your help.”
She wasn’t even trying to hide her snickering by the time I finished rattling off my instructions. “You’re sworn to secrecy,” I told her firmly. “Promise,” I demanded. “It’s a proprietary recipe, and there will come a time in your life when you’ll need to use it too. Guaranteed.”
“Can I fictionalize it? Change the names and circumstances? This is too good to pass up,” she asked in a cloying singsong.
“You know the answer to that. This is official business.”
“Oh yeah, sure. Business.” And that set her off into another peal of delighted juvenile laughter. “Aye, aye, captain, I promise. Under duress, I might add, but yeah, I promise,” she cackled, and hung up.
Then I called my Dad and warned him that he would shortly be having a visitor of a blue-haired persuasion. She was to have full reign of my kitchen, and what she produced therein would become his responsibility, if he was willing to accept a courier mission.
Which he was, most gladly, since being cooped up in the Tin Can listening to the rain drum on the roof wasn’t his first choice for a good time even though he’d willingly exiled himself there in order to support me in meeting my clients’ needs that morning. My dad is a brick.
I glugged more coffee and grimaced. Vaughn didn’t need to see me doing this. He’d been restricted to clear liquids since his surgery, and part of his underlying crankiness had to be related to hunger. Coffee is a clear liquid, but so far I’d managed to keep him from consuming any, certain that the hospital’s particularly vile version wouldn’t do his constitution any good, and I’d encouraged him toward weak tea and cranberry juice instead. Not manly foods, to say the least.
I’d had a little chat with the nursing staff, and learned that Vaughn would be upgraded to supping on those nasty vitamin-enriched liquid meal replacement products in the evening. Hence my hurried confab with Willow. There were a few things I wanted to cut off at the pass. It was sort of like running a public relations campaign for Vaughn’s stomach.
Returning upstairs, I saw the commandeered hospital room with fresh eyes. It was mayhem. Papers. Electronics. Power cords. Spare chairs pushed at all angles. And one long detective with his hair mashed up hilariously on one side of his head and nearly two days’ worth of stubble reclining grouchily on a bed with side rails. He had documents and phones and notepads and pens scattered all over his lap.
We were certainly violating all possible regulations about electronic transmitting interference. Good thing Vaughn didn’t have a pacemaker. Frankly, the nurses had been extremely patient and laissez-faire about the whole matter, and I was grateful. But I couldn’t help thinking that the sooner he could get out of the hospital and back to his regular routine, the better for everyone, especially him. I didn’t want my dear detective languishing in an environment that was rapidly starting to feel like a jail cell.
oOo
Andrea had shrunk. And she’d been fairly petite to start with. Slim—but now nearly cadaverous. Fragile—but now shattered. Pretty—but now frozen in glassy-eyed inanimateness, like an abandoned porcelain doll.
I sat beside her in an identically blocky and uncomfortable chair, but afraid to touch her lest she break. My warmth and nearness were going to have to suffice.
Her voice was a faint and brittle rasp as she began to answer Vaughn’s first question. “I’ve been thinking about it. There were signs I should’ve picked up on. But Reginald was always...was always...” Tears dripped off her chin, and I handed her a tissue from the box on my lap.
She dabbed, then fisted the tissue which had already disintegrated into ineffectualness. I yanked out a big gob of tissues and passed them over.
“Well, my mother called him an odd duck.” Andrea’s thin shoulders scooted up toward her ears. “Her comments used to make me so angry. Because he was my choice, you know? It took me a long time to admit she was right.”
“Do you recognize this?” Vaughn held up a photo of the bottle I’d snagged from Breaking Wind.
Andrea nodded. “The vet prescribes Ketaphorte for Melchior, my harlequin Great Dane. He has an anxiety disorder, and I’m to give him a drop or two of the Ketaphorte, sublingually if possible, to help calm him down. It’s an antidepressant.”
Was that an oxymoron? An antidepressant for a hyperactive dog? I gnawed on the inside of my cheek in order to keep my thoughts to myself.
“It’s an anesthetic,” Vaughn countered, with a remarkably straight face.
But Andrea only shrugged. “It’s gaining popularity and showing great promise for treating emotional and psychological disorders. There’s nothing illegal with off-label prescribing as long as the doctor is comfortable with it.” She sounded as though she were reading from a brochure, and I wondered what selective websites she’d visited to gain this justification for drugging her dog.
“In large enough doses, it’s lethal,” Vaughn replied quietly.
It took a while to sink in, then she gasped and gripped the chair arms, sitting up ramrod straight. “Are you saying...are you saying...that’s how he...” Fresh tears wiped out any words she might’ve wanted to add.
“Not completely.” Vaughn took pity on her. Or maybe it wasn’t pity, because the whole truth was worse. “Reginald injected Tessa with the contents of the bottle, but the bottle wasn’t full, according to the medical examiner. She had enough ketamine in her system to make her very sleepy and relaxed, but not enough to kill her. When she was too weak to resist, your husband arranged her on the bed and put a plastic bag over her head. She suffocated.”
Andrea emitted a strangled cry like a small animal in distress, and hid her face behind both hands and a mash of damp tissues.
Vaughn kept talking, laying out all the incriminating details. “We found a receipt for over-the-counter sleeping pills among your husband’s possessions. The pills were scattered all over the bathroom of the hotel suite—rather artfully, in fact. We counted the pills we found, and they were all there. Tessa hadn’t ingested any of them. Do you want to tell me why Reginald might’ve done this?” he asked gruffly. “It was a pretty elaborate attempt at misdirection, trying to make her death look like suicide.”
Andrea’s shoulders were heaving in huge, racking sobs. I got up and filled a cup with water from the tap.
Several minutes and several sips later, her voice was under control.
“We did okay, got by comfortably on my salary,” Andrea said shakily. “But Reginald always had grand plans. And he could sell them...I remember when we were dating. He could talk for hours, and held me enthralled with all his ideas. I thought he was a visionary...then.”
More like a lazy, parasitic leech, I thought. But I was being rude. Clearly, Andrea had loved Reginald at some point. Or at least had been infatuated with him.
“He had this new idea...well, it wasn’t his really. See, our uncle—Tessa’s and mine—was a bit of a tinkerer, and he filed for a whole bunch of patents back in the day. Tessa inherited his paperwork, just one more thing to stash in her attic. But he knew she’d keep it, whereas...I don’t know. Our uncle just liked Tessa better, I guess.” Andrea was clenching and unclenching her hands, shredding the tissues into a pile of confetti on her lap, her gaze fixed on the window opposite Vaughn’s bed and the tears forgotten for the moment. “She used to follow him around when she was little, ask him questions. I was too busy and...I thought he smelled funny.”
This coming from a woman who kept four Great Danes cooped up in her house while she was at work. Maybe she employed industrial-strength air fresheners.
“He was a little crazy, even then.” Andrea emitted a tiny, girlish giggle. “Maybe that’s why Reginald seemed normal to me—by comparison.” But her mirth quickly subsided. “Several months ago, Tessa got an unusual letter in the mail, from someone who was hunting down the owner of one of our uncle’s patents. He’d actually hired an investigator to find out who’d inherited the intellectual property rights. Anyway, he wanted to buy or license the patent. Tessa told me about it. Of course Reginald knew.” She shrugged at the free flow of information that was—and should be—common within a marriage. A healthy marriage, that is.
Which meant Simon had known too—maybe. Although the McNamaras’ marriage wasn’t healthy, and he and Tessa hadn’t been living together for at least a year. Still, uncommon information like that tends to get around.
Vaughn shifted, wincing as he did so, and the muscles along his jawline bunched up. “Where were you, and where was Reginald on Thursday night?”
Andrea whimpered. “You asked me that before.”
“And you lied.”
“I wanted to believe him.” Her excuse came out as a scratchy whisper.
I no longer had any sympathy for her. Maybe I should have, but the steeliness of Vaughn’s eyes told me a lot about Andrea’s repeated duplicity.
She dropped her head, started sorting the tissue shreds into piles on the taut fabric of the pencil skirt that was stretched across her thighs. “Reginald had this online venture capital club, people he’d been grooming to invest in his ideas. He was always looking for the next big thing—emerging technology mainly—and they’d had a few successes. I knew he’d been talking up this patent idea to the club, trying to round up enough money to knock that middleman out of contention.”
“I doubt this comes as a surprise to you, but Reginald had no money. Neither do you.” If Vaughn had had clothes on, he would’ve jumped out of bed and started pacing. Every muscle in his body was tense, and frustration was etched clearly on his face. “I have your bank statements. Your house is mortgaged to the hilt, just like Tessa’s. Reginald’s little hobby seems to have cost all of your life savings and your assets.”
Andrea cast a bewildered glance around the room, and half the tissue crumbs drifted off her lap and onto the floor. As an act, it was good, but not quite good enough. So that’s what the extra search warrant had been for this morning—the one that had been handled entirely by brisk phone calls and several absorbing emails.
“So I repeat, where were you and where was Reginald on Thursday night?” Vaughn gritted out.
“I was home, like I said,” Andrea whimpered. “Reginald was out. He often goes to the all-night pancake house on 43rd Avenue to use their wi-fi when he wants to whip his investment crew into a frenzy.” She shrugged. “Electronically speaking.”
Vaughn had stilled into deathly silence, his hands resting easily on the blanket, his expression now terrifyingly relaxed. At least it was to Andrea. I thought perhaps she was accustomed to having men cater to her every whim. She did have that helpless demeanor that could be appealing in some quarters.
But startled nervous energy was coming off her like a snake shedding a skin as she hedged. “He told me to lie, told me it would look better, be easier in the long run, if I just said that we were together. And it was true...most nights we were together. I mean not together.” She blushed furiously. “But together—like together. At home,” she finished lamely.
So it was all the dead man’s fault. I didn’t buy it for one second, and felt like hurling the tissue box in her face. Instead, I got up and went over to stand by the window, where I could look out and just catch her reflection in the glass.
“Patents are publicly available information.” Vaughn’s voice was calm and deep, his stillness seeping even more into the room’s weighty atmosphere.
Andrea was clearly rattled. “It was bogus,” she rasped. “All his patents were, the crazy ramblings of his manic-depressive mind. But the guy who wanted to license the patent thought it might work, with some modifications. And he was willing to pay for it, if we could also supply our uncle’s research notes.”
Hence the file boxes. Which had become a gold mine in Reginald’s eyes. And Andrea’s. And maybe even Tessa’s.
I whirled around. But Vaughn beat me to it. “You were set to inherit,” he stated. “When did you find out that Tessa had changed her will?”
“I don’t...I don’t...really,” Andrea was gabbling now, having no one left to throw under the bus. “I don’t...am I?” she croaked and dissolved into a rash of loud, hiccuping sobs.
CHAPTER 21
His most pressing job complete, Vaughn was turning into a bear. A growling, grumpy, fidgeting, restless bear.
Andrea had been hauled off in handcuffs on conspiracy to commit murder charges. She’d probably be granted bail, but it was even more likely that she’d be unable to obtain the necessary funds to take advantage of that leniency. Because no self-respecting bail bondsman was going to like the look of her nonexistent collateral.
From the few coherent words she’d leaked between sobs as she’d been led away, I was also pretty sure her first call once she was booked into jail would be to a dog-sitter, and not to a lawyer.
Karleen came in, exhausted from her grueling meeting, but carrying good news that distracted Vaughn for a while. Fourteen upstanding members of society had been arrested for illegal gambling, and Simon was blabbing all over the place, helping to incriminate a few more in the hopes of reducing his own sentence. The prosecuting attorney thought the evidence would hold up well in court and was disinclined to offer easy plea deals.
Chief Monk replaced Karleen after twenty minutes, making me wonder if someone had worked out a rotational shift for occupying the restless mind of a particularly morose and grouchy detective. I, too, was tapping my fingers on the chair arm, waiting for my special delivery.
“You’ve been cleared for duty,” Chief Monk announced. “You didn’t fire your gun.”
“I didn’t have an unobstructed shot,” Vaughn grunted.
“And I took your word for it, which is why I assigned you to continuing the case even before I had the State Patrol’s confirmation. Thought you’d be happy to know its official now.” Chief Monk shook his head, but his eyes held a rueful, knowing expression. “If I had to put every officer who drew or fired his or her weapon yesterday on administrative leave, I wouldn’t have a department left. But the good news is, all handgun bullets have now been recovered. You guys made a lot of divots in that dock and several boats, but none of your bullets hit people.”
