One Murder More, page 22
Maren realized she might need to be more explicit in indicating that this was still Jenna’s domain, that she hadn’t taken over completely. She’d learned in her brief experience teaching art to high school students that adolescents could regress from mini-grown-ups to children needing adult direction in minutes. It was a bewildering age for those going through it and for those on the outside looking in.
“Please, come in,” Mare said.
That seemed to do it. Jenna crossed to her desk, stepping over Maren’s open bag. She rummaged through the top drawer before finding a foil-wrapped Jazz #2 reed. She was almost out the door when she stopped. She looked down at the reed in her hand, turning it over.
“Is Camper okay?”
At her mother’s funeral while her father wept and Noel sobbed, Maren had bitten her lip until it bled rather than permit herself to cry. Since then her eyes might water, but she kept any real hurt locked deep inside. Not as a matter of pride, but of privacy. But at Jenna’s question about Camper something strange took hold of Maren. It started with an uncontrollable shaking in her shoulders followed by a soft, low keening escaping from her mouth. She hunched over and wrapped her arms around herself in a futile effort at containment of the utter, bereft loss of control she was experiencing. Then the tears came, her nose running and her face soaked within minutes.
She didn’t know how much time had passed, but when she looked up, Jenna was gone.
That must have terrified her.
She remembered what it was like to see an adult in her life completely lose it, and wondered if Jenna would suffer nightmares as she had. But in a moment Jenna was back at Maren’s side. “I found this website,” she said as she pulled the rolling desk chair, a worn cast-off from someone’s office, close to the bed and opened the inexpensive laptop she held, covered with stickers of musicians. She didn’t look at Maren, her eyes fixed on the keyboard as she clicked and typed. Her voice, though tentative, was hopeful. “See? It’s called tripawds.com.” She turned the screen toward Maren. “It says here it’s better to run on three legs than to limp on four.” She pointed to a banner at the top of the site. There were images of a golden retriever leaping for a ball, and a corgi playing happily with two small children. Both animals had three legs. “There are cool things you can buy that help with balance so the dogs can get around more easily. Plus training videos . . .” Jenna’s voice was gaining strength. She hazarded a glance at Maren to see if she was getting it. “And look, people blog about their dogs, what happened to them, how they’re doing. I bet Camper would be featured. Since he’s a hero.”
“He is that,” Maren said, a few new tears escaping her. This time she found it didn’t hurt to cry. She realized having someone stronger, even if that someone was fourteen years old, made a difference.
Maren rubbed her eyes with both hands, then looked directly at Jenna. “Camper will be home in a few days. If you make a list, we can figure out what he might need. I don’t know when I could do a blog, but if you . . .”
Jenna was up again, headed out the door. “I’m on it. My friend Danny is a really good writer. He can help.”
A FEW HOURS LATER, Polly had gone into her office and Jenna was at rehearsal, but Maren wasn’t entirely alone. A black-and-white patrol car was parked across the street in front of her house making sure Wallis Lisborne didn’t make another appearance.
Maren was getting around pretty well, although leaning heavily on the cane and taking only a few steps at a time. A patch the doctor had given her to put directly over the wound contained a numbing salve that helped a lot. She’d been able to cut the oral pain medication dose in half and intended to stop it altogether as soon as she could.
Polly’s dining table made a better work surface than Jenna’s small desk, so Maren sat in one of the padded chairs, her left leg outstretched. She opened Polly’s laptop, on loan since Maren’s iPad was still with Noel. The first two messages of the morning were from him. He expected to be discharged soon. Not that it meant he was ready to function at anything close to full speed. He would be on bed rest for at least two weeks. More likely the hospital needed the room, or his insurance limit had kicked in. Still, convalescing at home had to be better than the sterile environment of an inpatient unit.
Maren stretched her neck, and took a moment. She thought she and Noel, the Kane siblings, made quite a pair now. Gimpy and gimpier. But they were alive. Both of them. And she knew better than to take anything for granted anymore, especially not that.
She turned back to her in-box.
There was a note from Garrick on the subject of the Tamara Barnes attachments.
Maren,
The document is a history of three different stock prices over the past six years. It provides their value and other parameters up through two months ago. It’s odd that the company names aren’t listed. Many stocks show similar patterns over time, but one of my research assistants should be able to identify these with the programs I have.
More interesting is where the investments are located. The credit card receipt is charged to the main account, the investment partnership, held in a savings and loan in Albuquerque.
New Mexico has extremely permissive laws with regard to investor anonymity. All someone needs to park assets there via a limited liability corporation is to give a company name and provide an address for the principal office and a registered agent who lives in New Mexico. The owners don’t show up on any public record.
Garrick
Maren moved too quickly, putting weight on her leg before she had the cane in place. She winced but kept going, realizing she would need to keep her phone at her side from now on. She found it in the kitchen on the counter where she had made tea.
“Polly Gray speaking.”
“Polly, it’s Maren. Did you say Tamara Barnes went to college in New Mexico?”
“Yes. Born in New York, college in Albuquerque.” She thought for a moment. “University of New Mexico. She graduated with honors. Why?”
“The document I sent Garrick, the attachment from Tamara’s e-mail. It’s an investment account located in Albuquerque. The partners can be anonymous, all except the local agent.” Maren was talking fast. “Wallis Lisborne had access to the money. If Tamara did too, it might explain her expensive car and clothes, and how she got the charge receipt, the evidence placing Wallis at the Hopkins murder.”
“Hold on, love.” Maren could hear Polly talking to someone else, then the sound of a door closing. “How does this help Sean?”
“If we can find who was on that account, if there is someone else, that might be the person Wallis worked with to kill Tamara. Clearly, there’s money behind this somehow, and we’re getting closer.” Pain shot through her leg. Maren leaned against the counter for support, but didn’t stop talking. “Tamara said she and the governor had done something awful. That must be it—Ray Fernandez must be a partner on that account.”
“Maybe.” Polly hesitated. “I still don’t see how being part of this investment account links to any of the murders—Hopkins, Barnes, or the attempts on your life.”
“It is, it must. It’s just that everything’s so complicated. But I’ll figure it out. Or the police will.” Maren moved back to the sofa and gratefully took the weight off her leg as she sank down into the large cushions.
Once the call had ended, Maren took a sip of her tea, cold now, and suffered a moment’s doubt. She thought about the hunches she’d had so far on Sean’s case and how they had played out.
The similarity in the methods of killing in the Hopkins and Barnes cases, a single knife strike through the heart, had suggested to her one killer. The police hadn’t agreed, at least not without something more. The hairbrush with strands of orange-red hair in Ray Fernandez’s car also hadn’t meant anything to anyone but her. And Bethany Castro being Tamara’s child wasn’t linked to Sean’s case in any way she could see yet, not enough to expose Tamara’s secret.
She thought back to Rorie Rickman’s warning. To be thoughtful. To be careful. Generally good advice—Maren knew that. She just wished it weren’t so hard for her to follow.
SAL INSISTED ON CARRYING Noel’s bag and his briefcase in from the car while he waited on the pullout sofa bed in her living room. He lay on top of the covers, his hat and coat still on, while Sal started dinner and Bethany played upstairs.
Noel was on strict orders of bed rest for several weeks, and Sal wouldn’t hear of him going home alone to his apartment to fend for himself.
He was taking time to adjust to the idea.
Not that it would be his first overnight at Sal’s. They always started like this, with him on the sofa bed. They had agreed that Bethany shouldn’t be exposed to the fact that he and Sal were sleeping together unmarried. It wasn’t a strict religious code for either of them, although Sal went to church regularly. It stemmed from their shared concern that young children were highly impressionable. Neither of them wanted the future teen Bethany sleeping with someone just because she thought they had sanctioned it.
Sal’s modest Davis townhome had two bedrooms and a bath upstairs, with the living room, eat-in kitchen, and half bath downstairs.
In the past when Noel had stayed, he’d moved upstairs to Sal’s room for the night after they were sure Bethany was asleep, setting an early alarm for the next day so he could be back downstairs making up the sofa bed when Bethany woke in the morning. The strategy had only failed them once, when Bethany had a nightmare and knocked on Sal’s locked bedroom door at 2:00 a.m. Before Sal could say anything, Noel had jumped out of bed and hid in the walk-in closet. He’d stayed there for nearly an hour while Sal comforted Bethany, until the child had fallen asleep and Sal carried her back to her own room. When Sal teased him about it later—an hour was a long time to wait in a closet—Noel had looked puzzled, failing to see the humor in what he felt had been a logical action on his part.
But this time would be different, more than a night or two.
Several weeks. An extended stay.
Noel hadn’t lived with anyone since college. Then only a semester passed before he found he was ill-suited for roommates. They seemed uncomfortable with him, despite his trying to stay out of their way. As far as Noel could tell, the problem was simply who he was. Noel reasoned that if he moved in with Sal, the chill that followed him would become obvious to both Sal and Bethany. He might lose them, a risk he was unwilling to take. As he was preparing to get up and tell Sal that he would be fine in his own apartment and needed to go home, there was a knock at the door.
SAL WIPED HER HANDS on a dishtowel and went to see who it was. Likely a door-to-door salesperson or petitioner. They always chose the dinner hour to find people at home. Annoyed, she turned the heat under the stir-fry down so it wouldn’t burn.
Billy Machelli stood on the stoop, hands jammed deep in the front pockets of his jeans, his curly dark hair longer than Sal remembered it. A heavily made-up, platinum blonde woman stood next to him, her eyes struggling to stay open under lashes thick with mascara. Her smile was more childlike than the rest of her, something sweet and genuine in it. It was hard to tell her age, but Sal guessed the woman was younger than Billy. That was his type.
“Hey, Sis, great to see you,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“This is my fiancée, Marilyn Lewis. Seeing as how I’m getting married, I had to introduce you two.”
Billy took Marilyn’s hand and started to step inside, but Sal blocked him.
She acknowledged Marilyn with a nod, keeping her eyes on Billy. “If this is about money, call me and I’ll—”
“No, I have a job. We just want to be with family to share our news.” “Mommy, Daniel is hungry.”
Bethany took the stairs carefully, holding the banister with her free hand and cradling her stuffed lion, Daniel, with her cast against her narrow chest.
Noel’s medication made him dizzy, but he was up in time to intercept Bethany’s path toward the entry. “Let’s go in the kitchen and feed Daniel,” Noel said, taking the little girl’s free hand and turning her toward the back hall. “I’m hungry, too,” he said.
Marilyn gazed at Bethany’s retreating figure.
There was a longing, a depth of feeling in that look that gave Sal a chill. She remembered her own days when all she wanted was a child. And in that moment Sal knew. This visit wasn’t about money. It wasn’t about a marriage.
It was about Bethany. Her daughter.
Billy’s daughter.
CHAPTER 33
Evie dropped off all the files on the cell phone bill at Polly’s at Maren’s request. Included was a draft of the cost analysis for the upcoming Appropriations Committee hearing. Mare was pleased. Ecobabe interns Nadira and Elliot had done fast and good work. Their computations showed fines paid by violators would cover the cost of enforcing the cell phone driving ban. The bill would be “revenue neutral,” the magic phrase legislators loved to hear, meaning a bill would neither add to nor deplete state resources.
The final challenge remained—building enough support from Republicans members for the floor vote so that Ray Fernandez could feel comfortable signing the measure, declaring it a bipartisan victory. Maren rifled through the files on Polly’s until she found the ones that Rorie Rickman had pulled from Sean’s office and computer. She wanted to see whether there were specific notes on Republicans still in office now who voted against Smith’s bill back then—anything that might give her a handle on how to approach them. Nothing.
She turned to more recent documents. The agenda from the Health Committee hearing. Support and opposition letters and testimony. Nothing there either, at least not anything that seemed likely to serve as a silver bullet to remove Republican opposition. The work was tedious and slow-going, but Maren was feeling better and able to stay focused. She’d replaced the heavier prescription pain medication with over-the-counter pills.
Things were also finally looking up for Sean. Lana Decateau was busy on another case, so Maren hadn’t heard much from her lately, but enough to know the police were following up on the investment account. Maren was certain they would find that Tamara Barnes was the New Mexico link. That would explain how Tamara had access to Wallis’s receipt. And Maren thought Ray Fernandez had to be their likely backer, getting the fund started. She guessed Ray had had an affair with one of the two women, Wallis or Tamara. Most likely Tamara. Noel and the police might have viewed the location of that hairbrush in the glove box of his car as innocent, but they didn’t know Ray like Maren did.
She set her work on the bill aside and pulled up the investment document again. Garrick had called to walk her through it. She’d been surprised how easy he was to talk to since their “just friends” discussion.
He’d explained that two of the stocks showed typical returns of four to eight percent annually, with some years better, some years worse. But a third stock on the list had performed extraordinarily, jumping over 300 percent twice in the history that was provided. All told, from six years ago through two months prior to today—the period tracked in the document—an investment of a hundred dollars on that stock would have yielded a fifteen-fold return or $1,500. A million dollars invested would have turned into $15 million. Maren looked again at the graph and the periods when the third stock had peaked. She also went back to the original cell phone documents, checking the dates the hands-free bill had passed a major committee, then each house.
She recalled Lew Quintana, president of TalkFree Inc., testifying that 37 percent of Californians now owned a TalkFree hands-free instrument for their car. Lining things up, she could see that TalkFree’s tremendous growth in sales had happened since the passage of the hands-free phone law.
Maren hit speed dial for Polly.
“Slow down, love.” Polly seemed to be having trouble following what Maren felt was so simple.
“Tamara, Wallis, and Ray were betting on the outcome of bills. I don’t know what the other two stocks were, but I’ve compared the most successful investment from the document Tamara e-mailed with TalkFree’s history—it’s a perfect match.”
“Hold on.” She heard Polly talking to a young man, likely a fellow in her program. It never paid to call her at the office. Maren paced the length of Polly’s small dining room. Not very effectively, using her cane, but she couldn’t sit still.
Polly returned to the line. “So they invested in TalkFree?”
“Right,” Maren said, giving in to the growing ache in her leg and sitting down. “The value of the stock was nearly stagnant, no real change, until it skyrocketed after the hands-free bill became law. That maps exactly to the value of the highest-performing stocks in the investment account in the documents Tamara sent to me.”
“Let me get this straight. An insider like Wallis, working in the capitol, could follow which bills were introduced in Sacramento, assess the potential for a company’s bottom line, and invest in those she thought would take off when the new law was enacted? Is that legal?”
“Yes. Garrick confirmed it—not only that it’s legal but that it likely happens all the time. First, because it doesn’t need to be an insider. Anyone can look up bill proposals online, read them, and consider their potential for making a company money. Of course, people on the inside would be better at it, have a better idea of whether a given bill is likely to pass, sort of like how knowing personally the players on a football team, their aches and pains that don’t hit the media, improves your chances at betting on whether they’ll win.” Maren realized she was on a bit of a tangent about who could do this. “But the key word in terms of the legality of it is ‘potential.’ There’s no guarantee the bill will pass. It’s not rigged since it’s not a sure thing.”
“Okay.” Polly paused. “So?”
“Suppose Connor Smith’s hands-free bill hadn’t become law. Which would likely have happened if Marjorie Hopkins’s research had been completed back then showing that a driver’s conversation on a hands-free phone is no safer than holding the phone. The bill would have become a worthless idea. It would have died. And anyone who had invested in TalkFree or other hands-free cellular companies based on their expected performance under the anticipated new law would have lost all their money.” Maren swallowed hard. “There’s the motive, Polly,” she said. “Wallis’s motive to kill Marjorie Hopkins. It was to stop the cell phone research, or at least delay it long enough for Smith’s hands-free bill to be signed, TalkFree’s stock value to soar, and the money cashed out.”
