A Killer Column (20 page)

“Let’s see what you’ve got.”

She retrieved a shoebox from her bedroom and opened the lid. Inside were an assortment of photographs, talismans, and other small reminders of lost loves. Jenny was a nester, and that was a good thing at the moment. After she pulled out two reasonable photos of her former boyfriends, she said, “Hang on. I have to have a picture of Charlie somewhere.”

She frowned, and then went to one of the bookcases. Jenny took a photo album out, started leafing through the pages, and then suddenly stopped. “Is this good enough?”

We both peered over her shoulder and saw a photo of a block party, clearly taken out front. It showed Charlie smiling for the camera, and Zach said, “It’s perfect. Now we’re cooking. Tomorrow, we’ll start looking for that teddy bear’s mates.”

“In the meantime, there are some things I need to discuss with you,” I said to Zach.

“Understood,” Zach said.

“So, where do we begin? With the keys we found earlier?” Jenny asked.

I’d been about to pull out the planner, but that could wait. “Sure,” I said as I retrieved them from my jacket pocket.

I handed them to Zach, and as he took them, he asked, “Where did you find these?”

“Jenny found them while we were searching Derrick’s hotel room.”

“And you didn’t think to turn them over to his wife?”

I recognized that tone of voice, and I wasn’t in any mood to hear it, especially from my husband. “Zach, we weren’t about to give her what could be an important clue. If we decide they aren’t going to help us, we can ‘find’ them someplace else.”

“Okay,” he said, trying to appease me. “Let’s have a look.”

He went through the keys, and saw a house key, a dead bolt key, a key to a cylinder lock, and another one that said, “Security.”

“This one’s for a safe,” he said. “I wonder where it is at the moment.”

“My guess is Richmond,” I said. “Should we all go check it out?”

He scowled a little as he said, “I’ve already been there. I’ve got a hunch it’s a dead end.”

“Why?” I asked. “It could be holding a thousand things that Derrick was hiding, and one of them might have gotten him murdered.”

“Take it easy,” Zach said. “If he’d been killed in Richmond, I’d tend to agree. But think about it. Why kill him in another state, hours from where any evidence might be? Don’t you think it would have made more sense to kill him in Richmond, take the keys, and then get whatever the murderer wanted out of the safe before anyone knew Derrick was dead?”

Jenny nodded. “That’s probably true, but what if it was spur-of-the-moment? Stabbing him with a steak knife he was going to need for his meal doesn’t exactly shout premeditation.”

“That’s a good point,” Zach said. “But at the very least, the killer should have taken the keys. Where exactly were they?”

“Tucked into the toe of one of his shoes with a sock disguising it. You’d have to know it was there to find it.”

Zach nodded. “Okay, maybe there is something of value there, but we can’t break into his house in Richmond and search for it.” He spun the key-ring around his index finger. “And we can’t exactly ask Cary where it is without giving away the fact that we found the keys in the first place. All of that is supposing that the safe is at his home and not his business or somewhere else we don’t know about.”

“So, it’s a dead end,” I said, deflated that what we thought had been important really wasn’t all that significant.

“I wouldn’t say that, but it’s not going to help us at the moment.”

I nodded, and then reached into my bag as I said, “This may or may not be of any immediate use either, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be important.” I retrieved the planner, and Jenny asked, “Where did you find it?”

“Kelsey had it in her hotel room,” I said. “It was stuffed under the cushion of one of the chairs.”

“And you just walked out the door with it? She’s going to realize you stole it sooner or later, Savannah.”

“Take it easy,” I said as my husband started pacing around the room. “She noticed it was gone before I even left.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better? What did you do?”

“I deflected suspicion onto anyone else who’d been in her room since she’d seen it last. Trust me; the only person she doesn’t suspect at the moment is me.”

Zach still wasn’t pleased with what I had to say, and Jenny decided to intercede. “Regardless of how she came about getting this, shouldn’t we look at it and see if it’s any help figuring out who murdered Derrick? Doesn’t that serve the more important need, instead of trying to establish who actually has an ownership claim to the planner?”

“You’re talking to me like a lawyer,” Zach said. “Stop it.”

She grinned at him. “Sorry, I can’t help myself.” Jenny turned and looked at me. “So, what does it have in it?”

“I haven’t had a chance to even crack it open yet,” I admitted.

“Don’t tell me you were waiting for me, because I’m not going to buy it,” Zach said.

“Let’s just say that the opportunity hadn’t presented itself yet.”

I opened the planner, and Zach said, “Skip to the last day of his life. I want to see who his last appointment was with.”

I did as he asked, and then said, “It’s not important.”

“Sure it is. That could easily be the name of the killer.”

Jenny shook her head. “Zach, isn’t it obvious that Savannah’s name is probably the last one written there?”

“Oh, of course,” he said. “I didn’t consider that. Savannah, did he have any appointments later that evening? Is anybody down for dinner?”

I scanned the page. “No, I don’t see anything.” I looked at one of the many sticky notes protruding from the book. “Hang on a second. Here’s something interesting.”

I looked at the note and saw that Derrick had dated it for the day of his murder. It was so last-minute that he hadn’t even taken the time to record it in his planner, but it was there nonetheless.

From the look of things, Derrick had a late appointment with Sylvia Peters. I wonder if keeping it had killed him.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “I saw Sylvia when she left Derrick at the hotel, and she practically threatened him with bodily harm. Why would he agree to meet her later? Derrick was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid.”

“Maybe she had something else to offer,” Jenny said.

“You’ve seen Sylvia. I doubt Derrick would succumb to her charms, even if he didn’t already have a wife and a mistress.”

“Ew w w, thanks for that visual. That’s not what I meant. Could she have threatened him with something to keep her column syndicated? Do you think she’d be capable of it?”

I thought about it, and then nodded. “She’s got a dark edge to her, there’s no doubt about it. I’m not sure she’d kill him, though.”

“Think about it,” Zach said. “You told me yourself that Derrick threatened every one of his clients with the noncompete agreements he forced you all to sign. If Sylvia couldn’t work anywhere else, and Derrick was firing her, it was like he was holding a gun to her head.”

“Then we need to talk to Sylvia and see if she actually kept that appointment,” I said.

“Hang on a second,” Zach said. “There’s no reason to jump to conclusions until we’ve looked through the rest of the planner. There could be a dozen clues here about who might have killed Derrick.”

“Okay, fine, be the logical one.”

He took the planner from me and started leafing through it. “How did he ever get anything done with all of these notes attached?”

“It must have worked for him,” Jenny said.

“Well, I don’t know how we’re going to keep it all straight and still return it in some kind of order later.”

“Would a copy of it help?” Jenny asked.

“Absolutely. Do you know any copy centers open at night?”

“I’ve got one in my office.”

Zach said, “I’m sure you do, but I don’t want to go back into town just to copy this thing.”

“No, the office in my spare bedroom. I can make a copy for you in ten minutes.”

“That’s a deal. Can you set the exposure to a darker level? Some of these notes were done in pencil, and they’re starting to smudge.”

“Leave it to me,” Jenny said as she took the planner and disappeared back into one of her spare bedrooms.

“She’s really excited about this,” I said.

“I suppose it can be fun, if you’re not the one in the sights of the investigating detective.”

“Do you think Murphy honestly believes I killed Derrick?”

Zach sighed as he stretched. “Savannah, he’s playing this one close to the vest, and I don’t blame him. It’s got to be tough having another cop looking over his shoulder all of the time.”

I looked at my husband a moment before speaking. “That’s how you think of yourself, isn’t it?”

“What, as a cop? I was one for a long time.”

“You want to take the Asheville job, don’t you?”

He shook his head as he stared out the window. “I told you, I haven’t figured out what I want to do yet, and I’m just not ready to discuss it.”

I walked over to him and hugged him. “Sometimes I forget how much what you used to do is still a part of you.” Suddenly I knew the right thing to say. “Zach, do whatever you think is right about the job offer. You have my blessing either way.”

He pulled back from the hug and frowned at me.

“What did I say?” I asked.

“Savannah, we’ll make this decision together, and we’ll both live with the consequences. I’m not going to shoulder it alone. Do you understand?”

“Of course I do. I was just trying to help.”

“Well, you’re not, at least not by giving in. I need us to hammer this out together. We’re a team, remember?”

“Got it.”

I noticed that Jenny had come out of the bedroom. “If this is a bad time, I can give you two some privacy.”

I was about to answer when Zach beat me to it. “Everything’s fine. That was fast.”

“I believe in getting the best, and my copier is no exception.”

Zach took the original, while Jenny handed the copied pages to me. I saw that the penciled notations were now crisper than they’d been on the original documents.

“Hang on a second, this one stuck to my copy.” I looked at the lime green note and saw in printed block letters, THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING.

“Did you see where this was in the planner?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t even notice it as I was making copies,” Jenny said. After she and Zach read it, she asked, “Was he threatening someone?”

“Maybe,” Zach said. “Or somebody was threatening him.” He scratched his chin, and then added, “But I have to admit, I have no idea what it means.”

“What should we do now?”

“Before we start digging into all of this, we need to figure out how to get it back to Kelsey without her knowing we had it.”

“That’s going to be tough,” I said. “She knows it’s gone, so I can’t exactly slip it back under the cushion of her chair.”

“No, but you could leave it at the desk for her.”

Jenny asked, “Wouldn’t she ask who dropped it off? We don’t want to implicate Savannah in the theft.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll find someone to do it for us.”

“How are you going to do that?” I asked.

He grinned at us both. “Leave that to me.”

I started flipping through the pages Jenny had copied for us. “A lot of these notes are for Kelsey.”

Zach scanned as well, as Jenny asked, “Are they orders?”

“Most of them. There are a couple he hadn’t delivered yet stuck to the back of the planner,” Zach said. “Here’s something odd. Jenny, did you happen to tear one of the notes while you were making the copies?”

“No, I’m sure of it. Why?”

“This one says, ‘Fire,’ but the rest of it is missing.”

“That’s no mystery,” I explained. “He fired Brady and Sylvia after I got there for my meeting, so it could have easily been for one, or even both of them.”

“True,” Zach said as he kept looking at the planner. “He had to be a tough man to work for.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

Zach grinned at me. “I’m not talking about you. How do you think Kelsey managed to put up with it?”

“She wasn’t with him very long,” I said. “Who knows how long she would have lasted.”

“Well, she certainly ended up all right, didn’t she?”

“What do you mean?” Jenny asked.

“I keep thinking about who had something concrete to gain by his death, not just having a contract saved.”

“Hey, it’s a bigger deal than you think. Losing your source of income and not being able to get another job for five years is huge.”

“So is murder,” Zach said. “But we shouldn’t forget that Cary is the one who really benefits. I’m sure Kelsey wasn’t expecting to take over for him, and I doubt Sylvia or Brady knew their firings would be canceled with his murder. What could Mindi have gained? She lost her meal ticket. That leaves Cary.”

“There are more reasons for murder than money,” I said. “Love is another factor.”

Jenny nodded. “If Derrick was dumping Mindi, she had a motive.”

He countered, “And if he was dumping Cary for Mindi, she’d have an emotional and financial motive to want to see him dead, too.”

“So, are you saying we forget all about the others and focus on Cary Duncan?”

He shook his head as he walked to the window. “No, we still need to see if Sylvia actually met with Derrick after you left, but you have to admit, Cary has some good reasons to want Derrick dead. It makes her the prime suspect, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Hey,” I said, “as long as it’s not me, I’m fine with it. Jenny?”

“It’s something to consider,” she said. “I don’t want us to forget Frank Lassiter. He lost a great deal of money, and while he wasn’t going to get any of it back, he could have killed Derrick as a way of getting revenge.”