A Killer Column (27 page)

“I’m not letting you do that,” Jenny said. I’d heard that steel in her voice before, and I knew she wasn’t about to budge.

“We can always claim that we just found it,” I said.

“How can we do that?” Zach asked.

“We cleaned out his room, didn’t we? While we were there, we found this box of telephone directories, and I just now got around to looking inside it. Imagine my surprise when Derrick’s planner turned up.”

Zach laughed. “That’s all well and good, but that doesn’t explain how it was stolen from Kelsey’s hotel room days later.”

Jenny said, “I know. We didn’t find the planner itself.” She held the pages in her hand up and waved them in the air. “We found the copy.”

Zach frowned for a few seconds, and then nodded. “As crazy as it sounds, that might just work.” He looked at me and asked, “Savannah, do you see any problems with that?”

“Not off the top of my head,” I replied.

“Then let me finish that call.”

 

 

D
ETECTIVE MURPHY SHOWED UP SEVEN MINUTES AFTER Zach called him. Either he was an extremely fast driver, or he’d been somewhere close by. Either way, we barely had time to get our stories straight before he rang Jenny’s doorbell.

“Let’s see it,” Murphy said as Jenny opened the door.

“Hello, Shawn, it’s good to see you, too.”

He stepped in, and she added, “Won’t you come in?”

“I don’t have time for this, Jenny. A city councilman was just robbed at gunpoint by the Capitol building, and we’re all supposed to drop what we’re doing and start a search party.”

“The power of power is something, isn’t it?” she said.

Zach stepped up. “Here’s what we found.” Always a stickler, my husband had turned his back and asked me to hide the copy of Derrick’s planner in the pile of telephone directories I’d already looked through. When I was finished, he turned back around and “discovered” the copy in the stack. That way he was technically telling the truth to another police officer. It seemed a little ridiculous to me, but my husband had his own set of guidelines and rules that he ran his life by, and I was no one to judge.

Murphy took the pages, skimmed through them, and then said, “We’ve been looking for this.”

“You knew there was a copy all along?” Zach asked innocently.

“Not a copy, but the original. I figure Kelsey Hatcher or Cary Duncan still has the original, but if they do, they’re in no mood to share it with us.” He tapped the pages. “Thanks for this. We’ll jump right on it.”

I wanted to tell him about the entry with the Richmond divorce attorneys, but Zach was probably reading my mind when he shook his head slightly. I kept it to myself, and Murphy headed for the door.

“Any luck tracking the teddy bear down?” Zach asked before he could get away.

“I’ve got a man on it, but no news yet. It might take a little time.”

“Just checking,” Zach said.

“When I know something, you will,” he said. “I’ve got to run.”

He left without so much as a good-bye, and I asked, “Why didn’t you tell him about the divorce attorney?”

“For the same reason I didn’t want you to tell him. If he finds it for himself, which he will in a few hours, trust me, it will mean more to him than if we point it out. Besides, I wanted a little deniability about reading it. Did you notice how careful he was not to ask if we’d scanned it?”

“I thought that was odd,” Jenny said.

“It’s so we’d be covered,” Zach said. He retrieved the original from under his chair, and then said, “Now we keep digging.”

“My copy is gone,” Jenny said.

“You can always help me with the telephone directories I have left,” I told her.

“Thanks, but I’d rather make us all a snack.”

Zach perked up at that. “Snack? I could go for a snack.”

I just smiled at my husband as I resumed my search of the telephone books I hadn’t examined yet. My long shot was getting longer and longer, but that didn’t mean I could give up. We needed more clues, and I wasn’t about to turn my back on another source, no matter how remote the odds were getting.

 

 

F
IVE MINUTES LATER, JENNY CAME OUT WITH A TRAY FULL of cheese and crackers and some wine. “Is everyone ready for a break?”

“Why not?” Zach asked. “This planner is giving me a migraine. Derrick wasn’t the most organized man in the world, was he?”

Jenny said, “You should have seen his hotel room. That alone would be enough to prove it. The place was a complete wreck.”

“I have no problem believing that,” Zach said as he took a bite of cracker. “Half his notes make no sense at all, and those are just the ones I’ve been able to decipher from his chicken scratch writing.”

“You can do it,” I said as I took a sip of wine.

“Are you making any progress with the telephone books?”

“It’s slow going,” I admitted, “but it’s too good an opportunity to pass up.” I picked up a piece of cheese, took a bite, and then added, “Why all the telephone books if he wasn’t using them for something?”

“They’re really heavy,” Jenny said. “Maybe we were right originally and he was trying to make it seem as though the suitcases were holding something else?”

“We’ve already ruled out gold bars,” I said. “What else could be that heavy?”

Zach said softly, “Cash might be.”

“Seriously?” Jenny asked.

My husband nodded. “You’d be amazed how heavy two suitcases stuffed full of money can be.”

Jenny looked at him cryptically. “When have you moved that much cash, Zach?”

He shrugged. “It came up once on the job.”

Jenny looked at me, but I shook my head slightly, silently pleading for her to drop it. Zach didn’t like to talk about the time in Charlotte ten years before when he’d been forced to act as a courier for kidnappers. It had turned out badly, with the money taken and the victim never found, so I’d been surprised when he’d brought it up.

“Anyway,” I said, “I doubt Derrick ever had that much cash on him in his life. Besides, he’d have to take the telephone books out as soon as he was ready to leave.”

Jenny asked, “Why would he have to do that?”

“He had to get his clothes home, didn’t he? Those suitcases were just a temporary storage place.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t get it.”

“Me, either,” I said. I slapped my hands together, and added, “I’ve got two more telephone books, and then we’ll know for sure if they’re important or not.”

“I’ll help,” Jenny said.

“Thanks, but it’s become a matter of personal pride for me now.”

“Or stubbornness,” Zach said.

“Aren’t they the same thing?” I asked with a grin.

“Sometimes they are,” Zach said. “Jenny, maybe you can help me with the planner. How good are you at reading hieroglyphics?”

“I’ll do my best,” she said.

I took another sip, and reached for the fifth telephone book in the pile. As I fanned the pages, expecting nothing to happen, I was startled when an envelope slipped out and fluttered into my lap.

“I think I just found something,” I said as I finished fanning the pages of the directory. Nothing else dropped out, so I set the phone book aside and picked up the envelope.

“What is it?” Zach asked as he came over to join me on the couch.

“I’m not sure. Let’s see,” I said as I turned the envelope over and broke the seal on it.

The letter inside was brief and to the point, and I read it out loud to Zach and Jenny.

It was signed by Derrick, and dated the day of his murder.

“Am I wrong, or is that a strong motive?” I asked.

Zach took the letter from me, careful to handle it around the edges. “We need to call Murphy back.”

“He’s going to love this. How are we going to tell him that we found something else in the telephone books we had? It’s a little too coincidental, don’t you think?”

“That can’t be helped,” Zach said. “He has a right to know. Jenny, do you want to go catch a movie or something while we do this? It might help keep you out of it.”

She smiled gently. “It’s a little too late for that, wouldn’t you say? Call him, Zach. I can take it.”

“First, I’m going through the last book,” I said.

I did a quick examination, but it turned up empty. “Okay, now you can call him.”

Zach made the phone call, and two minutes later, I was surprised to see a car outside Jenny’s tear up the driveway with its police lights flashing.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Surely he’s not doing that just to get this letter.”

“There’s more to it than that. I’ll be right back.”

Zach walked out the front door, and Jenny and I followed him. He noticed, but didn’t comment.

As we stepped out together, a piece of paper was fluttering on the wooden porch floor. It looked like a note, and there was something holding it to the board.

It didn’t take a second glance to see that a knife had been stabbed through its center.

“I didn’t do anything,” a voice kept protesting from the yard, now lit by Murphy’s headlights.

“That’s not how it looked to me,” the detective said as he cuffed the man.

“I was going to see if I could do anything to help her,” Charlie protested again. “When I saw that knife sticking up, I couldn’t even warn them. Why did you put it there?”

“Me?” Murphy looked surprised by the implication. “I didn’t do it. You did.”

Charlie acted equally shocked. “You did! I watched you from my kitchen window. Just because you’re a cop doesn’t mean you can railroad me into this. I’ll testify in court that you’re the one who did it.”

“What’s going on?” Zach asked.

Murphy said, “When I drove up, I saw him creeping around the porch. My lights hit the knife, and he started running back to his house the second he saw me.”

“I had to get away from you!” Charlie shouted. “You did it! I saw you!”

“Screaming louder isn’t going to get anyone to believe your lies,” Murphy said.

“It’s your word against mine,” Charlie said, finally calming down a little.

I could tell he was nervous by the quiver in his voice, but he was standing his ground. Was he telling the truth? Murphy had a history with Jenny, one that might suggest something like this was possible. I leaned toward believing the policeman, though. But could Charlie be right? Was it going to boil down to one man’s word against another’s?

Zach said calmly, “I can help here.”

“How?” Murphy asked. “You weren’t looking out the window when it happened, were you?”

“Better than that,” Zach said. “I’ve got video cameras set up on the porch. We’ll be able to see who did it in just a few seconds.”

Charlie said, “I don’t believe you.”

Zach reached under the railing and removed one from its perch. “How about now?”

That was all it took to break the man. Through his tears, he told Jenny, “When you moved in next door, you were so nice to me. No one else even bothered to wave ever since I rented this place. I knew that the two of us had a special bond.” His expression grew angry as he added, “But then you changed. You started treating me like everyone else.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I wave to you all the time,” Jenny protested.

“But not with the same vigor you used to. Something changed in you, Jennifer.”

“I’ve heard enough of this garbage,” Murphy said as he led Charlie to the back of his car.

“I loved you,” Charlie shouted, and I felt a shiver run through me.

Murphy forced him into the back of his car, and then rejoined us. “Nice work, chief,” he said to Zach.

“You, too,” my husband said.

“I owe you one. If you hadn’t been taping, that could have gotten messy for me.”

Jenny said softly, “I didn’t honestly think that you were the one stalking me, Shawn.”

“Thanks for that, but a good defense attorney could have put enough reasonable doubt without the tape to get him off.” He nodded toward us, and then asked, “Where’s that letter you told me about?”

“I’ll go get it,” Jenny said.

Zach added, “I’ll get you the tape for evidence, too.”

After they were gone, I said, “It’s a good thing you came by when you did. Thank you.”

He raised one eyebrow as he said, “Sometimes timing is everything. There’s something that’s bothering me, though.”

“What’s that?”

“How come you just found the letter, if you’d already searched through the telephone books you found in Derrick’s room?”

“We didn’t search all of them when you were here before,” I said, something that was the absolute truth.

“Okay,” he said. “Have you finished searching now?”

I nodded. “We went ahead and looked through the last one before you came.”

He seemed to think about that for a minute, and then said, “I’ll have an officer here in ten minutes to pick them up. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Why should I mind?”

He shrugged, and then said with a grin, “I just want to make sure you didn’t miss anything else.”

Or have an excuse to find anything else
, I added silently to myself.

Zach arrived with the tape and the letter we’d found. The envelope was now in a large clear plastic bag. “Here you go. If you need me to testify, I’ll be happy to do whatever I can.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate that.”

Before he could get to his car, another squad car pulled up. Murphy directed him to collect the telephone books while he took photographs and then collected the knife and the note on the front porch.