An Intimate Murder (The Catherine O'Brien Series) (19 page)

Again, Katie nodded.

“Katie,” I said. “Did you hire someone to kill your cousin and her husband?”

Cheryl Patton stiffened. A flicker of concern creased her brow. She moved a half an inch away from Katie, as the reality of what I said sank through to her brain.

“I need to use the ladies,” Cheryl stood. “Could you please direct me?”

I pointed her toward the toilet, but Cheryl Patton headed in the opposite direction toward the elevators instead. Katie had no idea that her support had just caved. I didn’t feel the need to mention the sudden departure and upset her again.

“Katie?” Louise said. “Do you want your lawyer now?”

“No.” She stuck her thumb in her mouth and started to gnaw on the skin around her fingernail. “I didn’t do anything to Susan or Jonathan. It was Susan who did to me.”

“Pretty little, Suzie.” Her tone changed to a sarcastic mewling. “Suzie Q always had everything. She was everyone’s perfect little girl. She had everything but she still had to take from me.”

Katie beat one fist against her chest and the other against her temple. Her lips curled away from her teeth and she squeezed her eyes shut.

“Ahhhh!” She growled from her throat. “Because I can’t think right. They let her steal from me because my head doesn’t work.”

Katie put a hand on either side of her head, raked her fingers through her hair, and squeezed her temples. Tears shimmered from the point of her chin, and then plunked to the front of her blouse like the drip of a faucet.

“Suzie Q had it all.” Katie’s voice quaked with pain. “Why did she need mine?”

Her eyes pleaded with us for an answer.

“I don’t know,” Louise said. “Some people just never have enough, I guess.”

“Exactly.” Katie’s whole body bobbed up and down as she nodded. “That’s exactly right. They just want more and they don’t care who they hurt.”

With one sentence, Louise had gained Katie’s trust. Katie adjusted herself so her back touched the chair and her hand rested on the tabletop.

“Did you hurt Susan, because she hurt you?” I asked. “No one could blame you if you did.”

“No,” Katie shook her head. “I didn’t hurt her. I wanted to, because she kept making me mad. Then she had me locked up. When I got out she said she would have me locked up for good if I didn’t leave her alone.”

Her thumb went back between her teeth, and she gnawed, wide eyes darting from my face to Louise’s.

“So I did,” she said.

“Did what?” I asked.

“Left her alone.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to be locked up. My parents put me in one of those homes because they said it would be best for me, but I really hated it. Anyway, I do fine on my own, they didn’t need to worry about me.”

“Katie,” Louise said. “You promise that you didn’t hurt Susan or Jonathan.”

Katie’s fingers splayed straight out and she pressed her palms to the side of her head.

“No! I said no. Why won’t you believe me?”

“I’m sorry.” Louise edged back until she were safely out of Katie’s reach. “Don’t be upset, I just had to ask one more time. I believe you.”

One of Katie’s hands slumped to her shoulder; the other stayed firmly at her temple. She narrowed her eyes as if she had x-ray vision, and could see into Louise’s head to find the truth, if only she could squint tight enough.

“You believe me?”

“I do, Katie,” Louise said.

Her other hand dropped to her shoulder and she nodded. “Okay.”

Louise stood and indicated that I should do the same with a quick flick of her wrist. She instructed Katie to wait in this room for a little bit and promised her we would find Cheryl Patton and send her back in, a promise we couldn’t keep. We’d just make up some lie about Cheryl checking her messages and being called away on an emergency. Anything to keep Katie from making a scene.

I closed the door to the interrogation room behind me.

“That girl is cracked down the middle.”

“I’m not sure I really do believe her,” Louise said. “We need to get a psych evaluation for her. She might believe that she had nothing to do with the murder, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have some help.”

Help wouldn’t be too hard to find with over two hundred million and change on the line. Katie Dolan could probably find half a dozen people willing to help.

“Does the trust name anyone to succeed Susan Luther if she should happen to die before Katie?” I asked.

Louise combed through a few pages, and then nodded. “In the unlikely event that Susan Luther should precede Katie in death, sole responsibility for management of the trust falls to the First National Bank and Trust.”

“So she wouldn’t get the money anyway.”

I leaned against the wall and lifted my left foot. For the past three hours, I could feel a sore spot forming on the ball of my foot where a strange knot had worked its way into my sock. Now what I felt wasn’t just a sore, it was a full-fledged blister, the size of a pillow, poking out of my skin.

“But Katie might not know that,” Louise said. “Or if she did at one time, she might not remember. That’s why we need a psych profile on her, to find out who we’re dealing with.”

I agreed and Louise left to call for a doctor. My job was to make the excuses for Cheryl Patton. I decided my original idea was the soundest, and I told Katie that Cheryl had been called away on some trumped up emergency. Cheryl could deal with the repercussions of her abandonment when Katie got home.

I had the idea that Cheryl believed she wouldn’t need to deal with the truth; that her neighbor wouldn’t be coming home any time soon. So, after all her protests and defense of Katie, deep down Cheryl believed this woman capable of murder or at least hiring a murderer.

Katie took the lie better than I thought. She seemed momentarily surprised then accepted the idea with a distracted, “I hope everything is okay.”

She was too consumed with what was about to happen in her own world to care about her neighbor’s concerns. I decided that unless what her neighbors were doing, directly involved Katie, she didn’t care much about them at all.

I went to find Jane. She was holed up in the room behind the one-way mirror scribbling notes.

“I thought you had forgotten about me.” She looked up without lifting her head. “And our deal.”

“I haven’t forgotten.” I turned out my empty pockets. “I don’t seem to have the file on me at the moment.”

“Convenient.”

“Don’t worry, Jane, I’m not going to run off with the file. My word is good.” I dropped into a chair next to her, and then gestured toward her notebook. “What are you working on there?”

Her pen lifted from the page, returned to its position, and then she wrote a few more words.

“Just some observations about your interview.”

“Oh.” I leaned over to get a look at what she was writing. “Like what?”

“Like that woman is playing you.”

“What do you mean?”

Jane gestured toward the mirror, and Katie beyond, with her chin. “She’s not as mentally ill as she’s trying to make you believe.”

I turned my gaze toward the glass. I scrutinized Katie’s face and tried to see something that would support Jane’s theory. Katie’s slumped shoulder posture and nail chewing, while she stared dull eyed at the tabletop, did nothing to bolster Jane’s claim.

“How do you know?”

“Because when you and Detective Montgomery left the room her entire demeanor changed. She stretched her back, stopped chewing on her fingers, and her expression changed.”

“Changed how?”

Jane shrugged. “She didn’t have that little lost girl look on her face anymore. She looked impatient like someone waiting for a bus that’s twenty-minutes late.”

I watched Katie and still didn’t see anything except the frail child-woman we’d left a few minutes before.

“Then why is she sitting like that now.”

Jane closed her notebook and clicked her pen closed. “I can explain if you want me to.”

I rolled one hand over the other. “Proceed.”

She pointed with the tip of her pen toward the interview room. “The door to the room has a window. She watched the window until you two were no longer visible.”

“Well we’re not standing in the window now, so why put on an act?”

Jane trailed the tip of her pen in the air around the frame of the mirror. “I don’t know who built this place, but they must have put this glass in with bubble gum, at five o’clock, on a Friday afternoon.”

“What?”

“Little Miss in there, did her Jekyll and Hyde thing as soon as you opened the door to this room. The rush of outgoing air made the mirror suck into the room and then released. As soon as the glass rattled she went child-like again.”

I gave her a doubtful, narrow-eyed look.

“Give me some credit, Detective. I know you videotape the interrogation room. Review the tape. You’ll see what I’m saying.”

She was right. The department taped all interrogations, for our protection and the protection of the interviewees. The last thing the department wanted were accusations of police brutality in a locked interrogation room. The tape ensured that good cops weren’t fired without merit. They also ensured that bad cops went home for good.

“Okay, let’s go check.”

I brought Jane to the control room and we reviewed the tapes. Jekyll and Hyde was an understatement. She couldn’t have played us any finer if she were the lead violinist in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

“Nice, huh Detective O’Brien.”

I swiveled in my chair to face her. “Call me, Catherine.”

“Ooo.” She smirked. “Progress. Does this mean I’m free to print my story as I write it?”

“No, but it does mean I won’t ditch you at the next available opportunity.”

She stuck out her hand. “Fair enough, Catherine.”

I shook it. “Thanks for the insight, Jane.”

Doctor Sergei Xavier watched the tape along with Louise, who looked as pissed as I felt when I had viewed the tape the first time.

“It looks to me like Miss Dolan has Antisocial Personality Disorder or APD,” Sergei said. “Some of the symptoms are deceitfulness, aggressiveness, irritability, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and a lack of remorse.”

“Well, slam dunk,” I said. “You are the best, Doc!”

He gave me a tolerant, patronizing, smile that only doctors, and mothers of sick children, can manage with any authenticity.

“Perhaps you’re right.” Doctor Xavier rocked back on his heels. “However, if Miss Dolan has been hospitalized, or put in a home, as she claimed, I would like to speak with her doctors to find out what their diagnosis was before committing to APD.”

“I’ll call her cousin and find out who her doctor was during her hospitalization,” I said.

Xavier gave a quick nod. “I don’t think she’ll change her act in the next few minutes, but I’ll go in and speak with her. Maybe she’ll give us something we can review and compare on the tape later.”

“Thank you,” Louise said. “I appreciate you coming down here.”

Xavier smiled. Not the tolerant, patronizing smile he had given me but a warm and lusty smile. The expression was the first time since I’d known him that I had seen him look anything close to human. Normally he remained cool and detached from any situation or person. He’d fallen under Louise’s siren spell. It was nothing she laid out willingly, but something she exuded through her pores and sashayed out with every step. Sergei Xavier was human after all.

“Always a pleasure, Detective Montgomery.” He gave a regal bow, and then turned to me. “And Detective O’Brien. Nice to meet you, Miss Katts.”

He left and I dialed Linda Myers number on my cell phone. Jane nudged me mid-dial.

“I think Doctor Xavier has a crush on Detective Montgomery.”

She giggled like a schoolgirl who had taunted a friend with the chant k, i, s, s, i, n, g – first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Louise with a baby carriage. This is the place where I normally check out of girl talk. I’ve never been interested in giggling, make up, or who was screwing who.

“All men have a crush on Louise,” I said and pressed the send button on my phone. As an afterthought I added, “And some women.”

Jane raised her eyebrows at Louise. “Really?”

Louise held up her index finger. “One woman. And that one was mostly Catherine’s imagination.”

I pouted my bottom lip and shook my head.

Jack Myers answered the phone in time to save me from Louise’s reprisal. “Hello?”

“Mr. Myers, it’s Detective O’Brien. May I speak to your wife, please?”

“What’s this about? Do you have something on the murders?”

My feathers ruffled at his gruff response.

“Not yet. I need additional information from Mrs. Myers.”

“What more could you need?” His words dripped with disgust. “I told you, you need to look at Chad. Wasn’t that clear to you?”

“Mr. Myers, I need to speak with your wife. If you don’t put her on the phone, I’ll have to come to your house, and if I come to your house, I’ll be bringing a warrant.”