Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) (20 page)

I disagreed with them regarding the latter position. Much as I might have liked to blame what had happened on Leave It To God, I knew that Margaret Featherman had taken her plunge within hours of learning of her husband's dalliance with Naomi. No, dalliance wasn't the right word. That implied a level of romantic involvement on one or both sides that Naomi Pepper claimed hadn't existed. According to her, what had passed between her and Harrison Featherman had been little more than a friendly favor.

As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I wondered if it was true. Had Gary and Naomi Pepper paid Harrison Featherman a “stud” fee of some kind in exchange for his sperm donation? Or had he selflessly performed that so-called service strictly out of the goodness of his heart?
Fat chance
, I thought. Tears over his ex-wife's mishap notwithstanding, good old Harrison didn't strike me as a milk-of-human-kindness sort of guy.

Which led me to thinking about Gary Pepper. According to Naomi, her husband had willingly gone along with the whole program. He himself had suggested it. But was that true? How many men would have stood still for, much less encouraged, that kind of a cure for his own infertility and his wife's resulting depression? And how had Gary Pepper felt about the baby once Melissa was born? Had he regarded her as his own and treated her with loving, fatherly pride, or had he dealt with her as an interloper—as someone else's child and not his own? And how much did Harrison Featherman's involvement in their lives contribute to Gary and Naomi Pepper's eventual marital breakup all those years later?

Lying there on my bed, I suspected that the same seeds that had implanted Missy Pepper in her mother's womb had also doomed Gary and Naomi's marriage. Had they known what was coming, they might have realized that paying for artificial insemination using an anonymous donor could have spared them untold grief rather than accepting Harrison's so-called friendly offer.

As I mulled the intertwining fates of those four people, two of whom I had never met, I fell asleep. I had drifted into a deep sleep when the telephone on the bedside table startled me awake. It was pitch-dark in an unfamiliar room. While I fumbled to locate the receiver, I felt a momentary panic. No doubt the caller would report some kind of medical crisis having to do with either Lars or Beverly.

“Beau?” The plaintive female voice that greeted me definitely didn't belong to Beverly Piedmont Jenssen. By the time I located the bedside lamp and managed to switch it on, I had sorted out Naomi Pepper's trembling voice. She was sniffling and sounded as though she'd been crying.

“Can I come see you?” she asked. “Please?”

I had been lying on the bed naked except for a pair of shorts. Once I could see the clock, I saw it was twenty of one. “Now?” I asked, not very graciously. “It's the middle of the night.”

“I've got to talk to someone,” she said. “And not on the phone, either. I'm standing here in the lobby by the purser's desk. People are staring at me.”

There was a part of me that wanted to say,
So go back to your room
. But I didn't. Naomi sounded far too upset to be given that kind of advice.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Capri, four-five-four,” I told her.

“Good,” she said, sounding instantly better. “I'll be right down.”

I jumped off the bed and straightened the wrinkled covers. Then I pulled my shirt and pants back on. I was just tying my shoelaces when Naomi Pepper knocked on the door. Some women can cry and look good at the same time. Naomi wasn't one of them. She looked like hell. Her face was red and puffy; her eyes were bloodshot; her makeup, smeared under her eyes, had left a smudgy trail down both cheeks.

When I opened the door, she fell into my arms and sobbed against my shoulders. “What's the matter?” I asked.

I led her into the room and eased her down on the love seat. Then I filled a glass with ice from the ice bucket and poured her some bottled water out of my fridge. If I'd had something stronger, I would have offered her that. She looked as though she could have used it. She gulped the water gratefully and then subsided against the back of the couch while she waited through a full-blown case of hiccups.

“What's wrong?” I asked again when the hiccups finally stopped.

“They told,” she said simply.

“Who told what?” I asked.

“Virginia and Sharon,” Naomi said, as tears once more welled in her eyes. “I told them about Harrison and me this afternoon, and I swore them to secrecy. But they told anyway. I just spent two hours with an FBI agent named Todd Bowman. He saw the security camera video of me leaving Margaret's room right about the time she went in the water. He didn't come right out and say so, Beau, but I think he believes I killed Margaret. He thinks I had one of the waiters from the ship help me do it.”

“Did you?” I asked.

“Of course not. How can you even ask such a thing?” she demanded indignantly.

There were two answers to that question—the short answer and the real one. The real one had to do with a woman named Anne Corley—a woman as lovely as she was dangerous—who had walked into my life one afternoon at a cemetery on Queen Anne Hill and had thrown my whole world into a tailspin. Of all the killers I've ever met, she was the one who absolutely blindsided me. I fell in love with Anne Corley too hard and too fast. At the time there were plenty of red flags, all of which I blithely ignored. I ended up betting everything on Anne's presumed innocence. When I lost, I lost big.

I chose to give Naomi Pepper the short answer. “I'm an ex-cop,” I explained. “I spent most of my career at the Seattle Police Department interviewing homicide suspects or murder victims' grieving family members and friends. Someone who admits to having had a serious confrontation with a homicide victim within an hour or so of the time of death and who was seen in the victim's presence at around the same time is bound to be high on any list of possible suspects. Although, if you are a suspect, Agent Bowman should have read you your rights. Did he?”

Naomi shook her head and then blew her nose.

“Or offer you access to a lawyer?”

“No, but how could he? Where would I get a lawyer on a cruise ship in the middle of the night?”

I thought of my friend and lawyer, Ralph Ames, who wouldn't be above hiring a float plane and/or a helicopter if he had felt that kind of extreme measure was necessary. “It can be done,” I told her. “Until you have an attorney present, you probably shouldn't agree to talk to Bowman again.”

That was good advice, but I doubt she heard it. “Why would Sharon and Virginia go and tell like that?” Naomi resumed. “When I told them about Harrison and me, I begged them to keep it quiet. They both promised that they wouldn't say a word. How could they betray me like that when they're both supposed to be my friends? You can see why I don't want to go back to the room, can't you? How can I face them knowing what they've done?”

“They may not have done anything,” I said quietly.

Naomi Pepper frowned. “What do you mean?”

Here it was—fess-up time. “Sharon and Virginia didn't spill the beans about you and Harrison Featherman,” I told her. “I did.”

She looked stunned. “You? But why?”

“Because I had to, Naomi. The law compels me to. Todd Bowman is conducting a homicide investigation. It's against the law for anyone to withhold information in that kind of case, but that rule is far more stringently applied when the person doing the withholding happens to be a police officer or an ex-police officer. Civilians may be able to keep their mouths shut and get away with it, but judges don't look kindly on it when cops and ex-cops try to pull the same stunt.”

Naomi looked even more stricken. “That means you must think I killed her, too, don't you!” she said accusingly.

“I didn't say that.”

She shook her head and rose from the couch. “You didn't have to,” she replied. “I'll be going then and leave you alone. Maybe I can find a place to sit in one of the lounges and wait for the sun to come up. Once we get to Skagway, I'll decide what to do.”

“Sit,” I ordered. “Sit and listen.”

“Why should I?” she demanded in return. “So you can read me my rights, too?”

“I used to be a cop, Naomi, and I may be one again, but right now I'm a civilian the same as you—a civilian who's trying to be your friend. What exactly did Agent Bowman say?”

For a time Naomi stood uncertainly in the middle of the room. Finally she sat back down. “He said that I'm not allowed to leave the ship without checking with him first. He made it sound like I'm under house arrest or something. How can that be? Margaret was my friend. I'd never kill her.”

“She disappeared within hours of hearing about the relationship between you and her ex-husband,” I said evenly. “Think about how that looks. Everything is going along more or less smoothly. Then, as soon as she learns that one critical piece of information, she's out of here. I'm sure Todd Bowman believes there's a connection, and I don't blame him because so do I. How did Margaret find out?”

Too worn down to argue, Naomi huddled more deeply into the couch. “I don't know,” she said.

“Margaret must have given you some idea.”

Naomi shook her head. “When I talked to her she was a raving lunatic and not making much sense. She said something about Harrison rewriting his will, but I can't imagine what that would have to do with me.”

It was like a camera lens shifting into focus. For the first time I saw what had happened in an entirely different light. “Wait a minute. Has Harrison Featherman been giving you money?” I asked.

Naomi looked at me briefly, then her eyes shifted away. She nodded. “Yes,” she said softly.

“Why?” I asked. “For how long?”

“Harrison knew how difficult things were for me. And after Gary died, it was that much worse. I really had to struggle. Gary never believed in life insurance, you see, so there wasn't any of that—not a dime. And the medical bills were appalling. I took in roommates in order to meet the mortgage payments. Otherwise, Missy and I would have lost the house and been thrown out on the street. When we split up, I did manage to get Melissa on the reduced-price lunch program at school. I even went so far as to apply for food stamps once, but they wouldn't give them to me. They said I had too many assets.”

“And so Harrison helped you.”

Naomi nodded, but when her eyes met mine, what I saw in them was defiance. “Yes, he helped me. Missy is his daughter, too. He wasn't about to let her starve.”

“And when he gave you this help, how did he do it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he write you checks?”

“Of course not. Those would have shown up in his checkbook. Margaret or Chloe would have seen them.”

“But Harrison and Margaret were already divorced by then. How would she have had access to his checkbook?”

Naomi bit her lip. “He was helping me before they were divorced.”

“And before you and Gary separated?”

She nodded.

“So you're saying Chloe doesn't know about any of this, either?”

“I don't think so.”

“What about Melissa?”

“There was no reason for her to know.”

“So how did Harrison manage to pull this off and give you money without anyone else knowing about it?”

“He made cash deposits to my checking account from time to time. That's all.”

“And you paid taxes on this money?”

“Well, no. Not really. What he gave me I considered gifts.”

“How many gifts?” I asked. “How much money?”

She shrugged. “I don't know exactly. A couple thousand a year, probably. More when Missy needed counseling.”

“And now?” I persisted.

“What do you mean?”

“Didn't you tell me that Missy was living away from home?”

Naomi nodded. “She is now.”

“And is Harrison Featherman still helping out?”

“Only a little.”

I sighed and shook my head.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Naomi demanded. “Are you judging me? Have you ever been poor, Mr. Beaumont, so poor that when you got to the check stand with your groceries you didn't know how much food you'd have to put back on the shelves because you didn't think you'd have enough money to pay for all of it?”

When I was a kid living with my single-parent mother, we would have gone hungry from time to time if it hadn't been for the kindhearted baker downstairs who made sure whatever baked goods he didn't sell somehow made their way upstairs to our apartment. But I was the kid then, not the parent. My mother would have known far more about Naomi Pepper's side of the charitable-donation table than I did.

“I've been that poor,” I said. “But it was when I was a kid growing up in Ballard. I wasn't the parent worrying about feeding my child in those days. All I wanted to know back then was what was for dinner. I may be in no position to judge you, but Todd Bowman is.”

“Todd Bowman?” Naomi asked. “What does he have to do with any of this?”

“Did you tell him about the money?”

“No. Why?”

“Because Todd Bowman works for the FBI. When he finds out about Harrison Featherman's cash-only deposits—and he's bound to find out—he'll come to only one conclusion.”

“Which is?”

“Blackmail, which happens to be a very good motive for murder. When you talked to her, did Margaret Featherman threaten to blow the whistle on you?”

“You mean, was she going to tell Chloe? The answer to that is yes. In fact, that was the last thing she said to me—that she was going to tell. I told her to go ahead. I told her that if she wanted to wreck her daughter's life, that was up to her, but I didn't kill her, Beau. I swear to God I didn't.”