In Self Defense (21 page)

***

“In case you still want to know, we found the truck that ran Clare Durant off the road on Mercer Island,” a police officer told Dusty and Erin two days later.

Erin was instantly alert.  “Where?”

“In a scrap yard south of Olympia.”

“Conclusive?” Dusty asked.

“Yes,” the officer confirmed.  “We matched the first two numbers on the plate to the numbers one of the witnesses gave the Mercer Island officer at the scene, and then CSU found a scrape on the front right fender with red paint on it that was a match to the BMW.”

              “What do we know about it?” Erin inquired.

The officer shrugged.  “Not much.  It’s a 1986 black Ford Ranger, and it was bought about two weeks before the incident off a used car lot in Tacoma, from an owner who prides himself on not asking too many questions.  He said the guy paid cash and gave him a name, address, and driver’s license that all turned out to be phony.”

“Any kind of description?”

The officer glanced at his notes.  “He was tall, dark haired, and scruffy is all the dealer could remember.”

“Any prints?” Erin asked, knowing it would be too good to be true.

“A lot of smudges, but nothing usable,” the officer confirmed.

“Great,” Erin muttered.  She would add the report to the case file.  The stalker was alive and well, and she still very much wanted to get him.  But there was a bit of irony in the realization that his latest target might well have turned out to be a killer in her own right.

***

“About six months ago, Richard told me that Clare was having an affair,” Jeffrey Durant, Richard’s brother from Bellingham confided.  “I told him I didn’t believe it, not for an instant, but he assured me he had the proof.”

“He had proof that his wife was cheating on him?” Dusty asked.

“Yes,” Jeffrey confirmed.  “He said he’d hired a private detective to follow her, and the guy had gotten pictures.”

“Did he ever show you those pictures?”

“No, and I didn’t ask to see them,” Jeffrey said.  “Richard claimed he didn’t care so much about the affair, but he was afraid Clare might get it into her head to divorce him, and he was worried about his position at Nicolaidis.  Hell, he had a right to be worried.  Gus may have started the company, but it was Richard who brought it into its own.  I think he was afraid that, after she dumped him, she would have had the Board of Directors dump him, too.  She could do that, you know.  She has control.”

“Your brother didn’t happen to tell you this private detective’s name, did he?”

“No, he didn’t,” Jeffrey said.  “And again, I didn’t ask.  Look, I like Clare.  I’ve always liked her.  I think she’s a real nice woman, and a great mother.  I didn’t want to believe what Richard was saying.  But he told me she had changed a lot lately, that she was unpredictable.  I never saw that side of her, but Richard claimed, ever since the arsenic episode, she had begun to have these wild emotional swings, and she’d fly off the handle for no reason at all.  I know it sounds silly, but I think he was a little afraid of her.”

***

“I’m not sure I should be discussing any of this with you,” Elaine Haskell, Richard’s sister from Ravenna, said.  “I don’t think either Richard or Clare would appreciate me airing their dirty linen in public.”

“Did they have dirty linen to air?” Erin inquired.

“Everyone has some,” Elaine replied, looking directly at the detective.

“Did you know your sister-in-law was seeing someone on the side?” Dusty asked.

“No, I didn’t,” Elaine said.  “And I doubt that she was.  But if she had been, I wouldn’t blame her.  My brother was never terribly conscientious about keeping his wedding vows.  Between you and me, I don’t know how Clare put up with it.  I certainly wouldn’t have.”

“Did you know your brother had hired a private investigator?”

“To do what -- follow Clare?”  Elaine asked with a giggle.  “Now that would have been a boring job.  If she isn’t at Thornburgh House, or out working for one of those endless charities of hers, she’s at home with the children. Richard didn’t need a private investigator to tell him that.  Doreen could have told him.  So could I, for that matter.  Clare and I speak on the telephone just about every day.”

“You and your sister-in-law are close?”

“We’re family,” Elaine declared.  “If you must know, I like her better than I liked my brother.  He could be a real ass, sometimes.”

“Did your sister-in-law ever discuss the question of divorce with you?”

Elaine thought about that for a moment.  “Not exactly,” she replied.  “But I remember an odd conversation we had during the summer, it was a few weeks after her accident on the mountain.  Clare said something about how terrible it would be for Richard if he ever lost his position at Nicolaidis, because it meant so much to him.”

“Did she say why he might lose it?”

“Well, I asked her what she meant by that, and if Richard was actually in danger of losing his job, but all she said was something about how people change, sometimes so much so that they weren’t the people you thought you knew anymore, and you wondered if they ever really were who you thought they were.  And then I asked her if she was thinking about leaving Richard, and she said she wouldn’t have to do that, it was Richard who was going to do the leaving.  Pretty spooky, when you think about it now, isn’t it?”

“Do you think your brother would have left?”

“Never,” Elaine said flatly.  “He may have wanted other women, but take my word for it, he wouldn’t have given up being the CEO of Nicolaidis for any of them.”

***

Edwin Zipp worked out of a small dump of an office on Denny Way, with a discreet sign on the door.  He was a burly man with bushy eyebrows and an ugly scar down his left cheek that he passed off as a war wound.  In his time, he had been a Marine, a police academy dropout, and a private security guard.  Now he scrounged around the edges of society with a notebook and a camera.

“How’d you find me?” he asked.

“It wasn’t hard,” Erin told him.  They had simply started at the top and then worked their way almost all the way to the bottom.

“Well, I can’t tell you anything, you know.  My work is strictly confidential.”

“Your client is dead, Mr. Zipp,” Dusty reminded him.

“Yeah, well, even so,” the private investigator said with a shrug, “I still don’t have to talk to you.”

“Durant told his brother you had some pictures that would prove his wife was having an affair.  Is that correct?”

“What if it is?”

“If you have them,” Dusty declared, “produce them, or we might tell his wife, and then you might just find yourself caught in the middle of a nasty little lawsuit.”

Zipp sighed.  “Okay, so I spent a few days and took a few pictures.  The guy was hungry, I needed the money, and he didn’t care what it cost.  He said his wife wanted to divorce him, and he needed some ammunition to fight back.”

“Where are the pictures?”

Zipp heaved himself up out of his chair and walked over to a rusty metal file cabinet that sat against one wall, rummaging through one of the drawers until he found what he was looking for.

“This is all I got,” he said, handing Dusty a thin folder.

Inside were several photographs of Clare Durant, wearing an evening gown, and smiling up at a young man who was not her husband.

“Richard Durant thought his wife was having an affair with the guy in these pictures?” Dusty asked.

“I don’t know what he thought,” Zipp replied with a shrug.  “But that’s what I got.”

Erin leaned over to have a look.  “Isn’t that the assistant?” she asked.  “We met him at Durant’s office.  What was his name . . . Lilly, wasn’t it?”

“James Lilly,” Dusty said.  “And the way I understand it, he took Clare Durant to charitable events whenever her husband was unavailable.  I think it was part of his job description.”

“Every time her husband had a more pressing engagement, I’ll bet,” Erin murmured.

“What?” Zipp said.  “She wasn’t having an affair with the guy?”

“Not likely,” Erin told him.

“Let’s just say, if she
was
having an affair with him, her husband wouldn’t have had to hire you to find out about it,” Dusty added.

“Not much of a detective,” Erin said on their way out.  “But then, you get what you pay for.”

“Just for the hell of it, why not let’s go have a little talk with James Lilly?” Dusty suggested.  “After all, he
was
Durant’s assistant, and he has sort of a relationship with his wife.  Maybe he can shed a little light on all this.”

***

“I try very hard to stay out of people’s personal lives,” James Lilly said when Dusty and Erin found him cleaning out his desk at the Nicolaidis Building.  “Did I know that Mr. Durant was engaged in . . . extracurricular activities?  Sure, I did.  He didn’t exactly make a big secret of it.  He was always asking me to make dinner reservations for him and send flowers and stuff.  But other than accompanying Mrs. Durant to a charitable event now and again, I don’t know that I could tell you anything about
her
personal life.”

“You accompanied her to quite a few charitable events,” Dusty pressed.  “Did you ever notice her paying special attention to anyone else?”

“No,” James said.  “Certainly not the way I think you mean.  Why are you asking all these questions anyway?  I thought Mr. Durant’s death had been ruled an accident.”

“We’re taking another look,” Erin told him.

The pale eyes widened ever so slightly behind the glasses.  “Well, as I said, I couldn’t tell you very much about Mrs. Durant’s personal life,” he reiterated.  “But if you wanted to know about Mr. Durant’s personal life, seeing as he’s dead and all, and couldn’t care, I could maybe be more helpful.”

“Stephanie Burdick,” Erin said without preamble.

James rolled his eyes at that.  “She lasted a lot longer than any of the others,” he said.  “Usually, it was a couple of months, and then he’d get bored and move on.  But Ms. Burdick was still around, even after a couple of years.”

“Was it serious?”

“Well, I don’t know what you mean by serious, but she was certainly keeping him interested.”

“Do you know if he ever considered a divorce?”

James looked uncomfortable at that, and Erin leaned in.  “If you know something, Mr. Lilly, please tell us.  It could be very important.”

“At the beginning of last year, he asked me to find him an attorney,” James said reluctantly.

“What sort of attorney?”

“A divorce attorney.  He said he had already talked to one, but he was looking for a second opinion.”

“Did you find him one?”  Dusty asked.

“Sure.  There are lots of divorce attorneys around.”

“And was the second opinion more to his liking?”

“I don’t know.  He never said.”

“Did Mrs. Durant know that her husband was talking to divorce attorneys?” Erin inquired.

“I think it would be safe to say that she did,” James said with a chuckle.

“Why?”

“Because you always know what’s on Mrs. Durant’s mind.”

“What do you mean?”

James looked from one detective to the other, afraid he had made a mistake.  “Look, I don’t want to talk out of turn here,” he said.  “These people have been very good to me, and I owe them a lot.”

“This is important, Mr. Lilly,” Dusty told him.  “Or we wouldn’t be asking.”

“Well, obviously, Mrs. Durant wasn’t happy about it,” James said.  “In particular, she wasn’t happy about Ms. Burdick.  I overhead part of a conversation in Mr. Durant’s office.  She was reaming him up and down about how his string of tarts didn’t bother her, but someone like Stephanie Burdick was a whole other story, and he wouldn’t like what would happen if he didn’t end it right away.”

“Was she any more specific than that?”

James was now clearly uncomfortable with the nature of the conversation.  “She said there were ways of taking care of things that didn’t have anything to do with divorce attorneys,” he told the detectives reluctantly.

***

“Do you think she set the whole thing up, right from the beginning?” Mark Sundstrom asked the two detectives seated across the desk from him.  “The stalker?  You?”

“No,” Erin replied.  “The stalker is real, we know that.  We’ve got him on tape.  We know his history.  We believe she simply saw an opportunity, and took advantage of it.”

              “If you must know, we think the stalker may have set it up,” Dusty said.  “But of course, we have no idea how, and we have no way of proving it.”

“Clever guy, is he?”

“Our profiler says he’s smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is,” Erin told him.  “I think she may be wrong.”

Sundstrom sighed.  “It’s not the strongest case I’ve ever taken into court, but I guess I’ve tried weaker ones,” he said.  “Let’s see what a grand jury thinks.”

***

Eight weeks after the death of Richard Durant, the grand jury handed down an indictment, having found sufficient cause to charge Clare Durant with the murder of her husband.  Rather than having Dusty and Erin go to Laurelhurst and take her away in handcuffs, she was allowed to surrender herself, which she did, at ten-thirty on a Thursday morning, with her attorney at her side.