Unknown Means (24 page)

With the chief threatening to bust them to Traffic if he didn’t see the society strangler behind bars, and without any better ideas, they went to see Kelly Alexander. They didn’t have far to go—only a few floors down to the holding cells. Kelly Alexander had been arrested on seven counts of manslaughter regarding the salt mine disaster.

They waited in a small room with scuffed gray cells and without so much as a chair while the corrections officer relayed their request for an interview. A desk officer sat behind reinforced glass and watched them without visible interest.

“I bet she’s lawyered up,” David said.

“With her money, she’s probably got a panel of legal counsel.

You think Markham figures he’s getting the last laugh after she dumped him?”

“But now he’s found love with the indomitable Miss Quinn.”

“And another marriage. How about you?” Riley persisted. “You and Evie making any plans?”

“Maybe. And, no offense, they don’t include you.”

“But do they include her?”

David leaned against the grimy wall, avoiding his partner’s eye.

“I’d like to.”

“Good. Does that mean I’ll be getting a pretty ivory invitation in the mail one of these days?”

David snorted. “I just said we’ll stay together. But marriage—not a chance.”

“Not any chance?”

“No.”

“Then you’re a fool.”

“Excuse me?”

Riley waited until a hefty guard guided a kid in an orange jumpsuit through the waiting area and the desk officer buzzed them in through a heavy steel door. “I’m saying if you let her get away, you’re a bigger fool than even I suspected.”

David could feel his ears get pink. “It’s none of your business.”

“No.”

The desk officer swiveled his gaze to David, who said, “She doesn’t want to get married, anyway. Period.”

“She tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“Recently?” At David’s silence, Riley added, “Because women sometimes pitch balls they intend to go foul.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That when women say they’ll never get married, they usually mean that they don’t want to get married until they decide they do.

Or, in the case of my second wife, ‘I don’t want to have any more babies’ meant until just after the wedding, when the biological clock started clanging like Big Ben.”

The desk officer nodded in agreement, with all the gravitas of his twenty-odd years.

“Thanks for sharing,” David said. “And you’ve been married how many times?”

“Two.”

“And divorced?”

“Two. It should have been three, because I’d have divorced the first one twice if I could have, just to be sure.”

“Uh-huh. And I should take advice from you?”

“He’s got a point,” the desk officer put in, before answering his phone with an uh-huh. “Ms. Alexander and her husband can see you now.”

They followed their guide to one of the interrogation rooms, done in the same scuffed gray decor as the waiting area but with a flimsy table and four chairs. “This can’t be much like her place in

Bratenahl,” Riley said. “I’ll bet Ms. Alexander is in a deep state of culture shock.”

“You seem to have a love-hate relationship with the rich, partner. You’ll notice I don’t need a coffee cup to figure that out.”

“Long story.” Riley stood by the door, apparently fascinated by the wire mesh embedded in the glass of the small window. “I might tell you someday. Then again, I might not.”

The guard opened the door for a young man in a suit, and the prisoner. Even in a baggy orange jumpsuit and no makeup, Kelly Alexander stunned. Her eyes were so blue David could see the color from across the room. Her blond hair stuck out at odd angles, as if her hairdresser had used gardening shears, a look that probably required a lot of cash to get.

Under normal circumstances, her complexion would have seemed flawless. Today it looked as if she hadn’t slept in a week.

“Has someone else died?”

David blinked. “I beg your pardon, ma’am?”

“From the mine. The death toll is up to seven. I thought the other two were going to be all right, but they were too badly burned.”

“We’re not here about the mine.”

She halted. “You’re not?” She turned to the man, as if to confirm this.

“Then why are you here?” he obligingly asked.

“We’re here about Grace Markham and Frances Duarte.”

Kelly Alexander’s eyes filled with tears.

“Why don’t you sit down, honey,” the man said, “so the guard can take the cuffs off?”

She threw herself into one of the metal chairs and sniffled as the guard removed the handcuffs. “I haven’t had a chance to even think about them, or send flowers or anything—I don’t even know who I’d send them to. Frances didn’t have any family in town, and that loser Grace married would probably throw them away.”

The detectives sat across from her, and the guard retired to the

hall. Riley coughed his smoker’s hack. “I understand you were engaged to that loser before Grace was.”

“And didn’t I try to warn her! But Grace couldn’t believe anything bad about anyone. She’d seen, not to mention photographed, the worst this world could hand out, but it didn’t toughen her.

Quite the contrary. It made her more determined to give everyone she met one chance after another.”

Like Joey Eames, David thought. “We’d like to ask you some questions about them.”

“Sure.”

The young man said nothing until he noticed their curious looks. “I’m not Kelly’s lawyer—I’m her husband, Adam Farley.

She’s not concerned about having her lawyer present, despite the fact that, as of this morning, we have twenty-five lawsuits pending.”

“Twenty-six,” his wife corrected. “And the equipment manufacturer wants the next payment on the front-end loader that got trashed. I know all about the legal situation, Adam. But I don’t hide behind my money, and I’m not going to hide behind a lawyer.”

“What happened at the mine?” David asked, purely out of curiosity.

“We still don’t know,” Adam Farley admitted. He had a slender frame and intelligent gray eyes. His nose seemed permanently wrinkled in response to the jail smell, a mixture of disinfectant and sweat. “I believe the dynamite was faulty, carried a stronger charge than it should have. But it’s also possible that some of the natural gas stores leaked from a faulty pipe or crack in the salt and pooled. I checked for that when we put in the drill holes, but when the dynamite went off, it could have breached a pocket.”

“You work at the mine?”

“I’m the geologist.”

“That’s where we met,” Kelly put in, rubbing her husband’s back with a few tender swipes. “Twelve hundred feet below the earth, in front of a bunch of spitting, swearing, tattooed guys that

used to let me ride on their shoulders when I was a kid. It was terribly romantic.”

He patted her knee as her smile faded.

“Decades ago, there were serious accidents in the mine maybe once every couple of years,” she told the cops. “We haven’t had a death since before I was born. Now this. I swear, if my father doesn’t disown me, I’ll disown myself.”

“Every industry has accidents, Kelly,” her husband consoled.

“I didn’t get the clearances to store natural gas. That wasn’t an accident.”

David began to steer the conversation back to his case. “William Markham isn’t happy about your mine being where it is.”

“That’s just his latest politically correct bandwagon.” A spark returned to Kelly Alexander’s eyes as she expressed her opinion of the late Grace’s husband. “That the city would bounce back if we take the Flats back to their RiverFest, party-barge heyday, not thinking that no one’s got the money to party if they don’t have jobs. Heavy industry is what built this town, not overpriced drinks at Shooters.”

Riley leaned back in his chair as if he were not particularly interested in either the recent murders or Kelly Alexander, but his eyes never left her face. “Frances Duarte invested in your mine, didn’t she?”

Kelly nodded. “Poor kid, she must have worried when she saw the share values slipping and sliding. Don’t get me wrong, it will come around. The world uses a lot of salt, and nobody’s willing to stay home in a snowstorm anymore. The mine would have paid for itself in another five years. But they would have been lean years under any circumstances.”

“And now, with this accident?” Riley pressed.

“Hell, I don’t know. It depends how much the juries want to give the families. We’ll be sued for every penny the mine will ever bring in and then some. We can only hope the appeals court will leave us enough to live on. At least that’s what my lawyer says.

Maybe by then the press will stop camping on my lawn and I’ll be able to answer my phone.”

Her husband shifted on the cold metal chair. “I thought you weren’t here about the mine.”

“Frances Duarte had a lot of money. We have to consider the possibility that it might have a bearing on her death,” Riley said. “Did she talk to you about the investment? Express any disappointment?”

Kelly raked her fingers through already tousled hair. “You think her investment in the mine could have something to do with her murder? Are you crazy?”

“As I said, we’re covering bases.”

She shook her head, sending her blond locks into a funnel cloud of curls. “We got together for dinner once or twice in the past few months and commiserated, but I think she felt worse for me than she did for herself. I asked if it put her in a bind or anything, but she said no, if she wanted to make it up to her estate accounts, she could still cancel the million dollars she’d pledged to Butterfly Babies. The paperwork hadn’t gone through yet.”

David didn’t look at his partner, but he felt that spark cross between them, the sudden alertness that an unexpected fact can produce.

“Had she told the hospital that she might want her money back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mrs.—” David stopped, unsure which name to use.

“Farley,” Kelly supplied.

“So you know the fund-raising director there—Mark Sargeant?”

Her husband spoke up. “The campaign chair.”

“Yes. You know him?”

“Do I. He hits on every woman in sight,” Kelly explained.

“Young or old, married or single, doesn’t matter to him. That’s why they finally kicked him out of the Pathology Department, he couldn’t keep his hands off the candy stripers. But even he knows to be discreet around the people making the donations. You think he killed her for not giving a million dollars to the hospital?”

“It’s a lot of money. Had Frances mentioned him, or the fund-raising, in recent months?”

“Not that I recall.”

“So the three of you were friends—you, Grace, and Frances.”

“Sure.”

“Anyone else in that circle?”

She leaned forward, seeming to welcome the change of topic.

“Sure, about fifty. You know, the same names and faces you see at every event. We all know each other. Maybe I should clarify—Grace and Frances and I were friends, but not best friends. We only saw each other every couple of months.”

“What about Grace and Frances? Were they close?”

“Not particularly.”

Then what the hell did they have in common that made someone murder them? David chewed his lip. “You used to see more of Grace than you did recently?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“Any reason why? A falling-out?”

“No.” For the first time her attention seemed to wander. She took in the unforgiving environment with a slight curl to her lip, not of disdain but of dismay. “Well, Grace apparently wanted to streamline her life when she got on the mommy kick. The biological clock started ticking, a sound to which I’ve been blissfully deaf so far.”

“So she stopped going out as much?” David pressed. Not according to Joey Eames, and Kelly seemed strangely reluctant about the whole subject.

“Sort of. And, well, we were driving home after a party one night and I had a little too much— I probably shouldn’t be telling you guys this.”

“We’re not traffic cops,” Riley assured her. “So you had a little too much to drink—”

“Yeah, and had an accident. It shook us all up. I’m way too old for that kind of irresponsibility.”

“Was Grace hurt in the accident?”

“A scrape and a bruise. Same for me.”

“And when was this?”

“About two years ago.”

David thought that over. The spark had fled, leaving a deadening feeling, of having spent days asking questions without learning a single helpful answer. “Mrs. Farley, I’m going to show you a list of five names, and I’d like to know if you recognize any of them.” He handed her his carefully printed list of the five rape victims. She read dutifully while he watched her face. She gave no reaction at all.

She handed the list back. “No. Should I? Who are they?”

He didn’t answer. “Can you think of anyone who might want to kill Frances?”

Kelly Alexander cuddled her cheek to her husband’s shoulder and avoided their eyes for a long silence. Someone is heavy on your mind, David thought. Give me a name. But then she straightened up and said, “Not a soul. That lounge lizard friend of hers probably wanted to at times. He’s been trying to get her to marry him for years, but no go. Sometimes I thought Frances just wasn’t interested in men, but maybe she had her heart broken at a young age. For whatever reason, he couldn’t talk her into it.”

“I don’t think he would kill her, though,” her husband said.

“No. He’s too skinny. She’d have broken him in half.”

Riley leaned forward, and the chair’s thin metal legs squeaked in protest. “What about Grace?”

Again, the suspicious pause before she spoke. “I’d love to insist that waste of flesh she married did it, but I can’t honestly believe it.

He’s not used to getting his hands dirty.”

“What if he got someone to do it for him?”