2 CATastrophe (9 page)

“Those weren’t found at the scene. So who knew about his allergies? Was it common knowledge?” I thought of all the interviews I’d done, and nobody had mentioned it. Either they had all forgotten it, not thought it important or had just not known. Now that I knew, things were falling into place quickly.

“He was secretive about it as he was with most things. I knew; his parents knew. My father knew, but that was about it. Certainly none of his casual acquaintances knew about it. Hejust avoided cats at all costs. Since he was a workaholic, he just kept his home and his workplace clean, and he didn’t have any noticeable problems.”

The lawyer intervened. “Is that sufficient for your purposes? Do you have the information that you need?”

Mrs. Miller looked to him first and then to me. “When will the charges be dropped? I want to go back to my life.”

“I’m not sure, but I’m going to talk to the police today. We’ll see what happens.” I excused myself and headed out to the sunshine. I had explanations for the cat at the house now.

I called Green as I walked down the street to my car. I’d been so paranoid that I’d parked on the street in full view of everyone. Now that I had the details of the crime, I urgently wanted to share them with others so that there would be no reason to make me a victim like during the last case.

Green answered on the second ring.“This better be good,” she said without introduction. The effect was vaguely unnerving.

“It is. Care to meet me for coffee?”

“Is this a date or do you have information for me?” I could detect the slightest bit of sarcasm in her voice.

“Not a date, and it depends. Do you have anything back from the coroner’s office yet?”

“You know that I don’t. ”

“Meet me for coffee and I’ll tell you everything.” I gave her directions to the coffeehouse that I could see from where I stood downtown. I went in and ordered a decaf latte for me. I’d had enough excitement to last me for a long time.

Detective Green came in 15 minutes later, looking harried. She wore a navy pants suit today, one that I’d not seen her in before. It wasn’t a terrible shock, since she seemed to have an entire wardrobe of them.

After she’d placed a quick order, she looked at me “So what’s so important? How did Miller die?”

I explained the situation to her as succinctly as I could. “He died of anaphylaxis, brought on by a severe reaction to cat dander. You can check his records to confirm it, but his first wife, Evangeline, verified that he did suffer from those allergies.”

She looked vaguely disgusted at me. “But they have remedies for that? It’s not a very certain method of death.”

“It would be if you removed all of the medicines that could combat it. You didn’t find any medications or Epi-pens in that house. How easy it would be for someone to go in, remove all the medications, and leave a cat for him to find when he returned home. His reaction would be fast and he could be dead minutes after he locked the doors on his arrival. You wouldn’t need to be at the location, so you could establish a good alibi for the time.”

“So who do you figure for the crime? It had to be someone with access to that house with a motive.”

“The current Mrs. Miller, the same woman who adopted two cats, including one who had separation anxiety and followed the other cat around. She was probably the only other person with a key to the house.”

Green nodded. “I’ll say this only begrudgingly, but good work. You pretty much ignored every command I made to keep out of this crime, but you still found out more than we did.”

“So that’s why the second wife didn’t mention anything about his allergies. She wouldn’t have, because it would have led to accusations.”

“Right, especially after I found out that she’d adopted two cats. I’d thought perhaps that Miller was allergic, but then when I learned that she’d adopted those two cats, I doubted my theory since it practically screamed that she’d been the one to put him in contact with his deadly allergy.”

“I can’t believe she was the only one to know about his allergies. No one else said a thing about them.”

“I don’t think he told anyone he worked with about them. He didn’t share that information with the people from the theater. The only other person who might know would be his ex-wife, which is why I wanted to meet with her. I wanted to get confirmation before I came to you about the cause of death.”

“So why didn’t she mention it when we hauled her in for questioning? That would have been a great way to point fingers at the current wife, the one who replaced her. I would have lined up to get some revenge there.”

“I’ll get to that in a little bit. I wanted to work this out with you first.”

Detective Green sighed. “Have it your way then. You mentioned motive. Technically we don’t need one, but the DA always likes it when we tie everything up into a neat little package. Why did she do it?”

I shrugged. “I’m not positive, but I think that she thought Miller had found a new girlfriend. It fits Miller’s pattern. He’d been staying at the other home, where he said he was working on a new app, but everyone who I talked to told me that Miller was pretty content to live off the fruits of his father-in-law’s work. So that left him alone in a house with no wife to supervise. I think I’d probably draw the same conclusion that she did, especially given that Miller had been married when she’d met him.”

Green nodded. “We’ll do some investigating. You’d be surprised how much neighbors see and how they love to talk. We should be able to find out if there actually was someone new or if the wife just thought there was someone new.”

“So that wraps things up. I just feel sorry for the cats. They thought they had their forever home, and now they’ll have to go back to the rescue center. It’s a shame.”

She took a long sip of her coffee and looked at me. “It’s a bigger shame when someone uses a pet as a murder weapon to keep their unfaithful husband from cheating. It’s also a shame that the Toledo Police are going to look like idiots when we drop the charges against Evangeline Miller. It hurts the case we’ll build against the second Mrs. Miller.”

“I wouldn’t be too quick to let her off the hook,” I said. “She can still be charged with murder.”

“What? You just built an entire case, explaining how Marsha Miller killed her husband, and now you’re telling me that Evangeline did it? What is up with you? Make up your mind.”

I shook my head. “Not at all. The more I looked into this, the more I think that Evangeline killed her father, rather than Miller.”

Green waved a hand. “Go ahead. This is your story. I’m just here to listen.”

“Well, the person who killed Vires had to have both the app and a motive. It applies equally to either Miller or his wife. I think that Miller wanted to make a lot of money, and Vires was more interested in the research. That led to some disagreements between Miller and Vires. Miller was more businessman than inventor. He did well for himself over the years, but he never released any apps that he created by himself.”

“You’re building a very good case for him to have killed Vires, not his wife.”

“I kept wondering why Evangeline wouldn’t have come forward to tell the police that Miller was allergic to cats. She had everything to gain from such an action. Miller was dead, and his wife would go to jail for killing him. Likely the apps would revert back to Evangeline. That’s a great motive to go public with what you know, but she didn’t. It took some real pulling to get her to admit that Miller was allergic.”

“So you think her silence was forced? Someone was insisting that she not talk about the killing?” Green had forgotten the sarcasm and smirks. For these few minutes, I felt that we were peers working towards a common goal, and it felt good – it felt right. That emotion worried me, but I continued my story.

“That’s the only thing that makes sense,” I said. “Someone was blackmailing her into silence. The only thing that I can think of that would keep her quiet about a murder is another murder, and the only other murder we know of is the death of her father.”

“Why would she kill her father? She loved him.”

“I think she loved her husband more. She was worried that she was going to lose him to a new woman, so she gave him what he wanted. A million dollar app business with him serving as president.”

She sighed. “This is a great theory, but how exactly would we prove this? The case has already been closed. It’s been called a suicide for years.”

“It’s just a hunch, but I’m suspecting that Evangeline wouldn’t willingly agree to keep her mouth shut unless the current Mrs. Miller had some proof. So when you get that search warrant for the Miller house, you can look for any evidence of that earlier crime. I’m betting you’ll find it somewhere, and then you can use that to get Evangeline to confess as well.”

“So two women for one warrant? That’s not a bad trade,” she said as she sipped her coffee.

I felt better getting all of this off my chest. I’d been a bit nervous that I was in possession of all this information when no one else knew it. Now that I’d shared all with the police, I felt that my duty here was done. I could go back to work and start talking to cats and dogs again.

Just to show that I had a chivalrous side, I paid for the coffees. Sheila, because she was feeling more like Sheila to me at this point, thanked me for the coffee and promised that I could read all about the results of the investigation in the newspapers like everyone else. That was her in a nutshell. Grateful in one breath, and all business in the next.

True to her word, I read all about it in the
Toledo Blade
the next day. Once the police told Marsha Miller that Evangeline had spilled about the allergies, the current Mrs. Miller exploded into a rage that include sharing the details of how Evangeline had killed her father for money and for the love of a philandering husband. My guess had been correct. Evangeline had written Miller a note, announcing her father’s death and telling him how they could be together now that they both got what they’d wanted. It wasn’t damning, but it was certainly suggestive enough that the police asked for the case to be reopened.

The articles had photos of Detective Green, taking credit for the solution of the case. I didn’t care. My business was not solving murders, so this didn’t affect me. Besides the added publicity of being in the newspaper would have stressed me out since I strived to deflect attention.

I still had two days left before my next appointment, and nothing to fill my time. The case was completed. I was safe at home with no worries of being in the limelight. The police file loomed large in my mind.

The main reason that I kept thinking about it was that Sheila had given it to me for a reason. Nothing was served by giving it to me, if the file contained only the blandest level of information. It’s like making an expert in archaeology read a two-page overview of the subject. It shares nothing that he didn’t already know before.

I wondered what she’d found that made her give this to me. So far, I’d only read the statement from my brother and me, along with the police report. They’d all been very routine and details that were stuck in my memory. I hadn’t even seen a glimmer of something that could be investigated.

What had Sheila said? All cold cases, if investigated thoroughly, have the name of the perp in the file. Was the name of the person who took Susan in this file? Did I just need to open it up again and see whose name stuck out? So far, I’d only seen the names of my family. The thought of one of them being involved made my blood run cold.

The file was thick enough to fill up a binder, so there were probably 500-600 pages in the book. I’d read only a few pages of it, and yet I’d felt dread for every moment that I had. Still now that I had opened it, I felt called back to it to finish what I’d started.

The next thing that I found in the file was my mother’s statement to the police. It had been fairly run of the mill. She’d taken the call from the boyfriend’s parents. She’d gone looking for her on the most likely path from our house to the theater. She’d found nothing and decided to call the police. Again, it was a completely innocuous statement and I wondered why I was given this file to look at. Was this just a test to see if I was mentally strong enough to review my past without problems? If so, the exercise seemed cruel.

The boyfriend’s statement followed. I saw that his name was Peter. I’d nearly forgotten it, as for so long I’d only referred to him as “the boyfriend.”  My parents had blamed him in some ways for what had happened and referring to him only by title made it easier for them to discuss it in some ways. If he hadn’t asked Susan out or if his parents had been gallant enough to pick her up rather than insist that she meet Peter at the movies, then perhaps she’d still be alive. There always seemed to be more than enough guilt to pass around when blaming ourselves for her disappearance.

The next page was the one I’d been waiting for, the one that fell outside what of I knew about the disappearance. It hadn’t been explosive or definitive in terms of solving her disappearance. If that were the case, the police would have arrested someone years ago. They had not, because the report was only suggestive.

There were two police reports, both predating the disappearance and both for domestic violence. On two separate occasions, someone had called 911 on my family. The police had arrived and calmed down my father, who had been drinking. Just as I’d learned that my brother had perhaps been distant from my family prior to the disappearance, I was now learning that my father had been abusing alcohol long before Susan left.

Someone, I was hoping not Sheila, had written the word “suggestive” on the second report. Apparently when the police had arrived on the last occasion, which was approximately nine months before Susan’s disappearance, my father had been raving about how my mother had been cheating on him. He claimed that we were not his children. We were the byproduct of one of my mother’s affairs, and he could see that we bore no resemblance to him. He’d threatened to harm both my mother and all of us. The report was plain, clear and without emotion, but for some reason my emotions rose to the surface.

For so long, I’d assumed that an outsider, a stranger, had hurt our family. Now I had to wonder if that was true.

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