Friday morning, Vince climbed out of bed while it was still dark, showered, and got an early start. I stayed behind, mostly asleep, and smiled when he kissed me before sneaking out the door. It seemed only moments later that Jeannie was bumping around in his kitchen, but when I finally opened my eyes, light was streaming through the window.
Still in pajamas, I shuffled out to meet her and propped myself on a stool along the bar. Grinning, she passed me a just-poured cup of coffee that I assumed was originally meant for her. “Blankets on the couch this morning,” she said. “But no Emily.”
“I’m not going to talk about it,” I said. “Thanks for the joe.”
Without looking at me, she turned and pulled four eggs from a carton on the counter and cracked them into a bowl with surprising precision. “That’s fine,” she said. “Because I’m trying a new thing. Respecting boundaries.”
“How very mature of you. Need some help?”
“With the boundaries or the omelets?”
“Either.”
She found the silverware drawer and produced a fork. “No.”
She used the fork to whip the eggs, then pulled a knife from Vince’s cutlery set and cubed a block of cheddar cheese, her back still to me. “So what’s the plan for today?” A skillet, I noticed, had already been positioned on a front burner. She turned the knob to start the gas.
“I didn’t feel guilty,” I said.
She faced me, cheese cubes in hand. “What?”
“Last night. Does that make me bad? Should I have felt guilty?”
She tossed the cheese in the skillet and poured the eggs in too. As if she hadn’t heard me, she pulled open a series of drawers before finding a spatula and stirring the mixture. Finally she said, “What would you tell Annette?”
“If she asked about Vince?”
“No. If, twenty years from now, she were you and you were me and the same thing happened to her.”
I felt my face scrunch. Jeannie snapped her fingers at me. “Just answer.”
“I’d want her to be happy, and not to be alone. I’d tell her there was nothing to feel guilty about.”
Jeannie opened her hand and motioned as if to say “there you go.”
“Of course,” I said, “It’s different when the person in question is me.”
She turned the heat down on the burner and leaned backward on the counter, still within arm’s reach of the pan. Her expression softened. “I can absolutely guarantee what Jack would say.”
I tapped my nails on the ceramic mug. The coffee was too hot.
Her point made, Jeannie redirected her attention to the stove and used the spatula to test the edges of the omelet. After all the months of haranguing and unwanted advice regarding my tardy milestones with Vince, her new restraint flummoxed me.
I let it ride.
“Diana King deserves to know what we learned yesterday,” I said. “I’ll try to catch her at the club this morning. Not sure if she’ll see me, but either way the day is ours afterward. I’m sorry your whole week here revolved around the case. What do you feel like doing?”
“Laying out on the beach.” She folded the omelet over onto itself and then maneuvered it clumsily onto the reverse side. “How much time do you need at Tone Zone?”
“Not more than fifteen minutes.”
“Enough time to tan. Hand me the phone. I’ll see if I can get in.”
I grabbed Vince’s cordless off its base and tossed it to her. “Why tan in a coffin if we’re going to the beach?”
She shook her head as if I had the intelligence of a plank of driftwood. “No tan lines.”
Jeannie pulled her temporary club pass from her purse and, finding the club’s number, placed the call. With the phone squeezed between her shoulder and ear, she made an appointment while sliding a giant cheese omelet onto a plate and dividing it in halves. She passed me a plate but no fork, so I watched her talk tans with someone on the phone and rinse utensils absently. Her multitasking was mild, but watching it tired me.
Too lazy to get off the stool and find my own fork, I tore a piece off the omelet and ate it. Jeannie caught me and rolled her eyes. She hung up the phone and opened the silverware drawer, drew a breath as if to say something, and then didn’t.
She carried her plate to my side of the bar and sat down beside me, slid me a fork, and then, with apparent effort, returned her attention to her omelet.
“What?” I finally said.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
She shook her head.
Respecting my privacy was killing her.
“Thank you,” I said, not looking up from my plate.
“You’ll be fine, Em. He’s a good guy.”
I lifted my mug with both hands, reassured by its warmth, and almost didn’t notice the tremble.
***
“We never know what the day holds in store,” Diana King said from the other side of her desk, “but I confess this is a shock.”
She’d been writing when I showed up and held her pen barely over the page as if any moment she’d continue her written thoughts. I stayed in the doorway, partly afraid to go inside but mostly not wanting to give the impression I cared either way. I smelled apples, and wasn’t sure if it was air freshener or Diana’s fragrance of the day.
“I figured you’d want to know what we’ve learned.”
Her posture relaxed and she pushed back from the desk and moved her hand to her lap, the pen casually resting between long fingers. Huge rings, one silver, the other a shimmering amethyst, momentarily distracted me.
“My boss had a guy on you.” I said. “We know you were the one who left the key to Dr. Platt’s house.”
She cut a glance to a chair beside her desk and I slid into it.
“I used it. Found your old letters and the other half of this.” I pointed to the impressive geode on the corner of her desk. “It’s pretty clear you cared for each other.”
Diana’s lips tightened. Something in her expression morphed toward determination.
“I wondered why you’d let me inside, and why you’d have that key in the first place, but—”
“He traveled,” she said. “To conferences and such. I kept an eye on things when he was away. Picked up the mail.”
“You forgot the fish.”
“Excuse me?”
“After he died. No one took the fish.”
Her gaze fell to the desktop and flitted over it.
“I gave it to my daughter,” I said. “Hope that’s okay.”
“Poor thing,” she said. “I’d completely forgotten.”
Diana’s bauble necklace and matching bracelet, both with ridiculously oversized beads, made me wonder if some part of her depended on these external distractions to ignore whatever was going on inside.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I said. “I spent a lot of energy this week trying to convince a jackass attorney and a control-freak private-eye that you didn’t kill Platt. It was harder than you’d think, too—I couldn’t tell them how I knew it.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because I didn’t have permission to be in his house.”
“Nonsense. I let you in.”
“Unless you’re the property custodian, a judge isn’t going to care.”
She frowned. “I couldn’t have investigators calling the house and dropping by to see me about Wendell,” she said. “My husband thinks all that ended years ago, before we met.”
“It never ended?”
There was the slight tensing of her jaw again. She was apparently unused to personal questions. Good thing for me that the case was as good as over. The only one who stood to lose anything now was Diana.
“Wendell was honorable,” she said. “Nothing in our history disrespected our spouses. Still…” She seemed unable to find suitable words. “We shared a friendship that my husband would never understand. Some in our social circle might deem its nature inappropriate for a married woman. But ‘friendship’ remains the best description for what it was.”
Her expression drooped, much as it had Tuesday night on my front steps. I suspected Burke had taken away Diana’s only real friend.
Silence lingered between us while I considered how to continue. Diana caught me off-guard with a discreet yawn.
“It looks like it was Dr. Platt’s neighbor that murdered him,” I said. “Not Claire. A phone number in his Caller ID log led me down that path. I thought you’d want to know that your help getting me into his house made a difference.”
“His neighbor?”
“The caregiver, actually.”
“That man that lives with William?” She looked stricken.
“You know him?”
She nodded, almost imperceptibly. “He helped Wendell here at the club once or twice.”
“That’s Kevin Burke. Guy’s been scamming William for all he has. By the looks of it, he’s taken plenty of other people too—including Daniel and Claire Gaston.” I debated telling Diana about Daniel’s murder and decided not to. “It seems Doctor Platt found out what was going on. I gave a full report to the police yesterday. They’ll take over from here.”
Diana raised her heavily ornamented fingers to her lips, visibly affected by my story.
I stood to go. “Take care of yourself. I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.”
She nodded. I was nearly to the door when she found her voice again.
“I’m the property custodian for that house,” she said behind me. “Tell me if there’s more I can do.”
“Somebody will call,” I said. As an afterthought, I pulled a card out of my purse and walked it over to her. “Thanks for not kicking me out of the club again.”
She pursed her lips, not quite a smile. I took it as my sign to leave.
Jeannie, in glittery platform flip-flops, crossed Richard’s parking lot with her face lifted toward the late morning sun. She stole a glance at her watch. “We’re getting into prime tan time now. You promised to make this fast.”
A hot pink bow from her string bikini lay over the back of her fitted tee and bounced with each step.
Richard had phoned as we were leaving Vince’s neighborhood. I’d agreed to stop by the office—briefly—on our way to the shore.
“You and tanning,” I said. “I don’t see how you spend so much time in the sun and don’t have leather skin.”
“For one thing, I don’t buy cheap moisturizer at Walgreens.”
Her cover-up clothes were so tight they left nothing to the imagination.
“And how can you be ten years older than me with a body like that? I hate you.”
“Surgery,” she said. “Make it your friend.”
I opened the door to a community lobby Richard shared with a massage therapist and a financial planner. The transition to air conditioning gave me goose bumps.
Jeannie followed me down a hallway that led to our offices. “You’re such a Debbie Downer about women who have work done.” Behind me, her shoes were flipping and flopping. “Like Claire and that Diana woman…it doesn’t make us lesser people, you know. Just better looking than you.”
“Exactly.” We rounded a corner and found Richard at his desk. “More power to you.”
Richard perked up when he saw us. “Those employment apps you found at William’s house? I went to that store and asked if Sandy Diaz still worked there. It was only a hunch, but sure enough.”
“You talked to her?” I slid into a seat opposite his desk.
Jeannie tapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t sit.” Then to Richard, she added, “We can’t stay.”
Richard ignored her. “Add Sandy to the list of people Burke screwed over.”
I stood and jangled my keys. “What’s her story?”
“She was his girlfriend until about forty-five minutes ago. Works in Human Resources. Said Burke went back to school at U of H—totally false, I checked it out. He told her he was working on a telemarketing project for a class and asked if she’d copy applications for people the store didn’t hire. He wanted to recruit them for his project…they could earn easy money from home, and all that. She figured they were looking for work anyway and it helped him with his class, so every couple weeks she brought him a few more.”
“What’d he use them for?”
“Employment applications are a goldmine. Full name and address, birth date, Social Security Number, driver’s license number…all he has to do is apply for credit and have the cards sent wherever he wants. Scammers do this all the time. Max out the cards and pay the minimums on the bills.”
Jeannie looked incredulous. “What an ass.”
“I also went to the Heights and asked the neighbors about Saunders. The homeowner whose property backs up to his is the only one who knew him before his accident. Said he spent three years in brain injury rehab, most of it at a deluxe residential place.” Richard rubbed his fingertips and thumb together in the universal sign for “big bucks.” “Guy was lucky,” he continued. “Eventually he improved enough to come home, but he’ll always need supervised care.”
“How’d Burke get his hooks in?”
“Home care staff came in shifts for years until the hospital program was dropped in April. When that happened, he had a string of bad luck. His aunt, who coordinates his care, found a private agency, but most folks that came didn’t speak or understand English. Others couldn’t cook. Some missed shifts, leaving him alone for blocks of time throughout the day. Right now she’s torn between overseeing William’s care and looking after her sister in New Braunfels…end-stage cancer.”
I had a soft spot for William and didn’t like where I thought this was headed.
“Imagine her peace of mind when she found a charming, enthusiastic live-in replacement to bridge the gap for a few months while she tended to her sister.”
I felt my pulse quicken. “Are you kidding me? What about credentials and licensure?”
“Not sure. She’s juggling ailing relatives two hundred miles apart, all by herself. That’s a tall order for someone like you or me. Imagine doing it at eighty-four.”
Jeannie shook her head. “It sounds like Burke was a temporary solution. If she trusted him—”
“He could rob her nephew blind and get a paycheck for doing it.” The realization nauseated me.
“Anyway,” Richard said, “When I mentioned what was going on with Burke, this guy said two people on his street have been victimized by check washing this summer.”
“I have no idea what that means,” Jeannie said.
“I didn’t either.” Richard motioned toward his computer, where I figured he’d looked up the details. “Turns out, scammers steal outgoing mail—anything that looks like a bill being paid—and remove and alter the checks. They hold the signed check upside down to preserve the signature and dip it in chemicals to remove the ink everywhere else. Then they write in whatever amount and payee they want.”
I remembered the bleach and acetone in Burke’s work room. “Is there anything this guy didn’t try?”
“He knows a few tricks, that’s for sure. There’s also the cars. William Senior kept two vintage Mustangs. After he died, the cars never came out of the garage again until last spring.”
“When Burke moved in.” With each new detail, I felt angrier and more defensive about what this leech had done to William.
“Yep. He even added a new one, the car you saw in the Tone Zone footage. Neighbor says it came into circulation in May, a few weeks after Burke arrived on the scene.”
“How do you suppose he staged that e-mail from Claire to Platt?” Jeannie said.
“That was probably easy. I don’t think Claire was tech savvy.”
“She wasn’t,” I said. “Her son set up her e-mail. He told me she couldn’t do much on the computer without help.” I thought back to our Monday meeting in their River Oaks driveway. “Come to think of it, he said that her boyfriend helped her, too.”
Richard nodded. “You saw all that computer gear at Saunders’ house.”
“Yeah, and the bizarre spy watch with the USB port.”
“He’s slick, I’ll give him that.”
The events were adding up, yet one detail bothered me. “How do you send an e-mail from your account and make it look like it’s from somebody else?”
“My guess is he did it from her account,” Richard said.
“But he wasn’t living there anymore when the message was sent.”
“I think he installed remote access software on her machine. As long as the computer stayed on, he could access it from anywhere.”
I didn’t buy it. “He wouldn’t have known her Yahoo password.”
“
You
knew it,” Jeannie said.
I paused, stuck. She had me.
“Somebody with those skills might even have used keylogging software,” Richard added. “I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
I thought about it. “If he knew how to do that, he’d have access to all their on-line passwords and accounts too.”
“You bet.”
“Okay,” I said. “So he sends threatening messages to Platt from Claire’s account to make it look like Claire’s an obsessed crazy woman. Say he deletes them from her Sent folder too. That would explain why I couldn’t find anything when I went through her e-mail on Wednesday. But surely Platt would be confused when he received these notes. He didn’t know her. Wouldn’t he respond? At least once to tell her she had the wrong guy? Burke couldn’t camp at her computer twenty-four hours a day. He’d be taking a big risk that she might receive something back from Platt.”
Richard leaned back. “I thought about that. He might have set up her account to treat mail from Platt as spam. It’d give him a little time to check and delete anything. I don’t know. He’s obviously smart. Been getting away with this, and worse, for a really long time.”
“The police have her computers now,” I said. “They’ll know whether remote access software was found.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Then why’d you bring it up?”
“Because it can also be
uninstalled
remotely.”
I did a little mental calendar work. “You’re suggesting he uninstalled anything incriminating before the search warrants were issued?”
“That’s one way he might have done it.”
“He obviously wasn’t afraid to come back to the house,” Jeannie said. “Balls of steel.”
“Emily solved that one for us yesterday when she found the Gastons’ new credit cards.”
His reasoning had passed mine and it took a moment for me to catch up.
“Of course,” I finally said. “The phone. Burke intercepted Daniel’s replacement cards in Monday’s mail and then hurried inside to activate them—a task he could only accomplish from the Gastons’ home phone. No cars were in the driveway so he thought the coast was clear. When I showed no signs of leaving, he acted like he’d come to feed Logan’s snake.”
Jeannie picked up my line of thought. “That explains what happened to the missing gym note too. With free access to the house and its computers, he could erase anything, paper trail or electronic.”
“Gotta hand it to the slime,” Richard said. “He had it all worked out.”
We paused, each mulling the new information.
Jeannie pounced. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said to Richard. “But if there’s nothing more, we’re late for the beach.” The look she gave me said she expected my full support.
“Fair enough,” he said. “Surf safe.”
We said goodbye to Richard and this time I followed Jeannie down the hall. Ninety minutes later, she worked on her tan while I walked ankle deep in froth, glad for a break from the case. It felt nice to finally have a quiet moment to think about the other things on my mind.
I listened to waves and gulls, watched light glint over the seas, and reflected on my paradoxical shortcomings as a mother and a girlfriend.
With Vince, it would be easy to share my emotions once I understood what they were. With Annette, the opposite. My boundless love for her was unequivocal, but the challenge was how to express it in a way she’d understand.
Warm ocean water rolled over my feet and, somehow, soothed me. For the first time since moving to Texas, I didn’t even mind the sun.