Deception with Murder (A Rilynne Evans Mystery, Book Two) (11 page)

“
Y
ou must be psychic or something,” Ben said as he climbed into the car. It had taken only ten minutes for the local officials to arrive and take over the scene. By that time, Ben had already loaded everything back into the SUV, so they were ready to go.

“What?” Rilynne jerked her head up out of shock.

“You were talking about monkeys in your sleep last night and then you find the missing pages hidden behind a board covered in them. Seriously, you should set up a 900 number and help people find their lost keys and stuff.” Despite his joking manner, the topic made her very uneasy. Even with her flashes, she never considered herself a psychic. Some of that had to do with the stigma surrounding the word, but mostly it was because she had always associated psychics with people who read palms or charged people to tell their futures. She couldn’t even see herself even telling someone what she could do, let alone charging them for it.

She chuckled nervously. “Yes, because that’s always what I wanted to do on my off time.”

“So, are you going to read those things?” Ben asked, motioning toward the evidence bag sitting on the back seat.

“No,” she replied. “I’m going to wait until we get back to the office. There might be some trace we call pull off of them that could help us. I don’t want to risk tainting it.”

“Well then how are we going to pass the time? We still have three hours before we get back to Addison Valley.”

“Well, we could always play a game,” she offered.

“Like the license plate game?” he asked hesitantly.

“Well, we could play that game that Nicole told us about. That spitball game. She may have been unstable, but it actually was a pretty good idea. We can run through the case and see if anything jumps out.”

“Okay,” he nodded. “Where do we start?”

She pulled her feet up in her seat and turned toward him. “Well, let’s start with what we know. Villarreal was working on bringing down a home invasion ring. He told his wife and partner that he was getting closer.”

“And there’s the vacant house and the beach house.”

“Right,” she said. “It doesn’t appear that anyone knew about either house, so someone may have followed him.”

“Or he was meeting someone,” Ben said.

She nodded as she processed everything. “Why would he be meeting someone in a vacant house? We know that he was there at least four times over the last two months. We haven’t checked yet, but my guess is that he was using it even before that.”

“Was he meeting his wife there? You know, for some private time,” he asked.

“She said they had been meeting at motels around the city. She also didn’t seem to know anything about the house,” she said. “I ran her finances and did find weekly charges at a number of motels.”

“Could he have been having an affair?”

“It’s possible,” she said hesitantly. “But from everything I have learned about him, I don’t think it’s likely. He really didn’t seem the type.”

His face shifted in concentration. “Would he have been using the house for anything related to the case?”

“He could have, but he didn’t mention it in his journal or to his sergeant. What about the beach house? He’s only had it for a few months. How would anyone have known to search there for his journal pages?”

“If someone was tailing him, they could have just followed him there. Maybe someone in the group he was investigating was on to him. They could have been trying to make sure he really was who he was claiming to be.”

“How would they have known about the journal in the first place?” she asked. “Even his wife didn’t know about it.”

“Well, if he were being followed, they may have seen him writing in it,” Ben offered.

She nodded. “Then the thing we need to do is figure out who the other people in the ring are.”

“My question is, if he had figured out who was running the show, why wouldn’t he have put it in a report. He had obviously wanted the case to be closed quickly so he could start a family, so why wouldn’t he have called it in so the squad could start looking into it?”

“I think he was too much of a perfectionist,” she explained. “He wouldn’t have wanted to involve the department unless he was sure. The problem with that is, if he decided to investigate it himself, he might have aroused suspicions. There’s a possibility that it’s what got him killed.”

Ben let out a long sigh and looked to be working something out in his head. Rilynne considered asking him about it, but decided to wait until he was ready. “They must really trust the person they have handling the money now,” he said several minutes later.

“How do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, you said that the account had already been cleaned out twice and made to look like the men on the crew took it,” he said, shifting his glance between her and the road. “If I was running a big crime ring, and people working for me were stealing, I know that I would be cautious about who I chose to fill that position. I mean, what’s the point of running a crime ring if you aren’t going to get any money out of it?”

“Huh,” she grunted. “I haven’t thought about it like that. I profiled the ringleaders as being relatively intelligent, so it would make sense. I think you’re right; they wouldn’t take the chance that their accounts could get emptied again.”

Ben grinned proudly. “Well, she may have been a loon, but her game is actually useful. Now we only have two hours of driving left. Are you sure you don’t want to take a peek at those pages?”

“It’s actually very hard not to,” she said, shifting in her seat. “But if there was something on these pages that could help us find the killer and I contaminated it, I would never forgive myself. Especially since Villarreal was one of us.”

He nodded as if to say he understood. “So then how are we going to pass the time?”

“What, talking to me isn’t good enough?” she asked, trying to sound affronted.

“No, not at all,” he said with his impish grin. “You’re the most boring person I know. When are you going to have something interesting to say? Allowing yourself to get kidnapped by a serial killer, being involved in bar fights, going for a run and actually running into things-I still want a tape of that by the way. You really are quite dull.”

“I know, it’s so very dreadful,” she chortled. “And are you ever going to let me live the kidnapping down?”

He shot her an entertained look. “You’re joking right? You’ll be old and on your death bed and I’ll still be giving you a hard time for that one.”

“I hate to break it to you,” she grinned. “But men don’t live as long as women do.”

“Normal women,” he said. “But you have a tendency of intentionally endangering yourself. Something tells me that isn’t going to change as you get older.”

“Now you sound like my sister-in-law,” she said without thinking. Despite the sudden twinge she felt talking about it, it still felt good. “‘Rilynne is never going to be happy unless she’s in the middle of the action’. I’m pretty sure that was her favorite line of all time. Along with, ‘you deserve someone who will put you first, not a job.’”

“She just sounds pleasant,” he said derisively.

“You don’t know the half of it. My personal favorite was ‘she won’t even take your last name; it’s her way of trying to assert control over the marriage.’”

“You didn’t take his last name?” he asked quizzically.

She rolled her eyes. “I was going to as soon as we transferred to a new city. I figured it would be easier than having to change it within my department when I was only going to be there for another six months. We were actually supposed to move to the west coast a few months after he died.”

“So, it’s not like you just were refusing to take his name all together,” he stated. “I mean, you aren’t fundamentally against it or anything?”

“No, and Christopher understood,” she explained, looking past the sudden note of anxiety in his voice. “He was actually the one who recommended it when we were going over everything that needed to be done. Sarah just looked for any reason she could find to put me down. Most women are concerned with having a mother-in-law that despises them, but she actually adored me before she passed away just after our wedding. I had to deal with the cynical sister-in-law who didn’t even pretend to like me. I’ve actually been wondering if she had Christopher declared dead just to spite me.”

He looked a little shocked. “Do you actually think that she would do that? I mean, he’s her brother.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t put it past her for a second. I’m pretty sure she would have done it just to get the insurance payout alone, but the chance to undermine me was probably the deciding factor.”

“I take it he left her some money?”

“Quite a bit actually. She had found out she was pregnant about two months before Christopher died, and her husband took off when she told him,” she explained. “Christopher wanted to make sure that she would always be taken care of, so he took out a life insurance policy about a month before he was killed listing her as the beneficiary.”

“So she was making a big deal about you, saying that you wouldn’t be around enough to be a good mom, yet her husband split as soon as there was a child in the picture?” He sounded as though he was on the verge of laughter. Something about hearing it coming from someone else made it sound even sweeter than when she had simply thought it herself.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Rilynne smiled. “Actually, if we hadn’t known who was responsible for Christopher’s death, she would have ended up on the top of the suspect list. She actually wanted to have him declared dead immediately so she could receive the money.”

“That’s crazy. How much did he leave her?” Ben asked.

“Two million dollars,” she said coolly.

Ben jerked the wheel slightly as he turned toward her. The look on his face said he thought he must have heard her wrong. “You’re kidding!” he exclaimed.

She just shook her head and laughed at his dumfounded expression.

“So…” He seemed to be trying to find his words.

“No,” she answered, already knowing what he was going to ask. “I think the policy in my name was around $250,000. I’m not sure, I haven’t looked.”

This only seemed to confuse him more. “So he left his sister two million dollars, but his wife only a quarter of a million? That just doesn’t seem…” Again he was searching for the right word. “Fair.”

“Obviously he never expected anything to happen to him. And his sister didn’t really have anything going for her. She never went to college, and now she’s trying to raise her child alone. I think he knew if anything ever did happen to him, she would never be able to take care of herself, let alone a child. She was actually on the verge of moving in with us when he died.”

“Oh, that would have been fun.”

“My thoughts exactly,” she said with a grin.

“I never had to deal with anything like that with Laney. Her parent’s knew all about the trouble I had gotten into in high school, but they still seemed to like me,” he said. “If they didn’t, they sure didn’t show it around me.”

“I think I would have had mixed opinions on that one,” she joked. “On one hand, you turned out to be a pretty good guy. But on the other hand, you were a criminal.”

“Oh, shut up. I was
not
a criminal.”

“You went to jail. I’m not a professional, but I’m pretty sure that makes you a criminal,” she said. “Oh wait, I
am
a professional!”

He shook his head dramatically and groaned.

“You never did tell me why you were arrested.” She looked over at him, squinting her eyes curiously.

“What, Nicole didn’t tell you? I would’ve thought she’d have told you everything,” he paused while pulling his knuckles up to his jaw. “Although, I’m not entirely excited by that thought.”

“Afraid that she told me all of you dirty little secrets?” she chuckled at him.

His ears turned pink. “Well, I am now.”

“You’re avoiding my question.”

He let out a long sigh, knuckles still dragging along his chin. “There was a big party the end of freshman year at the captain of the football teams house. We thought it was going to get broken up a few hours in when his dad showed up, but he ended up just unlocking the liquor cabinet and heading upstairs. I won’t lie to you; we wound up getting pretty drunk. Toward the end of the night Laney ended up passing out on one of the lawn chairs in the back yard. I left her sleeping out there while I helped get the living room picked up. When I went out to get Laney so we could head home, I found the guys dad trying to reach his hand up her shirt,” he explained, his eyes fixed on the road in front of them. “He saw me and yelled that he was going to call the cops if we didn’t get off of his property.”