Lethal Little Lies (Jubilant Falls Series Book 3) (17 page)

              And what would telling Henrickssen do? Would it get Rick released? What if he was lying? Could I live with the possible consequences of setting a guilty man free? What if it got Charlie released? What if she really had been the one who’d shot Kay Henning? I shouldn’t have agreed to do any of this.

              Odds were that nobody was getting out of jail until Monday. That didn’t mean that Birger wasn’t going to talk to both Rick and Charlie this weekend, if he hadn’t already.

              Would telling Anna Henrickssen screw up the case? Would not telling her anything do the same thing?

I took a deep breath. “I have a couple more questions I need to ask you,” I asked.

              “OK. How has your search gone?”

“              Eh.”
I shrugged as if she could see me.

              “What’s that mean?”

              “Why did this whole thing begin, this hiding the fact that Rick and Rowan were twins?”

              “You heard my client. His mother was responsible for that farce and they had to let it continue.”

              “But after college? After Rowan was drafted by the NFL? Why not say something then? It wouldn’t have been a big deal to let his true age slip then. I know ninety percent of my readers wouldn’t even notice if we slipped his correct age in.”

              “That I can’t answer.”

              “And why make Rick complicit in faking Rowan’s death? Did he not think this would affect his political career if it came out?”

              “You’d have to ask him these questions, I’m afraid.”

              “Well, I can’t.”

              “Why not?”

              “Your advice that attorney-client conversations are not recorded was wrong. Anyone else who is there —  other than you and your client—breaks attorney client privilege. As soon as I left the jail the other day with that envelope, Steve Adolphus came charging down to the paper with the digital recording of our conversation, claiming if I did a story on Rowan, I’d poison the jury pool. If I come back with you, I’m toast professionally.”

              She was silent.

              “And furthermore, my boss said he’d fire me if I was in anyway interfering with a police investigation.”

              She sighed at the other end of the phone. “I’m sorry.”

              “And that’s
another
question I have. Your client has enough money to retain an attorney with experience enough to keep him out of prison for the rest of his life, even if he was standing over Virginia Ferguson’s dead body with a smoking gun. Why is he sticking with you?”

“              I know Mr. Starrett was insistent that you be the one he told Rowan’s story to. He has been asking me every day why your story hasn’t appeared in the paper. The
Journal-Gazette
is the only newspaper allowed in the jail.”

              “I can’t write a story unless I know all the facts and frankly no one’s telling me a lot of them.”

              “What do you want me to do?”

              Now it was my turn to be silent.

“You should have hired an investigator and kept me out of it,” I said finally. “But as long as I’m knee-deep in this mess, I need more facts. Can you meet me tomorrow afternoon? I’ll have a list of questions for Rick to answer. If you can get those answers to me by Sunday night or first thing Monday morning, I might have enough to do a story for Monday’s noon edition.”

              “Where do you want to meet?”

              “Where would be the most inconspicuous?”

              “Come out to my place. I’m right at the Plummer County line in Longfellow.”

              Longfellow was a wide spot in the road at the east end of the county whose founders had larger, grander, more poetic aspirations. Today, a run-down bar, a post office and an abandoned one-room schoolhouse sat amongst a gaggle of ramshackle trailers and tract houses. It was an odd place for a young attorney to live.

              “Sure,” I said. “Give me your address. I’ll see you Sunday.”

              “No, come now. I’ll talk to my client and see if I can get this back to you Sunday.”

*****

              The roof of Longfellow’s long-abandoned one room schoolhouse sagged under the weight of the mid-November snow as I pulled up to the village’s single intersection an hour later. Dead weeds poked their dry, brown heads through the snow at the base of the stop sign and, to my right, abandoned farm equipment—an old reaper and a tractor— sat in the middle of a field, covered with snow. No one was outside these sad, battered homes in the cold weather.

              The GPS told me to turn left, down an unmarked country road, over-arched by naked trees. I drove half a mile before the GPS ordered me to turn left again, this time down a small, unpaved lane. A cluster of battered trailers sat at odd angles off the lane, paired with rusty pick-up trucks and junk cars by their front doors.

              The door to the trailer just ahead of me opened; Anna Henrickssen, wearing a Cleveland-Marshall College of Law sweatshirt and jeans, stepped out and waved.

              “Welcome to my home,” she said.

              “Not exactly where I thought an up and coming attorney would live, I have to tell you,” I said as she shut the door behind me.

              “Just because I grew up here doesn’t mean I’m going to stay here. Right now, I’m too far in student loan debt from law school to live anywhere else. My granddaddy owns the land and all these trailers. My parents lived in the one to your right as you pulled in. Granddaddy lives in the one with the truck in front. He said I could stay here as long as I wanted. I don’t want to stay here at all, but right now, I don’t have a choice.” The trailer, while dated and faded, was clean. She indicated a small mismatched table and chairs near the kitchen. “Have a seat.”

              I pulled my sheet of questions from my purse. “Here’s the questions I need to ask Rick,” I said as I handed it to her. “The sooner you can get it to me, the better.”

              “OK.” Anna looked over the questions. “A lot of these are the same ones the police want to ask him and I won’t let him answer. You have to understand I can’t have my whole case laid out on the front page before we get to trial.”

              “Then why have me do this at all?” I asked, flabbergasted. “I’m not a PR machine! Did he think I was going to print some sort of one-sided story that would save his ass? I’m not going to do that—I’m going to print the facts as I know them and let the chips fall where they may. As his attorney, why would you let him do that?”

              “He insisted that the story of his brother’s faked suicide get out.”

              “Why? Because Rowan really shot Virginia Ferguson or because Rick doesn’t want to take the Starrett myth down all by himself?”

              Anna shrugged. “I can’t tell you that.”

              “Tell me one thing—where was Rick Starrett when Virginia Ferguson was shot?”

              Anna Henrickssen lifted her chin. “My client is not guilty of shooting Virginia Ferguson. I will tell you that.”

Chapter 29 Marcus

              It was Sunday afternoon and the three of us—Graham, PJ and I— circled our chairs around Addison’s newsroom computer as she pushed the button to bring the screen to life.

              “This story is going to be a bombshell, on a lot of different levels,” she said, turning to Graham. “How much time did you get with Charlie?”

              “About an hour this morning,” Graham answered. “She really spilled everything to me. She hasn’t got a lawyer yet, so after her hearing Monday we may have whoever is appointed to defend her coming to the newsroom to scream at us.”

              “Like I fucking care. I’m up to here with lawyers,” she said. Her tone was surprisingly harsh. Addison looked at my stepson. “Tell me you didn’t go with him.”

              “No ma’am,” PJ answered.

              “OK, PJ, what I need you to do is go through the computer photo files or the older photo files along the wall. I need you to find me any pictures of Rowan Starrett or his funeral,” she said. “I’ll also need a head shot of him in his hockey uniform. I can’t remember if photos were digitized back when Rowan supposedly died.”

              “I don’t think they were,” I answered. PJ jumped into action.

              Addison turned to Graham. “OK, tell me how Charlie found out she was being sought for Kay Henning’s shooting?”

              Graham flipped through his notes. “She said Deke disappeared at the end of October after a huge fight over this situation. She happened on your first story about Kay’s shooting while doing her daily Google search on Marcus.”

              “Why would she Google me
every day
? I can’t believe that!” I blurted out. “I still think this woman is a nutcase—and a stalker!”

              Addison held up her hand. “Hold on here. I don’t disagree. We just need to rule her out as a suspect. Has she got compelling evidence that she wasn’t here at the time of Kay’s shooting?”

              “She says she flew into Collitstown from Chicago and got in late Wednesday night. Rented a car at the airport,” Graham said.

              “Did she provide receipts? Tickets? Did she say where she was staying?”

              “No—nothing. It’s just her word.”

              Addison nodded. “The cops will verify that part of the story.”

              “Wait a minute!” I blurted out. “I got a call Wednesday morning at the hospital from a woman claiming to be my sister checking on Kay. When I talked to her, it didn’t sound right. I called my sister and she claimed she’d never called. Charlie couldn’t have known she was a suspect from that first story! She came to Kay’s hospital room at two on Thursday morning—fourteen hours after that call! Graham’s story naming a female suspect didn’t come out until noon, ten hours after that—that’s twenty-four hours total! She
could
have been here when Kay was shot!”

              “She’s still lying to us,” Graham said.

              “Like everyone else,” Addison said sharply.

              “So did she say if she came in contact with Deke once she got here?” I asked.

              Graham shook his head. “She did not. She said she has no idea where he is. I don’t’ know if that’s true or not.”

              “What’s the name of her book?” Addison went back to typing.

              “
Death Among the Celts
is her best known book,” I answered. “There have been two others, but that was the one she was promoting when we met.”

              “Get me some background information on her—her professional bio, information on her books,” Addison answered. “There’s going to be a lot of flack on this story, especially when we throw in a well-known author married to a once-dead hockey player. Have you talked any more to Birger about security at Kay’s hospital room?”

              “Just briefly. He said not to worry,” I answered.

              “But did he say one way or the other if security will be increased?”

              “No, especially when he knows that we’re going to do a story.”

              She nodded. “OK. Marcus, when did you notice Kay was gone?”

              I sighed and glanced at PJ, now digging for photos in the old files along the wall. “When I was writing, Kay would often go off on her own, go for a walk or something. She was out of the house Sunday night while I was working,” I began. “I got depressed at how far apart we’d grown, got drunk and passed out in bed. When I woke up on Monday, she still hadn’t come home and I found her note saying she’d gone to MIT to see PJ.”

              “So sometime during Kay’s Sunday night walk, she’s grabbed and drugged by somebody we now believe is Rowan Starrett, and, we believe, taken to the hotel where she was held,” Addison said and began typing. “What happened next?”

              “I called Dad that morning and left a message that Mom wasn’t on her flight,” PJ called from across the room. He’d heard me after all.

              “A message I didn’t get until later in the afternoon because I was running so behind on everything else,” I said, softly.

              “Didn’t you get a bunch of other phone calls that day, too?” Graham asked. “From someone Elizabeth thought was a man?”

“              Yes. I thought they were from Charlie, so I ignored them. She’d been calling again periodically—”

              “As part of her need to apologize for her drunken behavior before rehab,” Graham interjected.

              “Yes,” I continued. “So the fact that she was calling was normal, but the number of calls were higher that Monday.”

              “Let’s fill in some of the other holes from the rest of the day,” Addison jumped into the conversation. “About three or three-thirty, Rick Starrett came into my office, claiming he’s going to get back at Virginia Ferguson for what he feels are unfair campaign ads that cost him the election.” Addison typed as she spoke. “What next?”

              It was so painful to catalogue the last week, but I’d watched Graham and Addison do this when they’d worked together on big crime stories. I had just never been the victim. Some of this PJ had never heard—most of it I never wanted him to know. I inhaled deeply.

              “I talked to Kay about four-thirty or five and the call was interrupted when she was shot,” I said softly.

Addison nodded. “We contacted the police, next, they came and took a report.”

              “Then you did the original story and I went home to call the kids.”

              “And I went home, too, then got word that Virginia Ferguson was shot.” Addison stopped her frantic typing and searched through a stack of old newspapers strewn across the copy desk.

              “Here it is,” she said, finding an edition and smoothing the front page out beside her. “According to the police, Virginia Ferguson was shot about six-thirty that evening. What time did they find Kay?”

              “It was about seven thirty, eight o’clock when I got the phone call she was on her way to the hospital,” I said. “I don’t know the exact time they found her.”

              Addison nodded as she continued to type, then stopped and looked at Graham. “On Tuesday, you went to the hotel where Kay was found. Where was it?”

              Graham walked to his desk and pulled another notebook from a drawer and read the address aloud. “It was one of those old motels just off the highway going west toward Indiana, right on the western edge of the county. It took me about thirty minutes to get there. It’s called the Harmony Motel.”

              I knew the intersection he described: lonely farm fields that rotated through corn, soybeans and wheat, with the solitary little brick motel sitting just north of the highway off ramp.

              I’d gotten a glimpse of the motel on a weekend trip to Indianapolis once several years ago; we’d left the kids with my sister Calpurnia and were taking a romantic weekend away. The plans were to take in a play, a museum or two. We’d spent most of the weekend in bed, making love. On the way home, Kay was driving and I was staring out the window, wondering aloud what stories were held behind the haggard walls of the single story, brick building just inside the county line.

              “You’re always looking for stories, aren’t you?” Kay had placed her hand on my thigh and patted it affectionately.

              It seemed so long ago.

              I shuddered, imagining Kay as she lay bleeding in one of those rooms, just one short week ago.

              “So, Kay was grabbed Sunday night, probably taken to the Harmony, and kept there overnight,” Addison stared at the ceiling, trying to put all the pieces together. “Rick Starrett came into my office on Monday afternoon. Kay was shot at five-thirty or so at the motel thirty minutes away. Virginia Ferguson was shot at six-thirty. Just before she dies, Virginia identifies Rick as her shooter. Rick had plenty of time to shoot both women, then drive around until dark, when he hides himself in my barn.”

              “Rick had no reason to shoot Kay, though,” Graham said.

              “OK,” Addison continued. “What if Rick knew Rowan was holding Kay at the Harmony, that he was there when Marcus called her on the phone, and freaked out when Rowan shot her? Rick panics and drives around Plummer County or God knows where, trying to figure out what to do—he can’t tell anyone Rowan did it because no one knows he’s still alive. That would give Rowan—who’s livid at Virginia Ferguson for those nasty commercials during the campaign—plenty of time to come back to Jubilant Falls to shoot her. Rick could have returned to the Harmony, saw that police and emergency personnel there, panics again, and this time, drives around until he can hide in my barn, where he’s arrested.”

              “You think Rick Starrett knew Rowan was holding Kay?” I asked.

              “I don’t know,” Addison answered, still staring at the ceiling. “ I just know from the last time I talked to him he’s adamant he didn’t shoot Virginia Ferguson.”

              “That doesn’t make sense, though,” Graham said. “You said Rick hadn’t seen Rowan in years. He’d just stayed in contact with him via cell phone.”

              “When we talked at the jail, Rick’s attorney gave me a stack of cell phone bills with a phone number on it. Rowan could have called him from that phone number and told him about the shootings,” Addison said, thoughtfully.

Clutching a stack of eight by ten photos, PJ returned to our circle.

              “OK, what about this?” PJ asked. “What if Rowan had my mom at the motel, shot her, drove into town to shoot Virginia Ferguson and then called Rick about it? He knew how to get in touch with him. Virginia Ferguson could have incorrectly identified Rowan as Rick.”

              “That doesn’t make sense either,” Graham interjected, pointing at the campaign headshot we’d run when he was arrested. “Look at Rick Starrett: he’s got his fifty dollar hair cut, his nice suits, regular dental care—Rowan, or Deke, or whatever his name is, looks like what he is: a felon with an addiction problem. I can’t imagine Virginia Ferguson mistaking those two as she lay dying in her doorway.”

              “What if he cleaned up?” PJ asked. “Maybe he was trying to impersonate his brother when he shot Virginia                             Ferguson. Maybe she knew Rowan was still alive and was going to expose it and Rowan couldn’t allow that to happen.”

              “No,” Addison said. “Rowan’s face is too beat up to be mistaken for Rick these days.”

              “But like it or not, Rowan had a serious grudge against you,” Graham pointed at me. “As well as Virginia Ferguson. He was getting back at you for Seattle by kidnapping and shooting your wife and at Virginia Ferguson for the campaign against his brother. You said Kay never saw her shooter.”

              I nodded.

              “But where does that put Charlie?” I asked. “The one thing we don’t know is where Charlie was for sure. The only thing I know is that she called me constantly the day Kay was shot. Nobody has told me whether it’s a cell phone, which could have placed her here, or if she was still in Chicago. She’s played a role in this somehow. I just know she has.”

              “So you think those phone calls were to warn you about Rowan or to tell you she’d shot your wife herself?” Graham asked me.

              I shrugged, frustrated. “I have no idea.”

“We only have one thing that’s certain,” Addison said. “Nothing we have here clears any of these three of shooting either Virgini
a
or Kay.
”