Bucket List: Maple Syrup Mysteries

by Emily James

  His gaze followed mine, and he pulled the papers over and separated them into stacks. “Where do you want me to start?”

  We’d never be besties, but he was growing on me a little.

  Gordon had labeled everything else with a date and a line in the bank book, showing when he’d removed the money. He couldn’t have known his brother would question him after their mother’s death, so this must have simply been how he handled being a conscientious power of attorney. Or maybe he’d simply been the kind of man who didn’t like to take chances—yet another feature that wouldn’t match with a drug addict.

  When we finished all the stacks, only one withdrawal remained unaccounted for.

  The large one that nearly drained the account the week before Maryanne Albright died.

  13

  Gordon Albright hadn’t been a drug addict, but he might still have been a thief.

  If he’d had a drug addiction, he would have been skimming money all along. That large withdrawal at the end made it look more like he’d known his mother was reaching the end of her life and wanted to take what was left of her money before she died. Upon death, her accounts would have been frozen and his power of attorney would have ended. Then the estate would have been split between him and his brother, giving him only half.

  He might have fed Leonard the drug addiction story himself to convince his brother to drop the suit. That didn’t explain the strange reaction from Leonard’s wife, though.

  What would explain her reaction was if Leonard made up the drug addiction story to cover up the fact that he knew his brother stole that money and killed him over it.

  If that was the case, he shouldn’t have sued Gordon at all, but perhaps that was a mistake he realized once it was too late. Bringing the suit at all would make him a suspect if Gordon died under suspicious circumstances. If he dropped the suit, waited, and then planted Gordon’s body in Clement’s house, he had a chance of getting away with it.

  Did he want vengeance more than he wanted the money returned? If he’d continued with the suit and won—which he might have since Gordon had no record of where that large sum of money went—he would have gotten his inheritance. Killing his brother got him nothing monetarily.

  This case made me feel a bit like I was trying to run a marathon with one shoe on. I had to keep moving forward, but everything felt awkward.

  I took a picture of the bank book on my phone, wrote down the name of the accountant Gordon Albright used, and then Troy and I packaged everything else back up and replaced it where we’d found it. I couldn’t remove them without permission, and they’d be safe here anyway.

  There was only one way to unravel this conundrum. Anderson and I had to go back and confront Leonard Albright and his wife with the evidence I’d found proving Gordon didn’t have a drug addiction after all.

  When I left Gordon’s house, I called Chief McTavish on my drive home and asked about Gordon’s financial records. They hadn’t been included in the discovery package I received from the prosecution. Chief McTavish confirmed for me that they did look at his bank records, but there wasn’t anything that stood out. Since the prosecution wasn’t planning to use any of the information, it hadn’t been included in what I’d been given.

  I gave him the date and amount I was looking for specifically. “Did he have anything on that date or in the weeks that followed?”

  “He didn’t have that size of a deposit before or after that date.” His voice had a what-are-you-up-to-now tone to it.

  I wasn’t about to tell him. We weren’t exactly in agreement on this case.

  Depositing what he’d taken from his mother in one large chunk would have made it too obvious. Maybe he’d done it slowly over time. “Did his deposits increase at all after that date?”

  “Nope. Like I said, nothing in his financials stood out or pointed at anything going on that could have resulted in his death.”

  I thanked him and disconnected.

  That was annoying. What had Gordon done with the money, hidden it in his mattress? It made it more difficult to argue that he’d merely stolen it if he hadn’t somehow deposited it in his accounts. It made it look like he’d taken it to use for something.

  Leonard would argue drugs, but nothing else pointed to that, so I still had enough to make a solid case that Leonard lied to us about what was going on between him and Gordon.

  I called Anderson for his availability to go back to talk to Leonard again. The list of days was short. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he said he was busy right now.

  By the time I finished with Anderson, I was home. I put the car in park, but left it running so I’d have heat while I called Leonard Albright. I wanted to get it done before it got any later, and once I went inside, my dogs would be clamoring for my attention.

  Leonard’s number rang so many times I thought he might not pick up.

  “Albright,” he answered on the fifth ring.

  “This is Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes, Clement Dodd’s attorney. I have a few more questions I need to ask you, and I was hoping we could set up a time to meet.”

  “I’ve told you everything there is to tell, Ms. Fitzhenry-Dawes.” His voice sounded the same as I imagined it would if he were talking to a patient who’d tried to overstep the personal-professional boundary. “I don’t want to waste either of our time with another meeting. If you truly feel I have something germane to add to Clement’s defense, you can summon me to appear in court.”

  And then he hung up on me.

  I mimed whacking my phone off the steering wheel. That was both rude and final. Calling him back wouldn’t do any good.

  But I didn’t want to wait to question him in front of the judge at the preliminary hearing to determine probable cause. A judge wouldn’t even allow me to call Leonard to the stand unless I had more proof than a hunch that Gordon Albright wasn’t a drug addict and that Leonard dropped the law suit with the plan to kill him rather than forgive him.

  Truth was I didn’t know enough about what was happening to feel confident calling Leonard to the stand. I could end up looking like a fool, and that would be extremely bad for Clement’s case. Besides, I had to establish that there was a reason to call Leonard as a witness prior to the pre-trial motions that would take place after the preliminary hearing. If I didn’t, his testimony wouldn’t even be allowed at the actual trial. And waiting until the trial to show someone else had killed Gordon meant Clement might die an innocent man in prison waiting for his trial date due to his fatal insomnia.

  Too much was at stake to wait and gamble. I had to find another way to get Leonard Albright to talk to me.

  14

  “Did you learn your unconventional methods from your dad?” Anderson asked as we rode the elevator up to Leonard Albright’s office. “Because I don’t remember reading anything about him accosting possible witnesses at their place of business.”

  After Leonard refused to see me, I’d called his office and booked an appointment with him under a fake name. The only part of the ploy that made me uncomfortable was I’d had to tell his receptionist that I was feeling depressed and was afraid I might become suicidal if I didn’t speak to someone soon. Otherwise, she’d said he didn’t have an opening for a new client for weeks.

  I hated lying about something like that. Depression and suicide were serious and real mental health issues that cost lives every year.

  “I’m not accosting him. I’m not even going to cause a scene. But if I’m paying for an appointment slot with him, he can’t say I’m wasting his time.”

  Anderson scowled.

  I hadn’t told him how I planned to meet with Leonard Albright in the car. That part I regretted too. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I’ve gotten used to working on my own. It’ll take me a little bit to get back to working with a partner.”

  He didn’t turn to look at me, but a smile played on his lips. “Does that mean you’re going to accept my offer?”

  I deserved a mental self-sma
ck for falsely raising his hopes. “Maybe we should wait to see how the preliminary hearing goes. If I really botch it, you might want to retract your offer.”

  Anderson shook his head. “I suppose I have to accept that. I’m the one who pushed you to try arguing a case before you made the final decision.”

  Yes, he had.

  “You don’t have to look so smug about it,” he said, but there was laughter in his voice.

  I wiped my expression blank, and the elevator door opened, letting us off into the reception area of Leonard Albright’s office. Anderson took a seat while I checked in with the receptionist. The plan was he’d stay in the reception area as my back-up. I’d hoped the receptionist would be in the office, and I wouldn’t be in a building alone with Leonard, but I’d made that assumption before and ended up talking to a criminal by myself. I wasn’t taking that chance again. Those who didn’t learn from history and all that. I’d learned.

  My palms went a little moist waiting for Leonard to come out. All the ways this could go very wrong played in my mind.

  The doorway to Leonard’s office opened and he called the fake name I’d given. I stood up.

  Leonard’s gaze shifted toward me, and something flickered across his face too quickly for me to identify. All he said was, “Come on in.”

  The door clicked shut behind me, and Leonard’s lips drooped down at the edges. It was the biggest emotional display I’d seen from him.

  He kept a hand on the door. “This is harassment.”

  His body language oozed passive-aggressiveness. He didn’t want me here, and yet he blocked the door, holding it shut with his hand so I couldn’t escape. He couldn’t realize it or he would have controlled it.

  Along with the fact that he’d invited me into his office at all, his body language told me he wasn’t going to kick me out. He didn’t want his receptionist wondering why I’d left before the session time was over. He was afraid of someone asking questions. He’d probably been bluffing and hoping I wouldn’t call him to the stand in court because then he would have had to perjure himself if he wanted to stick to his story.

  That knowledge gave me the upper hand.

  “I thought you might want to talk without your wife around. I know she doesn’t know the truth about Gordon.” I pulled the picture I’d taken of Maryanne Albright’s bank book up on my phone and turned the screen toward him. “But I do. I know he wasn’t a drug addict skimming from your mother’s money. Until this withdrawal, everything he took was for your mother’s care.”

  Leonard moved back from the door and cracked his knuckles. The popping sent a shiver down my spine, but the trained-lawyer part of my brain whispered that it was the most honest gesture he’d made over both times I’d spoken with him. It was the kind of bad habit that people in professional careers worked hard to break. But those habits reared up again during moments of extreme stress.

  If he hadn’t cracked his knuckles, I might have doubted my interpretation of the situation. Now I knew to be patient. He was already uncomfortable. Silence would increase that.

  He sat in one of the arm chairs in the middle of the room. I took the one across from him. And then we stared at each other for what felt like five minutes.

  I knew it wasn’t that long because I was sitting right in front of the clock above his head, but we were both trying to play the same game. Counselors used some of the same technique as lawyers and police officers to get their clients to open up and share more than they otherwise would. Leonard was trying to trip me up as well. We were at a stalemate.

  I rested my hands on the arms of the chair, intentionally keeping my body language open and confident since I knew he could read mine as well as I could read his.

  “I’m going to tell you the argument I’m considering making in court, and then you can decide if you’d rather we talked about this here instead. That bank withdrawal makes it look like you were right when you brought the suit against Gordon. He abused his power of attorney to take the last of your mother’s money right before she died, leaving you with nothing. That’s a strong motive for murder.”

  He continued to stare at me for the span of three blinks, long enough that I almost cracked and gave up.

  On blink four, he leaned forward slightly. “I want to ask a hypothetical question of you first.”

  Not what I expected, but if it would get me the truth at last, I’d play along. “Okay. I’ll answer if I’m able.”

  “If a person didn’t learn about a crime until after the fact, could they still be considered an accessory?”

  That opened up more questions for me than I’d had before. Like was he worried about protecting himself or his wife? His wife was his soft spot. If he’d told her after our last visit that he’d killed Gordon and the drug accusation was a lie to hide it, then he might be worried the police would charge her with something as well.

  “It depends on the situation. To be an accessory, a person”—I was careful not to say you in order to keep it general—“had to have helped with covering up the crime or had to help the perpetrator avoid capture. And spouses can’t ever be forced to testify against their husband or wife.”

  “What about failure to report? As a therapist, I have a duty to report child abuse. Is there any law in place where an average citizen needs to report a crime that isn’t child abuse if they learned about it months later and didn’t participate in covering it up? All that person did was stay quiet once they learned of it.”

  He asked the questions so calmly that it raised the hairs on the back of my neck. If I hadn’t known it was his training hiding his emotions, I would have pegged him for a sociopath. As it was, that knuckle crack made me think he was likely just really good at his job.

  The second question also made it sound like it wasn’t his wife he was worried about. Had Gordon committed some sort of crime and Leonard learned about it? If so, the victim of Gordon’s crime could have come back later to exact revenge. Or someone else could have known about it and they were blackmailing Gordon. In that case, he would have taken the money to pay off his blackmailer.

  I brought my hands down to my knees, a friendlier position. “You understand I can’t give you legal counsel?”

  He nodded, but the movement was abnormally small.

  In many states, there wasn’t even a legal duty to render aid to someone in distress. I’d had trouble sleeping for weeks after I heard about the Florida teens who videoed a man drowning on their phones and laughed rather than calling 9-1-1. Police were hoping to charge them with failure to report a death at least.

  I doubted that’s the kind of thing Leonard was talking about, though.

  “As far as I know,” I said, “there’s no legal duty to report a crime in Michigan.”

  Leonard leaned forward slightly and put his hands on his knees as well, a mimic of my posture. “Gordon withdrew that money to purchase something for our mother that would help her peacefully end her own life.”

  15

  That was not at all what I’d expected to hear.

  I let myself slump back in the chair. Physician-assisted death was legal in only a handful of states and only so long as they provided the means of death but didn’t administer it.

  Gordon wasn’t a doctor, and Michigan wasn’t one of the states where providing medical aid in dying was legal at all. If Gordon administered the lethal aid, then it would definitely have been considered a murder, even if he had been a doctor.

  “Did your wife know?”

  “She did. That’s why she seemed shocked when I said Gordon had a drug addiction. I explained to her afterwards why I lied.” Leonard’s gaze shifted to the side and then back to me as if he was deciding how much to share with me. “Gordon refused to tell me at first where the money went. That’s why I brought the suit against him. He only admitted it after that, and that’s the real reason I dropped the lawsuit. Our mother was in so much pain those final weeks. If she asked Gordon to help end her suffering…it was a better use of he
r money than whatever I would have spent it on.”

  There was a fierceness to his voice that I hadn’t heard before—a defense of his mother and brother’s decision.

  I’d never been there. I’d never had to watch someone I loved suffering. A part of me could understand their decision and a part of me couldn’t. Life was a precious gift, and so many people who wanted more days didn’t get to have them.

  Despite that, it wasn’t my place to criticize Leonard or Gordon right now. Right now, all that mattered was whether this somehow resulted in Gordon’s death.

  Whoever he bought the means of suicide from got their money. They wouldn’t have had a reason to come after him or to frame Clement. It couldn’t have been blackmail. That was the only unusual withdrawal from Maryanne Albright’s account and Gordon’s financials hadn’t shown anything unusual according to Chief McTavish.

  It was still possible that Leonard had killed Gordon because he was angry Gordon helped their mother end her life.

  But I didn’t see it. He sounded sincere when he’d defended Gordon’s actions. He was good at hiding his emotions, but I hadn’t seen any evidence that he was equally as good at faking emotions. Most people either had one of those skills or the other, but to have both was rarer.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this when I first asked?”

  “I thought my wife and I could be prosecuted after the fact for knowing about it, and I figured if I told you Gordon had a drug problem, you’d leave it at that or you’d pursue the drug angle and wouldn’t find out the truth.”

  I almost had. If it hadn’t been for Clement insisting Gordon didn’t do drugs, I might have wasted a lot of time looking for a drug dealer who didn’t exist.

  With what was at stake, I had to make sure Leonard wasn’t deceiving me again. If he hadn’t planned to tell me that Gordon assisted their mother in killing herself, he might not have come up with a reason why I shouldn’t think he’d want to punish Gordon for it. “Withholding information that way makes it seem like you might have been angry with Gordon for what he did and killed him over it.”