by Emily James
The hollyhocks and purple flowers matched the ones that were in a tall vase on the kitchen counter in the crime scene photos. Sandra must have spent some of her last hours cutting blooms.
I gestured toward the garden. “Did Sandra like to garden?”
Dean hardly glanced in the direction I indicated. “Not really. Her sister was the one who liked plants. Nadine might have helped Sandra plant those, or they might have been here when we moved in. I can’t remember.”
Dean was shaping up to be the most difficult client I’d ever dealt with, and that was saying something, considering my parents’ stable of clients. “Where’s the bedroom window?”
Dean led me around the side of the house.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.
The side of the house practically butted up against the fence. I could walk through the space, but anyone with wider shoulders or hips wouldn’t have been able to. The neighbor’s house on the other side of the fence seemed equally close. If the fence wasn’t there, I could have stretched out my arms and touched both houses at once. The placement of the windows on the neighbor’s house meant they’d have had a good view of anyone trying—I couldn’t see them succeeding—to set up a ladder and climb into the bedroom window of Sandra and Dean’s house.
But their bedroom probably wasn’t the only room on the second floor. The killer hadn’t necessarily needed to come directly into the bedroom. Maybe he’d come into the bathroom or another bedroom window.
I blew out a puff of air. “Maybe we ought to look at the other windows.”
I continued on to the front of the house. It would have been dark out when Sandra died, so theoretically, the killer could have come in through one of the windows above the porch. They’d have even had an easier time because of the porch roof.
I took out my phone and made notes to interview the neighbor across the street. The police should have already done so, but if they were sure Dean was their guy, they might have skipped a step. I also wrote down all the other items I’d been keeping on my mental list. I’d been spoiled working for my parents. I’d always been part of a team. On this case, anything I wanted done, I’d have to do myself. The police certainly weren’t going to help.
“The screens don’t come out,” Dean said.
I glanced up. “The screens don’t come out of what?”
“The windows on the front. It’s an old house, and the screens on the front windows are in a metal frame. He’d have had to cut the screens.”
And clearly the screens weren’t cut. The killer hadn’t gone in those windows, either.
We walked the rest of the house, though by the end, it felt like I shouldn’t have bothered. The windows in the bathroom were too small for anyone other than a child to climb through, and the windows on the back that were large enough were also painted shut.
“Old house,” Dean said with a shrug.
How he could be so nonchalant was beyond me. What we’d managed to prove was the killer had walked right past him and killed his wife while he was downstairs.
Or he was the killer after all.
8
A tension headache bloomed in a line across my forehead. “You could have told me from the start that the killer couldn’t have gotten in through a window.”
“You’re the boss. I’m supposed to follow orders. You wanted to see the windows.”
I decided to ignore the touch of snark in his words. If a bit of wasted time was the price for him to do what he was told as a client, I’d pay it. “I need to see the bedroom next.”
Dean walked me to the bottom of the stairs. “It’s the first door, but you can look in the others if you need to. We use the second bedroom to store stuff.”
That sounded like… “You’re not coming up with me.”
He shook his head. His expression had gone flat, and for the first time, I noticed fine wrinkles starting in his forehead. “I haven’t been up there since it happened. There’s a second toilet down here, and I shower at the gym.”
He must also be sleeping on the couch. All my desire to hit him with something heavy faded. Maybe he had loved his wife after all. Maybe he hadn’t killed her. Not everyone knew how to deal with grief in a healthy way. Russ was a prime example. He hadn’t wanted to talk about the loss of my Uncle Stan and Noah. Instead, he’d put on an additional ten to twenty pounds and ended up on blood pressure medication.
“I’ll let you know if I have any questions once I take a look around.”
The stairs creaked on my way up, like I was an elephant rather than a person. I’d have to ask Mark’s medical opinion about whether a person could be passed out drunk to the point where they wouldn’t hear someone on the stairs or a fight taking place in a bedroom right off the stairs.
My look around was even quicker than the walk around the house had been. The bedding was gone, probably removed by the police as evidence. The mattress lay bare.
Dean had been telling the truth about not sleeping up here anymore.
Nothing in the room looked to have been broken or disturbed by a fight, either. That fact gnawed at me.
The mud smears were still on the bedroom floor. I crouched down as well as I could in my skirt and heels. There was only one set of prints, so there’d only been a single attacker.
The stairs groaned underneath me again as I went back down. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep through their noises, but then again, I’d never been fall-down drunk. I’d never even been drunk.
Dean sat on the couch, his feet propped up on the end table, and any humility gone from his expression.
That was my cue to leave. There wasn’t anything more I could do here anyway. In fact, I felt further behind than when I’d come. Always leave your client feeling confident in your abilities, no matter how hopeless the case seems, my dad would say.
“I’ll be in touch soon so we can discuss potential strategies for your defense. I need to talk to your neighbors first and see if they noticed anything they didn’t report to the police.”
I chose my words carefully to make it sound like we still had a chance to win. Unless I came up with something better than he was passed out asleep and a random person broke in and killed his wife and he didn’t hear it, a win wasn’t likely.
Dean hopped to his feet. “Don’t you need me to introduce you to my neighbors?”
Had he hit his head while I was upstairs? “I’m more likely to get unbiased answers from them if I go alone.” Anderson’s warning about how Dean tried to convince him to tamper with the jury flashed into my head. If Dean was willing to tamper with a jury, he’d have no qualms about bribing or blackmailing witnesses, either. “You shouldn’t talk to them at all from this point on until your trial is over.”
Dean’s gaze flickered to the side just enough for me to catch. I’d been right to be concerned. He had been planning on influencing them somehow.
I pointed a finger at him like he was a naughty child. This was definitely going to be a situation where I needed to follow my mom’s lead and lay down firm ground rules that couldn’t be argued with later on. “If you do anything illegal while I’m your lawyer, you’ll be back to defending yourself. Is that clear?”
I held back a shudder. I’d swear I’d even sounded like my mom.
Dean snapped a salute. I turned on my heel and left him there. I’d have to hope that my warning, along with Elise’s threat to keep the kids away from him if he ended up in prison, would be enough to keep him from doing anything stupid enough to sabotage his case.
I wasn’t optimistic. The sooner I could find solid evidence that someone else killed Sandra, the better. If this case went to trial, not only would we be handicapped by my bumbling courtroom abilities, but we’d have to cope with Dean’s flippant attitude and blatant disregard for the rules.
I stopped in the middle of the driveway and tapped my foot. Because of the way the road curved, Dean and Sandra only had four houses that could be considered neighbors. One was th
e house behind them, whose back yard butted up to theirs. Unless the murderer came through their back yard to enter Dean and Sandra’s, it wasn’t likely they’d have anything useful to say, though I would want to ask them if a roll of duct tape magically appeared in their backyard one morning.
The other three neighbors were the houses on either side and the one across the street.
I headed left. There weren’t any cars in the driveway, and no one answered the door. That wasn’t unusual, considering it was the middle of the day. I’d come back on an evening or weekend.
I went back to the house on the right and rang the doorbell. The man who answered had the lean, sun-spotted look of someone who’d spent their whole working life outside. At this point, I would have put his age at around 65 to 70.
He only opened the door a crack, and I had the feeling like he’d planted his foot behind it in case I tried to force my way in.
“I don’t need any tracts on salvation,” he said.
I peeked down at my clothes. I suppose I could be mistaken for a Jehovah’s Witness. They always came to the door nicely dressed.
“Actually, I’m Dean’s Scott’s lawyer. My name’s Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes.”
I held out my hand, but he ignored it. I lowered it back to my side.
“I was wondering if you could give me a few minutes for a couple of questions. Right here is fine.” His body language clearly said I wasn’t getting an invitation into his house, so right here would have to be fine.
His gaze shifted from the left to the right. “Which one is Scott?”
I pointed back toward Dean’s house. “His wife, Sandra, was killed.” I gave him the date and time.
He nodded along. “I did see the police crawling all over the place, and they asked me if I’d seen anyone lurking around. I thought there’d been a break-in. Didn’t realize someone had died.”
At least he remembered that much. That should mean he would also still recall if he’d seen anything suspicious. “I have to do my own investigation, so forgive me if it seems repetitive. Did you see anyone entering or leaving the Scotts’ house the day before?”
I left it broad. We had to allow that the murderer could have sneaked into the house at any point. He or she might have even been waiting for Sandra when she came home from the grocery store.
“I spend most of my day in my shop.” He hooked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Like I told the police, my hearing’s going, and my saws are too loud to hear anything else.”
This interview seemed like it was going to be a dead end, but I’d try one more route. “What about that night, after you came back into the house? Did you see or hear anything then?”
He gave me an are-you-stupid-or-something look. “I sleep at night like normal people. Can’t see anything with my eyes closed.”
Fair enough. I had one question left that the police might not have thought to ask. “You didn’t happen to find a roll of duct tape in your back yard the next morning, did you?”
He closed the door in my face. I would take that as a no.
The driveway of the house on the other side still sat empty of cars, so I crossed the street.
As I passed in front of Dean’s house, a figure stepped back from the window. Had he been watching me?
My skin went cold despite the warmth of the day. Why would Dean be watching me? If he’d been anyone other than my client, I’d have thought he was worried about what I’d find out from the neighbors.
I straightened my back and lengthened my stride as much as I could without risking wiping out thanks to my heels.
The front door of the house across the street swung open when I was only halfway up the driveway.
“Are you a real estate agent?” The woman standing in the door wore a sequined t-shirt and mom pants—the kind with the high waist that would make anyone look like they had a paunchy belly. “Are they selling the house?”
Did normal people not dress up in this town? First I’d been mistaken for a call girl, then a Jehovah’s Witness, and now a realtor.
I didn’t want to yell across the driveway, so I waited until I was almost at the door. “I’m a lawyer actually.”
Her face still held the anxious-hopeful expression it had when she first opened the door. “A property lawyer?”
“Criminal lawyer.”
“Does that mean the police think he killed his wife? If he ends up in prison, they’d probably sell the house instead of letting it sit empty for decades.”
The instincts I’d developed from years of listening to my parents interview witnesses both on and off the stand came to attention. This woman was much too interested in seeing Dean and Sandra’s house sold. “Are you interested in buying the place? I could talk to my client and see what I can do if you are.”
Her lips pulled together in a way that made her look like she was puckering up for a kiss. “I don’t have that kind of money. It’d just be better for the neighborhood if they weren’t part of it anymore.”
She narrowed her eyes as if to say I should be ashamed of myself for taking on someone like Dean as a client.
I knew that look well. It was the one that meant the person I was interviewing was about to shut down and wouldn’t tell me anything at all if they thought it would help my client. I needed to derail her before she got that far.
“I don’t think he plans to stay here now that his wife is dead.” On the color spectrum of lies, that one wasn’t exactly white, but hopefully it didn’t count as completely black, either. “What makes them such bad neighbors?”
“Besides the motorcycle that races into their driveway at all hours? I don’t know how anyone can sleep through all that racket, but I certainly can’t.”
The way she’d phrased it made it sound like the motorcycle didn’t belong to Sandra or Dean, but rather to someone else who regularly visited their house. “Did the motorcyclist visit the night Sandra died?”
“Thankfully, no. It was the first good night’s sleep I’d had in weeks.”
Her thankfully was my drat. If the person who rode the noisy motorcycle wasn’t here that day, it seemed unlikely they’d played a role in Sandra’s murder.
“What else made them bad neighbors?” I said, stalling for time so I could figure out another way to come back around to asking if she’d seen anyone going into the house during the day.
She gave me a litany about the unkempt lawn and washing his car during a drought warning a few years back. None of what she said should have resulted in Sandra’s murder unless I wanted to try to argue for the jury that an environmental activist wanted to stop his water waste, or that this woman had killed him because she couldn’t stand looking at his weeds anymore.
Still, she seemed like someone who paid close attention to what went on in the neighborhood. I might want to come back and ask her more questions later when I had a better idea of what might have happened. The man I’d spoken to before her would probably never open the door for me again since it was clear he thought I was either crazy or stupid.
“I’m so sorry for all the trouble they’ve caused you,” I said. “I’ll encourage him to sell the house one way or another, for the good of the neighborhood, and I’ll let you know if he does.”
The last thing she said before she closed the door was “You seem like too nice a girl to be a criminal lawyer. You really should consider a career change.”
9
I sat in my car in Dean’s driveway for five minutes to organize my notes. Short of finding anything unusual that the police had ignored, the only way I saw of getting Dean acquitted was to find the person who’d really killed Sandra.
Since the neighbors hadn’t seen anything, that left me without a clear direction except the clichéd catchphrase follow the money. Not only did he have a rundown house with an expensive, new-looking car in the driveway, but Elise had said he’d recently begun contributing to the support of the kids.
I couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that he wasn’t completel
y innocent. If he was involved in some criminal activity, that could have ended up in Sandra getting killed. Maybe she threatened to turn him in, and he killed her. Maybe Dean crossed the wrong person, and killing Sandra was retribution. Maybe Sandra had money, and Dean killed her for it.
Following the money seemed like my best option at present for figuring out who really killed Sandra, whether it was Dean or someone else. Besides, if Dean was involved in something illegal—whether or not he killed Sandra—Elise might let me quit this case. Talking to Dean left me feeling dirty in a way that even defending guilty clients hadn’t. I didn’t like him, and I didn’t trust him.
I started my car and pulled out of the driveway. Dean’s head appeared in his front window, then vanished again, and the neighbor across the street stood in her front door, openly staring. I was beginning to understand what a prey animal felt like.
A yawn cracked my face even though it was only early afternoon. Investigating a case on my own was turning out to be exhausting. In the past, I’d always had help from my parents’ firm and extensive resources or from the Fair Haven PD.
I certainly couldn’t ask for help from either of those sources now. Neither Elise nor Erik should put their careers on the line to run things down for me.
But I would need outside help to check in to Dean’s background and financials. The financial reports that came in the discovery package were a start, but I wanted to dig deeper and look into areas the police might not have.
I instructed my phone to call Anderson’s cell phone.
“Well, if it isn’t Ms. Fitzhenry-Dawes again. If we’re not careful, I’m going to look forward to our regular chats.”
His tone was light-hearted, but my throat squeezed shut a little bit. Had I given him the wrong impression at some point?
Egotistical much, Nikki?
He’d never even seen me in person. For all he knew, I was twenty years younger or twenty years older. I shouldn’t read too much into someone being nice. I was the daughter of his role model, after all, and he might not get a chance to talk to other criminal attorneys much.
