Aunt Beth looked at the stack of boxes as Harriet placed them on the desktop.
“What have you got there?”
Harriet set each box down so she could read the labels.
“Remember a month or two ago when I was digging up all those photos for Lainie and Etienne? They were working on a school genealogy project.” She held up one of the white boxes. “They sent their DNA to one of those services that analyzes your sample and tells you what country or countries your ancestors come from.”
Lauren stopped what she was doing, holding a notepad in her hand.
“And the punch line is?”
“You send them saliva samples,” Harriet said. “There are five boxes here. There should be four—one each for Lainie, Etienne, Aiden and Michelle.” She started opening lids. “I’m betting one of these boxes still has its vial inside.” In the third box, she hit pay dirt. She carefully eased the stoppered tube from its foam cutout in the box. It was half full of liquid. “She sent in two vials of her own saliva and kept Aiden’s. I’ve seen the report. It doesn’t tell gender because presumably you know that already. It only tells you countries and percentages. She’s been planning this for a while.”
Lauren set the pad she’d been scanning back in the nightstand.
“So I guess that seals the deal for Michelle.”
Harriet carefully replaced the vial in its box and put the boxes back in the drawer. For the sake of completeness, she opened the shallow center drawer on the desk.
“Hello. I found the stash of burner phones.” She pulled the drawer wide. Four phones were side-by-side, sticky notes on their tops identifying them by number.
Aunt Beth had struggled to push the blanket back into the dresser drawer, then finished looking in the other drawers, finding nothing else of interest.
“Do we have enough? I mean, to convince ourselves Michelle is involved. Isn’t this when we should call Detective Morse?”
Harriet explained what she and Lauren and their roommates had discussed at lunch.
“So, we need to tell Detective Morse, but I think we need to get Jules to help us set a trap.”
“Let’s finish up in here and get out. We can call Morse when we have this place locked back up.”
“Detective Morse said she can meet us in a half-hour at the coffee shop.” Harriet slid her phone back into her pocket.
“Has anyone called the watch team?” Aunt Beth asked.
Mavis picked up her coat and bag.
“We can call them from the car. I know they’re watching, but it still makes me nervous being in Michelle’s house. Especially if she really is capable of killing someone.” She shivered. “I hate to even think about that.”
Harriet turned to Carla.
“Can you come with us?”
She touched her phone screen to see the time.
“Wendy’s going to be playing at DeAnn’s for another hour, but I’ll take my own car, in case Detective Morse is late.”
At the Steaming Cup, Detective Morse picked up her coffee at the bar and joined the group, who were once again seated around a large table.
“Your message was pretty cryptic. Do I want to know what you think you know?” She sat down across from Harriet and looked at each one of them. No one smiled at her comment. “Okay, something has you spooked. Who wants to tell me what it is?”
No one spoke at first, then Harriet began.
“We came across some information that Aiden’s sister was seen talking to Marine’s dad. We were reviewing the evidence we knew about. We know Aiden didn’t deposit his saliva on Marine.” Morse started to speak, but Harriet stopped her. “Let me get this all out at once, or it won’t make sense.”
“Fair enough,” Morse said.
“We figured the people in Aiden’s house are the most likely to be able to get his saliva. We know it wasn’t Carla.”
Carla’s cheeks turned pink, but she didn’t say anything. Morse leaned back in her chair.
“We asked Carla where the police searched when they executed their warrant on Aiden’s house, and she mentioned that Michelle kept her bedroom locked at all times.”
Harriet sipped her tea and set her cup down again. Mavis took up the story.
“We were getting antsy sitting around doing nothing. Carla, here, knows where Michelle hides her spare key, so we decided we’d take a peek in her room. We figured we wouldn’t find anything, but at least we could eliminate her as a suspect.”
Morse ran her hand through her short hair.
“What did you find?” she asked.
“A couple of things,” Harriet said. “First of all, I was looking in her desk, and I found the boxes from the genealogy test kits Aiden, Michelle and the kids did a few months ago. There should have been four kits. I remember when the kids were doing their ancestry project for school; they only talked about testing themselves, their uncle and their mother.
“Anyway, I looked in all the boxes. Four had empty foam and papers. One box had a vial half full of saliva. We have no way of knowing, but my bet is Michelle sent in two vials of her own spit, since she and Aiden would have the same heritage. She kept Aiden’s actual vial for her own purposes.”
“Don’t forget the blanket,” Aunt Beth reminded her.
Morse drank a sip of her coffee.
“There’s more?”
“I found an electric blanket in her dresser drawer. This is out of our realm, but we’re wondering if Michelle could have used it to keep Marine’s body warm while she came to ask us if we’d seen her, then took it off before Aiden got back to find the body.”
Detective Morse looked thoughtful.
“It’s possible, I suppose. But you know there are problems with your illegal search of her room. I mean, I can go see if blanket fibers were found on her clothing or body, but even if you call in an anonymous tip about what’s in her room, it’s not going to take a genius to figure out it was one of you, and probably Carla will be accused of illegally entering her locked room.”
Harriet’s mouth lifted on one side in a half-smile.
“Oh, no. Here it comes,” Morse said.
“We have an idea about getting Michelle to confess,” Harriet told her. “Marine’s half-brother was the one who told me he saw Michelle talking to his dad. He runs with a rough crowd.
“I haven’t talked to him about this, but I’m willing to bet Jules would go to Michelle and tell her he saw her and Marine going into Aiden’s apartment at the critical time. He could say he was trying to find Marine and was waiting for Michelle to leave so he could talk to her. He could claim he went up to the door when he saw her leave, and no one answered. Then he can ask her for a payoff to keep quiet.”
“We assume you could wire him for sound?” Aunt Beth added.
Morse sipped her coffee thoughtfully. The Loose Threads stared at her intently. She set her mug down and sighed.
“You guys never make it easy, starting with the fact that it’s not my case.”
“But you can help?” Mavis persisted.
“Let me do some checking. I can find out about the blanket fibers. What color was the blanket, by the way?”
“Blue,” Aunt Beth said.
“I can talk to the genealogy company and see if they can tell us the gender of the samples sent by the Jalbert family. For your part, give Jules my number and ask him to call me. If it goes that far, and the detectives assigned to the case agree, we can set it up. In the meantime, are you sure you didn’t leave any sign that you were in Michelle’s room?”
They all nodded.
“Stay away from Michelle. We don’t want to spook her. I know you all think you’re Miss Marple but trust me, you’re not, and if you see her, there’s a good chance at least one of you will act different enough to tip her off.”
“I asked Tom to get the Renfros to make an excuse to keep Michelle’s kids,” Harriet told her. “I’d like to think she wouldn’t hurt her own kids, but I’m not positive.”
“It’s
sad to say, but I think that’s a good idea. If she is guilty, she’s sick and sick people sometimes do terrible things.”
Mavis rested her hand on the back of Carla’s chair.
“Honey, whenever this all goes down, I think you should go stay with Connie. I’ll call her, but I’m sure it’ll be okay.”
“That’s also a good idea,” Morse said. “If she realizes we’re on to her before she’s arrested, it could be dangerous for anyone around her.” She finished her coffee and crumpled her napkin. “I’d better get going. I’ll check with the crime lab and see what they’ve got.”
“I’ll call Jules and see if he’s willing to go along with our plan.”
Aunt Beth stood up.
“Let us know what he says.” She picked up her purse. “We better get going.”
Sharon and Harriet put their purses and coats away and went out to the grassy area by the driveway with Scooter.
“What will you do if Jules refuses?” Sharon asked.
“Well, it wouldn’t be optimum,” Harriet told her. “But we’d have to figure out another one of us to confront her and claim we’d seen her go in the apartment with Aiden.”
“Can I do anything to help?”
“I’m going to call and see if he’ll come by. I have to admit it’d make me feel better if you stayed within earshot. I think he’s okay, but I’ve only met with him twice, and one of those times he was trying to extort money from me.”
“I wondered.”
“I guess I’d better make the call,” Harriet said and led the way back into the house.
Chapter 28
Harriet dialed the number Jules had given her, and the call went straight to voicemail. She did as instructed, saying only that she needed to see him. An hour later, he still hadn’t called back.
“I’m going to work on my customer quilt out in the studio,” she told Sharon. “We’ll give Jules another hour, and if he doesn’t make contact, I’ll call Lauren and my aunt and see what they think.”
“I’m going to sit in the TV room and stitch on my crazy quilt block, if that’s okay with you.”
“Sure, no problem,” Harriet told her.
Forty-five minutes later, Harriet’s stitching was interrupted by a quiet tap on her studio door. She crossed the room and opened the door. Jules stood on her porch, hands in his pockets and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. His jaw was dark with five o’clock shadow.
“Are you going to invite me in?” he asked.
She held the door wide to admit him and indicated her reception area. He flopped into the nearest wingback chair.
“Yesterday, you barely had the time of day for me. Now you want to see me. We both know you could have left a message with what you found out. So, what do you want?”
Harriet had the grace to blush.
“I did follow up on what you told me. The phone turned out to be a burner. It had been used to call Aiden a bunch of times, even though he says Marine and he didn’t call each other.”
“Why am I here, Harriet?”
“Okay, I’ll cut to the chase. My friends and I searched Michelle’s room and found what looks like a vial of saliva—Aiden’s saliva, if my guess is right. We also found an electric blanket bagged up in a dresser.”
“I’m going to guess Michelle didn’t give you permission to search her room.”
“Umm, it’s a little worse than that. Her room was locked.”
Jules sat up.
“You broke into her bedroom? I like it.”
“We didn’t break in; we used a hidden key.”
“So, the police can’t act on what you found because you didn’t find it legally, right? Is this where I come in to it? You think I’ll be your pet criminal?”
“I went to the police. I told Detective Morse what we found and what we thought happened. She’s going to check to see if blanket fibers were found on Marine, but as you said, she can’t get a warrant to search Michelle’s room based on our illegal search. My friends and I had an idea.”
“And you don’t want to get your hands dirty.”
“Look, you came to me and tried to extort money for information, so don’t try to play Mr. Innocent now. You cast yourself as a bad guy. I do give you credit for coming back and telling me what you know—if that is, in fact, all you know. It doesn’t matter now. You want to know who killed Marine, I want Aiden out of jail. Can we stop with the verbal sparring and get to the plan?”
“Please, enlighten me.”
“First, if you agree to do this, you have to call Detective Morse. It will all be legal and aboveboard. The police will wire you, and you’ll go to Michelle and tell her that, on the day she died, you were trying to find Marine. Maybe you could say Marine wanted you to bring her drugs or something.”
“Because, of course, I’m that kind of guy.”
Harriet glared at him.
“Sorry, continue.”
“You tell Michelle you saw her go into Aiden’s apartment with Marine and then come out alone. You waited until she left then knocked on the door. No one answered. You found out later Marine had been found dead at Aiden’s. If Michelle would like you to keep this piece of information to yourself, she needs to pay you. It’s just another extortion scheme. You should be a natural.”
“What if she decides to just kill me instead? Did you think of that.”
The color drained from Harriet’s face.
“Guess not, huh? I’m expendable.”
“Of course not. I’m sure Detective Morse will have undercover people near you all the time. You could wear a Kevlar vest.”
“Oh, yeah, ‘cause that wouldn’t look suspicious at all.”
“Okay, so, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, after all.” Harriet sat back in her chair. “It all sounded so simple when we talked about it.”
“Things like this are always simpler when it isn’t your hide on the line.”
“We’ll have to think of something else.”
“I’ll do it.” Jules said.
“But it’s too dangerous. You said so yourself.”
“I didn’t say too dangerous. I just pointed out the risks. If Michelle killed my sister, she probably killed my dad, too. Someone needs to stop her.”
“Detective Morse is going to check on the blanket fibers, and check with the genealogy company and find out if she sent in two of her sample and none of Aiden’s. She thinks they can tell male versus female. There was one too many test kits in Michelle’s desk drawer, and one of them still had the spit sample in it, and it wasn’t full anymore. If it all checks out, she’ll talk to the detectives in charge of the case, and if they agree only then will she bring you into it.”
“Maybe I’ll find Michelle and take care of things myself,” Jules said.
“What happened to ‘I’m not a bad guy’? You killing Michelle makes you no better than she is.”
Jules sighed. “I know you’re right, but she killed my family. They may not be much, but they’re my blood. Can you understand that?”
“I do understand the impulse, but you can’t act on it.”
He blew out his breath.
“I know. I’ll call your cop and hope she does the right thing.”
“She will. She’s one of the good guys.” Harriet wrote Morse’s number on a piece of paper and handed it to him.
He looked into her eyes.
“If you say so.” He took the paper and then hung his head.
She looked at him, studying what she could see of his face. He was pale under his day’s growth of beard, and she could see fatigue lines etched into his face.
“You look tired.”
He swiped his hand over his face.
“I’m fine. I’ve been working the midnight shift at the factory.”
Harriet tried to keep her face neutral. She felt ashamed of the assumptions she’d made. After Jules had tried to extort her, she’d just assumed he made his living selling drugs or scamming people or both. Maybe he did all of those th
ings, but he also had a regular job; and she had to at least consider that he might not do any of those other things. She hadn’t bothered to find out.
“Do you want a cup of coffee or something? I mean, as long as you’re here.”
His mouth curved up on one side.
“Oooh, are you inviting the bad boy into the inner sanctum?”
“My roommate is on the other side of the door.” She hoped she was telling the truth. She was pretty sure she’d heard Sharon shuffling around in the kitchen shortly after he had entered. “I also have a ferocious watchdog.”
Jules laughed. “Yeah, we’ve met. Now I’m scared.”
Sharon must have been listening at the door. When Harriet led Jules into the kitchen, she was pouring water into the coffeepot and had an array of pods out on the counter. She had also gotten the box of ginger snaps from the cabinet and had a plate out to put them on.
Scooter wagged his tail and, when Jules sat down, jumped into his lap and attempted to lick his face.
Jules pulled his cell phone from his pocket.
“Let’s see what the good detective has to say for herself.” He tapped in the number Harriet had given him. He identified himself, stated his willingness to help, and then listened.
“Call me when you’re ready,” he said and tapped his phone off.
Harriet and Sharon had stopped what they were doing and stared expectantly at him.
“She wants to check a few more things, but she said there were blanket fibers on my sister’s clothes. She’ll call about the DNA tests tomorrow, but she ran into one of the detectives in charge of the case, and he’s going to talk to his partner about the sting, but he was pretty sure they were going to go along with it. He told her they had nothing to lose. If she confesses, good, but if she doesn’t, they still have Aiden.”
Harriet set a cup of coffee in front of him and sat down opposite him with her own.
“Somehow, I don’t find that very comforting.”
Jules looked up as Sharon slid a plateful of cookies onto the tabletop between them.
“The more we talk about it, the more convinced I am that Michelle killed my sister. It never seemed right that she would go get Marine out of her sobriety program and bring her to Foggy Point to go to a quilting class. I mean, no offense, but…quilting?”
Crazy as a Quilt (A Harriet Turman/Loose Threads Mystery Book 8) Page 22
