Still nothing.
I paused, my eyes darting around. Where could he have hidden it? And then it hit me: Matthew knew about the yarn I’d recovered. If he was guilty, he was smart enough to have gotten rid of whatever garment matched that yarn. No wonder he’d been furious at me for investigating. He was afraid of what I would find out.
I returned to my room, shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed, my head spinning. Finding the gun in his closet did prove he was the killer, didn’t it? I was in shock—sick to my stomach.
I thought back to the night of the murder, putting the events into sequence. Matthew had gone out to pick up dinner around nine, which was about the time Jeremy got that call. He could have made that call himself. He’d also gone out under the pretext of looking for Winston that night. My head spun as I added up all the evidence. I took a deep breath, trying to still my racing heart.
I shook my head again. There had to be a logical explanation.
I forced myself to think calmly. If Matthew had not put the gun in his closet, then the only explanation was that somebody else had. All at once I remembered David asking to use the washroom the night of the weaving class.
And then I remembered somebody else who had asked to use the washroom that night.
Mercedes Hanson.
Chapter 40
By the time Jenny pulled up in front of my house, I had made two decisions. First, I would keep quiet about finding the gun, at least until I talked to Matthew about it. And second, I would find out the truth about whether Mercedes had stolen it from Marnie. If I was correct, that put the gun in close proximity to Dolores—and made her my number one suspect. If she was guilty, that also meant that Mercedes was an accessory. What kind of a mother would involve her daughter in murder?
I locked the front door and hobbled over to the car.
“Nice shoes,” said Jenny, as I slid into the passenger seat. I slipped my crutches between the seats, and raising a foot I wiggled it to show off my sandals. “Thanks. How’d you sleep?”
“Not a wink all night,” she said, putting the car into gear.
“Me either.” Ever so casually I asked, “So, did you find out where Matthew disappeared to yesterday?”
“He said he took Winston for a walk and ran into Mike.” She sighed. “He made the mistake of telling him that he’d moved into my spare bedroom. It seems Mike didn’t take it very well.”
That was one heck of a long walk, I thought, remembering the call I’d made to her yesterday. By that time it had already been late afternoon and she’d told me Matthew had been gone for hours. I wondered what else he had done during all that time.
We sped along in silence until ten minutes later when Jenny tore into one of the hospital parking spots and came to a screeching stop.
“Oh, God, I hope she’s all right.” She hopped out, slammed the door shut and jogged toward the hospital entrance.
“Hey, what about the parking meter? You’ll get a ticket.” I fed the meter and hurried into the building as fast as I could. I caught up with Jenny at the reception desk, where the same chubby blonde was looking through admissions sheets.
She ran her finger down a list. “Susan Wood. Susan Wood. Ah, here she is—room 114.”
Jenny took off again, with me in lobbing pursuit—one turn and she was gone. “Hey, wait for me!”
I hurried down a corridor, took a left, and realized I was lost. What was it about hospitals? They were all built like mazes. They should do something about that, like maybe paint their corridors different colors so they wouldn’t all look the same. I stopped and looked around, trying to remember the directions the receptionist had rattled off. Suddenly I smelled the same odd odor I’d noticed on Mike Davis and on Joan Douglas a few days ago. That’s when I noticed the sign above the door in front of me. ONCOLOGY DEPARTMENT, it read, and below in smaller letters, CHEMOTHERAPY. It hit me like a ton of bricks. The smell I’d noticed the last time I’d been here had come not from Joan Douglas but from this room. I’d been standing in exactly this spot when I noticed it.
I paused as a new thought began to form. Susan Wood had said something about knowing everybody’s secrets. One of them had been about someone receiving chemo. And if Mike Davis was exuding that strange odor, it could mean he had cancer. Something niggled in the back of my mind. What had Matthew told me about Mike’s parents? Mike’s father had died from prostate cancer, and his wife had left him soon after he was diagnosed.
An orderly was walking by. “Excuse me. Could you tell me where I can find room 114?” I asked him. He pointed the way, and off I went, putting more of the puzzle pieces into place as I hurried along.
When I got to the room, Jenny was standing by Susan’s bed, holding her hand.
She turned to me as I walked in. “She’s still unconscious.” And then she smiled. “But, I don’t know, I have the feeling that she’ll be fine.”
I came closer and looked down at Susan. There were no bandages, no bruising. Her eyes were closed, her dark hair fanning over the pillow. But her color was good, her breathing regular.
“Are you sure she’s unconscious? She looks like she’s just sleeping.”
From behind me a voice said, “That’s because she is sleeping.”
I swung around. “Dr. Green!”
He stood in the doorway, wearing a lopsided grin. “I see you’re back to wearing high heels.”
“I wouldn’t call these high. They’re only small heels.”
He shook his head. “It’s your neck,” he said teasingly. He approached his patient and picked up the chart at the foot of the bed.
Jenny stepped back to give him room. “How is she, Doctor?”
“Pretty good. She was awake and alert for a few hours earlier. All her vitals are fine. As a matter of fact, if everything is still all right, she can probably go home when she wakes up.”
As if on cue, Susan stirred. Her lashes fluttered and she opened her eyes. She glanced around, looking confused.
Jenny leaned over her. “It’s okay, Susan. You’re in the hospital.”
“I am?” And then the cloud cleared from her eyes. “Oh, right. I remember.”
Dr. Green stepped forward and said, “Let me take a good look at this patient.” He did his flashlight-in-the-eyes thing. He listened to her heart and took her blood pressure. At last he smiled. “I think you’ll live.”
“She’s all right?” I asked.
“Good as new.” He smiled at Susan. “You can go home. Just make sure you stop by the nurses’ station and sign the release forms.” I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes kept drifting over to Jenny. He liked her.
When he spoke, it was to me, but he was grinning at Jenny. “It seems to me that you and your friends are a bit accident prone. Are you involved in some kind of extreme sport?”
I chuckled. “This is my friend Jenny Davis.” I watched as they locked eyes again, smiled and shook hands. She was looking rather intensely at the good doctor—probably reading his aura. And then it struck me. No. She wasn’t aura reading. Jenny liked Dr. Green. That raised the question of whether I should tell her my theory about Mike having cancer.
“I remember you. You used to work at that store,” he said.
“I still do.”
He stood smiling at her, and then he looked at his watch. “I was just about to have a coffee break. Would you care to join me?” As an afterthought, he turned to me. “You too, of course.”
Jenny looked uncertainly from him to me.
“Good idea,” I said quickly. “Jenny, you go ahead. It’ll take at least half an hour for Susan to get dressed and sign the discharge papers. We’ll join you when she’s done.”
Dr. Green smiled and nodded. “Shall we?”
Jenny hesitated.
“Go, go.” I shooed her away and watched them leave the room, both smiling awkwa
rdly.
“You have no intention of us joining them, do you?” asked Susan, pushing off the blankets and swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.
“You must have read my mind.”
She nodded. “I think we may have just witnessed the beginning of a romance.” She stood, and holding on to the back of her hospital gown, she looked around. “Any clue where my clothes might be?”
I spotted a locker against the far wall. “Probably in there.” I went over and opened it, retrieving a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. “Are these your clothes?”
“Yes.”
I carried them to her. “Now that we’re alone”—I glanced toward the door to make sure it was closed—“can you tell me what happened? Did someone attack you?”
“Attack me?” She looked shocked at the suggestion. “Eh, do you mind?” She signaled for me to turn around—modesty. I did. “Of course not. I tripped. Silly me, I was on the phone talking to you and tripped on the telephone cord.”
“So you didn’t confront anyone about being the murderer?”
She paused. I could almost hear the wheels grinding as she tried to remember. “I was going to. I called Dolores, but before I could get to it, she went into a screaming fit, accusing me of spreading rumors about her having an affair with Jeremy Fox.”
I swung around, just as she was pulling on her jeans. “Oh, sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m finished.” She tucked her shirt into her jeans. “You know the old saying, ‘The best defense is a good offense’?”
I nodded. “You think she already knew you were going to confront her?”
“If she thinks I’m just going to forget about that, she’s dead wrong.”
“You’re convinced it was her?” Now, more than ever, I wanted her to be right about this. I wanted anybody to be guilty, anybody but Matthew.
She nodded. “I know she had a gun. I saw it in her purse a few months ago. She stopped by the office to see Jeremy one day and left her bag on my desk while I went to the washroom. When I came back, I didn’t know whose bag it was, so I peeked inside. That’s when I saw the gun. I was so startled I closed the bag and didn’t tell a soul.”
So my theory that Mercedes could have stashed the gun in Matthew’s closet was plausible. A wave of relief washed over me. This theory could also explain the argument Dolores and her daughter had outside my front door. No matter how much mother and daughter argued, Mercedes was still Dolores’s daughter, which could explain why she decided to hide the gun in Matthew’s closet. She wanted to protect her mother.
“What should I do?” asked Susan. “I still don’t have any proof.”
Suddenly another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “I don’t know why this slipped my mind,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Did you know that Dolores is a dot-com millionaire?”
Susan nodded. “Yes, she invented some kind of software.”
“And the only thing that was missing from Jeremy’s house was his laptop.” I looked at Susan and saw the spark of understanding. “What if she wanted to break into his computer for some reason? If anyone would know how to do it, it would be Dolores.”
Chapter 41
We were at the nurses’ station and Susan had just signed the discharge form when Jenny came striding over, wearing a wide smile.
“There you are. What happened to you? I thought you were going to join us.”
“We figured you’d be perfectly fine on your own. Right, Susan? In fact, we thought you’d rather we left you two alone.”
Jenny blushed. “He’s nice.” She shrugged. “But it was only coffee, for goodness’ sake. I’ll probably never see him again.”
Susan opened her purse and dropped in her health care ID card. “Did he ask for your phone number?”
Jenny blushed even deeper. Before she could answer, I elbowed Susan. “Wait, wait, don’t tell me.” I closed my eyes, placing a hand to my forehead. “It’s coming to me. Yes. Yes, I can see it now.” I opened my eyes and pointed at her. “He’s going to call and ask you for a date.”
Jenny guffawed, slapping my finger. “You are so mean. You’re making fun of me.”
“You’re easy to make fun of,” I said, using the same words Matthew had once said to me.
• • •
As we headed toward the exit, I filled Jenny in on what Susan and I had concluded. “We still don’t have any physical proof, but we have enough circumstantial evidence to make a pretty good case.”
She pushed open the door, and we stepped outside. “So what are you going to do? Go to the police with what you know?”
We walked to the parking lot, trying to remember where Jenny had parked her car. “After the way Mike dismissed my tip before, I don’t really want to go to him. But I think if Dolores is aware of everything we know, she might decide to turn herself in.”
“There it is.” Jenny pointed to a row of cars. She pulled out her keys, clicked to unlock the doors and we slid in.
She paused, car key in hand. “So what’s the plan?”
I told her.
• • •
Ten minutes later we pulled up in front of a house that looked completely out of place on the quaint street. It was a large, modern stone structure that dwarfed all the neighboring houses. Except for that, it could have been on the cover of Architectural Digest.
“Her house suits her, don’t you think?” I said, staring at it as I gathered my courage.
In the driver’s seat, Jenny looked at Susan in the rearview mirror. “Are you up to this? We don’t have to do it now.”
“I’m fine. Just a bit cold, that’s all.”
“Why don’t you grab a sweater from the pile next to you?” To me, Jenny said, “I was going through some old uniforms of Mike’s to throw away, and then I thought of doing a new collection, pairing navy wool with sky-blue wool. What do you think?” She reached over the backseat and grabbed a pair of pants.
I fingered the fabric. “It’s nice, perfect for rugs and place mats. I bet it’ll look gorgeous.”
She looked pleased. “I’m glad you think so.” And then she got back to the subject at hand. “Ready?”
A moment later we were on the front stoop. “Her shrubs look as plastic as she does.” Susan smirked, looking at the immaculate landscaping. Bushes were clipped to perfection, flower borders in full bloom, automatic sprinklers spaced optimally. She pressed the buzzer and the sound of bells echoed through the house.
Jenny rolled her eyes. “Sounds like cathedral bells. A bit ostentatious, don’t you think?”
A moment later Dolores appeared, perfectly coiffed and made up. Her gaze landed on Susan. “You! You have no business here.”
Before she could slam the door in our face, Jenny pushed her way in. “We need to talk.”
To everybody’s surprise, Dolores moved aside with no argument. “We might as well get this over with.” She led the way through a foyer that would have been better suited to a hotel lobby than a private home. I looked around, taking in the polished marble floors, the white silk window treatments and the dozens of paintings covering the walls. This was not what anybody could call a cozy home.
She showed us into the kitchen. “I was just about to make some coffee.” She gestured toward the granite breakfast bar. “Anybody care to join me? Have a seat.”
Jenny, Susan and I looked at one another uncertainly. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but this was not it. We sat.
Dolores picked up a bag of Kona coffee and began measuring it into the coffeemaker. My eyes brightened. Kona was right up there with Jamaican Blue Mountain. “So what is it you want to talk to me about?” She did not look frightened as much as amused.
Susan raised her chin determinedly. “We know you killed Jeremy. And we have the evidence to prove it.”
Dolores paused, and for a seco
nd I thought I saw her waver. But she continued measuring and then she laughed. “You think I killed Jeremy? Now why would you think that?”
This time Jenny spoke. “You were having an affair with—”
“Jesus!” Dolores cut her off. “Have you got rocks in your heads? I never had an affair with that jerk. I despised him.”
“Then why were you spending so much time with him?”
She turned on the machine and spun around to face us. “Oh, what the hell, I might as well tell you. I’ve been spying on him—tracking the money he conned all those people out of.”
But Susan wasn’t about to be put off so easily. “You stole his laptop.”
“You’re right. I did.” She came closer, not looking guilty in the least. If anything, she seemed proud. “I needed to get into his computer. How else was I going to track the money?” She crossed her arms, giving us a smug smile. “And as of yesterday morning, everything he stole is back in the bank accounts of his victims. Go ahead and check for yourselves if you don’t believe me.”
I was too busy staring at her in shock to notice whether everyone else in the room had their mouths hanging open like mine was. At last I found my tongue. “Uh, I think she might be telling us the truth. Marnie told Jenny that the entire amount was back in her account yesterday morning.”
The coffee machine beeped and Dolores went to the cupboard, pulling out four mugs. She set them on the breakfast bar. “That, my dear ladies, was me.”
“But . . . how?” asked Susan. I glanced at her, noticing that even wearing one of Mike’s old uniform sweaters she was still shivering.
Dolores preened. “Jeremy Fox was greedier than he was smart. I invested in his project by way of international wire transfer. That’s how I found out he had an account in Belize. Once I knew where the money was, it was easy enough to do the rest. All I needed was his laptop. Jeremy was set up for online banking and, being lazy, he never deleted his browsing history.” She smiled. “He had a file with scans of all his victims’ checks, so I had their bank account information. And then I figured out he used his birthday for his password.” She smirked. “Such a moron! Once I was in, getting the money transferred back to everybody’s account was a piece of cake.”
Looming Murder Page 24
