Best Laid Plans

by Allison Brennan

  Jolene is distraught over Harper’s death, which is completely understandable given the circumstances. Sometimes, the people we think we know best disappoint us. I will, of course, not be pressing charges. I’m sure in the morning Jolene will be aghast at what transpired, and I hope to mend fences.

  The article ended with:

  Harper Worthington, CEO of HWI, a respected San Antonio CPA firm that specializes in corporate and government audits, was found dead early Saturday morning in a San Antonio motel known to be a downtown hub of prostitution. The cause of his death is unknown, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation is working closely with the San Antonio Police Department. Neither the FBI nor the SAPD responded to questions regarding the circumstances of Worthington’s death, but a source close to the investigation said, on condition of anonymity, “Worthington’s death has been unofficially ruled a homicide and the FBI has taken over the investigation.”

  Someone at SAPD had talked to the press. Maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but Lucy was angry—not just because there were a few details that would be better to keep out of the media, but because it put the FBI in a negative light. Only a local cop would say the FBI had “taken over” the investigation.

  But it couldn’t have been someone high up or directly involved with the investigation—the responding officers knew that their chief had requested FBI assistance.

  Barry walked through the squad room and dumped his briefcase and keys on his desk. “Kincaid, Jolene Hayden is here early. I assume you read the article?” He motioned to the newspaper on her desk.

  “Yes. Is she upset?”

  “Understatement. Let’s go, interview room two.”

  Lucy reached into her bottom desk drawer and pulled out a minibag of peanut M&M’s. As she passed Zach’s desk, she tossed the bag to him. “Thanks,” she whispered.

  He grinned without comment and immediately opened the bag.

  “Who talked to the press?” Lucy asked Barry.

  “Don’t know. I’ll find out, but dealing with it is Juan’s problem. To keep the peace, he’ll probably let it pass. I’m very interested in what happened last night between the daughter and the congresswoman. It puts another spin on the case.”

  “We should talk to Mrs. Worthington again.”

  Barry stopped outside the door. “Why?”

  “She called the police on her stepdaughter. That doesn’t say happy family to me.”

  Two people were waiting in the interview room—Jolene and her husband, Scott Hayden. Barry introduced himself and Lucy and slid over a set of business cards to each of them. “Thank you for coming down,” Barry said.

  Jolene had made an effort to pull herself together in a businesslike way, but her blond hair was limp and her face pale, even under the makeup. Her husband was dressed in a suit, sans tie, and held her hand.

  “Tell me what happened to my father,” Jolene said. “I have to know.”

  “We’re sorry for your loss,” Barry said.

  Her eyes teared, but her jaw clenched. “You told Adeline, but didn’t tell me.”

  “It’s policy to tell the next of kin, which in your father’s case was his spouse.”

  “I’m his daughter.”

  “Honey,” Scott said quietly. He didn’t need to say anything else. Jolene nodded, her bottom lip quivering. Scott said, “Harper and Jolene were very close. Harper raised her after her mom died. The last forty-eight hours have been extremely difficult.”

  Barry said, “I’ll share everything we know, but in turn, I need you to be completely honest when answering our questions.”

  “Of course—why wouldn’t I be? I need to know what happened. It’s not what she said, I know it. And the paper—they said he was murdered.”

  “That isn’t public information,” Barry said. “We don’t have a definitive cause of death, but we are treating the investigation as a homicide.”

  Jolene sucked in a breath and squeezed her husband’s hand.

  “San Antonio PD called the FBI into the investigation, and we’re working closely with them to find out exactly what happened.” Barry glanced at Lucy and gave her a brief nod. At first she wasn’t certain what he wanted, but decided he was asking for a gentle touch with Jolene.

  Lucy assessed the woman and determined that Jolene was stronger than she’d first appeared. Her posture was straight, and she was working hard to keep her emotions in check. She was a professional businesswoman, and her husband was there for support, so Lucy decided to be as blunt as possible, but also to walk Jolene through the facts as they knew them.

  “I want to give you the big picture first,” Lucy said, “because there are several things we don’t know about the events prior to your father’s death.”

  Jolene nodded. “I can take it. I just want the truth.”

  “Here are the facts. Harper Worthington bought a round-trip plane ticket from Dallas to San Antonio on Friday night. The tickets were purchased last minute—only hours before the plane left. It appeared he only planned on staying in San Antonio for a few hours before returning to Dallas. He told the taxi driver that he had a meeting at the White Knight Motel and requested that the man return for him one hour after being dropped off. The flight times confirm the timeline.

  “When the driver returned and suspected something was wrong, the manager opened the room and found your father deceased. The police were called, and when his identity was learned, the police chief contacted the FBI.”

  “Adeline said he had been with a prostitute. She’s lying,” Jolene said.

  “The taxi driver saw a young woman dressed immodestly leaving the motel room. Because the girl propositioned the driver, he determined that she was a prostitute—we have a surveillance tape with her picture and concur with the assessment. We’re looking for her now.”

  “No,” Jolene said. “You think that I can’t see the truth, but I know my dad, and he would never hire a prostitute. You don’t know him like I do. Ask anyone—anyone who knows him, and they’ll say the same thing. There has to be another reason my daddy was there.”

  “Did you know he planned on flying to San Antonio Friday night?” Barry asked.

  “N-no,” Jolene said, her voice cracking. “We had dinner with clients earlier. Daddy was a little preoccupied, said he was tired. He called me around ten thirty, said he was sorry about cutting dinner short, but we’d have breakfast together and he wanted to talk to me about something important. I thought—” But she cut herself off, and didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Thought what?” Lucy asked.

  “We were very close, Agent Kincaid, but Daddy is a southern gentleman. He didn’t like troubling me with personal problems. If it was business, he’d tell me. I started working for him when I was in high school, and I came on full-time after college. I’m not a numbers person like my dad, but I understand people and public relations, and work with our clients one-on-one. So it had to be something personal. And—” She hesitated again.

  “Jolene, you need to be open with us,” Lucy said. “We’re trying to find out not only how your father died, but why he was in San Antonio in the first place. No one at HWI knew about the spontaneous flight, there is no record of the meeting at the White Knight, and his wife didn’t know.”

  “After what happened last night, if I say it’s personal and had to do with Adeline, you’d tell me it was sour grapes. And it’s not,” Jolene said.

  “Everything is relevant,” Barry said, “until we rule it out.”

  “First, I want to make it clear that I did not attack Adeline last night. She made it seem that way, but I did not.”

  “Jolene, you need to be completely honest with these agents,” Scott spoke up for the first time. “Tell them exactly what happened.”

  Jolene drank from her water bottle with unsteady hands. “I should never have gone over there.”

  “You’re right,” Scott said. He turned to Lucy and Barry. “I had to go to the hospital to check on a patient who was in post
-op. There had been complications, otherwise I would never have left Jolene alone last night.”

  Jolene patted his hand. “Of course you needed to go. It’s my fault. I pretended to be asleep.” To Lucy and Barry she said, “Scott is a pediatric surgeon. His patient was a toddler; he saved her life.” Even through her grief, she beamed pride at her husband.

  Jolene continued. “I heard from a friend that Adeline had had people over to the house all day, receiving them, playing the grieving wife. She hadn’t told me anything about it. I didn’t care, at first, until I heard that she was planning the funeral. She emailed me—emailed!—that I should come to the house to approve her arrangements. I just … lost it. She was married to my dad for eight years—and I knew Daddy wasn’t enamored with her anymore. He used to glow about Adeline. How smart she was, how proud he was of her for running for office, how thoughtful she was. But lately—he didn’t talk about her at all. And he wouldn’t tell me because, well, I wasn’t really that supportive of him getting married in the first place.” She took a deep breath and shook her head. “You don’t care about that.”

  “What happened last night?” Lucy prompted.

  “I went in and she was drinking a bottle of my parents’ anniversary wine. It was a special collection Daddy had bought for my mom, and after she died, he would open a bottle on their anniversary to remember her. And she was drinking it and Daddy was dead and I was crying. It makes no sense to anyone else, but to me it was the worst betrayal. She told me that … that he was with a prostitute, she said that I didn’t know my dad at all, that he—he—he was a pervert.” She pounded her fist on the table as her eyes moistened again. “I will not let her destroy my father’s name. I won’t.”

  Scott said, “The sheriff’s deputies told me that the alarm had been tripped and they responded. Adeline baited Jolene into throwing that bottle. But she didn’t throw it at her. She aimed at a wall.”

  “But you weren’t there,” Barry said.

  “No, but I believe my wife. I don’t know how the press found out about it. They were at our house when the police brought Jolene home.”

  “Because Adeline called them,” Jolene said emphatically. “You know, I don’t care about the house. It’s just a house. It’s what’s inside that I want. My memories. Photographs. My parents’ wedding album. I can’t stand that Adeline will have her hands on it.”

  Scott said, “You said you’re investigating Harper’s death as a homicide. Please, be honest with us, was he with a prostitute?”

  Lucy didn’t say anything mostly because she wasn’t certain what she truly believed anymore. Barry said, “Our investigation is ongoing. We don’t know why your father went to that motel room or what that girl was doing there. We have evidence that she is a prostitute, but no evidence that your father had sexual relations with her.”

  “How did he die?” Scott asked. “Adeline originally told Jolene that it was a heart attack.”

  “We’re waiting for toxicology.”

  “What does that mean?” Jolene asked, turning to her husband.

  Scott said, “Blood and tissue samples. To see if he’d been drinking or on drugs.”

  “Daddy didn’t drink much, and he absolutely didn’t do drugs,” she said.

  “We’ve already determined that he had no alcohol in his system and none of the common illicit drugs were found in his blood or in his possession,” Barry said. “We’re waiting on additional tests. It appears that he was injected in the back of his neck.”

  Both Jolene and Scott stared at them, confused.

  Barry said, “Technically, he died of asphyxiation—he couldn’t breathe. But there was no evidence of strangulation or suffocation. That’s why the coroner is pursuing a chemical reason. But we haven’t released that information, because we don’t have a final report from the ME’s office. So I’d appreciate if you kept that to yourselves until the official word.”

  Lucy said, “Go back to something you said earlier, Jolene. That your father had been preoccupied for the last few weeks. Why don’t you think it was related to his business?”

  “Because he would have told me. We talked business all the time. Maybe not so much last week, but … it’s hard to explain why. I just know my dad. I guess—we’d talk about HWI and what audits were pending, what clients we were taking on or dropping, things like that. We met officially, with the staff, once a week, but I used to talk to him nearly every day about this or that. Not just business, but about Scott, or the house Scott and I are building, or horses—I keep several show horses. We’d catch up on friends, my cousins—personal stuff. But that all stopped a couple weeks ago. Maybe a month? He seemed rushed every time we spoke, like he needed to get to something else, so we talked about business and then he’d find an excuse to hang up. HWI wasn’t having any problems—I would know. So whatever was bothering him wasn’t about HWI. If that makes sense.”

  Lucy understood. It was subtle, but Jolene had the most intimate relationship with Harper, other than Adeline. She would know if something was occupying his mind. And her observations matched both Adeline’s comments about Harper visiting the doctor and seeming preoccupied, and Debbie Alexander’s comments about Harper acting out of character by canceling a meeting.

  Barry asked, “Do you know a real estate developer named James Everett?”

  “Of course. Everyone knows Everett,” Scott said. “But I don’t think we’ve ever met him.”

  “I did, a couple times,” Jolene said. “He wanted Daddy to go in with him on this land purchase outside of McAllen, but Daddy said no. He felt it was a conflict of interest to get into a business deal with one of Adeline’s biggest supporters. Mr. Everett and Adeline were in business together, a real estate development company, before she ran for office. I was in the meeting where he pitched the idea to Daddy. Mr. Everett was not happy my dad refused, and suggested Daddy give me the money to go in on the deal to avoid a potential conflict, but that made my dad even more furious. He told him to leave.”

  “Do you remember when this conversation took place?”

  “A couple of years ago. Before Scott and I got married. I don’t even think we were engaged. If it’s important, I can find the exact date. We met at HWI, they keep permanent records of all scheduled appointments.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Barry said. “Would you say that your father was friends with Mr. Everett?”

  “No,” Jolene said. “Friendly, maybe, but not friends, especially after that meeting. Why?”

  “His name came up during our investigation,” Barry said vaguely. “We’re doing everything we can to find out exactly what happened to your father. If you have any additional information about why he might have been in San Antonio Friday night, it would help.”

  Jolene hesitated, then reached into her large purse and pulled out a computer tablet. “I wasn’t sure I should give this to you.”

  “Jolene,” Scott said with a warning tone.

  “Well, I wasn’t, Scott! Not after what Adeline said. I don’t want to give her any ammunition to destroy my daddy’s reputation. He was proud of his name, his business. And now it’s my business, and I’m going to carry on his legacy. He would want that.”

  She slid the tablet across the table. “Saturday morning, when Adeline called me and said that Daddy was dead, I packed up his hotel room. I didn’t think anything of it then, because I was really upset, and I didn’t know how or when or anything. This tablet was in his briefcase, which he’d left in his hotel room. I’ve never seen it before. Last night, I turned it on, but it’s password protected. I tried all Daddy’s usual passwords, none of them worked, and it locked me out. I was going to give it to the security consultant HWI hired to assist with the forensic audit, but maybe you should have it.”

  Barry said, “You did the right thing.” He rose and shook their hands. “Thank you for coming down, and we’ll be in touch.” He opened the door. “By the way, who did you hire?”

  Lucy’s stomach fell. She should h
ave told Barry immediately about Sean, but she didn’t think of it when she saw him.

  “Sean Rogan. He came highly recommended, and Gregor—our security chief—says he’s the best in the business. I can give you his contact information if you need it.”

  Barry glanced at Lucy. She couldn’t read his expression, but the blank face couldn’t be a good sign. “We have it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As soon as Jolene and Scott left, Barry pulled Lucy back into the conference room and closed the door. “You should have told me.”

  “I didn’t know until yesterday when Sean told me. I didn’t suggest to Smith that he hire Sean. And I didn’t give Sean any direction. It’s his decision, not mine.”

  “You should have told Sean to turn it down. This is a huge conflict.”

  “It’s not a conflict. Sean is a security consultant. He has consulted with the FBI on numerous occasions. Having him on the inside will only help us. And honestly, it’s not my place to tell Sean what contracts he takes or doesn’t take. Besides, if they didn’t hire Sean, he would have recommended someone from RCK. They’re one of the top private security firms in the country with high government clearance. The ‘K’ stands for Kincaid.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I’m sorry, Barry, but this is Sean’s business.” She was sorry that there was a conflict with Barry, but she wasn’t sorry Sean had taken the job. “Why don’t you meet with Sean? Maybe if you get to know him, you’ll understand that when it comes to security, he’s all business.”

  “I’m going to have to tell Juan.”

  “I would have told you, but when you came in we immediately met with Jolene.”

  “All right.”

  She was confused. “What?”

  “You tell Juan. Now, not later. And I’m going to find out where James Everett is so we can interview him.” He held up the tablet. “I’m going to give this to Zach to work on cracking the code and extracting data.”