Deception (A Miranda Murphy Thriller)

by Tim Kizer

  “What do you think she’s after?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she just didn’t like him. She holds grudges forever. And she’s cunning, too. You’re not going to make her talk, you’ll see.”

  Unfortunately, Kieffer was right. Taking into account that she would hire the best lawyers the money could buy, they needed solid direct evidence to put Staggs behind bars. Right now all they had was Kieffer’s word against Monica’s.

  As Miranda drove back to Boston, she called Hackett and told him about the new development.

  “Why would Monica want to kill me?” Hackett asked.

  “I thought you might have some ideas on this,” Miranda said.

  Hackett frowned. “I saw her a few times. She looks like a nice person,” he said. “Frankly, I have no clue why she would hate me so much. What does she gain from my death?”

  “Maybe your half of Marshall’s inheritance? You are his only son after all.”

  “They’re not married.”

  “They may be planning to get married.”

  Hackett shook the head. “After he divorced Mom, my dad said he’d never marry again. He’s kept his word so far.”

  “People change their minds all the time, especially when it comes to marriage. Anyway, it’s clear that Monica Staggs is involved in this. Now we need to find out who’s helping her.”

  Then Miranda dialed Dillon’s number and asked him if they could meet later today. Dillon agreed.

  6.

  “I’m sorry, Ms Murphy, I don’t have a lot of time,” Dillon said. “Therefore, you’ll have to cut to the chase.”

  “Sure. What can you tell me about your friend Monica Staggs?”

  “Monica? Why are interested in her?”

  “I suspect she might be involved in the attempt on your son’s life.”

  Dillon frowned and leaned back in his chair. “Why do you think she might be involved?”

  “I recently came across evidence pointing to her involvement.”

  “What evidence is it?”

  “I can’t answer this question at the moment. I’d much appreciate it if you could share with me everything you know about Miss Staggs. You don’t have to do it today. Please take your time and think this over.”

  “It seems to me you’re looking under the wrong rocks.”

  “I have to follow every lead since there aren’t many. I thought you’d like my thoroughness.”

  After a short silence, Dillon nodded. “Yes, you’re right. You should follow every lead.” He glanced at his watch. “Here’s the thing, Miranda. I doubt I can be objective to Monica. I’m not sure if any man can be objective to a young beautiful woman. Monica is very beautiful, I suppose you noticed that.”

  “She certainly looks good.”

  “I just can’t imagine why she would want to kill my son?”

  “Are you going to marry her?”

  Dillon shook his head. “I’ve already been married once. It was not a particularly entertaining experience to me. Besides, I believe that a woman marrying a rich guy thinks about his money first and foremost, no matter what she says. This is my personal opinion, and you don’t have to agree with it.”

  “Has Monica ever mentioned marriage to you?”

  “No. She knows what I think of marriage.”

  “Do you have a will?”

  Dillon smiled. “Just like in that Columbo show. No, I don’t have a will. But your idea is pretty clear to me. You think Monica wants to get rid of Jeff so nobody will have a claim on my money after my death. No, Miranda, this motive doesn't apply here. Monica knows very well we’re never getting married, which means she’s not inheriting a dime from me unless I specifically leave it to her.”

  “I see. And now my last question. Did you ask Monica to tell to me that you’d like to talk to Jeff as soon as we found him?”

  Dillon nodded. “Yes, I did.”

  7.

  They found Noah Burton on Friday. The surgeon sat in his BMW, his eyes shut, two miles north of Medford, a northwestern suburb of Boston. There was a hole in his head, from temple to temple. The gun, a nine-millimeter Browning, that had been used to shoot Burton was lying on the floor of the car. According to the forensic pathologist, the death had occurred on Tuesday, the day Burton had disappeared.

  Burton appeared to have killed himself, but Miranda wasn’t in the mood to rush to judgment.

  The search of the area around the car yielded no evidence. Three days, one of which had been rainy, were enough for the clues, if there had been any in the first place, to vanish.

  What did they find inside Burton’s BMW? Nothing useful. There were Ray-Ban sunglasses and a bunch of music CDs in the glove compartment. No signs of fight. All the blood in the car was the same type as Burton's. The trunk contained a spare tire and a half-empty jug of coolant.

  The pistol? The gun was unregistered but turned out to have no criminal history.

  Chapter 6.

  1.

  On Monday, Miranda received the autopsy report on Noah Burton. The pathologists had determined that Burton had no alcohol or drugs in his system. They had found no traces of poison either. The surgeon had died from a gunshot wound to the head. The most curious piece of information was at the end of the report.

  The pathologists had stumbled upon a foreign object in Burton's stomach. The foreign object was a yellow flat key, which had no markings identifying what kind of locks it opened.

  Apparently, Burton had swallowed the key shortly before getting shot.

  What conclusion could he draw from this?

  It was pretty clear that Burton had not committed suicide. A man wouldn’t swallow a key before blowing his brains out, that just made no sense.

  Now Miranda had to figure out why this key was so important to Burton. First, he was going to chat with the surgeon’s wife Helen Burton.

  2.

  “Did your husband have enemies?”

  Helen Burton, Noah Burton’s wife, shook her head, staring into space absentmindedly. “No, Noah had no enemies; at least not the kind that would want to murder him,” she said in a soft voice. “He was a decent man. He had always avoided confrontation.”

  “Did he have a reason to commit suicide?”

  “No, he didn’t. It was not a suicide, I’m sure of that.”

  “Have you seen this key before?” Miranda handed Helen a clear plastic bag containing the key they had extracted from the surgeon’s body.

  Helen inspected the key without much interest and returned it to the detective. “No, I’ve never seen it.”

  “Do you have a safe at home?”

  “Yes, we do, but it’s not the key to our safe.”

  “We found this key on your husband. What do you think it opens?”

  Helen shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe some drawer in his work office,” she said.

  “Would you mind if I came by your house and looked for the lock matching this key?”

  “Be my guest. And don’t forget to check the check, too.”

  3.

  Neither Burton’s house, nor his clinic had a lock that matched the key found in the surgeon’s stomach.

  To make the search area more manageable, Miranda elected to assume that the key opened a safety deposit box at some bank. Taking into account that the surgeon hadn’t wanted his killer to get the key, it was reasonable to suggest that the deposit box contained something important or valuable or both. There could even be clues pointing to the killer’s identity in it.

  So they had to find the deposit box. Can you say “needle in a haystack”?

  What bank was it? What city was the deposit box in? What country? Burton could have easily rented a box in Mexico or Canada. Miranda hoped the surgeon had chosen a local institution to satisfy his safety storage needs. Positive thinking, ladies and gentlemen—it did wonders.

  Under the best case scenario, Burton had used his real name to rent the box. It was a very different story if he had rented it as Bruce Wayne or Austin Power
s or whatever his imagination had conceived.

  What was the plan? First, Miranda would do the easy thing—ask every bank in the Greater Boston area to search their safety deposit box records for Noah Burton. Second, she was going to collect safety deposit key samples from the banks and check if any one of them was the same type as Burton’s. If the match was found, they would have to try Burton’s key on all the boxes that used this type of key. The second option sounded like a lot of work—and mind-bogglingly tedious to boot—but there was no way around it if Noah Burton had rented the box under an assumed name.

  4.

  They found the surgeon’s safe deposit box on Thursday. Thankfully, Noah Burton had gone the easy route and rented the box under his own name, thus saving them hundreds of man-hours and tons of headache.

  What had Noah Burton kept in his deposit box? A flash drive with photographs. Twenty photographs of Marshall Dillon’s face from different angles.

  Besides the pictures, the flash drive contained a small Word document, which read, “Nose and cheekbone surgery, April 15. Marshall Dillon. American Discount Tires.”

  “That’s common practice,” Helen Burton said. “Noah took pictures before and after every surgery. It must be one of his patients.”

  Burton had operated on Dillon’s face?

  What kind of surgery had Dillon asked for? A facelift? A nose job? Silicone cheek implants? Had Marshall Dillon decided to rejuvenate himself and shave ten—fifteen years off his face? Had he done it for Monica Staggs?

  Unfortunately, the car accident Dillon had gotten into three months ago might have undone some or all of Burton's efforts. Or had the accident taken place before the surgery? Let’s check it later.

  Dillon. He could be involved in this. The question was how?

  5.

  After a little digging, Miranda found out that the car crash that had almost killed Marshall Dillon had taken place ten miles south of Rome, on May 7th of this year. Dillon had lost control of his Maserati Quattroporte and slammed into a tree at sixty miles an hour.

  Miranda had gone through the patient records at Burton’s clinic and found no trace of Marshall Dillon. According to his schedule, Burton had performed no surgeries on April 15th of this year. He had operated on women on April 15th of the previous two years.

  Could have Burton done the surgery out of the clinic setting? Absolutely not. Nose and cheekbone surgeries required special equipment and a sterile environment, unless one didn’t mind the patient dying on the operating table or suffering from serious post-op complications.

  Was it possible that Burton had received the pictures from his colleague at another clinic? To test this hypothesis, Miranda sent inquiries to every plastic surgery clinic on the East Coast that did nose and cheekbone surgeries. Why hadn’t he asked Dillon himself about Burton? He had a hunch Dillon wasn’t going to tell him the truth.

  Later that day, Miranda listened one more time to the recording of the conversation between Burton and the cop posing as Hackett.

  Burton: “Hello, are you Jeff?”

  Winslow: “Yes. Did you call me yesterday?”

  Burton: “Your father is Marshall Dillon, the president of American Discount Tires?”

  Winslow: “Yes, Marshall Dillon is my father. What do you want to talk to me about?”

  Burton: “When was the last time you spoke to your father?”

  Winslow: “About three months ago.”

  Burton: “When was the last time you saw him?”

  Winslow: “Three months ago. Why are you asking this? What’s your name?”

  Burton: “Be very careful, Jeff,” the man said. “I think someone wants you dead. If I were you, I’d leave Boston today and hide. I’ll contact you again later.”

  It was clear that Burton had not been sure he had contacted the right Jeff Hackett. He must have obtained phone numbers of every Jeff Hackett in Greater Boston and begun dialing them one by one. He had obviously been looking for Marshall Dillon’s son.

  So Burton had found out about the plot to murder Jeff Hackett and decided to warn him, right?

  Why was the surgeon so interested in the frequency of Jeff’s contacts with his father? Why did he want to keep Marshall Dillon’s photos out of his killer’s hands? Because Dillon was involved in this?

  The father was after his own son?

  It seemed so.

  So let’s recap.

  Assuming she had correctly interpreted the photos on Burton’s flash drive, Marshall Dillon had had his nose and cheekbones operated on three and a half months ago. Three weeks after the surgery, Marshall Dillon had gotten into an accident in Italy. The surgeon that had presumably performed the aforementioned surgery had been murdered shortly after attempting to contact Jeff Hackett.

  There were also Dillon’s photos Burton had stashed away in a safe deposit box. On some of those pictures Dillon didn’t look himself. It could mean something, or it might have been a case of bad lighting.

  Had Burton been killed because he had operated on Dillon? Interesting idea.

  Why did people usually have plastic surgeries? To correct flaws in appearance, to look younger. And also to...

  Ted Winslow. If they’d had more time and the money to pay for the services of a plastic surgeon, they could have made an excellent copy of Jack Hackett out of Ted, couldn’t they?

  But she digressed.

  Her new idea.

  Damn, this idea was insanely interesting. Crazy idea.

  6.

  On Friday, Miranda heard from the Italian hospital that had treated the injuries Dillon had sustained in the May car crash. In addition to brain concussion and bruised larynx, Dillon had suffered fractures of the left cheekbone, the nose, the lower jaw, the right forearm, and the right hand. Interestingly, the hospital couldn’t send her the X-rays because Dillon had taken them with him to America.

  The damage to his right hand must have been pretty bad as he still couldn’t use it for writing. Learning to write with your other hand was a tough task for sure.

  Dillon was forced to write with his left hand, right? It was not his choice.

  One couldn’t wish for a better excuse to avoid using a certain hand than a car crash. And don’t forget those broken facial bones. Plus the fact that X-rays were gone. Her crazy idea might be not so crazy after all.

  7.

  The next day Miranda found another reason why Marshall Dillon might have needed the car crash. The video of last year’s Christmas dinner at Dillon’s Boston estate, which was stored on Jeff Hackett’s laptop, provided an excellent sample of Dillon’s voice, and, just as Miranda suspected, it was noticeably different from the voice Marshall had now. It got deeper, coarser. Miranda was sure that, if she asked Dillon what had happened to his voice, he would blame the car accident he’d had in Italy. His larynx had gotten bruised, remember?

  Had he pretended to have a bruised larynx? He might have. It was one those conditions that you could fake by complaining.

  “Good thing you went to that dinner,” Miranda said to Hackett after they finished watching the recording. “And kept the video.”

  “I’m glad it helped,” Hackett replied. “So what’s you new theory?”

  After a short silence, Miranda said, “First of all, I believe that your real father is dead.”

  “What do you mean by ‘real father’? And when did it happen?” Jeff gave the detective a puzzled look.

  “I think the real Marshall Dillon died three or four months ago.”

  Jeff furrowed his eyebrows. “You have a peculiar sense of humor, Miranda.”

  “I’m not joking. Your father’s been dead for at least three months. The man who’s calling himself Marshall Dillon is an impostor.”

  “Impostor? What are you talking about?”

  “Your father’s been replaced with a look-alike. I suspect it happened when he was in Italy three months ago.”

  Jeff stared silently at Miranda for a few seconds and then shook his head. “I don’t u
nderstand. Who did it? Why? How did they do that?”

  “I suspect that your father’s girlfriend Monica Staggs is behind this. She found a guy who looked like Marshall Dillon and used him to replace your father. Why? She had three hundred and fifty million reasons to do it.”

  Yes, Miranda had a new theory. Dillon, or rather, Dillon’s double had needed plastic surgery not to deal with the signs of aging, but to enhance his resemblance to the original. To create a copy of Marshall Dillon, so to speak. Burton was the one who had done the surgery.

  Saddam Hussein’s doubles might have had to go through a similar routine.

  How had Burton guessed why that man had changed his appearance? Had he seen Dillon’s picture on the internet or in a newspaper? On TV? It was not important. The bottom line was Burton had realized he had gotten involved in a serious game. Why hadn’t they dispatched him right after the surgery? Maybe they believed the surgeon would never figure out their secret. Maybe they decided to let him live so he would take care of any medical complications that could arise. Or maybe they planned to kill Burton a few months later in order not to draw the cops’ attention to the surgery he had performed on the fake Dillon.

  Did Staggs and the impostor act independently or were they part of an organized crime group? Most likely, they worked for themselves. If an organization was behind this scheme, all of Dillon’s fortune would have already been transferred to dummy trusts and offshore accounts and Marshall Dillon would have vanished without a trace. Besides, a crime group wouldn’t have asked Monica Staggs' cousin to find a hitman.

  How many accomplices did they have? Probably not many. As they say, if two people know it, it’s not a secret. Monica’s cousin might be the only actual accomplice they had, and from the practical point of view that should be enough. Chances were no one but Staggs and the fake Dillon were privy to all the details of the conspiracy. In the past, there might have been one or two people more who knew what was going on, but one could bet Monica Staggs had made sure to take them out the picture.

  “Why do they want to kill me?” Hackett asked.