Playing Dead pb-3

by Allison Brennan

  But in all honesty, her job was the last thing on her mind. She had a trail to follow. Professor Don Collier hadn’t returned her call, but she didn’t know if he’d even received it. Maybe he hadn’t even been on campus yesterday.

  Hot mug of tea in hand, Claire made a small detour into her makeshift office and turned on her screen, glancing through the doorway to her bed, where Mitch hadn’t moved. The screen didn’t shine on the bed, so she hoped she wouldn’t wake him. Gently, she tapped the keys and brought up the UCD website. A few clicks later she learned that Collier’s first Thursday class was criminal law at eight a.m., and lasted ninety minutes. If she rushed out by seven in the morning, she’d make it to Davis in time, even with traffic. She glanced at the clock. 2:30. Now that she had a set plan, she might be able to get a couple hours’ sleep.

  She looked for her notepad to jot down the time and location of Collier’s class. She picked it up and saw a folded piece of paper protruding from underneath her keyboard with a bright green sticky note with CLAIRE written in large block letters.

  Someone had been in her house.

  Blood rushed to her head as she unfolded the note with shaking hands. An overwhelming sense of violation hit her.

  In the odd light of the computer monitor, she read the letter.

  Dad. He hadn’t signed it, but she immediately knew her father had been here. Not only from the small block letters he used, but from the way he addressed her.

  Claire Beth, it began.

  Short for Claire Elizabeth. Her dad was the only one who sometimes called her Claire Beth.

  She glanced at the narrow wall where she’d hung a picture of her and her dad. She blinked, at first seeing it, then realizing it was missing.

  She stared at the letter, her ears ringing. Her father had been here.

  Claire Beth,

  I wish I had approached you at another time and place, but my opportunity was limited. I understand why you don’t believe me. If I had been in your shoes then, at fourteen, walking in on what you did, I would probably feel the same way. And please believe me, I would have done anything to have spared you sitting through the trial.

  The pain you’ve endured all these years tears my heart. It shows in your eyes. You once enjoyed every moment of the day. Now, all I see are barriers and skepticism. How I wish I could change the past, change everything that happened.

  I did not kill Lydia or Chase Taverton. I am not a killer, Claire, and I will prove it to you. Somewhere a killer walks free and he is the proof of my innocence. I believe the way to find him is through Chase Taverton.

  I didn’t want to get you involved. I only wanted to find Oliver because he has the information about Taverton that could exonerate me.

  Oliver believes that Taverton was the target, not your mother. I don’t know exactly what he found, but it was big. He called me the week before I was transferred to Section B and said as soon as he tracked down a man named Frank Lowe, he’d have the evidence he needed. All Oliver told me about Lowe was that Taverton had cut a plea with him and he disappeared right after Taverton was murdered. I have no idea who Lowe is, but Oliver believes he can clear my name.

  Find Oliver or find Frank Lowe.

  I can face death if I know, in my heart, that you believe in my innocence. Until then, I’m in hiding. The police aren’t going to reopen this case without clear evidence I’m innocent. Even then, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I have to fight. This is my last chance. This is my stand.

  Consider this, Claire Beth, because I have thought of it every day and every night for the last fifteen years. When you came home that day and heard your mother with a man, they were alive and in the bedroom. Twenty minutes later, I came in and they were dead, killed with the revolver I kept in my nightstand drawer. You know I never carried my.357 with me. I always kept that gun in my drawer. I taught you to use that gun. I taught your mother how to use that gun. It never left the house.

  If you believe that, believe that I didn’t premeditate murder, then you know that I am innocent.

  What continues to haunt me every day of my life is that I know you almost died that day. I know I didn’t kill anyone, but my gun was used. That tells me that the killer spent time in the house. He took my revolver, and hid. Waiting for the right time to kill Taverton and your mother. Taverton was the target. I’m certain of that.

  You’re a grown woman. A beautiful, smart woman. You work for one of the best security companies in the country. Help me. You’re my only hope. Be careful! Someone framed me and if they know you’re looking into the case, your life is on the line. I would never put you in danger if I could avoid it, but you’re my only chance.

  I love you.

  Claire read the note three times. She’d ignored him, pretended he didn’t exist. It was much easier to think that he was guilty and she was doing the best she could.

  Her father’s written plea was far more compelling than his restraint at trial. She felt emotion in this letter. Fifteen years earlier, he had seemed to exist on autopilot.

  Oliver was dead. Where was Frank Lowe? How could she prove her father was innocent?

  “Working late?”

  She jumped and pivoted in her chair. Mitch sat up in her bed watching her.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said.

  “It’s nearly three. You need sleep, sweetheart.” He patted the spot next to him.

  She refolded the letter and put it under her keyboard, turned off the monitor, and went back to her bedroom. She slid between the sheets and Mitch took her into his arms.

  “You’re tense.”

  “I’m an insomniac.”

  He kissed her neck and pulled her to him so their bodies were spooned together. She snuggled against him, not wanting him to know anything was wrong. Showing Mitch the letter would risk his freedom and safety. Claire wouldn’t do that.

  She couldn’t do that to the man she was falling in love with.

  FIFTEEN

  Guilt washed over Mitch as he rifled carefully through Claire’s desk.

  She’d left before seven-took a quick shower and asked him to lock the door when he left. She said she had an appointment in Davis.

  Davis. While her appointment could be innocent, related to her job with Rogan-Caruso, it was an odd coincidence that Oliver Maddox had lived and gone to school in Davis.

  Mitch’s gut said there was something else going on. She’d been deeply upset and preoccupied when she’d come back to bed at three in the morning. What had happened?

  He found nothing about her father. No day book, no messages, nothing. On her computer monitor was a bright green sticky note with CLAIRE written across it. He didn’t know what had gone with that note. It was not her handwriting.

  He booted up her computer and first checked her e-mail. Nothing in the last forty-eight hours struck him as suspicious-most was work-related. He checked her browser history. It automatically erased every twenty-four hours, and Mitch didn’t have the technical skills to retrieve her old e-mails and web history from the hard drive. But what he saw gave him pause. Last night she spent time on the UC Davis website, including a page with Professor Don Collier’s class schedule. Collier was Maddox’s advisor. He’d been interviewed as part of the missing person investigation months ago.

  Claire was surfing Collier’s pages. Had she learned that Maddox was dead? Had he come to see her? While looking into Tom O’Brien’s conviction, Maddox would likely have spoken with everyone who knew O’Brien, including his daughter.

  Claire had also looked up the address of the Davis Police Department. Yesterday afternoon she had been at the Western Innocence Project website.

  She’d done searches on not only Don Collier and Oliver Maddox, but Chase Taverton. Mitch wrote everything down, then realized he was late to meet Steve. He left, taking care to leave everything exactly as Claire had left it.

  Claire had somehow been in contact with her father, Mitch was certain. He prayed he could keep her out o
f hot water, but feared she was already simmering.

  Claire rushed to Davis, driving recklessly to make it before Collier’s eight a.m. class. She risked a ticket by parking illegally and ran to the campus building where Collier’s criminal law class was scheduled to begin in five minutes. If he was already inside, she was screwed. She knew what he looked like from his photo on the website, and suddenly realized that he was walking right in front of her. He certainly played the part of law professor: pressed slacks, button-down shirt, no tie, and a tweed-who wore tweed anymore? — jacket with leather patches on the sleeves.

  “Professor!” she called.

  He glanced over his shoulder at her, slowed his pace. “Are you in my class? We’re almost late.”

  “Actually, I’m Claire O’Brien. I called you yesterday.”

  He stopped walking. “You didn’t need to visit in person. The phone would have sufficed.”

  She flashed her identification. “I’m a private investigator looking into Oliver Maddox’s disappearance. I understand that you were his advisor.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “So you’re here because you’re a PI, not because you’re a felon’s daughter?”

  If he was trying to throw her off her game, it was a good effort, but she’d withstood far worse over the last fifteen years. “I work for Rogan-Caruso Protective Services, Professor. My job always comes first.”

  He nodded. Rogan-Caruso had a certain reputation, Claire knew, and she used it without remorse. “So,” she continued, “I understand that you were the last person to see Oliver before he disappeared.”

  “You understand wrong.” He gave a dramatic sigh, and Claire’s instincts went on high alert. Collier avoided looking her square in the eyes and she watched him closely.

  “I never saw Oliver that day,” he said. “We had a meeting scheduled on Monday morning but he never showed. I assumed he’d forgotten. His girlfriend came to me on Wednesday to see if I’d heard from him because he wasn’t answering his phone and he’d missed classes. I told her I hadn’t talked to him since the Thursday before. She then said she was going to talk to the police. They spoke with me, and I told them what I just told you. You could have saved a trip if you had read the missing person report.”

  “That wasn’t my only question,” Claire said. She didn’t like Collier. He was too slick, too highbrow, too unconcerned about one of his students missing. And his answers were too perfect.

  She said, “How did you feel when Oliver told you he thought you were wrong in rejecting my father’s case for the Western Innocence Project?”

  “I–I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I spoke with Randolph Sizemore yesterday and you’re the attorney who reviewed the case evidence in the Thomas O’Brien trial and determined that there was no sufficient cause to have the Project look into filing an appeal. I thought it was ironic that Oliver picked that case to investigate. Did he share his findings with you?”

  “No. I never discussed it with him after our initial conversation where I explained my reasoning.”

  Claire saw in his averted eyes that he was flat-out lying. He moved ever so slightly left to right, looking for escape. A thin line of sweat formed on his scalp.

  “Yet he was writing his thesis on this case.” She continued to push. “He believed Chase Taverton was the intended victim, and my mother was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which pretty much throws the prosecution’s claim that it was a crime of passion out the window. Change the motive, and a whole world of suspects emerge.”

  “I think you’re a desperate young woman trying to cling to the false hope that your father is innocent of two brutal murders.”

  “Why are you lying?” Claire said, hackles raised. Collier went on the offensive when cornered; so did she. She tried to slow her heart rate, but she was angry.

  “If you don’t leave, I will call for security.”

  “I’m not stopping you from getting to class.” She glanced at her watch, mostly to prevent herself from decking him. “You’re already late.”

  He glared at her, turned, and walked briskly to the lecture hall.

  Claire went back to her Jeep and took several deep breaths to calm down. She rested her hot head on the steering wheel. Maybe she’d played him wrong. Maybe she should have gone in all honey and sweetness and asked if he had a copy of Oliver’s thesis, or his notes.

  Collier would never have given them to her. If he was involved in Oliver’s disappearance, he had either hidden or destroyed everything Oliver had shared about the case. But why would a college professor be involved in hiding information about her father’s case? Why would he even care? Or maybe he was just a touchy, crabby guy. Had she misread his reactions to her questions?

  Might Collier lie because he’d made a mistake in reviewing her dad’s case and his weak ego couldn’t handle it? There had to be something else, something more.

  The key was finding out more than just who wanted Chase Taverton dead. Who had the means and the motive to kill Chase Taverton? Claire had to learn everything she could about her mother’s dead lover if she was going to figure this out.

  Time was her problem. Fifteen years had passed since the murders. Memories faded. People moved or died. Criminals whom Taverton prosecuted might not even remember the man who put them away. Unless, of course, they had been involved in his murder.

  Was Taverton involved in any gang- or mob-related prosecutions? Sacramento didn’t have a “mob” problem in the traditional way New York and Chicago and, to a lesser degree, nearby San Francisco did. But there was a powerful criminal Russian community in Sacramento and Stockton. But would they or any other petty criminal have set up such an elaborate frame?

  She pulled out her father’s letter. Frank Lowe. She knew nothing about him except what her father said: that he was someone Chase Taverton had cut a deal with. How would Lowe be able to clear her father?

  Was he dead, like Oliver?

  She needed to see the evidence against her father. She was an investigator and while she didn’t investigate murder, she knew what was staged and what was real. Like Ben Holman’s arson. Obviously arson, staged to look like a theft.

  Claire broke out in a sweat. Her father’s guilt made sense on the surface, but there were so many layers when Chase Taverton was added to the equation as more than her mother’s lover. There was a damn good chance that everyone had drawn the wrong conclusions. And Claire saw a new reality, one where she’d been deadly wrong.

  Claire now saw flaws in the prosecution’s argument. Flaws that a good defense attorney should have exploited. Or was she seeing the flaws only because she wanted her father to be innocent? She rubbed her temples, feeling the pressure of a growing tension headache.

  A criminal lawyer named Prescott had represented her father. She made a note to track him down and find out what, if anything, he knew or remembered from the trial, perhaps something that Claire had been too catatonic to notice at the time.

  She had told the truth on the stand. The whole truth as she’d seen it. That alone may not have been enough to convict her father, but it had destroyed his life.

  She would discover the truth about that terrible day no matter what it took. Once and for all, Claire had to know for certain that her father was guilty. . or innocent.

  SIXTEEN

  Mitch had only worked in the Sacramento regional FBI office for two years, but until now he hadn’t had reason to observe an autopsy at the county coroner’s office. Generally, the FBI simply reviewed the reports if they were involved. But Mitch wanted to be hands-on. Steve came along.

  Deputy Clarkston greeted Mitch and Steve when they arrived. “Thanks for letting us come,” Steve said diplomatically.

  Clarkston shrugged. “You did the heavy lifting yesterday. If you want to watch the autopsy, fine by me. My boss said whatever you need, to help. But we’re working the case, just so you know.”

  “Good,” Steve said when Mitch wanted to argue. “We’ll give you whate
ver help you need, but it’s all yours.”

  Clarkston relaxed and opened the door to the observation room.

  The small room was cramped for three broad-shouldered cops. They stood, pushing the two chairs to the corners. A television high in one corner was blank. Mitch flicked a switch and static ensued.

  Clarkston tapped on the window and caught the attention of a young forensic pathologist. He turned on the mic. “Can we get a visual here? And we will need two copies of the tape.”

  She nodded and switched on the camera above the body.

  The pathologists all wore face masks, gowns, gloves, and booties, but that was the extent of their protective clothing. The three of them in the room were all women.

  Mitch wanted to tell Steve what he’d learned from Claire’s computer, but the information had been obtained illegally. Meg would have a meltdown: She was a stickler for constitutional law. You don’t bend the rules-any of them.

  Mitch glanced at the dead body. They would have confirmation within the hour-the dental records from his hometown dentist had been overnighted and the chief pathologist was off right now comparing the corpse’s dental X-rays to those of Maddox.

  Just last night he’d promised Steve that he would keep nothing from him, nothing that could jeopardize the capture of Thomas O’Brien. But what did he know now, really? Claire had done a few Google searches on the principals of the case. What did that tell them? It wasn’t illegal for Claire to look into her father’s case.

  But Mitch knew there was more to it than that.

  The external exam now over, the internal exam was beginning. The senior pathologist made the first incision.

  Maddox’s body was pale, the skin having dissolved. The body was a lumpy mass of human Jell-O. Because it had been in fresh, cold water, putrefaction had slowed, but bacteria had still done severe damage. If Maddox had drowned, there was no way to prove it. Only through external investigation-accident site, damage to the car, mental state of the victim prior to disappearance-could they determine it had been an accident rather than murder. A bullet would be nice, Mitch thought, but there had been no obvious wounds on the body when they’d bagged him underwater yesterday.