“Can you ask Mr. Littleton to come here to the office so we can talk with him?” Richmond asked.
Jeanette gave us a bemused look. “Whatever for?”
“Because I asked you to,” Richmond said, clearly impatient.
Jeanette Knowles narrowed her eyes at him, folded her arms over her chest, and adjusted her stance, looking ready for a fight. The grandmotherly aura had disappeared. “I think I have a right to know why you want to talk to one of my employees,” she said, her lips tight. “I heard that Jacob Ames has been arrested for the murder of his father, so I don’t understand your need to go fishing among my staff for any other suspects.”
“We’re trying to tie up a few loose ends.”
“Such as?” Jeanette said, her voice demanding. I imagined it was very effective on any students who were under fire.
Richmond sighed and smiled at her. It wasn’t a particularly friendly smile. “That’s really none of your business. Now can you get Mr. Littleton down here for us, or do I have to get a search warrant and disrupt the entire school day by searching this whole building and inviting all the parents to come by so I can talk to the students, too?”
I swear I saw light sabers spring out of Jeanette’s eyes. Her jaw muscles clenched like a pugilist’s fists. “Let me guess,” she said, her voice as venomous as a rattler’s bite. “You were one of those kids who visited the principal’s office a lot in school, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was,” Richmond said, biting back. “And as a result, I saw things. Lots of things. And that principal ended up not only getting fired, but being sent to prison.” He paused for a few seconds, and Jeanette’s eyes opened a little wider. “Now I’m tired of your verbal jousting.” Richmond lifted his arm and looked at his watch. “You’ve got thirty seconds.”
Though I wasn’t counting, I’d wager that Jeanette used twenty-nine of her allotted seconds before she finally caved, though she never took her icy glare off Richmond. She spun around and barked out an order. “Melanie, can you please find Mr. Littleton and ask him to come to the office?”
“Sure.”
Melanie got up from her chair and headed out of the office at a fast clip, head down. Since Jeanette had to step aside to let Melanie go by, Richmond took advantage of the moment and entered the office. The rest of us followed.
Jeanette scowled but wasn’t done yet. She turned to Richmond and said, “I want to sit in on any interrogations you do.”
“These aren’t interrogations,” Richmond said, his glare even icier. “They are interviews. And the only one you may sit in on is yours.”
I could tell Jeanette didn’t like this answer. Her lips and jaw muscles twitched with unspoken objections, but, wisely, all she said was, “You may use the conference room over there.” She pointed the way, then stomped back into her office, slamming the door behind her.
“Wow,” I said, looking over at Richmond with newfound respect. “It’s a good thing it wasn’t Jeanette who was killed because if it was, we’d have a list of suspects as long as my arm. And I have very long arms.”
“She’s a power-hungry bitch,” Richmond grumbled.
Hurley leaned toward me and whispered, “I love your arms. They’re the perfect size to reach everything they need to.”
I blushed. Now he loved my arms. Surely the whole of me couldn’t be too far away. Then I remembered that it really didn’t matter anymore.
I noticed that Charlie, who had stood in the background silently through all of this, was staring at Richmond with a curious expression. “Did you really get your high school principal fired and jailed?” she asked.
“I did. The asshole was buying drugs from some of the students in exchange for bumping up their grades or letting them slide on their offenses. I caught on because I got sent to the principal’s office a lot for getting into fights. I had a weight problem, and a lot of the kids made fun of me. I dealt with it by trying to beat the crap out of them.”
“Hunh,” Charlie said.
Suddenly lean, mean Mr. Dean didn’t seem so bad.
We all headed for the conference room that Principal Knowles had indicated. Once inside, Charlie grabbed Hurley by the arm and hauled him down to one end of the long table that was in the room. “Let me show you how to set up the camera in order to get the best audio and video.”
I watched as they bowed their heads together, and twice Charlie took hold of Hurley’s hand and guided him to the appropriate holding places, which fortunately were on the video camera and not on her body.
The door to the conference room opened, and Melanie walked in with Mr. Littleton in tow.
“Hello, Mr. Littleton,” Richmond said. He waved a hand toward the opposite side of the table and added, “Please have a seat.”
Melanie backed out with a wary look while Sam Littleton, who looked like a young Michael Caine, made his way to the seat Richmond indicated.
Hurley and Charlie settled into chairs at their end of the table, and Richmond and I sat across from Littleton. I decided to let Richmond do all the questioning unless there was something that jumped out at me that he didn’t ask.
“We’d like to talk to you about Derrick Ames,” Richmond said after Charlie gave him a go-ahead nod. Hurley had the camera in hand, but Charlie was leaning into him, watching the screen.
“It’s an awful thing that happened to him,” Littleton said. “I don’t know what I can do to help, but I’m willing to try. You said on the phone that you were interested in a text message I sent Derrick on the day of his death?”
Richmond nodded, and Littleton took a smartphone out of his pocket, tapped the screen a few times, and handed it to Richmond.
“He never answered me,” Littleton said as Richmond read the text. When he was done, he handed the phone to me, and I read the message, which said, WANT TO GET A BEER AFTER SCHOOL TOMORROW NIGHT? before handing the phone off to Hurley so he could film what it showed.
Richmond turned his attention back to Littleton. “Were the two of you pretty close?” he asked.
“We were friends,” Littleton said with a shrug. “We have . . . had a lot in common. We both have German parents, we’re both divorced with kids, we both like to play darts.”
“Darts?”
“Yeah, we belong to a league down at the Anywhere bar. It meets every Thursday night.”
“Do you know if Mr. Ames had any enemies?”
Littleton shook his head. “No, everyone liked him. He was an easygoing, friendly guy.”
“No fights with anyone down at the bar?”
“Fights? No,” Littleton said, dismissing the issue with an expression that suggested the idea was ludicrous. “It’s a friendly bunch down there.”
“Were there any problems you were aware of between him and any of the other teachers? Or any of the students or parents?”
Littleton looked as if he was thinking hard, and after a few seconds, he shook his head again. “Nope. He was active in the PTA and held regular parent-teacher conferences. And he got along great with the kids, though he did have some problems with his own from time to time.”
“Such as?”
“Well, the divorce thing. That’s always hard on kids. He and Jacob would argue a lot.”
“About what?”
“About whether or not Derrick and his wife were going to get back together, about Jacob’s behavior, Jacob’s choice of friends . . . all the usual teenage stuff.”
“What sort of behaviors did Jacob and Derrick argue about?”
“Jacob has a tendency to lash out without much provocation. His fuse is a short one. And Derrick didn’t like some of the kids he was hanging out with.”
“Which kids?”
“Well, that Fitzpatrick kid, for one. Sean is a troublemaker, and he and Jacob seem to feed off one another.”
“Can you give some examples?”
“Well, back around the holidays, they started a fire in the boy’s bathroom just to get out of a math test they didn’t want to
take because they hadn’t studied. Then Derrick caught Jacob and Sean smoking out in the parking lot and went ballistic. Two weeks ago, the boys broke into the biology lab late one night during a basketball game and set free all the fruit flies that were being bred in jars for a genetics study the kids were doing. There were seven periods’ worth of fruit-fly colonies, with probably two dozen jars of flies for each class. Not only did it mess up the whole study; we had to close down the cafeteria for two days to get rid of the damned things. We still find them in the teacher’s lounge from time to time if someone leaves a piece of fruit sitting out for more than an hour.”
Richmond’s cell phone chirped, and he took it out of his pocket and cast a quick glance at the screen. “Excuse me,” he said. “I need to take this.”
He got up and walked to a far corner of the room to take the call. As much to satisfy my own curiosity as to provide some privacy for Richmond, I took over the questions with Littleton. “What about Derrick’s social life? Was he seeing anyone?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, he recently hooked up with one of the moms who volunteers here, Mandy Terwilliger. She’s a looker,” he said, his eyes growing big. “A couple of the other men around here have made plays for her, me included. But she never gave any of us the time of day until Derrick came around. They hit it off, though they were trying to keep things under the radar—for the kids’ sakes, I suppose.”
“Did Derrick talk to you about his relationship with Mandy?”
“Some, yeah,” Littleton said with half a shrug.
“Did he say anything recently about breaking things off with her?”
Littleton shook his head. “No, in fact, things between them seemed to be pretty good. Although, last Friday when we had lunch he did say that he might have to cool things down with her for a little while if Jacob didn’t come around soon. He always put his boys first.”
Richmond disconnected his call, returned to the table, and said, “Thank you, Mr. Littleton. I think that’s all we need for now, but if you think of anything else, please call me.” He slid a business card across the table, and Hurley walked over and handed the man back his phone.
Littleton nodded, took both items, got up from his chair, and left the room.
“What’s up?” I asked Richmond.
“They found Derrick’s laptop.”
Chapter 33
“The laptop was in a Dumpster behind the high school,” I tell Maggie. “A student who was smoking in the back parking lot saw it when he went to dump his butts and recognized the German flag decal. He called it in to the police, and Junior Feller went out to recover it. He knew that Richmond and the rest of us were at the high school already, so he called Richmond to have us come out back and film the recovery.”
“Did it turn up anything?” Maggie asks.
I shake my head. “The hard drive had been wiped clean, and there were no prints on it. Just to be thorough, Richmond did get copies of e-mails that Derrick sent from his Internet provider, but they didn’t offer up any new clues. The fact that the laptop was tossed behind the school pointed the finger even more firmly at Jacob as the culprit, so Richmond declared the case closed.”
“And how did things in your own case progress?”
“Well, after five days of living at the motel, my cottage was finally released back to me, and I was able to move back in. It’s a good thing I didn’t need an entire week at the motel because once the story broke in the paper and Joseph learned the real reason why I was staying there, he wanted me gone. He said he didn’t want to develop a reputation for housing killers. He was so glad when I finally moved out of there that he even offered to refund my unused days. Izzy came home on Sunday, Henderson went back to whatever rock he crawled out from under, and life resumed something of a normal pattern, if you can consider having someone guarding you twenty-four hours a day as normal. I also got my car back, and I’m now more secure than the president when I’m driving it, which is hardly ever since I have a police escort of some sort everywhere I go.”
“Your work life has returned to normal then?” Maggie asks.
“Better than normal, as it turns out. Henderson was appalled at how little staffing we have, and he said we needed more help. When he got back to Madison, he spoke to some folks there, and we eventually got some additional positions approved. Arnie is happy, because he’s going to get help in his lab. In fact, he’s more than happy because he and Laura Kingston, Henderson’s assistant, hit if off in a big way, and she’s going to be his new assistant. The two of them have been dating for three months now.”
“That’s nice,” Maggie says.
“Yes, it is. And there’s been romance in the air for Richmond, too. It turned out I was right when I told him Rose Carpenter had a thing for him. She’s been a divorcée for four years, and I guess she was tired of it because she went after Richmond the way my dog Hoover goes after squirrels. They’ve been hot and heavy for a couple of months now, too. It seems everyone is happy in romance except for me.”
“Has Hurley found out about the connection between your father and this Dilles guy?”
“Nope, and I hope to keep it that way. I swore Grimes and Richmond to secrecy, even though they still think it’s possible the phone calls I’m getting are coming from my father and that he wants me dead for some reason.”
“You’re still getting the calls?”
“I am. I get one about every other week or so, and it’s the same thing each time: no one answers, but I can hear background noise or breathing that tells me the line is open and someone is there. After a few seconds they hang up. The cops have been tracing the calls, determining the general area they’re being made from, and for the last few weeks it’s always been somewhere in or around this part of Wisconsin. The calls have bounced off towers in the Chicago area, the Madison area, the Milwaukee area, in Waunakee, in Eagle River, in Sheboygan—like whoever is making them is circling ever closer. Hurley thinks it’s some crazed stalker, like one of those nutty women who wants a baby. He thinks they’re just waiting for me to get far enough along in my pregnancy that they can kill me but have the baby survive if they take it.”
Maggie frowns at this. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I say, shifting in my seat in a futile effort to get comfortable. “Even if Richmond and Grimes are right with their theory that it’s my father calling me, I can’t come up with any reason why he would want me dead. Regardless of who it is, the evidence suggests Roscoe Schneider wasn’t working alone and someone out there wants me dead.”
“That must be scary.”
“It is,” I admit. “Even though I grumbled about the changes Hurley had them make to my car, I do feel safer having the reinforcements. The security system on my house is nice, too, although I’m driving Izzy and the cops crazy because I’ve accidentally set the alarms off several times.”
“Speaking of Izzy, how are things between you and him?”
“It’s been good. He and Dom are both so excited about the baby, you’d think it was their grandchild. They bought a playpen, a high chair, and a crib for their house, and they’ve gone through and childproofed the place. Izzy and I have our old working relationship back, and other than the security issues, things have been pretty much the way they were before. And since the videographer thing has eliminated the conflict of interest issues, Hurley and I have been able to continue working together.”
“So what’s the current status of your relationship with Hurley?”
“It’s been a bit strained. He’s clearly worried about the phone calls and the stalker thing, and I can tell he’s upset about my refusal to marry him. To be honest, I think he might have worn me down had it not been for this thing with my father and some issues we’ve had with Emily. But how can I possibly marry him now, knowing what I know? He’d hate me if he knew about my father’s past. And I’m afraid he’d hate our child, too.”
“You can’t know that. Don’t you think Hurley’s a smart enough guy
to separate the two things?”
“I’m not sure enough to want to risk it. If I was the only one involved, I’d go for it and take what comes. But I don’t want to jeopardize the relationship Hurley will have with our child. Besides, he’s under enough strain these days dealing with Emily. He’s had to learn how to be a father through Crash Parenting 101, and for a man who wasn’t sure he ever wanted to be a father, he’s had a lot to deal with. Right now what Hurley needs is space and friendly support with no added pressures.”
“So where do you go from here?”
“I don’t know. If Hurley and I were meant to be together as a couple, the universe wouldn’t be obstructing us in so many ways. I think we are meant to be parents, just not husband and wife.”
“Are you comfortable with that?”
“What other choice do I have?”
“If Hurley ever starts a romantic relationship with someone else, are you afraid he’ll pull away from you and your child?”
I think about that, long and hard. Finally I say, “I guess I am a little. I know he feels pulled in a lot of different directions right now. He’s trying to find a happy balance, and it isn’t easy. And while I feel confident he’ll be a significant part of our child’s life no matter what, in some ways he’s already pulling away.”
“Such as?”
“Well, his decision to pull out of the birthing classes. for one. But in order for you to understand how difficult that was for him, I should first tell you about the ultrasound appointment, because I think that best reflects his frame of mind before everything started getting messy.”
And then I tell Maggie about one of the happiest days of my life so far.
Chapter 34
On the Wednesday after Hurley’s return, the two of us walked into the office of my OB doctor. We had the waiting room to ourselves, and after leaving my name with the receptionist behind the glass window, I sat down next to Hurley and leaned over to see what he was reading in the magazine he was holding. It was an article on preventing stretch marks, and with it was a picture of a huge belly with ugly tracks on both sides of it, and a dark stripe that ran from the navel down to the pubis. The look of horror on Hurley’s face didn’t do much for my ego.
Stiff Penalty (A Mattie Winston Mystery) Page 27
