by Jen J. Danna
Matt took the photo and the lens. He adjusted the lens to fine-tune the focus on the furniture. Dark wood. Five drawers. Round handles. His gaze flicked to Leigh in question.
“Keep going. You’ll know when you find it.”
His gaze returned to the photo. Small flat, leather jewelry case on the top. A picture of his family, including a much younger version of Ethel. Some papers. A pair of cuff links. A gold dress wat—
He stopped cold, his eyes snapping back to the cuff links. “Son of a bitch!”
“You’ve got it,” Leigh said.
“Take this.” Matt jammed the handheld lens back into her hand. He snatched the photo of Peter Holt’s effects, and strode across the room to the larger, lighted desk-mounted magnifying ring. He flipped it on, studying the two photos side by side.
There was no doubt.
He whirled around. “How in the hell did Charles Ward’s cuff links end up in Samuel Kain’s bedroom?”
“What?” Kiko hurried across the room to him, slipping the photos from his hands to study them under magnification as he had. “That’s absolutely the same cuff link design.” She motioned to Paul and Juka. “Come take a look.”
The men took their turn examining the photos.
“Can we be sure they weren’t mass-produced in some way?” Paul asked. “I know it’s doubtful, but can we leap to the conclusion that this is the same individual pair of cuff links?”
“It’s not a leap anymore. One of the reasons I took so long to get here is that I stopped in to see a jeweler I know in Salem—Martin Leary. He’s done work for our family for years, and I trust his opinion.” She drew a small plastic bag from her pocket and poured the cuff links into her palm.
“Is that them?” Juka asked. “The actual evidence?”
“The Real McCoy.” She handed one piece to Matt and the other to Juka. “Take a good look. You might even need the magnifying glass again. See the tiny stamp on the back?”
Matt carried the cuff link back to the lit ring, Kiko right behind him. He centered it under the ring, turning it so both he and Kiko could see it clearly. “Dole and Sons. Is that a jeweler?”
“Yes. A fairly well-known one in Boston back in the early part of the last century. Martin says that Dole was kind of a legend in the jewelry business back then, known especially for his custom work. Quality work, but expensive. Unfortunately, he and his business didn’t survive the Depression and they closed up shop.”
“Probably very few had money for custom work like this back then,” Juka said.
“And those that did were probably guarding their pennies a little more closely and not making extravagant purchases. But these were clearly purchased before he went out of business, likely in the early thirties. Martin said he’ll confirm when the store actually closed.”
Matt turned the cuff link over, examining the inlaid blue shapes of the Roman ruins. “Handy, as that helps date the item.”
“And, hopefully, reinforces that it’s one of a kind. The blue inlays are enamel, popular during the Art Deco period. The gold is fourteen karat.”
Matt handed the cuff link to Kiko so she could have a better look and crossed the room back to Leigh. “Okay, so let’s think this through. We have what we think is a one-of-a-kind piece that Ward wasn’t wearing on the day of his death. We found a pair of black inlaid cuff links intermingled with the remains instead. We assume these cuff links were left at home. So they were in the possession of Mrs. Ward. What do we know about her?”
“Only the bare minimum from doing research on Charles Ward. They were married in nineteen-twenty-five when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-nine. She was from another old money family. In fact, there was more money in her family than his.”
“Do we think he married her for that money? We don’t exactly know when he decided to get into politics,” Matt said.
“It’s not outside the realm of possibility.” Leigh set her bag down on Matt’s desk and propped one hip on the corner. “She was thirty-two when he disappeared and thirty-nine when he was legally declared dead. She died in nineteen-sixty-four.”
Kiko returned to hand the cuff link to Leigh. “Can we back up for a minute? I’m still trying to get this straight. These cuff links belonged to Ward, but were not on his body when he died in nineteen-thirty-six, presumably at the hands of Samuel Kain. Then these same cuff links appear thirty-nine years later in Kain’s own bedroom at the scene of his wife’s murder. Then they disappear again for nearly forty years before resurfacing at the scene of a third crime, tucked in the pocket of Ward’s dead grandson.”
“These two families are linked in the worst way possible,” Juka said.
Matt narrowed his eyes on Leigh, studying every nuance of her expression. “You think they’re a message, don’t you? An ‘I know what you did’ from one family to another.” The force of that connection struck Matt full force. “You think that someone in Ward’s family killed Kain’s wife. A revenge slaying?”
“And then tried to pin it on someone else when Bern refused to drop the case,” Paul added. “If the case had truly gone stone cold, they’d likely have been happy to let it go, but Bern kept looking so they needed someone to take the heat off them completely. It’s devious as hell, but, if you’re right, it clearly worked. Now … can we prove it?”
“I got a step closer to that today too.” Leigh twisted around to pull a file from the messenger bag. “I have Joe Emerson’s financials. He’s the fingerprint expert who worked Anna Kain’s murder. There seems to be a disconnect between Mr. Emerson’s bank accounts, his reported income, and his style of living. New properties, new cars, expensive Ivy League schools for his two children. Yet all apparently on a state employee’s salary. He’s now retired and winters at his beachfront property in the Bahamas. From nineteen-seventy-nine to nineteen-eighty-three alone, over two hundred thousand dollars was spent on purchases and credit card bills.”
Paul whistled. “That’s a lot of money now. That’s even more money then. But where did it come from?”
“I haven’t gotten a handle on that yet, but I have a plan.”
“Rob Tucker?” Matt asked.
Leigh nodded. “This will likely be child’s play for him. I know he’s busy right now”—she met Matt’s eyes briefly—“but he’ll find the time for it. Mr. Emerson is still in the area, but he’ll likely be packing up to head south soon, and it would be so much easier to keep him here than to extradite him from Nassau.”
“And if we find out where the money came from, then we find out who framed Cabrera for Anna Kain’s murder. Not necessarily who killed her, but at least who engineered the frame-up,” Matt said.
Leigh flipped the file closed. “Exactly. And speaking of the frame-up, Claire called me just before I left the unit. Cabrera’s new ten-print card matches his old ten-print card but not the ones from the crime scene. So the case against him has fallen apart. I’m taking it to Harper this afternoon and I’ll be asking to have Anna Kain’s case assigned to me as it’s now officially part of the Ward/Holt cases.”
Matt circled his desk and sat down in his desk chair, propping his boots up on the corner of the desk. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave …” he quoted. “So, let’s circle back. Kain kills Ward … but we don’t know why yet.”
“I don’t know that we’ll ever know that one,” Leigh said. “Unless Kain can tell us, there simply may not be enough evidence left to ascribe motive in an eighty-year-old case.”
“Then someone from the Ward family kills Anna Kain in retribution for Ward’s death and leaves the cuff links as a calling card,” Matt continued. “Something that would look innocuous to investigators at the time, but something that Samuel Kain would recognize immediately.”
“What if it was more devious than that?” Juka interjected. “Remember when we were going over the case information. Trooper Bern initially looked at Kain for the murder, but he alibied out. What if whoever committed the crime actually wanted Samuel Kain to go away for
it, to lose not only his wife, but his freedom?”
“It certainly fits. If you’re looking for revenge this would be the ultimate payback. If you kill him, he doesn’t hurt for very long. This way, he suffers for the rest of his life knowing those cuff links were left to tell him exactly why his wife died.”
“So theory number one is that someone from Ward’s family killed Anna for revenge,” Leigh said. “But the biggest question is why the huge gap in time?”
“Maybe they didn’t know who was responsible for Ward’s death until then? Or maybe it was a younger member of the family who had to grow up to commit the crime?” Kiko suggested.
“Could be,” Paul agreed, “but I’d be leaning toward the former. For the first few years, they probably held out hope that something had happened and he’d walk back through the door one night. At some point, they had to realize he wasn’t coming back, but there was never a body to prove it. But something had to change in the mid-seventies for this to come back to Samuel Kain when no one else even knew the murder had taken place. Surely it would have happened sooner otherwise.”
“And then to turn it around all these years later and kill Peter Holt. It’s like the Hatfields and the McCoys all over again.” Kiko pulled over a wheeled chair from the workstations and sat down. “So then who killed Peter Holt?”
“The real question is which member of that family knew Anna was killed by one of the Wards? If it was common knowledge, then it would be known publicly. But this was private knowledge only. And then, once again, why such a gap in time between the murders?” Juka asked.
“The other issue in all this is whether the person responsible for Anna’s death is even still alive,” Matt pointed out. “It might not even have been one of the Wards who were ‘hands-on.’ They had the money to pay for a hit. They had the money four years later to pay for framing Santino Cabrera.”
“And that brings up another question of timing,” Leigh said. “Why wait four years to frame someone? We know Bern wouldn’t let go of the case, but was he finally getting close? Was he about to find something out and they needed to distract him?”
“Is he still around?”
“He is, and it’s time I talked to him. We probably can’t go back to the beginning and talk to anyone who investigated Charles Ward’s disappearance eighty years ago. So this has to be our ground zero for now. I’m going to try and track Bern down this afternoon. He’s retired, but still lives locally. And before you ask if you can come, the answer is no.”
Matt jerked in surprise, his boots sliding from the corner of the desk to thump dully on the tile floor. “How did you know I was even going to ask?”
“I know you too well.” She gave him a twisted smile. “I’m going to go tell a cop there was a crucial error in his case and he sent the wrong man to jail for thirty years. If it was me, I wouldn’t want spectators, especially outsiders. I’m trying to leave him a little pride, Matt.”
Matt considered her point and nodded reluctantly in agreement. “Yeah, I guess if it was me, I wouldn’t want a crowd of people there when someone broke bad news to me.”
“Exactly.”
“Then while you’re working on that, let me see if I can put a little pressure on getting the cigarette DNA results ASAP. I’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready.”
Leigh pushed off from the desk and collected the photos, the cuff links, and her bag. “Sounds good. In the meantime, I’ll go back more than thirty years and try to find out what exactly happened to Anna Kain that put the ball back in play again in this family feud.”
CHAPTER TWENTY: SPARGING
* * *
Sparging: an early step when brewing beer is mixing crushed grains with hot water to convert complex carbohydrates into simple sugars. Sparging, the next step in the process, involves trickling water through the grain bed to extract those sugars. Water of the wrong temperature or pH will extract tannins from the chaff (grain husks), resulting in a bitter brew.
Monday, 1:10 p.m.
Bern Residence
Manchester, Massachusetts
“Trooper Bern, I appreciate you making time for me on such short notice.” Leigh took a seat on the couch next to the roaring fire, directly across from a balding older man so slender he bordered on frail.
“Just ‘Gary’ is fine. I’ve been retired for eight years now, so calling me by my rank seems needlessly formal. But I’m always happy to help with an investigation.” He shifted in his chair, pulling a worn beige cardigan closer around his thin frame. “You weren’t very specific on the phone. Just that it was an old case of mine. Which one?”
“The murder of Mrs. Anna Kain in nineteen-seventy-five.”
“Well, well. Anna Kain.” The hazy gray eyes went unfocused for a moment, lost in memories. “For a while, I thought that was a case I’d never solve. Home invasion. Shooting death. The family was absolutely devastated.”
“I’ve read your notes. You worked that case for a long time.” She pulled the overflowing case file from her bag, noticing how Gary’s eyes lit up at the sight of it. Retired, but he misses the old life.
“You’re a cop,” he said, his gaze fixed longingly on the folder in Leigh’s lap. “You know what it’s like when a case sinks its claws into you. This one had its claws into me for nearly five years before I finally put it to bed.”
Leigh had to fight to keep from wincing. There was such pride in his voice—for a job well done and a case finally solved. And she was about to shatter that pride. “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about. I met with Detective Lieutenant Harper earlier this afternoon. We’re reopening this case based on new evidence.”
“But …” Gary’s face went slack with disbelief, his fingers going white where they clasped the padded arms of his wing chair, thin blue veins bulging over the backs of his hands under the pressure. “But I don’t understand. That case was closed in nineteen-eighty. We had definitive evidence. We convicted and sent a man to jail.”
“Santino Cabrera. I’ve met with him twice in the past few days. He was never there.”
“That’s what he always said. But the evidence proved he was lying.”
“The fingerprint evidence?”
“Yes. There was definitive evidence that put him in that house at the time of the murder.”
“He was never in the house. The fingerprint evidence was falsified.”
“Falsified?” Gary’s voice cracked as it rose. “How?”
“There never was a match. The fingerprint tech who testified in court either lied or made a grave error.” She pulled Claire’s report from the top of the file folder and passed it across to him. “See for yourself. This analysis was done twice, the second time with a fresh ten-print card I took myself two days ago.”
Gary took the report with a trembling hand and then fumbled with his reading glasses, pulling them from the breast pocket of his cardigan and pushing them up onto his nose. He pressed two fingers to his temple as his face flushed a dull red that sent Leigh’s pulse quickening.
She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her knees. “Gary, are you all right?”
“As a cop, I spent my entire working life trying to do the right thing. And now to learn I may have contributed to helping convict and imprison an innocent man for over thirty years? Give me a minute to absorb it.” He looked up over the top of his lenses, meeting her gaze. The bone-deep regret there was like a fist to her gut. “Without the fingerprint evidence, there isn’t a shred of evidence to tie him to the Kain home invasion, is there?”
“No, nothing.”
Gary’s head drooped over his nearly concave chest. His shoulders rose and fell with a sharp breath, but then he raised his head, his eyes clear and resolute. Angling the paper into the light, he quickly read the report. When he was done, the papers dropped limply into his lap. “What have I done?”
“You did exactly what any other good cop would have done. You followed the leads, and you didn’t give up. If Cabrera’s prints
hadn’t popped, you would have continued to look for the person responsible.”
“But they did pop, as you say. And I thought we’d finally found our man.”
“It’s clear at this point it was a frame-up, but we’re trying to figure out who was responsible and why so long after the murder. The murder occurred in seventy-five; Cabrera wasn’t associated with the case until four years later. Why? What were you doing four years later that steered you in another direction?”
Gary slid off his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose between forefinger and thumb. For a moment he was silent, and then he looked up. “Can I look at that file again? It’s been a few years; I’d like to double-check my memory of the investigation.”
“Of course.” Leigh handed him the file and then sat back as he slipped his glasses back on and flipped through the pages. Some he paused over, some he flipped quickly past. Finally, he came to the mug shot of Santino Cabrera. Leigh recognized the young man in the older man she’d met. His expression hadn’t changed much—the anger was there, as was the bitterness. But the hardness that set his mouth and backed his gaze now was absent in this younger portrait. That kind of hardness could only be learned from decades in prison.
He tapped the photo. “I was exhilarated when Cabrera came up. Four years of looking for the right man for the job and coming up empty. And then there he was. His fingerprints placed him inside the house, he had a history of home invasion in the area, had already done time, and looked the part—an angry young Latino, with long hair and tattoos. It wasn’t a hard sell to the jury.”
“You mention the ‘right man’ for the job. Did you ever look at any women?”
Gary looked up sharply. “Women? No one ever stood out as a likely suspect.”
“But think back to the crime scene. Two teacups on the table, two colors of lipstick on the cigarette butts in the ashtray. You knew someone else was on scene that morning, but you never identified who it was?”
