Ready, Aim, Under Fire (Lexi Graves Mysteries, 10)

by Camilla Chafer

  “No one could tell them apart?” I mused.

  “Not even you,” said Sam, “and you’re smart.”

  “Aww, thanks.” I beamed at him and ruffled his hair. So far, this was a good evening.

  “Everyone says you’re smart.”

  I brightened. “Really?”

  “Yeah, a regular smartass.”

  “Sam!” said my mom. “Where did you hear that?”

  “I heard Serena say it in the kitchen when I was getting a drink!”

  My mother sighed but I ignored her, too focused on what Sam had just told me. “So, you’re saying with the right conditions, one girl that looks a little bit similar to the other can fool everyone into thinking she’s someone else?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘right conditions’ but yes, that’s what they’re doing. They’re fooling everyone so the queen doesn’t get killed by her enemies.”

  “Sam, you are wonderful!”

  “I know,” said Sam, looking more than pleased.

  “I know how they did it,” I said to myself. We’d run by so many different scenarios but only one stuck out. I knew now how Debby had returned. I just didn’t know why. However, I figured I could work that out now that the pieces were becoming clearer. All I had to do was prove it.

  “Me too,” said Lily. “Sam just explained it.”

  “No, not that! I got it all wrong. I know what happened to Debby Patterson.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “It was one hell of a night,” said Garrett, “and I don’t mean in a way that thrilled my wife.”

  “Sorry!”

  “Don’t be. You hit on something and I know I can crack her.” Garrett and I both turned our attention to the woman on the other side of the two-way mirror. Debby Patterson sat upright, her hands folded on the table. Every so often, her eyes flickered, glancing at different portions of the gray wall. Garrett had left her alone for fifteen minutes and she showed no signs of cracking under the strain yet. “Why don’t you sit in on the interview?”

  “Can I?”

  “You are an official consultant. You want in, you’re in.”

  “I really want in,” I told him. My phone beeped and I glanced down, seeing the information I expected to see. Just like Garrett and I had planned, Anna was sitting in the lobby when he brought Debby in. As far as I knew, Debby hadn’t seen Anna but Anna managed to get a good, long look at Debby. I held the phone up to Garrett, showing him what Anna had just sent in a text. If I needed more proof, it wouldn’t take me long to track down Amber Yuen, who clearly recognized Marley from their cooking class.

  He nodded. “Let’s go.”

  Garrett walked in first, holding the door open for me. We were silent as we took the chairs opposite Debby and sat down. Garrett placed a file on the table between us and leaned back in his chair, waiting another whole minute for the tension to rise before he spoke. “Do you want to do this the easy way or the hard way?” he asked.

  Debby stared. “I want to know why I’m here. You came to my hotel and hauled me in here, barely awake. What’s going on?”

  “I think you know why you’re here.”

  “No, I really don’t.”

  Garrett crossed his arms and fixed Debby with a hard stare. “I’ll tell you a story. You jump in whenever you’re ready. Ten years ago, there were two women. One was a hardworking graduate who disappointed her parents by not following their advice. She was their only daughter, very precious, and very much wanted, but she couldn’t please them. She was a dreamer. She didn’t really think too much about other people. Sometimes, she even took off without telling anyone so when she took off for the final time, no one close to her got worried.”

  “You’re talking about me,” said Debby.

  Garrett raised his eyebrows, just barely. “Am I?” he asked.

  “I didn’t take off. I was traveling.”

  “Let me tell you about the other girl. She was a hard worker too but things went south for her. Her parents decided to move away when she finished high school and took her with them. She attended college but had a hard time keeping up and it only got worse when her parents died. First, she had to care for her dying mom. Then she had to become a full-time nurse to her dad. She struggled with her studies and barely passed the courses. When her parents passed on, she didn’t know what to do with herself anymore. She had trouble finding a job and her closest friend hardly bothered to care because she was so wrapped up in her own world.”

  Garrett and I had worked up the profile over a couple of hours, finding all the information easily once we knew where to look. I could play out in my head exactly what he intended to say, even before he said it but I tried not to. My job was to watch Debby closely. I had to monitor her for any flicker of recognition, any chink in her well-constructed facade.

  “This is fascinating,” yawned Debby.

  “We’re just getting to the fascinating bit,” said Garrett, dismissing her. “You see, both these women went missing at the same time, and ten years later, only one of them came back. You want to know what happened to the one that came back?”

  “This is the interesting bit,” I said. Debby looked at me but didn’t say anything. “You might want to pay attention now.”

  “She killed someone,” said Garrett simply as he watched her. Debby didn’t flinch. “Someone who knew she was living a lie as an impostor.”

  I reached for the folder and opened it, pulling out two photos, which I lay flat on the table. “This is Debby Patterson and this is Marley McFadden.” I pushed them towards her and tapped one of them with my forefinger. “They were old friends. See how much alike they seem? Same height, similar facial features and comparable figures. It wouldn’t take too much of a stretch to tip the scales. After ten years, it could be hard to tell them apart, almost impossible to determine if you hadn’t seen either woman in all that time. See how Debby has this little bump on her nose? You, Marley, don’t have one at all but that was easy enough for you to explain. If anyone mentioned it, you replied that you got it surgically corrected during your time away. No one could ever confirm you didn’t. No one saw you recovering from it. Everyone assumed you got a nose job but it never happened, did it? It was just a story to explain how that little feature disappeared.”

  “I’m Debby!”

  “No, you’re not. We know you’re Marley McFadden and we can prove it.”

  “But that’s not the bit we’re most excited about proving, is it, Lexi?” said Garrett.

  “No, Lieutenant Graves, it is not,” I replied, playing right along.

  “We’re really excited about the next bit where we arrest you for the murder of Fiona Queller.”

  This time, Debby’s head shot up, her eyes widening in alarm. “I didn’t kill Fiona!”

  “Fiona discovered your secret,” I told her. “Maybe you said something, or did something, but she was on to you almost right away. She confronted you at your welcome home dinner, and told you she knew you weren’t the real Debby Patterson and said she was going to announce it. She told me about her suspicions and you knew you had to kill her before we could meet because once someone knew, your gig was up. If Fiona told me everything she knew, it was only a matter of time before your happy, new life disappeared and you couldn’t let that occur.”

  “No, that’s not what happened! I mean, yes, Fiona said she didn’t believe I was Debby but I didn’t kill her. You have to believe me!”

  “How long do you think she’ll get?” I asked Garrett.

  “Murder one?” he asked and I nodded. “Twenty-five years minimum. If she’s lucky, she might even make parole early, but that’s improbable if she doesn’t show any remorse.”

  “Juries don’t like to see any lack of remorse, do they?”

  “No, they don’t. Do you see any remorse here?”

  “None. We have quite the story for the jury,” I finished, just as we planned. Debby, or Marley, didn’t know we were bluffing her. We’d already decided the best
thing to do was stick to the facts we knew and hope the impostor caved and filled in the rest. Fear played a good part in that strategy. We needed Marley to confess her crime and tell us what happened because so far, we had nothing to tie her to the murder, only the appropriation of the real Debby’s life. Plus, there was the enormous question we hadn’t even begun to answer: where was the real Debby Patterson? We had a theory, sure, but no evidence.

  “We have DNA,” added Garrett. “We have everything we need to prove you killed Fiona. You went to her house with a gun and confronted her. You shot her and ransacked her house to make it look like a robbery. Taking a weapon to the scene is premeditation; and that’s a murder charge you can’t get out of. After you killed Fiona Queller, you just carried on like nothing happened. You thought you’d stick it out in Montgomery, milking the real Debby’s parents for whatever you could get while you probably planned on taking off again. Tell me, Marley, did I get all of that correct?”

  “This is crazy! You’re both crazy. She’s been stalking me,” said Debby, waving a finger at me. “She’s been trying to pin Fiona’s murder on me from the start and now she’s got you believing it too. You badgered my parents and Mr. Queller.”

  “I was never investigating Fiona’s murder,” I told her. “I was investigating you! You were right, I was following you but I’ve also done a lot of checking into your background. Or should I say, Debby’s? I even have your DNA to compare to the real Debby.” It was a lie but Marley didn’t know that. The one hole in her plan was not knowing how much information MPD held on Debby. DNA had been extracted, sure, but she didn’t need to know it was now unusable.

  “You can’t!”

  “I do. It’s being tested right now. I already have one witness who will attest that you aren’t Debby Patterson and I can get plenty more to join her. You don’t have a lot of time to admit the truth.”

  “I’m not admitting to something I didn’t do. I did not kill Fiona!”

  “You killed her, just as surely as you killed Debby. You took over her life entirely. You became her.” Garrett and I discussed the whole thing over a breakfast of coffee and donuts in his office. Both of us came to the conclusion that Debby couldn’t still be alive. Whether she died right away, or sometime during the past ten years, we weren’t sure. However, we felt certain Marley couldn’t have become Debby without the real Debby being gone entirely. The only thing standing between our theories and the actual truth was time. “I’ll make sure we get you for her murder too. If you want any chance of getting out of jail while you’re still alive, you need to start talking,” finished Garrett.

  Debby crossed her arms, her lips pinched together. “I want a lawyer,” she said.

  “You want to ask the Pattersons to retain one?” shot back Garrett but Debby had already clammed up.

  Garrett looked at her for a long minute, then he scooped up the photos and closed the file. He stood, indicating I should follow him from the room.

  “Well, crap,” said Garrett, closing the door and stepping away. “Now we have to wait for her lawyer to turn up.”

  “How long is that going to take?” I wondered.

  “The public defender’s office will send over whomever gets freed up next. It could be in an hour, or it could be tomorrow. We just have to wait.” We walked over to the coffee machine in the homicide squad room and Garrett pulled two cups from the shelf. He filled them, passing me a coffee which I took gratefully, wrapping my hands around the mug.

  “She’s cool as a cucumber under pressure,” I said.

  “She is.”

  “I really thought she would admit to everything once we told her we had her.”

  “It’s rarely that easy. My guess is she will keep trying to wriggle out of it until we stick irrefutable evidence in front of her. By that time, her lawyer will try and cut us a deal. It will be interesting to hear what she has to offer in return for a plea bargain.”

  “Would you really consider giving her a deal?”

  “Depends on what it is. We’ve got Jerry Queller grieving and he deserves to know why his wife died and her kids sure as hell deserve to know. Plus, the Pattersons should know what happened to their real kid. That woman in there is the only one who can help.”

  “If she doesn’t tell us anything, she’s in a really strong position to deny everything.”

  Garrett grimaced. “Let’s hope she gets so worked up over wondering about what we know that it doesn’t occur to her.”

  My phone buzzed and I plucked it from my pocket. “Solomon,” I said to Garrett before excusing myself.

  “What’s happening?” asked Solomon.

  “She lawyered up right after Garrett told her she killed Debby and he would get her for Fiona’s murder too.”

  “Sounds like she’s panicking. What’s your read on her?”

  “When it comes to Debby, she isn’t protesting much about the fraud, but mention murder and she’s adamant she didn’t kill anyone. In Fiona’s case, I hate to say it, but I think I believe her.”

  “Evidence backs that up.”

  “I know,” I said, recalling the blood on the gun. “She seems genuinely upset that anyone could suspect her as a killer. We might have a long wait for the lawyer. She’s getting a public defender.”

  “She didn’t ask for the Pattersons’ lawyer?”

  “No, I think she’s cracking. She knows she can’t keep up the ruse much longer.”

  “Hang in there. You’ll get her.”

  I smiled. “How are things going at the office?”

  “Busy. Two new clients walked in with two big security breaches in their software. I’m thinking there’s a connection but they don’t know it yet. It might keep me busy.”

  “That’s why they pay you the big bucks,” I pointed out. “Garrett’s waving to me so I have to go. See you later?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I stuck my phone in my pocket and hurried over. “Something happen?” I asked.

  “Debby, Marley, whoever the hell she is, struck lucky. A lawyer was already in the lobby and he went in just now. He’s not the best attorney but he’s here. We might get this over with a lot faster than I thought.”

  “That’s great news.”

  “I’ve got to admit, I’m looking forward to hearing the story even if we already have it all figured out.”

  I nodded. I’d thought a lot about the case in the past few days and once it all started clicking together, I was almost certain what the woman currently speaking to her lawyer would say. There was only one thing I couldn’t be sure about. “Do you think she’ll confess to the murders?”

  “You read my mind. Depends on what kind of offer I put on the table and that depends on what she says.”

  “Two murder charges and a fraud doesn’t sound too tempting to me,” I said.

  “It might be if it reduces her sentence and gives her the chance of seeing daylight before she dies, or if Debby’s death were truly an accident. Even so, the DA will say she covered up the death for who knows how long rather than calling it in. As for Fiona, I’m stumped. Did you check into the fake Debby’s alibi?”

  “Rod Patterson told us he spoke to her at six-forty-five which fits with what fake Debby told us. I spoke to the place where she got her food and they confirmed a sighting; and the concierge at her hotel also gave me a positive. Unless she’s hiding a pair of wings, I don’t see how she could have gotten to the Queller house and murdered Fiona or staged a robbery.”

  “Shit.” Garrett ran a hand over his hair. “I still like her for killing Debby.”

  “What if Debby’s alive?” I asked, even though I didn’t believe it.

  Garrett raised his eyebrows. “If she were, she would be here.”

  “Perhaps she’s living a whole new life and willingly sold her identity?”

  “It’s been done before but I’m not buying it. My gut says Debby’s dead and she did it,” he said, thumbing his hand in the direction of the interview room where fake Debby
was holed up with the public defender. “Even if she didn’t kill Fiona, I think she might know who did so I’m going to press her hard.”

  The door to the interview room opened and a short, balding man stepped out. With his gray pallor and even grayer suit, he had all the warmth and presence of a vending machine. He beckoned us over. “I’m Stanley Chalke,” he said, shaking Garrett’s hand then mine with a toasty palm. “My client is ready to talk to you.” Stanley turned and shuffled back into the room, taking the chair next to Debby. Garrett and I resumed our positions opposite them.

  “I’m listening,” said Garrett.

  “My name is Marley McFadden and I’ve been using the identity of Debby Patterson,” she said, keeping her eyes firmly fastened on the table.

  “Can you prove it?” asked Garrett.

  The woman we know knew as Marley looked up and frowned. “You said you could?”

  “I mean, do you have anyone who can attest to whom you say you are?” Garrett asked, recovering quickly from his slip.

  “There’re a few people from my old life but I have hospital records too. I broke my arm in three places when I was twelve. You can get the records and X-ray my arm to confirm that.”

  Garrett made a note. “That will help. Any family who could vouch for you?”

  “My parents both passed away and I don’t have any other close relatives so there’s no one left who can help. The girl you mentioned earlier is me. I did nurse my mom and then my dad. They didn’t leave anything behind for me. We lost our house to the medical bills. Fortunately, I’d already finished college on scholarship but there was nothing left from them. I didn’t have many friends. I used to be shy and since I was caring for my parents, I didn’t have time for many people or social outings. One day, I realized I had almost no one left.”

  “What about Debby Patterson? You two were friends,” I said.

  Marley lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “We met in high school. I enrolled sophomore year when my parents relocated here but we left a week after graduation when my dad got a new job. I wasn’t one of the popular kids, not athletic or even musical, but I was smart. Lonely, too. Debby took me under her wing.”