He thought a moment before answering me. “My gut says yes. It seems clear to me that there was little romance left in their relationship, and all that money has to be a powerful motive. What do you think?”
“I think she’s definitely hiding something. I should’ve had Roberta ask Caroline outright if she killed her husband. If she said no and I determined she was lying, it wouldn’t be admissible in court, but at least it would have given us a guideline for whether to keep digging. Although, if that guilt trip of hers about nagging Oliver more about his health was genuine, she might feel like she did kill him in away, even if she didn’t commit murder. And that could make her answer to the question ring false.”
Duncan’s phone rang, putting an end to our speculations for the moment. I listened to his end of the conversation, which consisted of little more than a few grunts of acknowledgment and a couple of single-word responses. I tried to hear what was being said on the other end, but there was too much ambient noise in the car, and Duncan had the phone up tight to his ear. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long.
“We may have a new lead in the Sheldon Janssen case,” he said once he disconnected the call. “A more thorough canvass of the neighbors found someone who saw a woman knocking on Janssen’s door the day before he was killed.”
“The one in the picture maybe?” I posed hopefully. “A girlfriend perhaps?”
“Maybe,” Duncan said, though the look on his face suggested otherwise. “Except according to the neighbor, Janssen wasn’t home at the time. You’d think if it was a girlfriend, she would know that, what with cell phones and texting and all.”
“Was this neighbor able to provide any sort of description?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how useful it will be. The neighbor is a man, and he didn’t notice the same sorts of attributes a woman might.” Duncan shot me a sidelong look—eyebrows raised—that told me what sort of attributes the man had focused on. “He said the woman looked to be in her thirties, maybe early forties, with curly, shoulder-length brown hair. She was too far away for him to be able to tell what color her eyes were, but he said she was a larger woman and that her chest appeared impressively big beneath a plain, tan wool coat.”
“Well, other than the description of her chest, it’s a rather ordinary description that could fit hundreds of women in the city,” I said. “But who knows? His observation about the chest might prove helpful.”
We arrived at the bar, and Duncan found a parking spot half a block away. Once we were inside, we went straight to my office. Duncan said he needed to make some phone calls, and I told him he could use the office to do so. I shrugged out of my coat and headed out to the main part of the bar to give Duncan some privacy.
I don’t open my bar until five on Sundays, so we had the place to ourselves. For the past couple of weeks, the O’Reillys had been my Sunday company, but they had taken the day off and gone sightseeing, so even they weren’t around. I did some prep work for the opening later by stocking beer, cutting up fruit for garnishes, replacing a near empty soda canister in the basement, and washing up some glasses. My stomach growled, and I hoped Duncan would finish up with his calls soon so I could fix the two of us something to eat for lunch. It was after one, and I hadn’t eaten breakfast. I decided if he took much longer, I was going to eat without him.
Fortunately, he came out a few minutes later. He looked excited and eager to share news with me, but before he could get a single word out, I told him, “Food is the priority at the moment. I have to eat now or I’m going to pass out from hunger. Do you want something?”
He smiled and said, “Surprise me.”
I was too hungry to play games, so I took him at his word and disappeared into the kitchen, deciding then and there that he was getting the same thing I was going to eat: a cheeseburger and fries. I’d already turned on the fryers in anticipation, so it only took me ten minutes to fix us up two plates. If it wasn’t for Duncan’s preference for well-done meat, I could have had it ready in seven. After fixing up both plates with lettuce, tomato, some ketchup for Duncan and some herbed mayo for me, I carried them out to the main area, where I found Duncan seated at one of the tables close to the bar. He had a soft drink in front of him already, so after setting down our plates, I fixed myself a cup of coffee and joined him.
“Okay,” I said, picking up my burger. “You can talk now.” I sank in my teeth and bit off a huge chunk of cheeseburger, savoring the flavors and all the synesthetic responses that came with them.
Duncan watched me chew for a moment, an amused expression on his face, before he spoke. “I tracked down this Norman Chandler fellow Mal mentioned, the one who’s good friends with Janssen. I called him, and he’s going to come down to the station to talk with me at three this afternoon.”
“The station?” I said, speaking rudely with a mouth half full of burger that I struggled to swallow. “Why there?”
“I want whatever he has to say to be on the record. If he’s that close to our victim, he has the potential for being a suspect.”
“You want me to go with you?” I mumbled, holding a hand in front of my mouth because I had just stuffed a couple of fries in there.
“Of course. And because you’re an official consultant now, I think I’m going to have you sit in the interview room with me rather than observe from outside.”
I made no comment to this, though I conceded the idea to him with a nod and a shrug.
“I’m going to have a chat with Klein, too,” Duncan went on, nibbling at his fries.
“Are you going to ask him about Mal?”
Duncan shook his head without hesitation, but he didn’t answer right away because he’d just taken a big bite of his burger. “No, I don’t want Klein to think we know anything about Mal. He won’t be surprised by me wanting to talk to him, given that Janssen was his right-hand man and someone killed him. But if there is a connection in Klein’s mind between Janssen’s death and Mal, I want him to tell me, not the other way around. If there is even a remote chance Mal’s true identity hasn’t been discovered, I don’t want to blow the case. Mal may not be able to go back there, but that doesn’t mean they can’t put another undercover cop in there in his place.”
“Do you know yet when you’re going to talk to Klein?” I asked him.
“I called him but got his voice mail. I left a message, explaining who I was and that I needed to speak with him regarding Janssen, and to call me back as soon as possible. Hopefully, he’ll call back today, but if not, I’m sure we’ll hook up tomorrow sometime. I want to go to him rather than have him come in to the station. I want to see him in his element, in this mobile office he has. Maybe we can get a glimpse at these books Mal was describing.”
“And am I going along for that one, too?”
“Of course,” Duncan said, winking at me.
“Any chance I can go see Felicity again sometime soon?”
Duncan frowned, and I thought he was going to tell me no, but it turned out to be different news. “I don’t see why not,” he said. “But there’s something you should know. That third fingerprint we found on the gun was definitely hers.”
I frowned at this. “So she touched it, or maybe she picked it up when she found her father. It doesn’t mean she shot him.”
“True,” Duncan admitted. “I found out a few other things, too. I had some of my guys dig into the life of Janssen’s wife, Hope, to see what they could find. They found a death certificate from three months ago that says she died from a drug overdose, so that part is verified. But there wasn’t a lot else. Hope lived very much off the grid. She and Sheldon split when Felicity was three, though they never actually divorced. Sheldon paid her child support for the next five years. When the kid was four, she was placed in an institution by her mother.”
“Wait,” I said around a french fry. “Why did Sheldon pay Hope child support all those years if Felicity was placed in an institution?”
“Hope didn’t tell Sheldon that. S
he let him think Felicity was living with her all that time, and she kept the child support money for herself.”
“That’s cold,” I said. “Didn’t she have to pay for Felicity’s care?”
“Ah, there’s the rub,” Duncan said, in a tone that let me know something juicy was about to follow. “Hope took Felicity to an out-of-state residential mental health facility in Illinois and said she was scoping the place out for a possible admission there. Then Hope disappeared, leaving Felicity behind. She used a false name for both Felicity and herself, so no one knew who Felicity really was. Hope told them the kid’s name was Jean, which happens to be Felicity’s middle name, so the place called her Jean Doe. They couldn’t just toss her out at that point, and efforts to find Hope were unsuccessful, so the kid became a ward of the court and stayed there, her care being provided at the taxpayers’ expense.”
“So how did Sheldon find her?”
“We found some payments in Sheldon’s files from a year ago that were for a private investigator. A couple of my guys talked to that PI this morning and learned Sheldon had hired him to see if he could find out how Felicity had died, and where her grave was, so he could visit it. According to the PI, Sheldon had just been told by Hope that Felicity had died, and Sheldon, knowing Hope had a history of drug abuse, was suspicious about the circumstances. Coincidentally, just before Hope told him Felicity had died, Sheldon had written a letter to her that he sent with one of his child support payments, saying that he wanted to see Felicity, and maybe even talk about setting up some sort of shared custody.”
“Why? I wonder.”
Duncan shrugged. “Maybe his conscience was getting to him. Maybe it was some kind of midlife-crisis thing. Or maybe he was trying to mitigate his child support payments. Who knows?
“Anyway, Hope didn’t want to lose out on the child support payments, but clearly, she couldn’t have Sheldon asking too many questions or trying to visit his daughter, because then he’d discover the truth. So she accepted she was going to have to give up on the child support money and came up with the death story, thinking that would make Sheldon go away.”
“So how did Sheldon find his daughter?”
“The PI tailed Hope, saw she was homeless, which explained why Sheldon was mailing his payments to one of those mailbox stores, and that she was heavily into the drug scene. He found her high as a kite one night, pretended to be high himself, and started questioning her. She admitted the whole story to him. She told him that Felicity was still alive, and what facility she was in. Once the PI took the information back to Sheldon, he found Felicity and went about establishing his paternity through DNA testing. Then he simply checked her out of the place. I’m guessing he built that hidey-hole before he took her out of the facility so it would be ready when he brought her home. And apparently, he didn’t tell anyone about her.”
“Odd,” I said, wiping my mouth with a napkin. “I wonder why he felt the need to have her living with him when he didn’t have anyone to care for her while he was gone, and didn’t try to get her into any programs.”
Duncan shrugged. “It is a bit puzzling.”
A terrible thought came to me then. “When the doctor examined her, was there any evidence of sexual assault?” I asked.
“No, thank goodness,” Duncan said. “That was one of the first things I thought of, that Janssen was abusing the child in some way. But there was no evidence of that, or any other abuse for that matter. The kid appears well nourished, she doesn’t have any unexplained or unusual marks, injuries, or bruises, and while it’s impossible to tell if she’s suffered any sort of emotional or mental abuse, given her condition, she doesn’t strike me as someone who’s been severely traumatized in any way. And since there are DNA records proving Sheldon is her father, we know Felicity is who we think she is. Just to be sure, we emailed a picture of her to the facility, and they confirmed it’s her. Granted, Sheldon’s means of caring for her were less than ideal, but it doesn’t appear to have caused the kid any harm.”
I had to agree with his assessment of the situation. At first blush, the whole hidey-hole business had seemed like some form of abuse, or captivity at the very least, but in the end, it had turned out to be a comforting factor for Felicity.
Duncan finished off his burger and pushed his empty plate away. “We need to get going,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Our Mr. Chandler will be at the station in twenty.”
I popped my last fry into my mouth and gathered up our plates, carrying them into the kitchen. Then I went to my office to get my coat.
The sky outside was leaden and heavy, threatening a winter storm. I hunched down inside my coat and hoped Duncan’s car heater would warm up fast. It reached a comfortable level about the same time we reached the station, and it was all I could do to coax myself out of the car and into the frigid world outside. That cold seemed so ominous.
Chapter 19
I’d been to Duncan’s station before to observe suspect interviews, but on the other occasions I’d stayed inside an observation room that let me see and listen in to the interrogation without the room’s occupants being the wiser. This time, things would be more nerve-racking because I would be in the room with the suspect, though I reassured myself some by remembering Chandler wasn’t a suspect at this point. He was what Duncan and the other cops often referred to as a person of interest.
“Want a cup of coffee or some water to take into the room with you?” Duncan asked me as I shucked my coat and handed it to him so he could hang it on a hook in the station break room.
“I’ve heard about the coffee you have here and I think I’ll pass,” I said sardonically.
“Wise choice. Water? It’s bottled, so we haven’t had a chance to ruin it.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Duncan bought two bottles of water from a vending machine, handed me one of them, and then led the way to the interview room. “You can have a seat here,” he said, pointing to a chair in one corner of the room. There was a table with three other chairs positioned around it, and I knew from my past observations that Mr. Chandler would be directed to the one at the end farthest from the door. That would put him opposite me, with a healthy distance between us and the door nearest to me, which helped my rattled nerves a bit.
“I need to go set up some things to make sure this is recorded,” he told me. “Make yourself comfortable and I’ll be right back.”
I settled into the chair, which was clearly not designed for comfort—I wondered if this was intentional—and sat with my water bottle between my legs and my hands primly folded in my lap. The walls in the room were bare, and the table and chairs were plain wood, scarred in places, and cheap in design. From a synesthetic point of view, it was a calming place. There was no sound other than that of my breathing, little visual stimulation, and no overwhelming smells for me to pick up. Then I remembered Duncan was very likely watching me at this very moment from the observation room. I looked at the mirrored window and gave a tentative smile. Not knowing who was back there watching me didn’t do much to further settle my jangling nerves.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long. Minutes after he left, Duncan returned. I felt relief at his presence until I realized Norman Chandler was right behind him, or at least some man I assumed was Norman Chandler. My brain barely had time to register the incongruence of Duncan letting a potential suspect walk behind him when I saw there was a third person: Chief Holland.
The presence of the chief unsettled me even more. I shot Duncan a look, but he ignored me.
The chief gave me a cursory nod and a smile. “Ms. Dalton,” he said. He then summarily dismissed me, shifting his attention to Norman Chandler, so I did the same.
Chandler’s face was leathery and weathered, befitting someone who had spent a lot of time working outdoors in all seasons. His build was lean and sinewy; his hands looked like thick slabs of meat and his fingers bore the many scars of his work. His eyes were a pale blue—almost watery—and his nose bore
a road-map of superficial and burst blood vessels that I had seen hundreds of times in people who worshipped alcohol a little too much and a little too often. As he walked past me, I caught a whiff of him and was surprised not to smell any alcohol. But there was a lingering scent of old sweat that emanated from his blue jeans and his wool winter jacket, which looked like it had seen better years. Stains blotted the front of it, there was a button missing from both the top and the bottom, and the material looked threadbare. His feet were clad in work boots that were creased and discolored, and the soles appeared to be unevenly worn. On his head was a knit cap, dirty-blond hair escaping from the sides and back.
Duncan directed Chandler to the seat at the far end of the table, and he walked over and plopped down like someone who was exhausted and could barely stand. Duncan took the seat closest to him, while the chief took the remaining chair at the opposite end of the table, close to me.
Before starting any questioning, Duncan pulled a small notebook from his shirt pocket, opened it, and flipped to a page. He then stated the date, the time, the people present, and the fact that we were talking with Mr. Chandler regarding the Sheldon Janssen homicide case. When he was done with that, he shifted his gaze to Chandler and informed him that our talk was being recorded. He did not recite the Miranda to him. Chandler said nothing, did nothing in response to all this.
“Mr. Chandler, thank you again for coming down here to talk with us,” Duncan went on. “As I explained to you on the phone, one of your coworkers and someone I’ve been told was a personal friend of yours, Sheldon Janssen, was found murdered on Friday. We’re trying to establish some background and history on the man in hopes of getting a better idea about why someone would want to kill him.”
Chandler eyed Duncan with casual indifference. If he was nervous, it didn’t show. “Damned shame, what happened to him,” he mumbled. His voice was gravelly, and it tasted like bland barbecue sauce. “Hope you catch the bastard what did it.”
Duncan made some brief introductions, introducing the chief with the caveat that he was Duncan’s boss and there to observe him in action, and introducing me as Ms. Dalton and stating I was his assistant. Chandler barely spared the chief or me a glance.
Last Call Page 19
