by Lauren Carr
“I’ve read a lot about Mac Faraday,” Doris said through her laughter. “He does not trust or like journalists.”
“Did Faraday handcuff you to any vehicles, Christopher?” Bruce asked.
“No. Leave it to me. I’ll reach out to him and his wife to see if they have any information they can pass on,” Chris said with a smirk. “Here’s the point of Shannon’s letter. Mercedes Livingston set out to disappear so that she could be with the man she loved. Someone used her running away to abduct her husband, hold him for ransom, and murder him. Because of that, Shannon’s children can never go public about who their mother was because it will be assumed that she’d done it.”
“Not only did they kill George Livingston, but they stole Shannon’s legacy,” Jacqui said.
Chris referred to the notes from the case file. “Let’s start by going through the timeline of what happened when.”
Elliott laid a whiteboard in the middle of the table. “It’s not as big as the one we use at the library, but this will work for now.” He drew a line across the middle of the board. At one end, he drew another line down the side.
Chris said, “Saturday afternoon. Four to five o’clock, Mercedes Livingston gave a speech at the mystery writers conference at Hill House in Harpers Ferry.”
“Christopher and I were there,” Doris said. “Most everyone who attended the conference went to see her speak. It was in the main banquet room.”
“Mercedes left Hill House on foot at six-twenty,” Chris said, “but not without an altercation with Leah Woodhouse, the mother of Mercedes’s late roommate. During that altercation, Leah said she was going to teach Mercedes a lesson by taking away someone she loved.”
“Less than an hour later, George Livingston goes missing,” Doris said.
“Kirk eliminated Woodhouse as a suspect,” Elliott said while referring to a folder from the box. “Hotel security detained Woodhouse and called the police.”
“Because she’d threatened Mercedes with that dagger,” Chris said. “Of course, they’d have to call the police.”
“The police took her into custody for public intoxication and brandishing a weapon,” Elliott said. “She was held overnight and released on bail Sunday morning.”
“What about her son?” Chris asked. “The one who attacked Robin Spencer?”
“Rex,” Elliott said while reading the report. “He was taken to the ER for a broken nose. Was there most of the evening.”
“He didn’t have the opportunity to abduct George Livingston either,” Doris said.
“Unless they had other accomplices we don’t know about, I guess we can cross the Woodhouses off our suspect list,” Chris said with a sigh. “Mercedes had told her literary agent that she was going to meet George for cocktails at O’Toole’s before that evening’s banquet.”
“When really she was meeting Billy across the road in Hogs Alley,” Doris said.
“So they could ride off together into the sunset,” Jacqui said. “You have to admit that was very romantic.”
“The banquet at Hill House was to begin at seven o’clock,” Helen said while referring to the case file. “People noticed she wasn’t there for the dinner portion. A witness—” She stopped.
“What?” Jacqui asked.
“According to this statement here from Sue Richardson, Mercedes’s agent, Robin Spencer told her that Mercedes had returned from drinks with a migraine and wanted to lie down for a bit in her room.”
“She was buying time for Mercedes and Billy to get away,” Chris said.
“When we’d met Robin Spencer, I told her that Chris bumped into her because we were in a hurry to get Mercedes’s autograph,” Doris said with breathless excitement. “She told us to hurry because an autographed copy of her book was going to be worth a lot of money one day. That proves she was in on it.”
Helen continued reading. “Mercedes received an award that night.”
“Author of the Year,” Doris said.
“Her agent accepted it for her. She took it up to Mercedes’s room and found that she wasn’t there.”
“And since Robin Spencer claimed to have seen Mercedes Livingston at the hotel after returning from drinks,” Bruce said, “everyone assumed she had disappeared from the hotel. Clever woman. Robin Spencer planted a false lead in Mercedes’s whole disappearance.”
“Mercedes’s agent called the Bavarian to try to get in touch with George Livingston,” Helen said, “who everyone thought she had met for drinks.”
“This was before cell phones,” Bruce said.
“Meanwhile, in Shepherdstown,” Chris said as Elliott drew a second timeline beneath the one he had created for Mercedes, “George also had a speaking engagement. His speech ended at three o’clock in the afternoon. They also had a banquet dinner at seven o’clock and he was to do a major presentation afterwards. However, he’d told witnesses at the last minute that he was blowing off the banquet to go out to dinner with his wife. He’d said he’d be back in time for the presentation.”
“That’s different from what Mercedes had told her agent in Harpers Ferry,” Doris said. “She’d told her that she was meeting him for cocktails, not dinner. There’s a difference.”
“Good point, Doris.” Elliott made a note on the whiteboard. “Beautiful and smart, too.” He winked at her and she giggled.
“Pul-eeze,” Chris muttered before continuing. “At seven o’clock, two witnesses saw George Livingston climbing into a red Camaro with Virginia tags, matching the description of the one Mercedes had rented that weekend, and riding away with her.”
“But now we know that George could not have ridden away with Mercedes because she was running away with Billy,” Francine said.
“Who was driving the red Camaro?” Elliott wrote a note on the whiteboard under the time that George had disappeared.
“Do we know for a fact that the Camaro was indeed the same one that Mercedes Livingston had rented for that weekend?” Bruce asked. “Could George have climbed into a car that only looked like Mercedes’s rental?”
“Mercedes’s rental car had disappeared from the parking lot at Hill House,” Chris said. “I remember seeing it in the parking lot while she was speaking. It was gorgeous and hard to miss. It was gone before she’d left the hotel.”
“You were seven years old, Christopher,” Bruce said. “Can you say for certain that the Camaro you were admiring was in fact the very same one that Mercedes had rented?”
Chris frowned. “No, I can’t.”
“The state police were called at ten o’clock after the agent discovered that Mercedes was not in her room,” Helen said.
“Kirk was the detective on call that night,” Doris said. “It was one of his first cases as a new detective. He was only on the case for about an hour. By the time they got to Shepherdstown to follow up on George’s disappearance, the FBI were already on the scene.”
“What time was that?” Chris asked.
“I don’t know,” Doris said. “But I remember Kirk cussing up a storm about it.”
“No one knew it had been a kidnapping until three o’clock in the morning when Horace Billingsley got the ransom call at his estate in New York,” Chris said.
“Until the ransom call came in, everyone would assume that they had maybe gotten into a car accident on one of our country roads,” Elliott said. “No need to call in the feds at that point.”
“Or maybe they had checked into a seedy roadside motel under Mr. and Mrs. John Smith for some dirty role playing,” Francine said.
“They were married,” Chris said.
“Didn’t you and your wife ever stop in at a cheap motel for some sexy fun and games?” Francine asked.
Shaking his head, Chris cringed. “She was terrified of bedbugs.” He noticed Helen looking at him questioningly. His cheeks turned pink. “Let’s move on.”
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“The next morning, Mercedes’s car was found in the Potomac River,” Doris said.
“On Sunday evening, the kidnappers insisted that Kyle Billingsley, who had flown in from California as soon as he had gotten the news about the kidnapping, deliver the ransom,” Chris said.
“The same Kyle who was the only one in on Mercedes’s plans to fake her death,” Elliott said.
“Though now we have reason to believe Robin Spencer knew about it,” Francine said.
“Does anyone know George’s cause of death?” Jacqui asked while searching through the reports in the case file. “I know there was just skeletal remains, but if he was shot, there may even had been a spent cartridge at the gravesite if the bullet was still in the skull when they buried him. I’d really like to get a look at the medical examiner’s report.”
“I’ll get that report for you, Jacqui.” Chris flashed her a grin. “Have I let you down yet?”
“There’s always a first time.”
“Witnesses saw Mercedes walking down the hill into the historic district,” Doris said. “The culprit need only wait for her to leave Hill House, snatch her rental car, and drive in the opposite direction to go to Shepherdstown. He would have had plenty of time to get there to grab George.”
“But George had told witnesses he was going out to dinner with his wife,” Francine said. “Wouldn’t he have thought something was up when he saw someone else behind the wheel of that car?”
“Definitely,” Chris said.
“Unless he was lying when he told the witnesses that he was going out with his wife,” Elliott said. “Mercedes was miserable enough to walk away from everything—an extremely successful career mind you—to be with the man she loved. There were two people in that marriage. Don’t you think that maybe he was equally unhappy?”
“Are you thinking George had a mistress and she killed him?” Jacqui asked.
“What would be the mistress’s motive?” Francine asked. “Obviously, whoever killed him had to know about Mercedes running away. George stood to inherit her estate. Murdering him would be like killing the goose that lay the golden eggs.”
“I’d say the first suspect we need to look at is Mercedes’s brother, Kyle Billingsley,” Elliott said. “She told him about her plans.”
“He was the one who delivered the ransom,” Doris said.
“But he was in California at the time of the abduction,” Chris said.
Ray was already searching the Internet. “Kyle Billingsley was a talent agent in Hollywood during the eighties—specializing in boy bands. He’d discovered Lover Boyz.”
“Lover Boyz?” Helen asked.
“They were before our time,” Chris told her.
“They were a gritty version of the Beach Boys,” Francine said. “I never got into them.”
“What’s Kyle Billingsley doing now?” Chris asked.
“He’d be in his seventies,” Doris said.
“I’m looking,” Ray said while squinting at the laptop screen.
“Shannon said that she had transferred her share of their joint accounts to an off-shore bank,” Bruce said. “Granted, this was the eighties, so we didn’t have the instant notification process with banks like we do today. We’re talking about over a million dollars. George was a lawyer and a businessman. He had a lot of people working for him. It’s very possible that someone in his inner circle realized what his wife was up to and took advantage of it to embezzle money for themselves. He found out and they got rid of him.”
“We need to find out who benefited from George’s death,” Chris said. “He was the one who ended up dead. He was the real victim in this case.”
“Already on it,” Ray said while noting the information on his laptop. “George Livingston was vice president of Billingsley, Incorporated. They dealt in finance—investments, stocks, that type of stuff. George’s father had been a lifelong friend and associate of Horace Billingsley. George walked into a vice president position in charge of the legal division.”
“I imagine some of the company’s employees who worked their way up the ladder were a bit unhappy when little Georgie just walked into a vice president slot,” Bruce said. “We might want to look into who took George’s place in the company after his murder.”
“Who else benefited from George’s murder and Mercedes’s assumed death?” Francine asked.
“Kyle,” Elliott said. “With his sister and her husband out of the way, that paved the way for him to inherit his father’s estate.”
“Horace Billingsley left his entire estate to charity,” Ray said with a shake of his head. “Kyle now owns a night club in Baltimore, by the way.”
“Kyle may have thought there was still hope for him to inherit once Mercedes was gone,” Francine said.
“And he was the one Shannon gave a heads-up to of her plans,” Doris said.
“And he did deliver the ransom,” Elliott said, “which was never recovered.”
“I guess Kyle Billingsley is at the top of our suspect list,” Chris winked at Helen. “How about a road trip to Baltimore?”
To his surprise, she cringed.
Chapter Six
The chili was a hit. The children ate downstairs in the family room while fending off Chompers who had yet to develop manners.
While eating, the Geezers mused over the various aspects of the case. Jacqui read copies of witness statements that Kirk had obtained from a friend in the FBI. Francine studied newspaper clippings and magazine articles that he had collected over the decades. Ray searched the Internet for information about Kyle Billingsley.
“While Dad managed to collect a lot of official information, he basically has very little about George Livingston’s disappearance,” Chris said. “I’m assuming that’s because the feds were called in as soon as they realized George was missing.”
“Kyle Billingsley didn’t get in from the West Coast until Sunday afternoon.” Elliott referred to the details in another report while spooning chili into his mouth. “He had taken a flight out of LA as soon as his father called to tell him that Mercedes and George had been kidnapped and he’d gotten a ransom demand. I find it very suspicious that the kidnappers demanded that he deliver the ransom. How would they even know that he flew in from the West Coast?”
“Christopher, do you think your old partner at the FBI can get ahold of their case file?” Bruce asked while buttering a piece of cornbread.
“Ripley? Maybe,” Chris said. “Everything is digitized nowadays. If she makes a copy of the report, they’ll know about it and start asking questions. At this point, do we want to call attention to the fact that Mercedes Livingston staged her own disappearance? Once that happens, she’ll become the prime suspect in George’s murder.”
“We don’t want to put Shannon’s kids through that,” Doris said. “They’ve been through enough.”
“You can’t keep Shannon’s secret from them indefinitely,” Jacqui said. “She says in the letter that she’d left them a case of signed first editions of her book. They’re going to start asking questions when they find them.”
“Unless that box of books is removed from the house and put in safekeeping,” Bruce said. “Houses get broken into quite often once news hits that the homeowner has passed. I think we should go get that box of books and lock them up in the office at the library to keep them safe.”
“I do have a key to their house,” Doris said. “The girls are coming out Monday to start packing up the house. We know Shannon didn’t kill her first husband. I just can’t believe she did it.”
“If she did kill George, then she would never have left this letter telling us that she was Mercedes Livingston,” Chris said.
“We’ll figure it out, Doris.” Elliott winked at her.
“Helen, would you like to come along with me to Baltimore to question Kyle Billingsley?” Chris asked.
“Sure.”
He noticed that she glanced at the time on her cell phone before answering. It wasn’t the first time. He had also noticed that she had been relatively quiet that evening.
“According to Shannon’s letter, she and George lived separate lives,” Bruce pointed out while setting his bowl, the chili finished, aside. “That gives us two pools of suspects to look at. George could have been killed because of something to do with his connection to Mercedes or something going on at Billingsley, Incorporated.”
“Do you have any contacts in the Billingsleys’ world?” Chris asked.
“I have a lot of contacts,” Bruce said. “The Billingsleys? We’re talking about high-high society. Kennedys and Rockefellers. I’ll have to ask around. Maybe some contacts of contacts will know them.”
“What about Mercedes Livingston’s publishing contacts?” Chris looked across the table at Francine who was draining her beer.
“I was an investigative reporter,” Francine said. “I hung out in cop bars and dark alleys—not coffee houses and libraries.”
“But a lot of your contacts wrote books—they’d know editors and publishers,” Doris said. “Maybe some of them know Mercedes’s agent.”
“I’ll ask around,” Francine said. “Who owns the copyright to The Last Thing She Said now? Kyle?”
The Geezers exchanged questioning glances before they turned to Ray, who was searching the internet.
“There have been three movie versions made of The Last Thing She Said,” Doris said.
“Every time they make a movie from that book, the studio has to purchase the movie rights from whoever owns it,” Bruce said. “I guarantee the owner of the copyright gets a cut from the proceeds on ticket sales.”
“Thousands of copies of the books are sold every semester,” Doris said. “It’s required reading in a lot of schools and universities.”
“Whoever owns the copyright to The Last Thing She Said is making a lot of money,” Bruce said.
