The level of detail she’d squeezed into such a tiny space was astounding.
I shot Adeline an incredulous look.
“What? It helps me concentrate.”
On the next page, Damon was swinging a baseball bat at a piñata of Tony’s head. The left side of Piñata Tony’s jaw had already been caved in and was spilling out candy.
Next, Connor was posed on a wingback chair, straight-backed, grim-faced, and for some reason—shirtless.
Given Adeline had never seen him shirtless, it was remarkably accurate. Damn how I missed his chest, his embrace.
Ahem.
And on the following page, I was…
Oh, I wasn’t in there at all.
Right.
Connor returned the notebook to Adeline without a word. She tucked it into her clutch, grabbed her dinosaur piñata, and took her leave without bothering to thank Connor for allowing her to shadow him. Or sketch him shirtless for that matter.
She did, however, promise to see us tomorrow.
Lucky us.
15
Fifteen minutes later, Connor and I were en route to Alhambra in the San Gabriel Valley. He broke the comfortable silence. “At least one worthwhile thing came out of our monotonous morning.”
Did he mean uncovering the discrepancy over whether Isaac was helping Rick? Or was it that he could now check off “having an artist sketch me shirtless” from his bucket list?
“What’s that?”
“It freed us of Etta’s niece.”
I grinned. “Maybe we’ll have to interview more boring suspects first thing tomorrow then.”
A smile tugged at Connor’s lips. “Maybe we will.”
It was silly perhaps, but after discovering Adeline would be joining us, I’d been worried that rather than the case bringing Connor and me together, it might push us farther apart. Not that Connor was the type to latch on to the nearest pretty thing—Harper’s revelations made that clearer than ever. But what if he and Etta’s niece had gotten along really well? Learning about Sophia and how different she was to me raised the uncomfortable question of whether I truly was a good fit for Connor, and Adeline might have made me question that even more.
But instead, it had been reassuring to witness their obvious disconnect. Connor’s complete lack of interest despite her generous assets had been reassuring too. And it had highlighted some of the reasons we did suit each other. We cared about justice and doing a job well and could be stronger in both those pursuits when we teamed up. Family was important to us. If I did manage to win Connor back before our Australia trip and he met my parents, I knew he’d try (at least by his standards) to make a positive impression, the same as I’d tried with his family. We might go about things in different ways, but the life values—the big stuff—we shared.
And we made each other laugh. Well, smile in Connor’s case. When you pared it down like that, it was a solid foundation for a relationship.
Connor stopped the car in front of an old red-brick home mostly hidden by well-watered trees and shrubs. The street the house was on wasn’t a particularly nice one, but the flourishing garden brightened it. We walked up the concrete driveway onto the postage-stamp-sized porch. Up close, it was obvious the building had been meticulously maintained, from the condition of the mortar to the new roller shutters on each window.
Isaac Anand’s parents had died when he was young, leaving him with one living relative in the United States. He had more distant relatives in India, but he’d never traveled there in his thirty-one years on earth, so it was his grandmother who we’d come to see. Connor knocked on the freshly painted door.
The woman who opened it was built like a tree in harsh country. Short and stout and a little bent, but made to last, having weathered some of the harshest conditions life could throw at her.
But her resilience didn’t lessen her grief or pain. It just changed the way she dealt with it.
She listened quietly while Connor introduced us, then asked, “Have you got news for me about my grandson’s case?” Her accent was strong, but her English was perfect.
And her question, with its mixture of hope that we might have news and hopelessness because nothing would bring her grandson back, hit me like a bucket of ice water.
Knowing what a jerk Rick was had rendered me partly immune to Lyle’s grief, but now the tragedy of the crime penetrated. This brave woman had left her birth country of India and everything she knew behind for a shot at a better life, a better future for her family. Yet the land of opportunity had turned out to be a land of tragedy, and in its soil, she’d buried her husband, her only child, and would now be burying her grandson too.
Isaac, who had been little more than a vague, hazy figure in my mind the past few days, flashed into high definition. And remembering his body sprawled on the carpet left me sick with regret.
“I’m afraid not yet, Mrs. Anand,” I said, fixing my eyes on her searching brown ones in an attempt to drown out the image of her grandson. “But we’re so sorry for your loss and are doing everything we can to find who’s responsible.”
She dropped her gaze and shrugged. “It would not do him any good anyway.”
I got the impression she said so to be polite rather than meaning the sentiment. How could she mean it? How could anyone find peace when a loved one’s killer was roaming free?
Yet Connor had, I remembered. At least enough to get on with his life.
Until I’d come along and blown things up.
I swallowed hard and focused on Mrs. Anand. “We’re still trying to get a more comprehensive picture of why he might have been… targeted. May we come in?”
“Yes, please do.”
I hoped our efforts would be enough to find the person responsible, to go some way toward helping her find peace.
Inside the house, the complex patterns and bold hues of India sat alongside several framed posters of Elvis and a retro diner booth seat. There was also a large flat-screen TV with surround sound in the living room that I suspected Isaac might’ve had something to do with.
Mrs. Anand had us sit down and offered us homemade chai tea, but I declined, not wanting to put her through the trouble. When she had lowered herself into a red armchair too, I asked, “An acquaintance of his said Isaac was part of a secret online group. Do you know anything about that?”
“Online? Ever since I bought him his first computer, that is where he spent most of his time. Yes, I believe he was part of a group. I am not sure how it worked exactly, but it was for a noble purpose he told me. Maybe a charity or something like that? Except I think he said they stopped bad things from happening. Sorry, he did tell me about it, but I never really understood.”
“That’s okay, anything you can remember is helpful. Did you ever meet any of his friends from this group? Or hear of anything specific he was working on?”
“No, no, it was all online.” She said it as if “online” was as inaccessible to her as the planet Jupiter. Maybe it was.
“This is a strange question, but did Isaac have a fondness for wasabi peas?”
Her face creased in a heartbreaking smile. “He loved them. Used to be disappointed when people gave him candy instead at Halloween.”
So Damon hadn’t been lying about that. “Do you know anything about his current projects? There were rumors of a breakthrough of some kind.”
She shook her head helplessly. “He did not tell me much about his work; he knew I could not understand it. But he was very excited… about a month ago maybe? He said he was creating something that would make his parents and me proud.”
His dead parents, she meant. How could it be that some families were pummeled by such tragedy?
“Did he give you any hints?” I asked.
“No. He wanted to surprise me, and I have all the patience in the world for that boy.” Her eyes didn’t tear up, but her hand shook as she touched the beads around her neck. “Had, I mean.”
It was an effort to keep my mind on the ques
tions. “Do you have any idea what his relationship might’ve been with the other victim?”
The network of lines on her face deepened into a frown, and she straightened in her armchair. “You mean Richard Knightley? When you people asked me the first time, I could not remember where I had heard the name. But I saw him on the nightly news and realized why it was familiar. That horrible man stole millions from people. I have no idea what my dear boy would be doing with the likes of him.”
“Then I’m sorry to ask, but is there any possibility he might have been working with him, maybe helping to clear Richard’s name?”
“No. Not a chance.” She met our gazes. Read the doubt in them. Her hand went up to touch the beads around her neck again—a gift from Isaac?—and she took a deep breath. “Let me tell you a story.” She paused as if gathering strength to tell it. “You may or may not know that Isaac’s parents were killed in a terrible situation. Some good-for-nothing thieves tried to rob a Best Buy store, and when they got caught in the act, they took hostages. They killed four people. Including both Isaac’s parents”—her face momentarily crumpled—“and my only son.”
The break in her composure was almost the undoing of mine. It was stupid that I was so little impacted by the death of a stranger until it was made personal in this woman’s grief. But I suppose if we felt the loss of every injustice in the world, we would crumple under the weight of them.
I had no idea how Mrs. Anand hadn’t done so under the weight of hers alone.
She went on. “My husband died of a heart attack the year before, and so that is how I found myself trying to raise a six-year-old when I was almost sixty myself. Let me tell you, sixty is too old to raise a child single-handedly. We were okay for money thanks to my son’s life insurance, but the young have an energy only they possess, and I was exhausted trying to keep up.”
In some backward corner of my brain, it struck me that I often felt the same way about Etta.
“Truth be told, I was relieved when Isaac took to computing. It slowed him down a little. But I am getting off track. The point is, I had no energy left for anything else like gardening, or maintenance, or even shopping sometimes, and that is where my dear neighbor Burt came to our rescue time and time again. He did everything my husband would have been doing. And he was like a father figure to Isaac. Those two would spend hours tinkering in Burt’s work shed, repairing things or making bits and pieces for around the house, and who knows what else? Isaac loved and appreciated Burt more than most kids love and appreciate their real fathers.”
Her hands were steady again. “All this is to say that when Burt was tricked by one of those telephone scams, not as bad as some but bad enough that he would have had to sell the house if he wanted to keep food on the table… Well, Isaac heard about this and said Burt had been there for him through everything, and he was going to return the favor. But we both knew Burt would not accept a handout. He is far too proud for that. The man would not go to a doctor for help if he was dying. So, my wonderful boy came up with a plan.”
A ghost of the proud smile she would’ve beamed at Isaac flitted across her face.
“Isaac still would visit once a month to tinker in Burt’s work shed. It was an excuse to keep him company and help with the gardening. But anyway, Burt keeps all sorts of things in that shed, so after the scam, Isaac chose this random old bowl he kept his screws in and said, ‘You know, I think this might be antique Indian pottery. Do you have any idea how much that stuff sells for? Me either. But I have a friend who can value it for us. How about I take it to him and see what he says?’”
She was becoming more animated in the retelling now, remembering the good that had happened before the loss. I could almost imagine the bright, shrewd, and kind grandmother she would’ve been to Isaac growing up.
“Burt had no need for the silly thing, and so he agreed Isaac could take it. My dear boy brought him back an envelope full of money, claiming he sold it for forty-five thousand dollars. Burt insisted on giving him a finder’s fee, but Isaac had planned for that as well and chosen the pretend value accordingly. So he took a cut of the money, which kept Burt and his pride happy, and old Burt is still my neighbor to this day. Which is why you must see, someone who would go to all that trouble for a victim of one of those scams would not help that Richard boy. No way. Not a chance.”
And wouldn’t you know it? I believed her. Which meant Cox was lying. Or had been lied to himself.
We needed to find out why.
Hunt wasn’t at the station. An apologetic police officer gave us the reason.
“He’s taking a very, very late lunch with his lady friend. I swear I hadn’t seen the man do anything but eat at his desk in twenty years, and now he seems to take a lunch hour every other day. It’s as if he doesn’t have thirty unsolved cases breathing down his neck. But at least he’s less of a grump when he comes back.”
“We need to talk to Stanley Cox again,” Connor told him.
The officer grimaced. “Hunt hates being interrupted at these lunches of his. But you’re the consultant working the case with him, right? I’ll grab Cox for you, and you can go ahead without him.”
Which is how I found myself in the interrogation room five minutes later, face-to-face with the man claiming the double homicide as his own handiwork.
Stanley looked much like he had when he walked into the station and confessed. Not just because he was wearing the same clothes—well, except for his belt and shoelaces, which must have been taken from him. I hoped his underwear at least had been washed or changed too. Regardless, his second night in jail hadn’t seemed to faze him any more than the first, and Hunt’s questioning about the microcomputer had left him unaffected.
I wanted ours to be more successful.
Connor introduced us both and explained we had a few more questions for him, but Stanley’s eyes were stuck on me.
Neither Connor nor I had expected the recognition in them.
“I’ve seen you somewhere before… Wait, you’re the girl from the video! You were out to dinner with that scumbag before he died, and you took down the poor old man with the steak knife.”
Crap. Not an auspicious start to questioning an uncooperative subject. If I denied it, he’d clam up and refuse to talk. So I had to come up with an explanation that would satisfy him fast.
“You’re right,” I said. “I was there, and I stopped the old man from losing his freedom on top of the money he’d already lost. Ever wonder why Richard didn’t press charges? I talked him out of it. Something I couldn’t have done if the man had actually attacked.”
“Uh-huh, and who are you to have that kind of sway with the bastard?” He straightened as another thought occurred to him. “And what are you doing investigating this case? Did Knightley’s rich daddy set this up?”
This was going from bad to worse. How could I turn it around?
In a stroke of inspiration, I realized my poor acting skills might just save me. When Connor had shown me the recording, I’d noticed I hadn’t hidden my dirty looks toward Rick as well as I’d thought.
I searched for the video on my phone and showed it to Stanley. “I can’t disclose my reason for being there, Mr. Cox, but I can tell you that it’s not what it seemed. I share similar sentiments toward Richard Knightley as you.” Well, except for the murder part. I tapped the screen as the footage showed my disgusted expression. “Does that look like someone who’s on Richard’s side?”
Stanley peered at it, chewed the inside of his stubbled cheek, then said, “Okay, I’ll bite. What do you want to know?”
I left the phone in front of him, a reminder of our mutual ground, and leaned back. “Tell me why you wanted Isaac Anand dead again?”
“The same reason I gave you the first time. Anand was helping Knightley rig the court cases. Plus the AI security system made for a convenient opportunity to take them both out.”
“That’s why we’re here,” I said. “Because we’ve established that Mr. Anand wasn�
�t helping Knightley.”
“Oh come on, I’m not an idiot. It’s impossible to prove a negative.”
“I have it on very good authority he wasn’t helping Knightley.”
Stanley huffed. “And I have it on good authority he was.”
“Whose?” I asked.
He blanched, realizing he’d given something—tiny, but still something—away. Cox had been told Isaac was helping Richard. What did that mean?
Knowing he wasn’t going to be tripped so easily into revealing new information again, I tried another tack.
“Well, if you won’t share your source, let me tell you about Isaac Anand and why I believe he couldn’t have been helping Knightley.”
I recounted the whole tale that Isaac’s grandmother had told us, letting my emotion color the story.
Stanley remained quiet throughout and was staring at the table by the time I’d finished.
“Mr. Cox, we’ve come across two holes in your confession now, and we’re only going to keep finding more. First there’s the microcomputer you neglected to mention and are refusing to explain how you got into Isaac Anand’s house. And now we have compelling testimony that there’s no way Anand could’ve been helping Knightley the way you claimed.”
Stanley swallowed but didn’t look up or speak.
“I don’t know who you’re protecting, but I suggest you think long and hard about whether they’re worthy of it. If you’ve been paid to confess, the holes in your story mean no one’s going to be convinced, so you’re not going to get whatever you were promised. And if you did it for someone you cared about, well, we’ve just established they’re lying to you… and if they’re lying to you about this, what else are they lying to you about?”
It wasn’t a question I expected an answer to. Not yet. So I continued on with my closing argument, the memory of Mrs. Anand and her quiet strength in the wake of so much tragedy spurring me on.
“You might think Knightley deserved what he got—he destroyed your family after all—but today Isaac Anand’s grandmother is mourning the loss of the grandson she raised from the age of six. After burying her only child twenty-five years prior. Think about that as you sleep on your jail bunk tonight.”
Duty and the Beast Page 14