Let Sleeping Cats Lie: The 9 Lives Cozy Mystery Series, Book Four

by Louise Clark

  Chapter 23

  Quinn jabbed the End Call button on his phone with more force than was required. In fact, he didn’t need to touch the button at all, since Mallory Tait had already disconnected. Her voice echoed in his mind. You need to be prepared. I expect it to happen any time. Short of finding the real killer, there’s no way to stop it.

  It was Tamara’s arrest. He closed his eyes, imagining her in a cell down at the remand center. A Canadian cell this time, but still a small space surrounded by four solid walls and a locked door. It would bring back memories of her captivity in Africa. Being locked up would cause her mental pain at the very least. At worst? He feared it would break her forever.

  The Tamara he remembered had been bold, passionate, confident. The woman who had returned was introspective, cautious. She’d confided to him that she still wanted to help people caught in war zones or existing on the margins of societies in crisis, but she couldn’t do it on the ground anymore. She’d been thinking about creating a foundation that had the goal of exposing underlying causes of armed conflicts as well as the atrocities that resulted. They’d brainstormed ways and means, the kind of reporting that would need to be done, how to structure such an organization, the kind of money required to fund it.

  Her meeting with Fred Jarvis and her initial rejection of him was based on his complete disinterest in her as a person and his child. She’d been angered by his enthusiastic assumption that she’d be an asset to his campaign, nothing more. The irony was that after reflection, she’d come to the conclusion that joining with him to win the leadership of his party would provide her with an incredible wealth of opportunities to help her in the creation of her foundation. If he won, his position—and hers as his daughter—would provide a solid base for the foundation to grow. She’d planned to tell him of her change of mind the day he was killed. She never had the chance.

  Archie Fleming assumed he was the obvious choice to win the leadership, and Quinn thought that might have been true before Tamara arrived in Vancouver. How would the sudden revelation of a daughter, one who believed in just causes, who had endured suffering in the pursuit of those causes, have affected the political balance between the two men?

  Archie told him that Fred wanted the Foreign Affairs portfolio if he lost the leadership bid. That meant he already had an interest in international relations. He would have known how to use Tamara and her experiences to his advantage. In Quinn’s estimation, Fred’s support would have grown, while Archie’s remained static or diminished.

  A powerful motive for a politician in pursuit of power.

  Quinn firmly believed that Fred Jarvis’ murder was rooted in his political life. Fortier thought it had international implications, so he was focused on Tamara, but Quinn believed he had discovered a solid political motive for Archie Fleming. What he needed to do now was dig deeper, find a connection, the proof he needed, before Fortier charged Tamara, locked her in a cell, and convinced a judge to refuse her bail. He settled down to work.

  His research brought to light the fact that Archie Fleming’s chief strategist was Colin Jarvis, Fred Jarvis’ only son. Now that, Quinn thought, sitting back in his desk chair and staring at nothing in particular, was very interesting indeed. Why would Colin Jarvis support his father’s main opponent? According to his sources, Colin Jarvis was both shrewd and farseeing, with the kind of mind able to leap past the obvious and see the pitfalls ahead. Some said Colin was the main reason Archie had achieved such success in the party, why he was the frontrunner in the leadership race. None of Quinn’s sources could pinpoint why Colin Jarvis stayed with Archie Fleming when his father put in his own bid for leadership. There was no overt break between father and son, no particular reason why Colin would remain loyal to Archie instead.

  Clearly, he needed to talk to the man himself. Quinn set his mind to figuring out how to get an interview and what questions to ask when he did.

  He arranged a meeting with Colin Jarvis through an unsuspecting secretary who thought he wanted to profile Archie Fleming for one of the major Eastern dailies. Since Colin made the decisions on who had access to Archie, she blithely told Quinn he’d have to pitch his idea to Colin before she could schedule a meeting with Archie.

  Perfect. Even better, she said Colin had an opening in his schedule this afternoon at five. Could Quinn make it? Oh, yeah, he could.

  Archie Fleming’s national campaign headquarters were located in a sleek glass and steel tower on West Georgia. Like all such buildings, the inside was a shell that the tenant could make of what he or she would. Archie’s style of decoration was lots of desks loaded with computer equipment and telephones, arranged bull pen style, a few partitions for calls that demanded a bit of quiet, a conference room for meetings, and one office. His.

  And Colin’s, Quinn discovered. That suggested a level of trust and intimacy that fit well with the weird pseudo-family relationship that seemed to exist between Archie and Fred.

  “I have a half an hour,” Colin said as he ushered Quinn into the office.

  Unlike many of his staffers, he was smartly dressed in an expensive suit, a dark charcoal wool and silk blend, if Quinn guessed right, a pearl gray shirt, and a conservative blue tie, establishment clothes that implied the right to govern.

  He indicated a visitor chair as he sat down behind the desk visible from the bull pen and Quinn realized that there was a second desk tucked away at the back of the room, away from the doorway and the prying eyes of the mass of staffers and volunteers who populated the main area. Colin Jarvis was not only Archie’s strategist, he was also his guard dog. “My admin assistant didn’t know you are tied to the woman who killed my father, but I do. If this is a legit interview tell me what paper you’re targeting and what angle do you intend to take.”

  No sense in trying to build a rapport. Time, Quinn thought, to just dive in. “How about this? Archie Fleming ordered the hit that killed your father.”

  Colin froze. Quinn watched shock fade and anger bloom. “What the hell kind of statement is that?” He jerked to his feet. “I think you’d better leave.”

  Quinn stayed put. “Did you know that your father and Archie Fleming had an agreement in place that whichever of them won, the other would have a senior cabinet position in any future government?”

  “Of course,” Colin said, still standing, his voice scornful. “Agreements like that happen all the time in politics. If you’re as good as you’re supposed to be, Armstrong, you’d know this.”

  Quinn nodded. “I do. It’s just odd in this case, since one guy was sleeping with the other guy’s wife and they both seemed to see it as one big happy family.”

  He could see at once that Colin knew exactly which guy was doing the sleeping with the other guy’s wife. His face whitened and he sat down abruptly. “That’s bullshit. You have no proof.”

  “I talked to Archie last night.”

  “Archie wasn’t meeting the press last night,” Colin said.

  “It was a private conversation, over drinks with Archie and Marian,” Quinn said, watching Colin intently. He could see signs of fear, perhaps even panic that Colin was struggling to control. He was sitting very still, but there was a tremor in his hands, which were lying flat on the desktop. His skin, if possible, was paler than before. Quinn would swear that he didn’t know about his father and Marian Fleming, but he did know something. What?

  Colin moistened dry lips. “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not.” Quinn watched emotions of betrayal and anger flit across Colin’s face and pressed gently. “You didn’t know about the relationship?”

  “Of course not!” Agitated how, he sprang up and started to pace. “Do you think I would have supported a man who pimped his wife out to tame the competition?”

  “Harsh, and not quite accurate,” Quinn said. “From my understanding, the relationship was Marian’s choice.”

  Colin snorted and waved a disparaging hand. “He let her think it was her choice.”

  He
was obviously Fred Jarvis. Quinn thought it very interesting that Colin had not yet expressed any warm feelings for his late father. He didn’t comment, though, just let Colin continue on, hopeful the man would reveal something valuable.

  “That’s how he worked,” Colin said. He kept pacing, his eyes anywhere but on Quinn’s. “He targeted women he thought could be useful, then he seduced them until they abandoned their morals and forgot about any ethics they’d ever had. Along the way he made them, and everyone around them, think the relationship with him was the best thing that had ever happened to them.” His voice died off as his agitated pacing brought him to the open doorway and the bull pen full of staffers. He closed the door gently, his expression stricken.

  Quinn shifted in his seat to keep Colin in view. “Your description is precise and it fits with what Archie told me last night, although he described it in a more positive way. You claim you didn’t know about Marian and your father. Where did you get your knowledge of his methods, then?”

  Colin turned away from the door. He walked slowly back to the desk. The expression on his face was bleak, the kind of look Quinn had seen more often than he cared to remember, when a person learned a loved one had died. The look of loss, of realization that nothing would ever be the same again.

  Reaching the desk, Colin pulled open a top drawer and began unloading the contents. “I was in grade ten when I discovered my father was sleeping with the principal of my very expensive private school.” He pulled a Mont Blanc pen from amid the regular bits and pieces found in every desk drawer and pushed it to one side. A tiepin with the party logo and Archie’s name followed. “Turned out that he’d started the liaison shortly after my name was submitted for admission to the school.” He looked up from his agitated, almost obsessive, sorting. “It was an exclusive institution and not even Jarvis money and my mother’s Eastern Establishment family could ensure I would get in.” He went back to rifling through his desk. “She was a prize, that one was. Her husband was a senior administrator at the university I chose to attend.” He stilled. “I chose to attend,” he muttered derisively. With a sudden violent move, he picked up the expensive pen and the gold tiepin and flung them at the desk in the back of the room.

  “How did you find out?” Quinn asked as the clatter of the falling pen died off.

  Colin fell into the desk chair with a plop. Leaning forward, his elbows on the desktop, he rubbed his temples, soothing himself, letting the poison flow. “My father was one of the parents who always showed up at the school. My friends noticed it. The kids I didn’t hang with, noticed.” He lifted his head and met Quinn’s gaze. “One afternoon, halfway through the term, a group of us were working on a class project after school hours. When I was leaving, I saw my father’s car in the school parking lot—so did all the others. They wanted to know why my dad was there and they pretty much dared me to go inside and find him.” He shrugged. “So I did. I caught them at it. The principal and my dad. She didn’t see me, but he did.”

  He stopped talking, his eyes staring blankly into the past, Quinn thought, as he saw again that pivotal act of betrayal. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. We talked it out. Like men, my father said, as he explained that people like my principal could be useful.” His lip curled. “I remember feeling proud that he was talking so openly to me, sharing his viewpoint, his way of being. He promised me he’d split with her.” The curled lip turned into an outright sneer. “All he did was move the site of their meetings somewhere else. When I graduated, I was steered to the appropriate university, where I received early admission and a scholarship. That was when he dumped her. Even then, she and her idiot of a husband remained part of his so-called extended family. She was one of the ones at the funeral. Bastard.”

  He swept the pens, pencils, and highlighters on the desk back into the top drawer, opened another, and hauled out a pair of dress shoes, a white dress shirt, folded and bagged from the drycleaners, two silk ties—both solid variants on the party’s signature blue. Slamming the drawer shut he glared at Quinn. “Think I’m a chump?”

  “I think both men realized you would never agree to work for Archie if you knew about your father and Marian. You were manipulated by a man who was a champion manipulator.” Colin went back to methodically emptying his desk. Quinn watched him for a minute, then he said, “The question is, did you just find out about Fred and Marian because I told you? Or did you learn about it yourself?”

  Colin slowly straightened, “What are you suggesting?”

  Quinn didn’t flinch. “That you found out your father was banging your boss’s wife and he’d set you up. You couldn’t stand that. Bad enough when you were a teenager. But now? When you should have known better, here you were again, so you killed him in a fit of rage. Just like you threw that fine pen across the room because you were angry at the man who gave it to you.”

  “You need to leave. I’m not going to ask again,” Colin said. His eyes were narrowed, his expression hard.

  Quinn shrugged and stood. He hadn’t expected a confession. In fact, he’d gained a lot more than he’d anticipated from his meeting with Colin Jarvis.

  As he headed for the exterior door to the suite, he saw Colin pull out a leather backpack from beneath the desk. He started to stuff his personal items into it as Quinn was strolling out of Archie Fleming’s campaign office.

  Looked like Archie just lost his chief strategist.

  Chapter 24

  “He didn’t know about his father and Marian Fleming,” Quinn shifted restlessly in his lawn chair. “I think he really believed in Archie Fleming. Discovering his father and Fleming were more than just political allies infuriated him. It also brought up memories from his past, but this betrayal was fresh. He didn’t see it coming.” Quinn shook his head. “Colin Jarvis isn’t the killer.”

  He sounded disheartened, Sledge thought, which wasn’t surprising, since Tamara was still in police custody. This was apparently gnawing Quinn harder than it was Tamara, though. Mallory Tait had seen and talked to her, and said she was holding up well. Tamara was calm, polite, and firm in her denials. Clearly, she was coping. In Sledge’s opinion, Quinn wasn’t. He could understand why. He and Quinn shared a core belief—if a man cared for a woman and that woman was in trouble, then the man needed to help her out. If he couldn’t … Well, he was entitled to freak out and do things that were, perhaps, not in his usual style. Like confronting Colin Jarvis and accusing Archie Fleming of murdering Colin’s father.

  Sledge reached for the box of pastries Christy had brought to this morning’s brainstorming session and picked out a Danish. He held up the box to see if anyone else wanted to refuel, but Roy and Ellen shook their heads. Christy was watching Quinn with a single-minded focus and worry in her eyes. She didn’t even notice Sledge’s gesture.

  Since the morning was clear and warm they were sitting in the Armstrong’s backyard. He was representing his father, who was still down at the cop shop trying to breakout Tamara, with the help of Mallory Tait. The cat was sitting at the edge of the greenbelt behind the garden, watching the trees, his eyes glued to the canopy above, his ears flicking at each new sound. High in the branches a squirrel twittered. The cat’s tail twitched and he crouched, ready to spring. Frank wasn’t adding a lot to the discussion at the moment.

  “When Christy and I shopped with Marian Fleming, she was very open about the relationship,” Ellen said. She had her leather portfolio in front of her and her collection of pens arrayed beside it. She’d already started a ledger of suspects and the clues they offered.

  Sledge munched the Danish and resisted the urge to shake his head. He thought the music industry had some strange behaviors. The political world made his seem wholesome by comparison.

  Christy frowned. “Letitia Jarvis was more circumspect, but she made reference to his extended family, which meant his mistresses.”

  Ellen tapped her chin with one of her fountain pens. “I came away with the impression she guarded her childre
n carefully.” She turned to Christy. “Do you think she knew Colin was aware that his father had a mistress?”

  “Good question,” Roy said. Like his son, his mood was subdued. He was holding a coffee cup and watching the steam rise lazily above the rim.

  Quinn stirred and shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “It might,” Roy said. “If she was determined to keep her kids ignorant of their father’s extracurricular activities.”

  “Colin Jarvis was in grade ten a long time ago, Dad. If Letitia was angry at her husband over this, she’d have dealt with it years ago.”

  Roy leaned forward and put the coffee mug onto the table with a thump. “Maybe. Maybe not. That family was full of secrets. What if Colin Jarvis was as good at keeping quiet as his father was? What if Letitia only found out what her son knew when Tamara showed up and blew the family secrets out into the open?”

  “She discovers that her now adult son’s teen years were less innocent than she thought. So what? No one is going to kill their spouse because he made a parenting mistake long ago.” Quinn and Roy glared at each other. Roy picked up his mug again and sat back in his chair.

  Roy’s right. The key to this thing is in the mistresses—

  Frank’s thought ceased abruptly as the cat lunged at the black squirrel who was unwary enough to descend from his place in the treetops. There was a burst of speed from both animals as the squirrel raced for the nearest tree trunk with Stormy hot on his heels. There were zigs and zags, then suddenly the squirrel was bounding up a tree trunk. The cat lunged and almost caught the squirrel’s bushy black tail, but missed by inches. The squirrel scrambled up to the nearest branch, tail quivering, raced to its end, then leapt onto a branch of another tree and disappeared into the canopy of fresh green leaves.