“Nothing.” Brian’s eyes shuttered.
“What happened that night, Brian?” Morgan’s hands wrapped around Lance’s bicep.
But her slim fingers had no hope of holding him back. Lance leaned in, until he was right in Brian’s face. “Where is my father?”
“I don’t know,” Brian yelled.
Lance shook off Morgan’s hand and grabbed Brian by the front of his polo shirt. “Did you kill Mary?”
“God. No.” Brian tried to lean away, but the wall behind him limited his movement. “And that’s the truth. I didn’t see your father that night. I dropped Mary back at PJ’s afterward.” Brian didn’t try to look way. “That’s the last time I saw her. I didn’t know she was dead until you told me.”
Was that the truth? Brian had already proven himself to be a gifted liar.
Lance eased back, putting some space between them. Brian’s sliminess felt contagious. He was supposed to have been Vic’s buddy, someone his dad confided in about his troubled marriage, his wife’s fragility, his son’s vulnerability. Brian had betrayed one of his best friends.
“Twenty-three years ago, someone murdered Mary Fox.” Lance barely recognized his own voice. “But since her bones were found, two possible witnesses have died, and someone tried to kill my mother. Where were you last night?”
“I had a meeting and then dinner with a client,” Brian said. “I was tied up from five o’clock until ten.”
“Would this client back you up?”
“Yes.” Brian nodded. “It was a business dinner. There’s no reason why he wouldn’t. We were at a restaurant. I have a credit card receipt.”
He took out his wallet and pulled out a receipt. Lance glanced at it. The time stamp was nine thirty-six. The date was correct, and the dinner was expensive enough to have lasted several hours. If Brian’s alibi was legitimate, it would clear him of P. J.’s death and the attempt on Jenny’s life.
“I’d be very, very careful,” Lance said. “Someone is making sure anyone who had information about Mary’s death can’t talk.”
Brian looked over Lance’s shoulder. “Shit.”
Lance spun around. Natalie was standing in the doorway. Had she been there long enough to hear Brian confess to adultery?
“You bastard!” she shouted.
Seems like she had. While Brian’s face was dead white, Natalie’s cheeks had flushed an angry red.
“Nat . . .” Brian’s throat worked as he swallowed hard.
“I always knew you cheated on me, but a hooker?” Natalie took two steps, moving through the doorway into the kitchen. “Who knows what kind of diseases you’re carrying.”
“It was just her,” Brian stammered. “There haven’t been—”
“Oh, shut up. Do you think I’m stupid? You’ve always been a cheater. But you couldn’t be discreet about it?” she yelled. “You’re even lazy about cheating. How many whores have there been, Brian?”
“No more. I swear. Mary wasn’t really a hooker. She was . . .” Brian seemed unable to fill in that blank.
“A fucking hooker!” Natalie screamed. “You paid her for sex. This is simple stuff.”
“You never liked sex.” Brian’s eyes went mean. “Men have needs.”
“It wasn’t sex I didn’t like. It was sex with you.” Natalie gritted her teeth. Her furious gaze darted to Lance and Morgan. Humiliation hovered under her rage and helplessness for a few seconds. Then her attention snapped back to her husband with the force of a mousetrap. “Brian can’t get it up unless there’s some violence involved. He’s into inflicting pain. I’m not into receiving it. Did Mary let you yank her around by the hair? Did she like to be tied up and have you hurt and humiliate her? You realize that none of that dominant shit really compensates for a small penis, right?”
Brian looked like he was going to have a stroke at any second. His mouth opened and closed, gaping as if he couldn’t suck in any oxygen.
“You’re pathetic,” she spat.
Lance eased sideways, distancing himself from Brian and the stream of wrath his wife was pouring on him.
“Natalie.” Morgan’s voice was soft and soothing. “Where were you the night Lance’s father disappeared?”
Lance froze.
Did Natalie kill Mary?
“I was here. Someone had to be home with the children.” Natalie’s focus never left Brian’s face.
No one would be able to give her an alibi.
“Did you kill Mary?” Morgan asked in a gentle voice, her tone suggesting an admission would be totally understandable under the circumstances.
Natalie blinked. Her attention flickered to Morgan. “Why would I kill her? It wasn’t her fault that my husband is disgusting.” A tear rolled down her cheek. She didn’t seem to notice. Her attention returned to Brian, fresh fury flickering in her eyes. “I didn’t even know it was Mary until just now.”
Brian hadn’t just betrayed Vic. He’d betrayed his wife too. Everything about him was a lie.
Who was he sleeping with now?
“Natalie, is there anyone who can verify that you were here that night?” Morgan asked.
“No. The kids were all in bed.” More angry tears spilled from Natalie’s eyes. “But you can believe me when I say that the only person I have ever wanted to kill is Brian.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a huge handgun.
Lance took three steps sideways, stepping in front of Morgan, one arm sweeping out to tuck her behind him, the other drawing his sidearm. But the only reason he’d shoot Natalie was if she turned the gun on him and Morgan. Brian was on his own. Life lesson: If you lie down with dogs, you might not get up again.
“Where did you get that?” Brian screeched.
“I bought it, dumbass,” she shot back. “It’s not hard. You go out late at night. I’m here by myself. You don’t like dogs. I wanted it for protection.”
“Put it down! You’re not going to shoot me.” Brian took a step forward, his face smug.
Lance thought she might.
“Dude, I wouldn’t do that,” Lance said.
Natalie’s gun went off. The rooster cookie jar exploded a few feet to Brian’s right, sending ceramic shards and cookie bits in all directions.
Brian turned toward an open doorway to his left, but Natalie fired another shot, cutting off his path. Trapped, Brian searched the room for a way out. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Oh, please. I’ve been taking lessons for months, not that you would notice. Do you think I’d buy a gun if I didn’t know how to shoot it? If had wanted to hit you, you’d be bleeding.” She lowered the gun, pointing it at the floor. “Get out of my house.”
“It’s not—”
The gun muzzle lifted an inch.
“Brian . . .” Lance warned in a what-are-you-thinking tone.
“You have three seconds.” Natalie tapped the toe of her sensible shoe on the kitchen tile. “One.”
Brian complained, “But this is my—”
“Two,” Natalie said.
Brian slid along the wall. Natalie moved out of his way, keeping several feet of space between them, but she didn’t turn her back on him. She spun in a slow circle as he passed her.
The front door slammed. A few seconds later, a powerful engine started up, and they heard the Porsche roar away.
“He’ll be back.” Natalie stuffed her gun into her purse. “Best purchase I’ve made in years. I was just never the sort of person who could stand up for myself.”
“What changed?” Morgan asked.
“A few months ago, a friend of mine finally talked me into going to a support group. Hearing other women talk about getting out of bad marriages made me think I could do it too. I’ve been secretly planning to leave him for months. Kicking him out feels even better.”
“We should go.” Lance nudged Morgan’s arm. Someone probably called the police. Gunshots were not normal in this neighborhood.
Natalie walked across the kitchen, pieces of ceramic crunchin
g under her shoes. She pulled a dust pan from the pantry and began to sweep up.
“Are you all right?” Morgan asked.
Natalie paused for a few seconds. “I feel better than I have in years. It makes me angry that I wasted so much of my life. I could have been happy. Why did I put up with that asshole all this time?”
The question sounded rhetorical. Lance kept his mouth shut.
Natalie swept up a pile of red-and-yellow crockery pieces. “I always hated that cookie jar. Brian bought it for me.” She nudged the decapitated rooster head with a toe and then ground it under her shoe. “Stupid cock.”
Lance didn’t wait for the police to show. He took Morgan’s elbow and steered her toward the front door. “The last thing I need right now is another run-in with the sheriff’s department.”
“True,” she agreed as they went outside. “You won’t be able to solve the case from a cell.”
“You asked Natalie about her activity the night my dad disappeared. Do you really think she could have done it?” Lance got behind the wheel. He glanced up and down the street but didn’t see any curious neighbors or police.
Morgan slid into the passenger seat. “Now that I think about it, no. I would lean toward a male killer. Strangling a young woman and putting her into the trunk of a car would take physical strength. I doubt I could lift a dead body. Hanging Crystal took some muscle too.”
“We’ll have to tell Sheriff King about Brian.” Lance drove away. “Brian lied in his police statements.”
“He lied to Sharp twenty-three years ago,” Morgan said. “The statute of limitations would have run out on making a false statement many years ago.”
“But admitting he falsified his statement means he has no alibi for Mary’s murder.”
“And he also admitted that he was with her that night,” Morgan said. “He said he dropped her at PJ’s, but who can believe a chronic liar?”
“But if Brian had an alibi for P. J. Hoolihan’s death and the attempt on my mother’s life, then he probably didn’t kill Mary.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Morgan stepped into her office. Her grandfather was studying the whiteboard from his wheelchair. He held one of Sharp’s green protein shakes in his hand. Next to him, Sharp pointed at the board with a dry erase marker.
“What have you two been up to?” She touched her grandfather’s shoulder on the way to her desk.
“Sharp made me this drink.” Her grandfather examined his glass. “It looks disgusting, but the taste isn’t bad.”
“We’ve found a couple of new leads, thanks to your grandfather,” Sharp said. “Art hasn’t forgotten anything about investigating.”
Lance came in. Four adults crowded the small room.
Sharp set down his marker. “Tell us what happened with Brian Leed.”
By the time Lance finished the story, Sharp and Grandpa were shaking their heads.
Sharp snorted. “Nice to see Karma getting payback. I can’t believe he lied all these years.”
“I’d keep Brian at the top of the suspect list for Mary’s murder.” Grandpa drained his glass. “We suspect the current murderer is the same person who killed Mary, but we don’t know that for certain. And forgive me if I don’t take his word for it that he dropped Mary back off at PJ’s that night. Or about anything else. Once a liar, always a liar.”
“His word is worthless.” Sharp drew a big fat star next to Brian’s name.
“Warren Fox is a liar too. He told us he hadn’t seen Crystal in months, but Abigail said he’d been hanging around the motel harassing her recently.” Lance pointed to the board. “We need to follow up with him.”
“Stan needs a follow-up interview too,” Morgan said. “If Brian lied about their whereabouts, then so did Stan. Was he covering for a friend, or was there another reason he lied?”
“We have more lies than truth at this point.” Lance shook his head.
“Now, what did you two discover today?” Morgan asked Sharp.
“First, your grandfather found indications that Crystal could have been murdered.” Sharp opened a laptop on Morgan’s desk.
The four gathered around the computer. Sharp pulled up a photo of Crystal. The gruesome image made Morgan flinch, even though she’d seen it before.
Grandpa pointed to the screen, where he’d zoomed in on Crystal’s hands. “Look at her fingertips.”
“Her fingernail is broken,” Morgan said. “And I see a yellow thread and a little blood under the nail.”
“Good eye.” Grandpa zoomed in even more. “She pulled at the rope. She has some scratches on her neck too, which could indicate that she was struggling against an attacker. Or once her brain figured out she was dying, her survival instincts kicked in and she tried to get the rope off her neck. Without a drop long enough to break the neck, it can take a few minutes to die by hanging.”
Morgan had a mental image of the woman’s body flailing, her feet kicking, knocking over the chair, her fingers tearing at the noose around her neck. “But at that point, she couldn’t free herself.”
“Right.” Grandpa went to another image, a close-up of the rope around her neck. “Do you see the way the rope has shifted on her throat?”
Morgan leaned in and pointed to the screen. “This abrasion?”
Next to her, Lance said, “I would expect the rope to move a little when she stepped off the chair.”
“Yes,” Grandpa said. “But to me, this looks like it could be two distinct ligature marks, a horizontal line and an angled line, with the abrasion connecting them.”
And here’s where Grandpa’s experience with the dead made all the difference.
Morgan sat back. “As if someone stood behind her and choked her with the rope and then strung her up.”
“And the noose shifted position when her body weight hit the rope.” Lance straightened. “Maybe she didn’t commit suicide. Maybe she was murdered.”
“We can’t prove it,” Sharp said.
“How do we tell the ME?” Morgan asked. “We aren’t supposed to have these photos.”
“We don’t,” Lance said. “Frank won’t miss it. He’ll have the actual body. The marks will be even clearer to him. Is this enough for the medical examiner to find the death suspicious?”
“Depends what else the autopsy turned up.” Grandpa studied the screen for a few seconds.
Without his insight, they wouldn’t have had this information until the official autopsy was released, which could take months, since the medical examiner would wait for lab results and the tox screen before he would issue an official cause of death. Sheriff King would never share preliminary autopsy results.
“What now?” Lance asked.
Morgan studied the board. “What did Crystal and P. J. and Jenny all know?”
“Crystal and P. J. have a tighter connection: a relationship with Mary. But I can’t see how Jenny fits into this.” Sharp tapped his closed marker on his chin. “She was home when Vic went missing.”
He started a new column for Crystal’s death. “Art has some other ideas as well.”
“Feels good to be useful.” Grandpa closed the laptop and stared at the board. “The more I looked at the file, the more I thought this was never about your dad, Lance. Vic had a wife sinking into mental illness, financial problems, and a ten-year-old he was trying to shield from all of that. He didn’t have time to misbehave. He could barely squeeze out an hour or so a week to have a beer with his pals. He couldn’t even play baseball anymore. He’d quit his baseball team because he didn’t have time for it.”
Sharp cradled his injured arm. “Until Mary’s bones turned up, we had no other crime to link to Vic’s disappearance.”
Grandpa nodded. “And since her bones were discovered, you’ve been looking for a connection between Vic and Mary. It’s possible Brian was that link, but what if there is no connection?”
“You think my father was collateral damage?” Lance asked.
Morgan watched Lance. What
was he feeling? How could he discuss his father’s fate objectively? His face was strained, his mouth grim.
“It’s possible that Vic was accidentally swept up in something relating to Mary.” Sharp set his marker on the bottom edge of the board. “But Art and I have been researching other events around the time of Vic’s disappearance, thinking he and Mary might both have been caught in something entirely unrelated.”
“Have you found anything?” Morgan asked.
Sharp paced. “During the week of August 10, 1994, the biggest events were a fatal car accident on the interstate, two burglaries, and three drunks arrested for assault.”
“At first, we found nothing unusual about any of these events,” Grandpa said. “Until we dug deeper and learned that Lou Ford, one of the drunks, died from a traumatic head injury.”
“I don’t see how that could possibly be related,” Lance said.
“He was arrested during a bar fight on August 10.” Sharp paused. “At PJ’s.”
“Oh.” Lance dropped into a chair and rubbed his temples. “Brian said he dropped Mary at PJ’s around eight p.m.”
Grandpa shuffled some papers. “Lou Ford was arrested at eight thirty.”
Morgan tapped a pen on her desk. “If Brian was telling the truth, Mary might have seen the fight.”
“Then what? How does Mary end up dead?”
“She saw something?” Lance suggested. “Maybe there was more to the bar fight than the cops were told. Who was the arresting officer?”
Sharp consulted his notes. “Deputy Owen Walsh. Owen retired and moved to Florida a few years ago. Ford’s family sued the sheriff’s department.”
“What were the grounds for the lawsuit?” Morgan perked up.
Sharp continued. “The other two men were taken directly to the ER for stitches. Ford appeared to be uninjured, just intoxicated. He was brought to the sheriff’s station and put in the holding cell, where he died. The ME found a head injury during the autopsy. The family won a small civil settlement. Ford had a long history of drunk and disorderly conduct. This wasn’t his first bar fight. Multiple witnesses stated he was the aggressor. The jury was unsympathetic. They found for the plaintiff, but the settlement was too small to matter. No charges were ever filed on Deputy Walsh, though the department changed several policies as a result of the case.”
Bones Don't Lie (Morgan Dane Book 3) Page 20