Nothing to Hide

by Allison Brennan

  He hung up before Jerry could say goodbye.

  “What a jerk,” Lucy said.

  “We see all kinds in this job.” He shook his head, rubbed his eyes. “Nothing there we can use. He might not give her a good character reference, but that’s not going to convict her of murder.”

  “Time for me to talk to Abby. Alone. She’ll feel more comfortable that way.”

  “Tread carefully, she’s a minor.”

  “And if she’s in danger, we need to get her out of that house.”

  An officer came in with a thick file folder. “The documents you requested from Allied.” He dropped it on the table.

  “Thanks.”

  Jerry immediately opened the file, but glanced at the clock. “Want me to read?” Lucy asked.

  “Would you mind? I’m going down the hall to talk to Jimenez. See if she thinks we have enough for a warrant. I don’t know—I don’t see it.”

  “If we can get Abby to go on record, that might give us what we need.”

  “She would need a court-appointed advocate, just to do everything aboveboard. We don’t want a conviction jeopardized because the defense thinks we pressured a minor.”

  Jerry stepped out, and Lucy started reviewing Steven James’s files on Victor King. There were a lot of financial records—hardcopies of everything, with notes that the financial documents had been scanned into the system. Every meeting was detailed—time, date, what they discussed, what Victor needed to do, and what James would do regarding filings and transfers and the like.

  And then she saw it. The two items that might give them the warrant they needed.

  First, Steven James met with Victor one day at his house. It would be easy enough for Teri, who worked from home, to overhear any conversation—but this meeting took place two days after Garrett was fired. It was something that Victor might have discussed.

  And second, everything on Allied’s server could be accessed with Steven James’s password.

  That meant not only King’s records, but Joyce Witherspoon’s audits of Abby’s trust. While Teri might have access to joint financial statements, it was clear that Steven James also had his own accounts, separate from his wife.

  She called William Peterson. “Mr. Peterson, I’m sorry to disturb you again.”

  “Did you get the files? I gave them to an officer who produced the warrant.”

  “Yes, I did, thank you. Another question—can your IT department run a log of every time Steven James logged into the Allied server from a remote location? And provide the IP address, date, and time of that login?”

  “I imagine they can—but why?”

  “I have a hunch, and this may help us bring a killer to justice.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  Jerry walked in with Maria Jimenez. He didn’t look happy. “We need more,” Maria said to Lucy.

  “I have more. Victor King was at Steven James’s house end of June for a business meeting. Steven’s notes say that he was bringing over documents, it was a Saturday. That gives Teri James proximity—she could know about Garrett’s job situation, that he’d been fired, and make the logical deduction that Julio Garcia fired him. And she may have had access to Allied’s records, which would include King’s as well as her stepdaughter’s trust.”

  “It still isn’t enough.”

  “I’m going to talk to Abby. If she has any hint that Teri is dangerous, we’ll have her sit down with an advocate and give an official statement. Enough to get us a warrant. At a minimum for her car.”

  “Why her car?” Maria asked. “GPS tracking?”

  “No,” Jerry said, “grease. It’s hard physical evidence.”

  “With that, we can get a full search warrant.”

  “Make sure it’s solid because we don’t want this biting us in the ass,” Maria said. “I’ll talk to the ADA and give her a heads-up.”

  “Thanks, Maria.”

  “Just do it right, Jerry.” She left.

  “I have an idea,” Lucy said, “and I need to enlist Sean’s help to do it.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Each murder was committed on a Friday night. Teri lives in Olmos Park. The people in Olmos Park are security-conscious. Many of them have security systems, including cameras. Sean knows a lot of the neighbors—he’s friendly. He’s also a security expert who has high government clearance for his job, so if he extracts and documents data, it will be far easier to get it admissible in court.”

  “I’m not arguing, I just don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “We need to prove that Teri had the opportunity to kill each of those men. I think from security feeds we can track her moving to and from the neighborhood on the nights of the murders.”

  “She could easily say she was going to the store. Going to a friend’s house.”

  “Yes, possibly, but we can also set her up. Ask her where she was on those nights. Get her to make a specific claim, something that we can then disprove.”

  “If she’s as smart as you say she is, that’s not going to work.”

  “But it’s one more piece of evidence. And remember what Ash said? Standish fought back. She was hurt that night. Steven James was at Abby’s summer camp that weekend. He drove up Friday afternoon, stayed until late Sunday night.”

  “Two days for bruises to heal? I don’t see that.”

  “She could conceal them. Lie—we don’t know, because Steven James is dead.”

  “I can see the benefit. Okay, as long as he knows he might have to testify, so no cutting corners on this.”

  “Of course not,” Lucy said, mentally crossing her fingers.

  * * *

  Abby James had volleyball practice after school, and Lucy was waiting for her at the locker room entrance.

  “Agent Kincaid, right?” Abby said.

  “Yes. Do you have a minute?”

  “Is it about my dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need to tell my coach.”

  “I already talked to her. But if you want to check with her—”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “Do you want to sit or walk?”

  “Um…” She looked around.

  Lucy motioned to picnic tables outside the gym. They were in the shade, and the afternoon was warm and sticky. “Good?”

  “Yeah.”

  They sat down and Lucy said, “We’ve been working nonstop trying to solve your father’s murder.”

  “Someone was arrested. He did it, right?”

  “No.”

  “No? But I saw the news.”

  “He was the son of the latest victim … and he was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. We thought he might have done it, but so far there is no evidence that he did—and what little evidence we found exonerates him.”

  “Oh.”

  “Abby, I’m going to ask you some tough questions. If you would like an advocate, I would be happy to bring one in.”

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, absolutely not. I want to ask you questions about your stepmother.”

  Her face drained of blood. “She killed him, didn’t she.” Her voice cracked. And it wasn’t a question.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I—I don’t know. I just—living with Teri is like walking on hot coals. Or something.”

  “Are you scared of her?”

  “Yes. I mean no.”

  “You can tell me the truth,” Lucy said. “I will do everything in my power to protect you.”

  “It’s—I mean, she’s so unemotional. She’s like a robot. She doesn’t get happy or sad or angry or … or anything. When my dad met her, she was nice, you know? And I was little and didn’t really pay much attention. I mean, I guess I kind of acted up a little because I didn’t want to share my dad, but it was fine. I was eight when they got married, and my dad took me out to dinner a couple nights before that. Maybe a week. And he said that he and Teri had a lot in common, and he liked her, but he w
ouldn’t marry her if I didn’t want him to. And I said it was okay because I wanted him to be happy. And … and it’s my fault.”

  “Honey, none of this is your fault.” Why did kids always put the blame on themselves for the decisions adults made? “Your dad loved you. He wants you to be happy. You have nothing to feel guilt about. I’ve gone over your father’s calendars. He traveled a lot, mostly to visit clients in California, Tennessee, and Florida. He often took you with him, even if you had to miss school. Why?”

  “He said he liked to spend time with me, and we usually planned those trips around a weekend so we could do fun stuff.”

  “Did Teri ever go?”

  “No. She doesn’t like to travel. The only thing she really likes to do for fun is her ceramics.”

  “Ceramics?”

  “Yeah—one of her clients owns one of those places where you go in and design pottery and fire it and paint it and stuff. She took me there for one of my birthdays. Teri is actually really good—she has like infinite patience. I get bored too easily.”

  Lucy made a note. She didn’t know if that would mean anything, but every detail was important.

  “When your dad visited you at camp, did he have any specific reason?”

  She bit her lip.

  “Honey? It could be important.” That was the weekend Standish was killed.

  “I was surprised to see him. He didn’t really say anything, but I thought he was sad. My dad didn’t talk a lot. He didn’t want to share his problems with me, but I never really thought he had problems. But I asked if he was sad. My mom—my real mom, who died—they were married in July. I thought he was thinking about that. He said he’d talked to Teri about a separation, and she agreed, but thought they should try counseling first. He agreed, but he said he’d never been to a counselor and he didn’t know what to expect. He actually seemed nervous.”

  There were no counseling appointments in his calendar.

  “Did he talk to anyone about it? We don’t have records of any appointments.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. When he picked me up at camp a couple weeks later, he didn’t say anything about it, and I didn’t ask. I should have.”

  “I see why you didn’t. I never asked my parents about their marriage. They’ve been married for over forty-five years. And I think if my dad started talking stuff about my mom it would kind of freak me out.”

  “Yeah,” Abby said with a half smile. “I guess.”

  “Where were you the last two Friday nights? Were you at home?”

  “No. I was at my friend’s house. Becky. I go over there a lot. She’s on the volleyball team, too.”

  “Both Fridays?”

  “Actually, all weekend, almost every weekend.”

  “And that’s because…?”

  “I don’t have anything to talk about with Teri. She asks me questions, I answer, we eat dinner, she goes to her office, I do my homework. We don’t … communicate. I can’t really talk to her about anything important. The one time I really tried it was after I started my period. I was twelve and kind of freaked out because I knew it would come, but not really what to expect. She, like, recited a biology book. And I just lost it, started complaining that she doesn’t listen to anyone, that she’s so weird, I don’t remember exactly what I said.”

  “She got mad?”

  “No. She just listened, then repeated herself, adding that my emotions were because of hormone levels, and if it continued, she could take me to a doctor to put me on birth control to regulate my hormones so I wouldn’t get so emotional. I never talked to her about it again.”

  “Did you tell your dad?”

  “No. He wouldn’t know what to do about that stuff.”

  “You’d be surprised what dads are capable of.”

  “It would have embarrassed him. I talked to Becky’s mom and it helped.”

  “Has Teri said anything to you, or have you heard anything, that would indicate interest in your trust fund?”

  She shrugged. “She didn’t seem to care. My dad and I would talk about it over dinner a lot, though. He always explained why he invested money in certain ways, explained what rate-of-return and risk were. I’m not really into numbers—but I’m interested, because I need to know how it works so when I’m on the board, I know what I’m doing. But I always expected him to be here, you know? To take care of it for me so I wouldn’t have to.” She paused. “She can’t get my trust. Is that why she killed him? Because she thinks she can get my trust?”

  “Your trust is well protected, I assume she would know that the allowance was just that—an allowance, not the entire trust. Still, we’re working on it. There may be a motive we’re not seeing—like if they were planning to divorce. One more thing. We believe that the last victim’s dog bit the attacker on Friday night. Did you see anything that might support that?”

  She started to shake her head, then stopped. “Her running pants.”

  “What?”

  “She has these expensive running pants—you know, the skintight ones that cost a hundred bucks or something? She has a pair in like every color they make. They had a hole in them. I came home Saturday morning because I’d forgotten my history notebook and I had an essay due today. She was inspecting the hole. She was frustrated—and she doesn’t get frustrated, you know? I asked her what happened, because these are like indestructible pants. She said she fell running that morning and it snagged. But it didn’t look like a snag. It looked like a big hole. Right above the knee.”

  “Can you stay with Becky tonight? Not go home?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

  “Just as a precaution.” She gave Abby her business card and wrote her cell phone number on the back. “Call me for any reason. I need to talk to the district attorney and have you make a formal statement. Would you be willing to do that? Make a formal statement as to what you know?”

  “Do you really think she killed my dad?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I will tell you everything I know if it’ll help prove it.”

  “Tell the truth. Just what you know. And yeah, it all helps.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Monday Afternoon

  Lucy returned to BCSO headquarters and told Jerry everything she’d learned. “We need to get someone out there to talk to Abby tonight. Everything about Teri fits the profile.”

  “We can’t get a warrant because of the profile,” Jerry said. “They didn’t even put it in writing.”

  “Jerry—why were you so certain that the profile in the Barton case was wrong?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “It’s important.”

  “So you can tell me how wrong I am?”

  “So I can prove that you’re right.”

  “You’re making no sense.”

  “Humor me. Haven’t I earned at least that much?”

  “It was just a feeling.”

  “Intuition. Gut instinct. Experience,” Lucy said.

  “Whatever you want to call it, nothing that damn Stocum would listen to. When I talked to the mother of those boys, I just had a sense that she wasn’t telling us everything. She was hysterical and crying and that was to be expected, but the way she looked at me—or didn’t look at me—I had a strong feeling that she harbored guilt. Now, I said as much to Stocum, and he shot back that most parents whose children are abducted feel guilty even though it’s not their fault. I argued with him that it wasn’t that, it was something else, but I didn’t have anything to back up my impression. He gets this damn profile and uses that as a club to tell me I don’t know shit.”

  “For what it’s worth, I trust gut instincts just as much as—and sometimes more than—a psychological profile.”

  Jerry clearly didn’t believe her, but he continued. “After the fact—after I’d been thrown from the case and came to blows with Stocum—we learned that the mom had been babysitting when her nephew drowned in the pool a year before. The day her boys
were abducted was the anniversary of her nephew’s death. Her sister wanted to punish her by killing her boys. Then she couldn’t live with herself for what she’d done—that’s my guess—and she killed herself.

  “I didn’t know all that—no one did—we would have learned it if we had more time, but we didn’t. It was my gut telling me that something was off, that this wasn’t a typical family squabble, and I wanted to go harder at the mom. I sensed the guilt, but had no basis for that. And profilers, especially if they’re not here, on the ground, they can’t know any more than we do. Less, in fact. You need to talk to a person, interview them, see them interact with people, listen, then you can make a good judgment.”

  “Take that feeling … you had it again when you thought there was tension between Abby and her stepmother. There is. Abby doesn’t have a connection to Teri James. The woman is like a stranger to her—and Steven may have been considering a divorce. There’s no record of a marriage counselor, but Teri could have erased any scheduled meeting. I think that was her trigger—not the divorce as much as going to a counselor.”

  “Based on what?”

  “My gut. Sociopaths know there’s something wrong with them, that they aren’t like other people—but they don’t want anyone to see that. No way would Teri want to sit down with a shrink who might be able to see into the darkness of her soul.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No, it’s not—just like I don’t think it’s ridiculous that your gut told you there was something about the Barton mother’s statement that felt off to you.”

  “There’s no way we’re going to prove this.”

  “Maybe not—but there’s two mistakes she made. First, trying to frame Garrett King. By killing Victor King, she tipped her hand … and the dog tore her clothes.”

  “Why would she keep them?”

  “Because she thinks she’s smarter than us. We have to at least look for them. And if she tossed them, that’s okay—because the dog will know.”

  “No judge is going to let a dog testify.”

  “We might be able to get her to incriminate herself.” Though considering how well-planned the murders were, that might be difficult.

  “That’s a real long shot.”