“We’re interested in who came in with the check. And in what happened while they were here.”
Ellen nodded.
“Did Mr. Knight himself come in and present the check?”
Ellen shook her head.
“Who presented the check?”
“His girlfriend,” Ellen said.
His girlfriend? Normally I would have said that would be Brittany, but after what Han Neyman had told us yesterday, it might equally well have been Magnolia Houston.
I had my mouth open to ask when I caught Grimaldi’s eye. She shook her head. I closed my mouth again.
“Can you describe her?”
“Early twenties,” Ellen said, “blond hair, blue eyes, big earrings. Pretty.”
It could still be either Brittany or Magnolia. That description could fit either of them. They wouldn’t look very much alike at all, if you put them side by side, but a pretty blonde in her early twenties with blue eyes and big earrings could be either.
“She looked familiar,” Ellen added. “Like maybe I’d seen her before.”
“Here? Like she has come into the bank before, maybe with Devon? Or somewhere else? Like on TV?”
Ellen blinked. “TV? Oh, I wouldn’t think so.”
“I’m going to show you some pictures,” Grimaldi said, opening her folder. “I want you to tell me if you recognize any of these women.”
She laid them out on the desk in two neat rows. They were upside down from where I was sitting, but I recognized Brittany. I also recognized Magnolia Houston, looking a bit less glamorous than usual. Maybe it was her driver’s license photo that Grimaldi had dug up. Nobody looks good in those. There was also a picture of Megan Slater, a young police officer who has pretended to be me a couple of times. Another blue-eyed blonde. The picture must have been taken a few years ago—maybe when she was in the police academy or something like that—because I’m twenty-eight now, and she’s probably close to the same. Not in the same age range as Brittany and/or Magnolia.
Ellen chewed on her bottom lip. “She looks familiar.” She pointed to Brittany.
Grimaldi nodded encouragingly.
“And she.” Magnolia.
Grimaldi nodded.
“She looks like you.” Ellen looked from the photograph of Megan Slater to me and back.
“She isn’t,” Grimaldi said, and removed the photo of Megan from the lineup. Too distracting, I guess. We didn’t want Ellen focused on someone who definitely couldn’t have been here at the bank, withdrawing the money. “Anyone else?”
Ellen gave the remaining photographs another look, and shook her head. “Just those two.”
Grimaldi shuffled up the others, leaving just Brittany and Magnolia side by side. “Did one of them come in on Monday and withdraw the five hundred thousand?”
Ellen gnawed on her lip. At this rate, she’d chew right through it. “I’m not sure. I just know I’ve seen them before.”
Nothing extraordinary in that, unfortunately. If Devon did his banking here, Brittany probably did, too. And Magnolia’s face had appeared in a lot of places, so it wasn’t surprising that Ellen thought she recognized it.
“I don’t suppose there are security cameras?” Grimaldi asked, with a glance at Glenda Tulis.
“There are. But we tape over the footage every seventy-two hours. The footage from Monday is gone. Sorry.”
If you ask me, Glenda Tulis didn’t sound as sorry about that as she should have been.
“Maybe we should take a look at the cashier’s check,” I suggested. “In case there’s some clues in that.”
Grimaldi gave me a look, but didn’t demur, just held out her hand for the printout Glenda had brought in along with Ellen. I leaned closer.
It was a cashier’s check, for sure. For the full five hundred thousand. Made out to Margaret Murphy.
“Who’s Margaret Murphy?” I said.
Grimaldi gave me a look, but no answer.
“That’s who she said to make the check out to,” Ellen said.
She? “Was it Margaret Murphy who came into the bank? Did she want the check made out in her own name?”
Ellen shook her head. “That wouldn’t make any sense, would it? She already had a check.”
“But not in her name.” Ellen looked blank, and Grimaldi added, “You looked at her ID?”
“Of course I looked at her ID,” Ellen said, with the first show of spirit she’d exhibited so far. “She had a check for half a million dollars from someone else’s account that she had to endorse. I looked at her ID. I even made her put her fingerprint on the check, although she was a depositor with us, too.”
Grimaldi’s brows rose. “She was?”
“I remember,” Ellen said. “She came in with the check. She endorsed it in front of me, and wrote down her account number. Usually that’s enough to cash a check. I checked the account, and the signature matched. But since it was for so much, I made her put her fingerprint on it, and I also asked for her driver’s license, so I could write down the driver’s license number.”
“So her signature, fingerprint, and driver’s license number are on the back of the canceled check?”
Ellen nodded. Grimaldi turned to Glenda Tulis, who said defensively, “You didn’t ask for a copy of the back of the check.”
No, we hadn’t. Not specifically. Because we hadn’t known we needed to. And I guess maybe the bank wasn’t in the habit of volunteering anything someone hadn’t asked for.
“May we see the back of the check, please?” Grimaldi said with what I thought was admirable restraint.
Glenda sighed. “I’ll get it for you. Do you need Ellen for anything else?”
Grimaldi shook her head. “I think that’s it. Thanks for your time.”
Glenda nodded, and Ellen scurried out of the office and back to her station, with the demeanor of someone who had narrowly escaped being fed to the lions. Glenda followed, her steps measured.
I turned to Grimaldi. “Who’s Margaret Murphy?”
“Magnolia Houston,” Grimaldi said.
“Hah! I was right.”
She arched her brows. “What about?”
“I figured her name wasn’t Magnolia Houston. It’s just too perfect for a country singer.”
“Stage name,” Grimaldi said. “A lot of performers have them. She was born Margaret Louise Murphy in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.”
As I had suspected. Less euphonious. And nothing even remotely country about it.
“How common,” I said with a grin. Grimaldi arched her brows, and I added, “There must be dozens of girls named Maggie Murphy all over Ireland. Magnolia Houston is a lot more distinctive.”
“Definitely,” Grimaldi agreed.
“You checked her alibi for Wednesday morning, I assume?”
“Of course,” Grimaldi said. “She was home in bed, alone. Where most people are at two-thirty in the morning. No one can verify it.”
“So she could have snuck out and shot Devon.”
Grimaldi nodded. “He’d been with her until a quarter to two, when he left for home. Or so she said. She could easily have followed him. Parked her car on the street for three minutes. Run into the parking garage. Shot him and left.”
“Does she have a security system?”
“She does, but it wasn’t set that night. She said she was in bed when Devon left, and she didn’t feel like getting up to reset it after he walked out.”
So she could have walked out, too, right behind him. “Does she have a gun?”
“She does,” Grimaldi said. “It’s at the lab, awaiting ballistics testing. I’m sure they’ll get to it this morning.”
No doubt.
“This is going to be big news. Magnolia Houston is a thief and a murderer.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Grimaldi warned.
“Who else could it be? It all makes sense, right? Devon stole the money for Magnolia, and she shot him so he couldn’t tell anyone.”
“But that doesn’t
make it true. There are other explanations that could make just as much sense.”
“Like what?” I asked.
But before Grimaldi could answer, Glenda Tulis walked back in, with yet another printout in her hand. “Here you are.” She handed it to Grimaldi.
I leaned in, for the last time.
The back of the check did indeed have a signature, a fingerprint, and an account number written on it. The loopy, girlish handwriting was easy to read, and not just because I’d seen it before.
Brittany Stevens, it said.
TWENTY-FOUR
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I complained when we were outside in Grimaldi’s unmarked sedan again. “It made perfect sense that Magnolia was the guilty party. She did it for the money. And then she killed Devon after he got the money back for her. But what does Brittany have to gain?”
Grimaldi didn’t say anything, but she shot me a look, in the process of reversing the car out of the parking space it had been in.
So I went on, down the track of my thoughts. “She isn’t getting the money. It’s already out of Devon’s account and into Magnolia’s name, and anyway, she isn’t Devon’s legal heir, so she wouldn’t inherit it anyway. If they were married, that would be a different story, but they’re not.”
And now they wouldn’t be. She was supposed to be flying to Curacao this afternoon on her honeymoon. Right about now, she and Devon would probably have been down at the courthouse, tying the knot, if he hadn’t wound up dead. “And besides,” I added, “since he stole the money, it’s not like she’d have gotten to keep it anyway. Or so I assume.”
I glanced at Grimaldi, but she didn’t say anything. So I continued. “And Brittany didn’t kill Devon. If she’d found out that he was cheating on her with Magnolia, maybe she’d have been tempted to—” I knew I would have been tempted to shoot anyone Rafe was fooling around with, “—but you said she hadn’t left the apartment the night he was killed.”
“She didn’t,” Grimaldi said, pulling the car into traffic on Franklin Road.
“Well, then I don’t understand it. Brittany wouldn’t be cooperating with the woman who was sleeping with her boyfriend. Would she? I mean, that doesn’t make any sense.”
Grimaldi didn’t respond. We pulled to a stop outside Brittany’s apartment building, and she cut the engine. “C’mon.”
“Are we going to talk to her?” I opened my door.
“She was at the bank on Monday morning,” Grimaldi said, getting out of her side of the car. “She had a check for five hundred thousand dollars signed by her boyfriend. She turned it into a cashier’s check in her boyfriend’s mistress’s name. I’d like to hear her explanation.”
Come to think of it, so would I.
I hustled across the street after Grimaldi, and waited while she pressed the buzzer outside the front door.
No one answered. Grimaldi developed one of those wrinkles between her eyebrows, too, and pulled out her key chain.
“Is this legal?” I asked when she inserted a universal key into the lock and got us through the front door into the building.
She glanced at me. “You’re welcome to stay in the car. As for me, I have concerns for her wellbeing. Her boyfriend was shot two days ago. I think she’s despondent and a danger to herself.”
She hadn’t seemed despondent to me, but who was I to quibble with the long arm of the law? And if Brittany had been involved in moving the missing money, it wasn’t likely that she’d want to quibble with the long arm of the law, either.
So I trotted after Grimaldi to the elevator, and waited while we rose three stories. At Brittany’s floor, Grimaldi told me to hang back while she went to knock on the door.
“You told me Magnolia’s gun was at the police lab,” I pointed out. “And if Brittany has one, it’s news to me.”
“Just do as I say, Ms.... Savannah.”
She stood to the side of the door herself when she knocked. “Ms. Stevens. This is the police. Open the door, please.”
There was no answer. Grimaldi knocked again. I pulled out my phone and dialed the number for LB&A. Just in case Brittany had woken up with a new lease on life and decided to go to work this morning.
The phone rang once, and then again. Then it was answered. “Thank you for calling LB&A. This is Heidi speaking. How may I help you?”
“Hi, Heidi,” I said, while Grimaldi pulled out her trusty key chain and unlocked the door to Brittany’s apartment.
“Stay here,” she told me, as she pulled her gun from the holster and slipped inside.
I nodded, not that she could see me, since she was already inside the apartment. I’d spent a large part of yesterday at gunpoint; I wasn’t eager to risk my life again. “I guess,” I told Heidi, “if you’re answering the phone, Brittany hasn’t come in today?”
“No,” Heidi said. “But she wasn’t supposed to. She and Devon were getting married this morning, and going to Curacao.”
“Yes,” I said, “but Devon’s dead.”
“Brittany can still go,” Heidi said. “I’m sure the tickets were expensive.”
I’m sure they had been. And perhaps non-refundable, too. But what almost-bride goes on her honeymoon alone after her almost-husband is gunned down two days before?
Grimaldi came back out of the apartment, holstering her gun. “Empty.”
“I have to go,” I told Heidi. “I appreciate it.”
I hung up before she could ask me when I’d be back to relieve her. I had no desire to spend the rest of the day on desk duty. Not when something was afoot. “Did you check her closet?”
“No,” Grimaldi said. “Do you have reason to believe she’s there?”
“Heidi reminded me that Brittany and Devon were supposed to be flying to Curacao this afternoon, on their honeymoon.”
“The honeymoon Hanse Neyman said they weren’t taking,” Grimaldi said.
“Heidi thinks maybe Brittany went on the trip by herself. To get away from everything that’s happened. And because the tickets were expensive. She had the tickets and the hotel booked, and she’d already requested the week off. Heidi might be on to something.”
Grimaldi said a bad word.
“What?”
“I haven’t put any restrictions on her travel. I knew she couldn’t have killed her boyfriend, so I didn’t tell her she had to stick around and not leave town.”
She headed for the elevator with long strides. I had to jog to keep up with her. “This was before you knew she had something to do with the money, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Grimaldi said.
The elevator was still on Brittany’s floor, and we got in and headed down. Grimaldi was visibly annoyed, tapping her fingers against the outside of her thigh and glowering. When we reached the lobby, she stormed out with me bobbing in her wake like a dinghy trailing an ocean liner.
“Where are we going?” I asked diffidently when we were back in the car and Grimaldi had started the engine with an angry roar and then taken off in a U-turn that broke several laws.
She spared me a glance. “Put your seatbelt on.”
“I’m trying.” It was harder to do these days. My arm didn’t have as easy a time reaching across my body as before I was pregnant.
“We’re going to the airport,” Grimaldi said. “Can you remember when the flight was?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. I just know what Brittany told me. That they were getting married this morning and going to Curacao in the afternoon.”
Grimaldi glanced at the clock. It wasn’t afternoon yet. “Do you remember the airline?”
“I don’t remember anything. I didn’t know anything. You’re the one who looked into this. You told me that you’d checked, and that the tickets and hotel were booked in both their names. It was while we were talking to Han Neyman.”
Grimaldi nodded. “Hang on,” she told me, as we hit the entrance ramp to the interstate. “We have a plane to catch.”
I grabbed hold of the d
oor handle and closed my eyes as the car leapt forward, lights flashing and sirens blaring.
* * *
WE GOT to the airport in record time. Grimaldi drove as if I-40 was the Autobahn and the world was her oyster. I was used to going fast—Rafe is another speed demon—but this took driving to another level. I think, at times, we weren’t even actually touching the ground.
Grimaldi parked the car in a no-parking zone and left it there, lights flashing. My guess was, nobody would be going near it. As it was, all the other cars gave it a wide berth. From there, we went directly to the security office, where Grimaldi badged her way up to the head honcho.
“We’re looking for a traveler,” she told him, with no introduction or anything. I guess she expected the badge to do it for her, and maybe it did. “Her name is Brittany Stevens. She was booked on a flight to Curacao this afternoon with her husband, but he was murdered two days ago. We think there’s a chance she may be on her way out of the country.”
The security guy—middle-aged and balding, but with a physique that spoke of time spent at the gym—turned to the computer. “You realize,” he told Grimaldi as he typed, “that without a subpoena I don’t have to help you.”
Grimaldi didn’t answer. Afraid to jinx anything, I guess, since it appeared he was helping her even after saying he didn’t have to.
“Brittany Stevens. Checked in thirty-five minutes ago. Still planning to end up in Curacao tonight, but changed the first leg of the flight—Nashville to Panama City—to an earlier flight.”
“Panama City, Florida?”
The security guy shook his head. “Panama City, Panama.”
So if she got on the flight, she’d end up outside the country in pretty short order. With Magnolia Houston’s half a million dollars.
“Is she traveling alone?”
The security guy consulted the computer again, and shook his head. “She checked in with one Margaret Murphy. That the husband?”
“The husband’s dead,” Grimaldi said. “His name was Devon Knight. Is he still on the passenger list?”
The security guy checked. “The ticket was canceled. There’s a note that the refund is dependent on getting a copy of the death certificate.”
Scared Money (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 13) Page 27