“Wait. Summers is her married name. We should be looking under her maiden name.”
“Do you know what it is?” Hal asked. “Because I have no idea.”
“You could look for a marriage announcement,” suggested Mum.
“Good idea,” I said and turned back to the computer screen. “But I don’t know what her husband’s first name was.”
“Maybe there’s a divorce announcement,” Hal suggested.
“Hmmm,” I said. I typed in magicvalley.com, selected Clarion, and searched in vain for divorces for the last ten years, since I didn’t expect that Tiffany had been a child bride, but no joy.
“I’m going to try one more thing,” I said. I went back to Google and typed in Emily Summers.
Hal, looking over my shoulder, objected. “You’re just gonna get more porn sites doing that. Go back to the Clarion, and maybe you’ll find a birth announcement.”
“What if she wasn’t born here?” I objected, but I did what he said and hit pay dirt.
Emily was born September 3, 2005, at our hospital, to Tiffany and Eldon Summers of Twin Falls.
Tiffany and Eldon Summers?
Hal straightened up and stretched. “Well, we don’t know any more about Tiffany, but at least we have her ex-husband’s first name.”
“But that’s just weird!” I said.
“What’s weird?”
“Her husband’s name is Eldon Summers.”
“So?”
“The father of the Tiffany Summers who died was Eldon Summers.”
“Huh,” said Hal. “You’re right, that is weird. What do you suppose it means?”
“Surely it’s just a coincidence,” said Mum.
“You know what the Commander says about that?” I asked her.
“What, dear?”
“‘First thing ya gotta learn about coincidences,’ he says, ‘is that there’s no coincidences.’”
“Dear me,” said Mum.
“What are you getting at, Toni?” Hal said.
“It’s such a long shot,” I said, “for our Tiffany Summers to be married to an Eldon Summers, when the father of this other Tiffany Summers who was born in Duluth and died in 1981 is also Eldon Summers.”
“So let’s look for a marriage announcement.”
“Or a divorce announcement.”
But we found neither.
I went back to Google and typed in Eldon Summers.
There were 1,690,000 entries. I tried to narrow them down by location. None of them were in Twin Falls or even in the Magic Valley. I threw up my hands in frustration. “I can’t do this anymore. Why don’t we just ask Tiffany where her ex-husband is?”
“Kitten, have I missed something?” inquired Mum. “Why do we need to know where her ex-husband is?”
Hal and I looked at each other. He turned his palms up. “I don’t know. Why did we?”
I shrugged. “Maybe we don’t. We needed his name to find a marriage announcement or divorce announcement. But we didn’t find either.”
“Not in the Clarion, anyway. All that means is that they were married and divorced somewhere else.”
“What we were really doing,” I pointed out, “is trying to find out something about Tiffany. Something. Anything. For what it’s worth. Which may be nothing. I’m done here,” I said, shutting down the computer. “I think I can get more information from the medical record than we can get here.”
Mum and Hal, obviously bored out of their skulls just hanging around the house, insisted on accompanying me to my office. Such a parade would attract way too much attention on a weekday, but today, Sunday, the halls were deserted. Brenda was on duty in the lab, and I took my companions into the lab and introduced Brenda to my mother, telling her that Mum had never seen my office. I knew that if I had sneaked us into my office, she would hear us and come looking to see who was there and catch us violating HIPAA.
According to the medical record, Tiffany’s date of birth was July 3, 1978, and her birthplace was Duluth, Minnesota.
And her middle name was Sue.
Hal and I looked at each other. Mum, pointing to the computer screen, said, “Isn’t that the same as that birth announcement in Google?”
“Oh, now, that is just too weird,” I said. “That baby died of leukemia at age three.”
“Don’t go off half-cocked,” Hal cautioned. “It’s not impossible that more than one Tiffany Summers was born in Duluth in 1978.”
“Tiffany Sue? And on the same day?”
“Not impossible,” Hal said.
“My loves, you’re forgetting something,” Mum pointed out. “Summers is Tiffany’s married name. What’s her maiden name?”
“It gets weirder,” I said, scrolling down. “Tiffany’s maiden name is Summers. She’s listed here as divorced.”
“But the birth announcement said Emily was born to Tiffany and Eldon Summers,” Mum said.
“There’s no husband given here,” I pointed out. “It says ‘father unknown’.
“Makes sense if Jay Braithwaite Burke is Emily’s real father,” Hal said.
“But she gave her ex-husband’s name to the papers,” I said.
Hal laughed. “You really wouldn’t expect her to give Jay’s name to the papers, would you?”
I continued to scroll down. “No, but look who she gave as next of kin. Parents, Marjorie and Eldon Summers, in Duluth, Minnesota!”
“Jesus,” Hal said. “She gave her father’s name as the father of her child. Why would she do that?”
“Maybe it was the first name that came to mind,” Mum suggested. “Like you said, she couldn’t give the real father’s name to the papers, now, could she?”
“Can you print that?” Hal asked. “Just in case the police need it?”
“Sure,” I said and hit the proper keys. “But you know the police will have to subpoena it, and they’d have to have probable cause … hang on, I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” Hal asked.
“The printer’s in the lab. I’ve got to get that before Brenda sees it.”
I got the printout just as it came off the printer. Brenda was in another part of the lab and didn’t see me. I folded the printout and stuffed it in my jeans pocket.
Back in my office, I shut down the computer. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.
It wasn’t until we were climbing the steps to the front porch that I voiced what I was thinking.
“You know what? I think the real Tiffany Sue Summers died in 1981.”
“Then who’s this?” Hal said.
“I don’t know,” I replied, closing the front door behind us. “But I’ll bet it isn’t Tiffany Sue Summers.”
“In that case,” Mum said, “perhaps it would be best not to ask her who she really is, don’t you know.”
I agreed with her. “Not if we don’t want to get burned.”
I’d let the police do it; because if Tiffany had really stolen that child’s identity, it was because she had something to hide.
Like a rap sheet, for instance.
In Duluth, Minnesota, maybe.
For arson, perhaps.
Elliott had gotten home with Ruthie by the time we got back; but it was not what anyone would call a joyous homecoming.
Ruthie lit into me before I had taken two steps into the living room. “How could you do that to me?” she yelled, her face less than a foot from mine. “How dare you accuse me of trying to poison Kathleen and the children! And my own husband? What kind of a monster do you take me for? For your information, I no longer have any of Lance’s Lovenox; I threw it all away after he died. Only now I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d kept it to kill you with, you bitch.”
“Ruthie, for God’s sake,
take it easy,” Elliott remonstrated. “You shouldn’t make threats like that. They’ll come back to bite you in the freakin’ butt someday.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck!” she shrieked at him. “I’m not staying here. I’m not going to spend another minute under this roof. Take me to a motel. Now!”
Elliott shrugged. “Whatever you say. Get your stuff.”
With one final vitriolic look in my direction, she headed for the stairs. I looked at Elliott. “Now what?”
He shrugged. “She’s out on bail. She can go anywhere she likes as long as she shows up in court when she’s supposed to.”
Ruthie came back downstairs with what remained of her earthly possessions in two grocery bags. “Ready,” she said.
“Car’s unlocked,” he told her.
She opened the front door and turned to fire a final shot at me. “I swear to God, I am going to sue you for everything you’ve got.”
“You already are,” I reminded her. A look of confusion washed across her face, but she said nothing more before she went out the door.
“Did she really dispose of all Lance’s Lovenox?” I asked Elliott.
“I don’t know. Maybe it all burned up when her house burned.”
Another thing to ask the police about.
Monday, December 22
Chapter 25
A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon
you’re talking about real money.
—Everett Dirksen
Good thing I was on vacation, because I hadn’t slept worth a damn.
I’d lain awake most of the night, mulling over question after question while Hal slept peacefully beside me, snoring softly. Killer, on the floor next to the bed, did the same. Geraldine wedged herself into the small of my back as she always did, like a little furry heating pad.
I didn’t know where Spook was and didn’t care, as long as he wasn’t in the linen closet.
Right away I dismissed Lance as having murdered Jay. He had no motive. But Kathleen, Tiffany, and Ruthie probably did, as well as the other women mentioned in Jay’s will.
Although love was a perfectly good motive for murder, in this case it didn’t help much. These weren’t crimes passionels; they were clearly premeditated. I was pretty sure it was all about money. Considering what Jay had been doing with his Ponzi scheme, money was a much more viable motive. Kathleen stood to inherit under both of Jay’s wills, unless she was the murderer, of course. Tiffany stood to inherit under only one of the wills, the most recent and probably the legal one. But so did an unknown number of other women, including Mitzi Okamoto, assuming none of them had remarried or died. I didn’t count Jodi. Not even Jay Braithwaite Burke would be brassy enough to make Elliott draft a will that had his own wife in it.
And if there was anything left to inherit, where would it be? In Jay’s Swiss bank account?
I figured that it wouldn’t be in a bank account or brokerage account anywhere in the United States, because if it was, Jay wouldn’t have needed to declare bankruptcy. On the other hand, there was that doctor from Hawaii who had sued him for his lost million dollars. It was only then that Jay had declared bankruptcy. So if Jay had any money in a domestic account, he would have wasted no time getting it into an offshore entity to protect it.
I assumed that if offshore accounts were safe from the IRS and bankruptcy courts they were also safe from lawsuits filed in the United States.
How much did Kathleen know? Besides the Swiss bank account, had she set any of this up when she worked for Jay? Because their oldest son was born in 1995 and Jay had started the fund in 1990, Kathleen had to have been working for him during the first five years of the fund’s existence. I wasn’t sure why none of us had asked Kathleen these questions. Maybe we were all afraid that if she had killed Jay it would tip her off and she might retaliate by killing somebody else.
How was Tiffany involved?
We still knew nothing about her. She didn’t look a day over twenty-five, but I supposed she could have been thirty. If she was born in 1978, how old would she have been in 1995? Seventeen. It might work, if she could show that she had graduated from high school. But if she was somebody else who’d stolen that baby’s identity, all the information we’d gotten from her medical record was a pack of lies; so that was no help.
On the other hand, if she’d stolen the identity of someone born in 1978, she’d have to present herself as that age when applying for a job. If she’d started working for Jay in 1995, she would have been in the perfect position to replace Kathleen when Bryan was born—in more ways than one, I thought cattily.
What about Ruthie? She must have worked in that office too at that time, because she witnessed Jay’s first will. So both Kathleen and Tiffany knew about both of Jay’s wills, and possibly also knew where the money was. But how much did Ruthie know? Did she know about the second will? How much had Lance known, and how much had he told Ruthie?
Nothing, if he was smart. Anything Ruthie knew would be common knowledge by now. The woman had a mouth like a steel sieve. Or was that just an act? Maybe that gossipy exterior hid a multitude of secrets that nobody would suspect she knew.
Like what she had really done with Lance’s Lovenox.
Unfortunately, any records had probably been destroyed in the fire that destroyed Jay and Lance’s law office.
Or had they?
Had that fire been set to kill Lance and Tiffany or to destroy incriminating files?
In the morning, I sat blearily at the kitchen table with Mum, Hal, Jodi, and Elliott, trying to revive myself with vast quantities of coffee. Mum, disgustingly perky for that hour of the morning, inquired chirpily about everyone’s plans for the day.
“I need to go to the police station,” I said.
“What for?” Hal asked. I knew he was thinking about Bernie Kincaid and wished I could say something to allay his fears, but I couldn’t think of anything. Bernie would either be there or he wouldn’t, and there was nothing I could do about that.
“I need to find out if the fire department recovered anything from the law office, like safes or fireproof file cabinets, and see what’s in them,” I said.
“I’ll go with her,” Elliott said. “I need to see that stuff too. I’ll just give them a call so we won’t be wasting our time. Hand me the phone, would you, Shapiro?”
Hal handed him the handset. Elliott placed the call, and from the sounds of it, he had connected with the Commander. After a few pleasantries, Elliott put a hand over the mouthpiece. “He says they recovered two safes, but they don’t know the combinations.”
“I’ll bet Kathleen does,” Jodi said, “or maybe Tiffany. Want me to get them up?”
“Get who up?” Kathleen asked. None of us had heard her coming down the stairs.
“You,” Jodi said. “Do you know the combinations to the safes in Jay’s and Lance’s offices?”
Kathleen looked surprised. “You mean they managed to save those? Wow. Let me see. Jeez, it’s been such a long time.” She thought for a minute and then said, “Got some paper and a pen? I’ll write them down.” Hal gave her a pad of Post-its and a pen, and she wrote down two combinations. “I think that’s right,” she said. “If that doesn’t work, maybe Tiffany knows.”
I wasn’t altogether sure that Tiffany would give us the right combinations, even if she knew them, in light of what I now suspected about her. It was another item I planned to discuss with the police, but I didn’t want to say so in front of Kathleen.
Elliott relayed the combinations to the Commander. “He’s telling Pete. Pete’s giving it a try. Hey, he’s got one of them open … and the other. Great,” he told the Commander. “Don’t take anything out. I’ll be right down.”
Five minutes later, Elliott and I presented ourselves at the police station. The safes stood open on the f
loor, their contents visible. We pulled up a couple of chairs and got to work. The Commander, clipboard in hand and toothpick in mouth, parked one butt cheek on the corner of the desk. “Gotta make a list of the contents for evidence,” he said.
The contents of Jay’s safe included copies of both his wills, a copy of Kathleen’s will, and a Banque Suisse statement dated November 30, 2008, showing a balance of just over five million dollars. “Wow,” Elliott said. “Looks like there’s something to inherit, all right.”
The contents of Lance’s safe included his will, Ruthie’s will, and his First Cayman Bank Ltd. statement, also dated November 30, 2008, with a balance of eight million dollars. Elliott’s response to that was a little more unconventional. “Holy freakin’ shit,” he said.
When I’d remarked that this case was swimming in money, I had no idea what I was talking about. This case was drowning in it.
Elliott handed Jay’s original will to the Commander. “We don’t need this one anymore,” he said. “This is the one we want. Toni, want to take a look?”
I took it and skimmed the pages, looking for the names of the beneficiaries. Ruthie had mentioned some of them but not all of them. Jeannie Tracy wasn’t there. Aside from Kathleen, Tiffany, and Mitzi, I didn’t know any of the other women—except for one.
Rebecca Sorensen.
Tall, blonde, gorgeous Rebecca. Nice Rebecca. Pregnant Rebecca. Pregnant with her and Jeff’s first child.
Poor guy. I hoped he’d never find out it was really Jay’s child.
“Well?” Elliott asked. “Any surprises?”
“Only one,” I said and told him about Rebecca.
Pete came in at that point. “We managed to locate all those other women,” he said. “They’ve all remarried, so they won’t inherit.”
“Rebecca won’t inherit either,” I said. “So far, she’s still married.” Until Jeff finds out about his child’s actual parentage, that is, and divorces her.
We moved on.
Kathleen’s will divided her estate equally among her four children and Tiffany. In case of her death while the children were under eighteen, their shares of the money were to be held in trust, the trustee being her mother, Mary Reilly. Also not a surprise; it was pretty much what we thought.
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