“How’s he doing?”
“Yesterday he came to work. It wasn’t even until after lunch that he told me what had happened. But then he was ... not distraught, because Sam keeps his emotions in check. But he’s understandably very upset. Today he’s not even coming in.”
“You talked to him?”
“Debbie did. He called and asked her to reschedule his appointments.”
Hannah wondered if their interview with him yesterday afternoon had rattled his composure. “What’s your assessment of the Russells’ marriage?” she asked.
“Good,” he said, almost too quickly.
“No problems at all?”
Kincaid hesitated.
“I realize Sam is your partner—”
“And friend. We grew up together. My dad died when I was a kid, and the senior Dr. Russell was like a surrogate father to me.”
Hannah nodded. “I understand your loyalty, but if you have information—”
“No, nothing like that.”
Hannah rephrased her question. “What issues were they dealing with?”
“Not issues, really, but ... well, there didn’t seem to be much spark between them either.”
“You think he might be involved with someone else?”
Kincaid looked surprised. “I doubt it.”
“How about Maureen?”
He held up his hands and smiled. “I wouldn’t even venture a guess. I have a long track record of being wrong about women.”
A fact in which he seemed to take some pride, Hannah thought. “How are the Russells doing financially?”
The question seemed to catch the doctor off guard. “Fine, as far as I know. I mean, all of us could use more than we’ve got, right?”
“Anyone who might be upset with Dr. Russell? Have there been lawsuits or complaints?”
“No, Sam’s a good doctor. And we have a general practice. We don’t have to worry as much as some of the specialists.”
Hannah leaned forward. “Did you know Lisa?”
“Yeah, I was at their wedding.”
“Were you surprised when he was arrested for her murder?”
“Yeah, I was. Though by then Sam and I weren’t as close as we’d been growing up.”
“And now? Do you think he could have anything to do with Maureen’s disappearance?”
Hannah could see a battle at play behind Ira Kincaid’s eyes. That in itself was telling. More telling than the words that followed.
“You suspect foul play?”
“She is the second wife of his to disappear.”
He fingered the edge of a paper on his desk. “I guess we never really know what a person is capable of, but Sam’s a doctor. He’s trained to save lives, not take them.”
A sufficiently vague answer, Hannah noted. She stood and thanked him for his time. “Let me know if you think of anything else.”
Sherri Moore was, as far as Hannah knew, the last of Maureen’s friends to speak with her before she disappeared. She greeted Hannah’s knock on the front door with a cordless phone pressed to her ear. As soon as she realized Hannah was a cop, she told her companion she’d call back later.
“Another of the fifth-grade mothers,” she explained to Hannah, inviting her inside with a sweep of her arm.
Sherri had shoulder-length hair streaked with several shades of honey blond. She was slim and perky, with perfectly manicured fingernails and sparkling white teeth. The kind of woman who always made Hannah feel inadequate.
“You’re here about Maureen Russell, right?” Sherri said as she led Hannah into a spotless, upscale kitchen.
Hannah nodded. “I understand you’re a friend of hers.”
“Yeah, mostly because of the girls. My daughter and Molly are”—she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers—“ ‘best friends.’” Sherri dropped the phone back into its cradle. “Can I get you anything to drink?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” Hannah slid onto one of the high stools at the granite-topped counter. “Do you have any idea where she might be?”
Sherri shook her head, started to walk toward the sink then apparently changed her mind and took a seat at the other end of the counter.
“Maureen wouldn’t just walk away though,” she said. “For one thing, she’d take at least two suitcases.” Sherri tried to laugh, but the sound caught in her throat. “I’m sure something terrible must have happened to her.”
“Any ideas along that line?”
Sherri wrinkled her nose. “I’ve been asking myself that, but nothing comes to mind. Maureen is just ... I was going to say average, but that sounds wrong. She’s just a regular person. She wouldn’t hitchhike or go off with a stranger or anything like that. I can’t imagine what could have happened.”
“Was anything bothering her?” Hannah asked. “Or anyone? Maybe some odd experience she’d had recently with a deliveryman or someone in town?”
“No, she never mentioned anything like that.” Sherri twisted the gold mesh bracelet on her wrist. “And she was upbeat, always. It would bug me sometimes, because to listen to her, she never had a bad day. But I realized that some people, that’s just their way.”
“What about bad habits?”
Sherri frowned. “Oh, no. She’s ... very polite.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of drugs, gambling, hanging out in bars.”
“Not that I know of. But we aren’t superclose. Maureen is younger than me, younger than most of the other fifth-grade mothers, in fact. And she’s not Molly’s real mother. I mean, she tries hard to fit in, but I’m not sure her heart’s in it.”
Hannah felt some sympathy for Maureen. Unless you had kids or were retired, Monte Vista wasn’t an easy community to fit into. “What about her and Sam?” she asked.
“Great. She likes being”—again, Sherri punctuated her words with quotation gestures—“‘the wife of a doctor.’ And Sam’s a sweetheart.”
Hannah looked for a hint of anything more in the remark about Sam than the words indicated, but nothing jumped out at her. “Molly spent Saturday night at your place?” she asked.
“Yeah. Heather was having a slumber party. Only four girls, but it felt like forty. Maureen and Sam were going out for their anniversary. Big night on the town. That’s why I wasn’t too worried at first when no one showed up to get her. I figured they’d just slept in. But then Molly was getting worried, and I couldn’t reach Maureen, so finally I called Sam’s service.”
Sam hadn’t mentioned the anniversary date with his wife. “Going out where? Did they say?”
“Pietro’s. Down near Sacramento. Have you eaten there? Expensive but really good.”
“I’ll have to give it a try some time,” Hannah said. Assuming she ever had what might pass for a normal social life again. But she made a mental note to check with the restaurant. Maybe the Russells had had a lovers’ spat.
“What time did you try calling them Sunday morning?”
“Gosh, maybe around ten, ten-thirty. I tried back a couple of times, then tried Maureen’s cell too, before trying Sam’s work number.”
“What time did you finally reach him?”
“It was almost noon.”
“What did he say?”
“Something about a medical problem or a patient. I don’t recall exactly. But he got here within the hour.”
It was almost three by the time Hannah met up with Dallas back at the station.
“How many of the names did you reach?” she asked. Hannah had talked to all of her four, and several others she’d been directed to in the course of her interviews. She’d come away with a slightly clearer picture of Maureen, the woman, but had picked up nothing that would help them trace her whereabouts.
“I was able to reach all but one,” Dallas said.
“What did you learn?”
“Nada.”
“Give me the gist of it anyway.”
“The second Mrs. Russell has no bad habits and no enemies. On the other hand, she doesn’t ha
ve any close friends either. By choice, it seems. Ms. Personality, she’s not. Her life pretty much revolves around Sam.”
“That’s the picture I got too.”
“There was one thing though.” Dallas paused. There was a glint in his eye that Hannah recognized. It was the gotcha glint. Dallas often withheld morsels of information so that he could serve them up like a mouth-watering confection at just the right moment.
Hannah waited for him to continue. She wasn’t going to play his game.
“One of the women she played tennis with told me that Maureen had asked her for the name of her divorce lawyer.”
“Maureen was thinking of leaving Sam?”
“It’s certainly an avenue worth looking into.”
“Sherri Moore told me Maureen liked ‘being married to a doctor.’ Her words.”
Dallas shrugged. “Maybe she liked the idea but not the man.”
“Saturday was their anniversary. They had plans to go out to dinner at a place called Pietro’s. It’s worth following up on.”
“Good discovery.”
“You get the name of the attorney?”
“Myrna Edwards. She’s got an office on the outskirts of Sacramento.”
A safe, twenty-mile distance from Monte Vista, Hannah noted. Just like her own forays into the world of pickup bars and anonymous sex.
CHAPTER 12
Hannah turned to Dallas as they approached Myrna Edwards’s law office the following morning. “Let me take the lead on this, okay?”
“Because of the woman-to-woman thing?”
Try human-to-human, she thought. A tactic she suspected was alien to Dallas.
“That,” she replied, “and since I made the initial contact, it might be best if I followed up.” Hannah had talked to the secretary rather than the attorney herself, who’d been in court when she called, but she wasn’t about to point that out.
“Fine by me,” he said. “Never met a lawyer I could stomach anyway.”
She thought immediately of Malcolm then pushed the memory away. It wasn’t the lawyer part she had trouble with; it was the husband part. Or, rather, the not-so-husbandly behavior.
The divorce attorney’s office was on the second floor of a two-story stucco building that also housed a dentist’s office, a real estate office, and a barber shop. The adjacent parking lot was striped for maybe twenty cars, but only a handful of the spaces were taken.
Hannah gave the secretary their names then sat in one of the green tweed chairs while Dallas stood at the window looking out at the parking lot below.
Myrna Edwards greeted them a few minutes later. She was a large woman, weighing close to two hundred pounds by Hannah’s estimation. She had on a flowing, teal blue tunic, accented with lots of chunky silver jewelry. A far cry from the power-suit attorneys Hannah had known in LA.
She led them to her office, which looked as though a tornado had recently blown through, and gestured to a pair of chairs facing her desk.
“You’re with the Monte Vista police department?”
Hannah made the introductions. “We’re here about Maureen Russell.” She paused, waiting for a reaction. When none was forthcoming, Hannah asked, “Was she a client of yours?”
“I’m afraid I can’t answer. It’s confidential.”
“She’s missing,” Hannah explained.
“I read that in the paper this morning.”
“We’re hoping you might be able to shed some light on what’s happened.”
“How’s that?” Myrna Edwards’s skin was a lovely alabaster marred only by deep frown lines in her brow. Given the intensity with which she was now scowling, Hannah could understand how the lines had become permanent.
“We have reason to believe she might have contacted you,” Hannah said.
“In regard to what?”
Hannah shrugged. “Divorcing her husband, I guess. That’s your line of work, isn’t it?”
“And now that she’s missing, you suspect he might have harmed her.” It wasn’t really a question.
“That’s one possibility,” Hannah said. “Another is that she was unhappy or scared and decided to simply leave.”
Myrna Edwards folded her arms across her ample chest. The band of bracelets clanked on her wrist. “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can tell you.”
Dallas rocked forward. “Not even whether or not she contacted you?” He sounded incredulous.
“Not even that.”
Dallas grunted with disgust. “This is a police investigation.”
“So you said.”
“I understand about attorney-client privilege,” Hannah said, trying for a less confrontational tone. “But this isn’t an instance where a client needs protection from the law. The law’s on her side. We’d like to find her and, if she’s come to harm, to punish those responsible.”
The attorney nodded. “Unfortunately, I’m bound by the rules of ethics, not common sense. I’m sorry you wasted your time by coming here, Detectives. There’s nothing I can tell you.” She rose from her chair. “I’ve been without a regular secretary for several months now, making do with temporary help. Anyone familiar with my practice would have told you up front that coming to see me would be useless.”
Hannah left her card on the attorney’s desk. “If you find there’s anything you can tell us, please give me a call.”
Getting back in the car, Hannah slammed the door. “Well, that was helpful.”
“She’s way over the top with this confidentiality stuff. Must make her feel important or something.”
“Still, if Maureen Russell hadn’t contacted her,” Hannah reasoned, “she’d probably have said so.”
Dallas shrugged. “People like that get a kick out of pulling the strings.”
A description that fit Dallas himself, Hannah thought. “Maureen Russell asked that friend of hers for the name of her attorney,” she said. “I think there’s a good chance she contacted Ms. Edwards.”
“Makes sense. Let’s say the marriage was on the rocks. Maureen wanted out and Sam wasn’t any too happy about it. Maybe it was the idea of paying alimony, or maybe he didn’t want to let her go. Or maybe it was an assault on his ego. In any case, he was pissed, so ...” Dallas made a shooting gesture with his fingers. “Pow. No more wife.”
Hannah started the engine. “Is that what you think happened with his first wife?”
“Basically. She wasn’t shot though. She was strangled and stabbed.”
Hannah winced. She tried to picture the mild-mannered Sam Russell angry enough to stab his wife. It was an image that didn’t form easily.
“Maybe Maureen was sleeping around on him,” Dallas added, still theorizing. “That would really push his button.”
“Did you pick up any indication of that from the friends you talked with?”
“Not really.” Dallas craned his neck to the right to check traffic as she backed out of the parking space. Like she couldn’t manage without his help.
“I didn’t get that impression either.” Though that didn’t mean it wasn’t so. Malcolm had managed to keep his infidelity a secret, hadn’t he? Hannah had never suspected a thing. It was only when she was cleaning out his closet after he died that she discovered the notes from Claire. She wished she had known before so that she could have asked him why. Not knowing how she fell short made her doubt herself even more.
“Do you think Sam could have been having an affair?” she asked after a moment. “If Maureen found out and they argued. . .”
Dallas grinned. “Now there’s a thought. Sam always did have a lost-puppy-dog way of attracting the girls.”
Girls. She realized Dallas was talking about high school again. “People change,” she said. She had only to compare who she was today with the timid, mousey thing she’d been in high school.
But it brought her up short to realize the germ of truth in Dallas’s comment. Hadn’t Hannah herself found that very quality in Sam attractive?
“What if the attorney ac
tually has information from Maureen that warrants confidentiality?” she asked. “Something about Sam, maybe. His past, his medical practice, some hidden vice. Or something that involves both Maureen and Sam.”
“So he offed Maureen to keep her quiet?”
“Not necessarily,” Hannah said. “Could be he had nothing to do with it. Not directly, anyway. But I get the feeling he knows more than he’s saying.”
“I’ve been telling you that from the beginning.” Dallas adjusted the air vents on his side of the dash. “Let’s pick up lunch before we head back.”
“It’s only eleven.”
“So what? I’m hungry.”
Nothing unusual there; Dallas was always hungry. And if they didn’t stop to eat soon, he’d only grouse about it until they did. Hannah sighed. “Okay, what’ll it be?”
They settled on McDonald’s because it was quick and Hannah could get a salad with low-fat dressing. Dallas ordered a double cheeseburger and fries.
A man who looked to be in his early thirties, five or six years younger than Hannah, was in line ahead of them. Broad shoulders, Hannah noticed. Good muscle definition—the kind that came from everyday hard work rather than hours with a trainer. His butt was firm, his hair long and soft enough to invite a finger-combing. Hannah felt a familiar jolt of electricity somewhere deep inside her. Too bad she was at McDonald’s and not one of her regular evening haunts. Although she might have been able to handle the setting, having Dallas along put a definite damper on things.
She stared hard until the stranger turned, then caught his eye. She smiled, and he smiled back. Damn, but he was a good one. What rotten timing.
Oblivious to all but his lunch, Dallas handed her a fistful of paper napkins and a plastic fork. “You want a knife too?”
“Fork is fine.” She bit her lip to keep from laughing. She’d come close to saying, “Fuck is fine.” She wondered if Dallas would have noticed.
They grabbed a table by the window, where she had a full view of the restaurant. She was hoping for a little more eye flirtation, if nothing else. But the stranger took his food out to his pickup truck and left.
Dallas ate half the burger before he broke for conversation. “You think that pooch got it right about Maureen leaving the house by way of the garage?”
The Only Suspect Page 9