by Carly Bishop
Kiel explained. “I’ve slowed time for them, Robyn.”
“You can do that?”
He nodded.
“They can’t hear us?”
“No.”
She shivered and rubbed her hands up and down the sleeves of her mohair sweater, accepting this minor miracle. “What just happened here, Kiel?”
“I’d say Trudi just took a stab at the gaping hole in your armor.”
“Yes.” Robyn exhaled sharply. “Maybe. But why wasn’t her first instinct to come flying at me?”
Kiel shrugged. “Any number of reasons.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe she’s innocent.”
“Or maybe she’s been clued-in to the fact that it would be double jeopardy to retry her. That it would take an act of Congress to bring her up again on the charges of murdering Spyder Nielsen.”
“She’s cool, Robyn,” Kiel agreed. “She was out on bail. She may even have seduced Stuart Willetts with the express intention of causing a mistrial.”
“But if that was the purpose, why would it be necessary to murder Keller?”
“Maybe he saw what she was up to. Maybe he threatened to take Willetts off the prosecution team. The timing was critical. If Trudi already had Willetts wrapped around her little finger, Keller’s dumping him would have been disastrous to his career and his reputation.”
Robyn played unwittingly with the tiny pair of wings at her breast. “I don’t even know for sure that she or Willetts had anything to do with that cave-in.”
“You won’t know, either, until you just plunge in and do what you do best. Ask the questions. Find the inconsistencies. Cross reference every answer with every other answer and every other witness.” He smiled encouragingly. “You know your own drill, Robyn. You just have to trust yourself.”
“I hardly recognize myself anymore, Kiel.” She swallowed hard. “I let Trudi derail me with one simple question inside sixty seconds. How can that be? A year ago it wouldn’t have happened.”
“A year ago, you hadn’t already lost Keller.” He remained seated in the deep plum-colored chair. “Step back and make her play your game.”
The advice sounded so much like something Keller would have said that it stole her breath away. No matter what Keller played at, he had made it into a mental game, a test of sticking power and wits.
“It’s your move.” He didn’t offer to hold her or put an arm around her shoulders or bolster her in any physical way.
“I know.” Did he know that’s what she craved more than air, to be held? She thought he did know. She even thought he wanted to hold her too. Something stopped him, some greater strength than she possessed.
She would have to make do with her own resources now, and she was tired of waffling, tired of feeling needy. Needing to be rescued. “Okay. Let me at her.”
Giving her a thumbs-up, Kiel sat back. Trudi’s eyes darted to Stuart, then back up at Robyn.
She touched the wings at her throat once more and went on as if no time had intervened, this time without missing a beat. “I’ll be straight with you Ms. Candelaria. I don’t believe my husband’s death was accidental.”
Trudi blinked. “This has something to do with me?”
“I believe it does, yes.”
“How utterly extraordinary!” Trudi raved. “Please, by all means, continue.”
“Don’t bother, Robyn,” Stuart snapped. “Trudi didn’t kill Spyder Nielsen, and she sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with Keller’s death.”
“Did you, Stuart?” Robyn asked, sitting in the club chair opposite Kiel, turning her attention to Keller’s former second chair and assistant.
“Look,” he said, sinking back down onto the foot of Trudi’s chaise longue. A low, three-foot-square beveled glass table sat between them. He and Trudi had already knocked back half a bottle of a wildly expensive rosé. He rapped on the gleaming surface of the table. “Let’s cut to the chase. I know how this must look. ‘Associate counsel blows away special prosecutor, drops charges, shacks up with wealthy murderess.’ Am I doing the theory justice here?”
“It plays, Stuart.”
“In Peoria, maybe.” His attractive mouth shaped itself into a sneer. “An interesting Hollywood script idea, Robyn, but it didn’t happen that way.”
She sat back, ready to listen. “Then suppose you tell me how it did happen.”
“Why should we talk to you at all?” Trudi asked, leaning into her cushions, still somehow amused.
“Because I want to know what happened, and I don’t intend to stop looking for answers until I’m satisfied— and until my husband’s death is avenged.”
“Get a life instead, Robyn,” Willetts advised, his voice edged with something not quite disdainful, not quite fearful. “My God, how self-destructive can you get? Keller died. It was tragic. But your reputation will drop like a stone if you try to make anything more of his death than a terrible accident. Do you seriously think that’s what Keller would have wanted to become of you?”
Robyn exchanged glances with Kiel. She felt so in control of herself and her intentions that she wondered if Kiel had somehow kicked every endorphin-producing cell in her brain into hyperactivity.
“Keller isn’t here, Stuart,” she said. “And my reputation is my business. I don’t intend to ruin my own credibility or libel anyone or make up wild-eyed stories or try to prove that someone succeeded in murdering Keller.”
“Unless that is what happened,” Kiel added.
Stuart scowled. “Who the hell are you, anyway? What’s your interest in all of this?”
“Justice.”
Kiel’s body language looked about as angelic as Rambo’s. She imagined if Willetts provoked him much further Kiel might fly off his heavenly handle and clap his mortal counterpart between a mighty pair of wings—if only to put the fear of God into him. She directed a quelling look at Kiel, then turned back to Stuart and Trudi. “Please. Talk to me.”
“You already believe the worst, Robyn.” Stuart shot Kiel another ugly look, as if what Robyn believed must be his fault.
“No one has ever dictated what I think, Stuart—not even Keller.” Especially Keller. He’d been in love with her from the first because she was a woman with a mind of her own and the backbone to speak it. “All I want is the truth. Frankly,” she said, “I won’t settle for less. But I will listen.”
“That’s what your husband said, too.” Trudi tossed her mane of blond hair and reached for the wine bottle. “He didn’t believe a word I said.” She sloshed the rosé into her wineglass, then swallowed two-thirds of it in one toss. “Tell them, darling.”
Robyn got a spiral and pen from her bag and began running a tape player. Stuart stared at it a moment, then sighed and rubbed his eyes, ending by pinching the bridge of his nose. His features were ordinary by any standards, except for long, thick eyelashes most women couldn’t contrive with mascara.
He began reciting the facts in the dry, emotionless fashion of attorneys. “Spyder Nielsen died on the night of October 12—almost two years ago—of a blow to the back of his head while he was sitting in the hot tub just outside those sliding doors. The case against Trudi was largely circumstantial. No eye witnesses. Elsa was gone that night.
“Trudi had been out to a party,” he went on, stroking her hand. “Spyder refused to go. Trudi got home shortly after midnight, saw a shadowy figure slipping away, and then found Spyder dead—floating in the hot tub. She called the police immediately. Despite an alibi and the shadowy figure, the cops arrested Trudi the next morning. Her fingerprints were on the bronze statue—do you remember seeing it?”
Robyn shook her head. “I never saw any of the physical evidence.”
“Not in person, but Keller sketched it for you on a napkin at the pizza parlor, Robyn. The same night he was named special prosecutor and he hired me to be his second chair.”
She remembered that sketch. The murder weapon was a casting in bronze of a likeness of Spyder
Nielsen hurtling through a racing course on skis. She’d seen the sketch again, not too long ago—on a night when she’d succumbed to loneliness and had been reduced to going through Keller’s books trying to catch the scent of him.
She shoved the tattletale memory from her mind. Fingerprints on the murder weapon didn’t prove anything conclusively. “I knew—everyone knew—that the case against you was circumstantial. But Keller would never have agreed to prosecute if the case wasn’t airtight.”
“The air is very thin in Aspen,” Trudi said. “My alibi didn’t stand up because in the hot tub, Spyder’s body temperature didn’t drop as it might have otherwise. The time of death could not be established.”
“And motive?”
“I had motive to spare,” she snapped. “I had very vocal, quite nasty scenes with the great and mighty Spyder Nielsen in public places. Yes. I had motive and opportunity and his precious bronze at my fingertips. My defense attorney tried to suggest to the jury that I am too small and fragile to have wielded that bronze hard enough or accurately enough to bash Spyder in the back of the head. I could have.
“But I didn’t kill Spyder, Ms. Delaney—and your husband refused to believe me.”
Chapter Five
Kiel watched Robyn’s response to the accusation Trudi made against Keller Trueblood. She had managed to regroup, to distance herself so that she wasn’t kicked in the gut by Trudi Candelaria’s recrimination. He was proud of her, touched by her. He let her handle the accusation her way.
“Most defendants on trial for murder protest their innocence,” she said. “Tell me why Keller should have believed you.”
“Because,” she said, shrugging insolently, “I did not kill Spyder.”
“Look, Robyn,” Stuart interrupted. “This won’t get us anywhere. Trudi maintains her innocence to this day. Keller believed otherwise until the day he died. He was capable of being wrong, you know.”
Checking her tape player, Robyn straightened. She’d never known Keller not to own up to making a mistake or to being mistaken. “Was he wrong about this, Stuart? Was there any physical evidence inconsistent with Trudi’s having committed the murder of Spyder Nielsen?”
Stuart shook his head. “No. There was no evidence implicating anyone else. There was a set of tire tracks in the snow that went unidentified, but that was all.”
“Keller made every effort to have the authorities match those tracks?”
“Naturally. If you’re serious about delving into this case, interview the police. Crandall. Ken Crandall. He’s a real piece of work, Robyn. He has it in for anyone with two cents to rub together.”
“That would include most people who live in Aspen. So anyone else with a motive could have killed Spyder, is that it?” Kiel asked. “Not only Trudi.”
Stuart grimaced, refusing to look at Kiel. “Just talk to Crandall, Robyn.”
“We will.” She wrote the name on her notepad and circled it, but she didn’t let Stuart get away with dismissing Kiel or his point. “It’s true, isn’t it, that if Crandall has a chip on his shoulder about wealthy Aspenites, he’d have been happy to nail any one of them.”
“Maybe.” Stuart’s jaw tightened. “I’m just saying he has an attitude problem that you might want to keep in mind.”
She nodded and looked at Trudi. “Ms. Candelaria, you said my husband wouldn’t listen to a word you said. If the only thing you could say was that you didn’t kill Spyder in the face of a great deal of circumstantial evidence, what was it you wanted him to hear?”
“I expected to be believed. I am many things, Ms. Delaney, but a liar isn’t one of them.”
Everything Robyn understood about body language lobbied on the side of believing Trudi, but in Robyn’s experience, that wasn’t unusual, either. Robyn shook her head. “Do you have any idea what percentage of defendants say exactly that? The ‘I ain’t no saint but you can trust this’ routine is as old as the hills.”
Trudi’s eyes hardened. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me, either.” She flung an arm toward the door. Her twenty-four-karat gold bangles clinked together. “Get out of my house.”
Robyn didn’t move. “Give me something to go on. Anything. Any reason to believe you now.”
“There is nothing, Robyn,” Stuart answered. “If there had been, Keller would have been persuaded. But here’s the bottom line. I believed Trudi on nothing more than instinct. Keller wasn’t satisfied by that. In fact, he suggested I might have been thinking with some other part of my anatomy than my head. If you want something to go on, take my admission that was true. I was attracted to Trudi, she knew it, she fanned the flames—“
“Oh, stop it!” Trudi got up from the chaise longue in one lithe motion and sent her wineglass hurtling into the fireplace.
Robyn flinched at the crashing noise. Kiel’s eyes narrowed in the direction of the fireplace. She guessed his energy prevented the splinters of glass from flying any further than the hearth.
“Don’t say another word!” Trudi hissed.
Stuart quietly ordered her to sit down and shut up. In a million years Robyn would not have believed he would have had the nerve—especially if Trudi had turned him into a kept man, here in Spyder Nielsen’s house and in her bed at her whim. Just as astonishingly, Trudi clapped her mouth shut and sat down without uttering another sound.
Stuart took her hand and went on. “I came perilously close to misconduct that would have caused the people’s case to end in a mistrial.”
“Isn’t that the point?” Kiel asked. “That you were so enamored with Trudi you were willing to force the case into a mistrial?”
Trudi rolled her eyes but Stuart nodded. “That’s the way it was, yes.”
Robyn shivered. “Stuart, are you saying Keller knew about your affair with Trudi?”
“No. It wasn’t a full-blown affair at the time, anyway…. But no. He never guessed how I felt about her?”
Stuart said, his features stark, even grimly composed. “Keller knew my work. He trusted me. He believed I was playing devil’s advocate to the case—that’s how we worked, how we’d always worked.”
The betrayal struck at her composure. She felt a terrible anger rising in her. “You’re telling me now that you were prepared to let the whole thing, your affair with the defendant, blow up in Keller’s face.”
He studied his hands a moment. “I’m not proud of it, Robyn, but yes. If he ever found out, the strategy would have backfired.”
“Because Keller would have dropped you from the prosecution if he knew?”
“He’d have had me disbarred, Robyn. That, plus making a very compelling case before any magistrate that Trudi seduced me with the express intention of forcing a mistrial. In that event, the case would be brought to trial again. And I’d have been washed up.”
“Stuart, that thinking was absolute madness! No matter when Keller found out, the results would have been the same. Why? Why would you do this? Don’t you understand that everything you’re saying tells me that you were the one desperate enough to kill Keller?”
Willetts literally shook. He rose and tried to ease a knot from the back of his neck, tried to get a grip on himself. “You have to understand, Robyn. We were just desperate enough to take the risk. Keller would have gotten Trudi convicted of a murder she didn’t commit.”
“Then you know I have to ask this question, Stuart. How far were you willing to go to prevent Keller getting that conviction or exposing your affair?”
“Don’t answer that, Stuart,” Trudi flared, turning her furious gaze on Robyn. “Neither one of us is on trial. Not anymore. It’s over. You’re powerless to hurt us or—“
“She’s not powerless, Trudi,” he interrupted her tiredly. “Judges have been known to allow charges to be reinstated on less than she already knows.” He turned back to Robyn. “I would not have gone so far as to murder Keller, Robyn. You have to believe that.”
She felt his strain. “You stood to lose everything, Stuart. Everything you’d wo
rked for your entire life…your stature in the community. Trudi.”
“I’m hoping that’s the piece of all this you’ll understand.” He looked at Trudi, not with some calf-eyed, lovelorn expression, but with one of deeper, more complex emotions. “We’re neither one of us kids, Robyn. We’re as committed to each other and as much in love as you were with Keller.”
Robyn put her pad and pen down on the glass table. Trudi seemed suddenly older, more solemn, silently agreeing, finally, with Stuart’s statements and his reason for pasting his heart on his sleeve.
Robyn knew now why he had been willing to go on tape with this. He wanted to play on her emotions. He wanted her to have a reason to believe if he admitted to this much, he must be telling the truth. That Trudi hadn’t murdered Spyder, and that together, they had not murdered Keller.
All of which turned inside out everything Robyn had walked in to Spyder Nielsen’s house believing. Stuart’s appeal to her to understand how much in love he was by comparing his relationship with Trudi to hers with Keller was a thundering shot across her emotional bow. But was he blinded by love?
If she believed him, then someone else had killed Spyder.
If she believed him, then if Keller had been murdered at all it must have been by someone else who feared Keller was onto them. Someone else who needed to make sure Keller was stopped.
Stuart Willetts made her stomach turn. He reminded her of the joke about California getting all the lawyers and New Jersey getting all the toxic waste dumps—because Jersey got to choose first among the available plagues.
What tore hardest at her was that despite the despicable things he’d done and wished and caused, despite his being the most reprehensible behavior she had ever seen, in her heart, she believed him.
She made herself set all that anger and resentment aside because she had to know what else he knew. “Are you certain Keller hadn’t come upon information implicating anyone else?”
He gave a sigh. “You believe me, then?”
She wouldn’t give him that. Not now, maybe never. “I don’t know what I believe, Stuart. You’re a selfacknowledged liar. How can anything you say be believed?”