The Cost of Betrayal

by Dee Henderson

  He kissed her good morning. “You needed the sleep.”

  He pulled blueberry syrup from the microwave, avoided the steam rising from the waffle iron, and placed the syrup on the counter. “Would you prefer something else?”

  “Blueberry is fine.” Ann brought out glasses, poured orange juice, and set one by each place setting. She slid onto a stool. “What time is the car picking you up?”

  It was telling that she simply assumed he’d be heading into the office. He glanced at his watch. “Forty-five minutes.” Work requiring some of Saturday was a fact of his life in December. “The New York matter is resolved if Sam can get the judge to take a new bribe and we get it on the record, preferably both audio and video. To our good fortune, a case got assigned to the judge this week that has organized-crime overtones. The defendant would have both the means and motive to offer a bribe. We just need to find a reason he would like to cooperate with us, unrelated to the case going to trial. We’ll be looking through his past for that leverage today.” He forked out a finished waffle and placed it on her plate.

  “Thanks.” She reached for the syrup. “If you can connect him to anyone now in witness protection, there might be an avenue of information you can tap there,” she offered.

  Paul nodded, pouring more batter. “I’ve already got Lori in mind. One has to approach carefully when asking her a question like that one. Risk the reward of taking down a federal judge versus protecting Lori’s past? It’s not even a close call.”

  “Well, I wish you a quick answer, for when you get home today I’m thinking we take an hour and go build a snowman somewhere, freeze our fingers, maybe toss a few friendly snowballs at each other, with Black to umpire.”

  Paul laughed at the image. “I’m game. Party number four is tonight?”

  “It’s late, eight to whenever, at the Marriott. It’s mostly your parents’ friends, so I expect the party to go into the early hours of the morning, but we can duck out at a reasonable time.” Ann nodded toward the crime photos. “Switching cases—anything surprise you?”

  He reached to pick up his orange juice. “If it were not for the fact Andrew was stabbed with a pocketknife, I could make a good argument this was simply an unfortunate Friday night for him. He breaks up badly with his girlfriend, stays stewing over it on that beach after she leaves, it gets dark, he gets robbed on the way back to his car, and rather than hand over his wallet he throws a punch because he’s in the mood to hit something. He gets stabbed once, stumbles back, and tumbles down that steeper set of stairs. The robber either already had his wallet and phone or hustled down the stairs after him and takes them.”

  Paul plated his waffle, sat down beside her, reached for the syrup, and continued with his thought. “The injuries were not fatal. If Andrew hadn’t knocked himself out, his evening would have ended with a bad headache and some stitches. But the fall knocks him unconscious and he bleeds to death from the stab wound before he’s found. According to the ME, he’d been on a mild blood thinner since he was in his teens, and that stab wound wasn’t going to clot and close on its own since it had nicked his liver. It reads as mostly a very bad night. The problem is the stabbing . . . it’s with a pocketknife. No self-respecting robber is going to use a pocketknife as his weapon of choice. You bring a knife rather than a gun to a robbery so you don’t do a decade in jail if convicted of taking a wallet with forty bucks in it, but you do at least bring a decent knife.”

  Ann nodded. “I see a pocketknife, I’m liable to just kick the guy, and I’m a girl. Andrew’s a young athletic man, tall, giving him good reach, from all accounts confident in himself. He would have gone for the fight that night.”

  Paul sliced into the center of his waffle. “So . . . probably not a robbery.” He gestured with his fork. “Then there’s the blood on Janelle’s tennis shoes, and the fact we now have a pink pocketknife that has both Janelle’s name on it and Andrew’s blood. Which are also saying not a robbery.”

  “There’s that too,” Ann agreed. She had finished her waffle and reached for her juice. “I think we’ve got a stage set for us, and a stage manager. Tanya stabbed her brother with Janelle’s pocketknife and sent him tumbling down the beach stairs. She confirms he’s dying satisfactorily fast, makes it look like a robbery, gets blood on a pair of Janelle’s tennis shoes, leaves him there, and goes to establish her alibi. She slips those tennis shoes into Janelle’s closet either before Janelle got herself home by taxi or while Janelle is out walking her dog that night, and then Tanya waits for it to be late enough in the evening she can go ‘find’ her brother dead.” She paused. “I think this was planned, premeditated for months.”

  Paul forked the last of his waffle through syrup and felt like he’d walked into that one. He thought through what he had seen so far of the case and couldn’t come up with a single timeline item that said she was wrong. “You deliberately leave me with hours to ponder that statement before I can walk through the details with you.”

  His wife gave him a small, wise smile. “Guilty.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Remember our first meal at this counter?”

  “Cheeseburgers, I think it was. It was raining. You were piloting a borrowed plane from one case to another.”

  “Our lives are always going to be moments together like this between cases.”

  He laughed and tipped her chin, kissed her. “I can deal with that kind of marriage if you can.”

  “We’d be bored if the topics of conversation were limited to family, books, painting, and business,” Ann replied. “We’re going to enjoy retirement, but let’s give it a few more years. So long as no one’s shooting at me, I rather like the occasional case.”

  “You do realize you’re mostly hiding out with this one. You don’t have a book idea for what to write come January first, and you’re avoiding that problem by hiding in this one.”

  Ann playfully slapped his arm for the reminder, then slid off the stool to collect dishes for the dishwasher. “That’s the pleasure of not having a contract or deadline. When I come up with something that stirs my imagination, I’ll turn my attention to writing another book.”

  “Good, because for all the recent activities, you’re actually getting bored. I recognize the signs.” Paul glanced at his watch. His driver would be downstairs waiting soon. “Snowman, friendly tossed snowballs, dinner delivered in, and you can walk me through your Tanya theory on either side of the party. I’ll do my best to be home by three.”

  “It’s a plan.” Ann shot a warning finger at the dog considering if he could reach into the dishwasher to lick a syrupy plate. Paul chuckled and headed out. Ann would have a good morning. He hoped he would be able to say the same about his.

  four

  PAUL FELT LIKE SNOW was still melting down the back of his neck and shook out his shirt collar as he entered their home office. Ann was already settled on the couch with an oversized mug of hot chocolate. She tossed a couple of miniature marshmallows for Black, who barked with delight as he pounced on them. “He thinks I won the snowball fight,” she told her husband with a grin.

  “Yeah, he knows you’ve got the bribes going.” Paul settled in his office chair, coffee in hand. Ann didn’t often let her inner child show, but he’d heard a few giggles during the snowball battle that had made the last hour and a half well worth it.

  Ann tossed another marshmallow to the dog. “Tanya gave Janelle that pink pocketknife, had it engraved, called it a birthday gag gift.”

  Paul felt his attention snap toward the case. “Talk about burying the lead. Okay, that’s interesting.”

  He set his coffee aside, considered his wife. Her cheeks were still the rosy red of cold and snow. She had a good arm when she was tossing even friendly missives his way, and he’d been effectively shellacked. “I’ve been wondering what was tipping you toward Tanya setting this up. An engraved pink pocketknife is something people remember, something a jury would latch on to.”

  Ann nodded. “You’ll need a murder
weapon one day, so you give it as a gift—to your best friend, a pink knife, her name on it, hard to miss. Then you use it to kill your brother.” She closed her eyes and quoted, “‘Where’s your pink pocketknife, Janelle? The one with your name on it? You had it in your purse two days before his death. The ME says that model of knife is consistent with the stab wound. You say you didn’t do this. Produce your pocketknife so we can see it’s not the weapon and believe you.’” She opened her eyes and glanced over at him. “Not verbatim from the trial transcript, but close enough.”

  “And she can’t produce it,” Paul said simply.

  “That fact crucified her at the trial. The jury probably gave the missing knife more weight than if it had been sitting there in evidence with Andrew’s blood on it. The jury likes the logical answer. Murder weapon? Of course she got rid of it.” Ann sipped her hot chocolate. “Tanya took the knife, uses it, tucks it away as her insurance. If the cops start looking beyond Janelle, that pink pocketknife can turn up in the beach sand, bearing Janelle’s name and Andrew’s blood. If subtle evidence doesn’t get the job done, blunt will.”

  He needed maybe sixty hours just to read the materials Ann already had been through in depth. The odds of that happening soon were not promising, but Paul thought they might be able to get a solid four hours in on it tonight. Where the next hours after that could be found was tomorrow’s problem. He’d go through the case, and somewhere during that process he would find the information he needed to make a conclusion of his own.

  Paul pulled off damp socks and put on the dry ones he’d taken from his dresser drawer. “I need to see the trial transcript first, then probably the first interview with Tanya. You don’t like her.”

  “I viscerally don’t, mostly because of what I’m uncovering. I think Tanya planned this for months in advance. The first step was convincing her best friend and her brother they should date, knowing eventually there’d be a fight or a breakup, something to give her cover to kill her brother, and give the cops an obvious viable suspect in Janelle. Tanya took the person who trusted her most and walked her into a guilty verdict for murder.”

  Paul stopped the sock thief with the snap of his fingers. Black dropped the sock and decided to roll on it instead.

  Ann smiled. “He can’t help it. Smelly socks are his favorite.”

  “He ends up smelling like one too.”

  “I’ll face his wrath and give him a bath this week. He’ll need one before our party anyway.”

  Paul considered the dog, now upside down with four feet in the air, watching them, tail swishing, obviously hoping to hear his name and the word play. “He’ll be okay for a few days. There’s probably a rule that guys should smell like guys occasionally. At least he hasn’t tangled with a skunk this year.”

  Ann laughed at the shared memory. “There is that.”

  She dug out the trial transcript and handed it to him. “The fact Tanya gave Janelle the knife, it gets used in a murder, and Tanya has that knife in her possession years later—that’s nearly evidence.”

  Paul appreciated the nuance of her using the word nearly—it reflected reality. For all his wife’s passion for digging through the layers toward the truth of a matter, she was still at the heart of it a cop who understood reality. What was true and what was provable were not always the same.

  “Let me start reading. We can pick it up again after the party tonight.”

  Their lives were a constant refrain of conversations put on hold and picked up again in the next block of time until the topic was satisfactorily covered from all angles. Paul could list a dozen such conversations he and Ann were currently having on topics of various importance and urgency. The pattern worked for them.

  The party was not a distant memory, for his mother had sent home a box of the confectionaries, but the work was absorbing them both again. Ann was sitting on the office floor now, case materials piled around her—interviews and the detective’s report—methodically taking him through the record piece by piece.

  Paul considered what he was reading, paused, and changed directions on the question he was going to ask. He studied his wife for a long moment. “Argue the other side for me.”

  Ann gave him a slight tilt of her head, a hint of a smile, and did just that. “Janelle did it, killed her boyfriend because he broke up with her. Heat of the moment, pure tragedy, she didn’t mean to do it. ‘I was going to stab the tires of his precious sports car and walk myself home. Only he tried to take the knife away from me when I told him that, and I got knocked off-balance, fell into him, and accidentally stabbed him. I didn’t mean for him to stumble back and tumble down the stairs to the beach. I tried to grab him and stop his fall. He crashed down the stairs, and I started down after him, but then I heard voices yelling at the base of the stairs and I panicked. I ran. I rushed home and prayed it would be only a nightmare, that Andrew wouldn’t give me up to the cops as the one who stabbed him. I was certain he had help as soon as he fell. That’s why I left the beach in such a hurry. I didn’t rob him. I wouldn’t do that. Then the cops came to my apartment. . . .’”

  Paul nodded as Ann drifted to a stop, not surprised she gave him her strongest theory for Janelle having done the crime. “Well argued. Knifing his car tires—that’s what an angry ex-girlfriend would do. It’s authentic. And it puts the knife in her hand without premeditation.”

  “Yeah. The knife tumbles and gets lost in the beach sand when Andrew falls. Tanya finds the knife in the sand after the trial is over, can’t stand the thought of talking to another cop, so drops the knife in a forget-me drawer—can’t let herself throw it away, just holds on to it in case Janelle gets a retrial because it’s tangible evidence of what happened. Similar with the ring I found in the jewelry box. Andrew didn’t always wear it; Tanya found it in his things and held on to it as a keepsake. She moves to New York right after the trial because she can’t stand to be in the house without her brother. Years later she sells the family home, and those items end up in a box at an auction.”

  Paul looked at the photos of the pocketknife with Janelle’s name it, the jewelry box with Tanya’s initials. “Ann, it’s possible to argue both answers convincingly. Janelle had a fair trial by her peers. Nothing here is conclusive enough to do more than get her a retrial.”

  “It’s Janelle’s knife with Andrew’s blood on it. She’s got no chance of a retrial,” Ann replied. She shifted and moodily poked at the trial binder. “I can argue both scenarios, but only one is actually true, Paul. And it’s that Tanya killed her brother and framed her friend. It’s there in the interviews of Tanya and Janelle, in the way the trial transcript reads. Tanya’s leading people to the conclusions she wants made even as she’s flowing tears at the idea her best friend killed her brother. She convincingly sold the story she wanted people to follow.

  “Janelle was furious and devastated that she was getting dumped by the guy she was in love with. But she didn’t have reason to kill him. She wanted him to change his mind. She’s worked in restaurant kitchens since she got a work permit at fifteen. She’s not someone who makes a mistake with a knife. If she intended to hurt him, he would have been stabbed in the heart or hit multiple times. And the cynic in me says if you want to betray someone, the best person to target is the one who trusts you the most. Tanya killed her brother and set up her best friend.”

  Paul wasn’t there yet. He was seeing beneath Tanya’s emotional language and tears, hearing the calculation in what she said in the interviews. He could see instances where she was leading the conversation in subtle ways and how she was directing the cops, DA, and jury. But the cold calculation to murder a brother, betray a best friend—that was a long last step. “I need to see the Tanya interviews again, the third one in particular.”

  “It’s late.” Ann leaned forward to check the time and winced. “Very late. We can pick it up again another time.”

  He conceded he was running on fumes, and the reality of it being a Saturday night factored in. They both
attempted to give church and those they met for lunch after the services the best they could offer. He closed the transcript he held. “For Janelle, time is running by very slowly. We’ll find the time, Ann.”

  She got to her feet and offered him a hand. “We will. As you’ve shown me, the best way to live life is to do what you can and expect God to do the rest.”

  They carved out more time Tuesday night. Ann set a fresh cup of coffee beside Paul on his desk and curled up with hers on the couch. “I’ve been thinking today about the hardest piece. The coldness this implies has to be in Tanya. I can give you a variation on the theme that might be easier to accept. Tanya killed her brother because he was already dying, tried to get the cops to see it as a robbery, and only sacrificed her best friend to keep cops from looking beyond Janelle to herself.”

  Paul set aside the detective’s report. “It’s interesting already. What are you thinking?”

  “Andrew simply had an accident. He tumbled down those stairs because it was dark and they were damp, and he knocked himself out. There’s no initial robbery, no stab wound. Just a bad breakup with his girlfriend. She’d stormed off for home, and he’d stayed on the beach fuming until it turned dark.

  “Tanya’s waiting for Andrew to get home, for Janelle to call. Neither do. She comes to the beach looking for him. She sees her brother at the bottom of the steps and thinks he’s dead. By the time she gets down there, she’s realized her own life is so much better off if he is dead. And that idea seals his fate.

  “She instead finds him badly injured from the fall, but alive. He’s lying there probably with a broken back, broken neck—he could be crippled for life, and the family trust prioritizes health expenses over everything else. She’s seeing her future disappear. If she calls 9-1-1, she’s hurting herself. She can walk away, but the cops will find him when they check the parking lot and see the car still there. If he hasn’t died already, odds are good he’ll live another day or two just lying there. She can’t risk smothering him, having the ME put that as the cause of death. She wants her freedom, not to walk herself into a prison term. He has to die before he’s found, and she has to be protected from any blame. She needs to give the cops a stronger viable suspect. And with that thought Janelle’s fate is now sealed too.