He laughed. “Yeah, but look at their faces. They’re having a blast.” I studied the crew members and had to agree—they did appear to be having fun.
After a couple of seconds I shrugged. “Well, maybe after my race; you never know.”
He smiled. “Good. You can count on it. I’ll give you a call.”
Brownell rejoined us carrying a tray with two bottles of water and two cups of coffee, which he set on the table before turning to Gaston. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Thanks, Robert.” He turned to us. “Okay, then. You guys ready to get started?”
“We are.”
“Good. As you asked, I’ve scheduled you fifteen minutes or so with each of the people who Sophie worked with, not counting Ryan Crosby, who you said you already talked to.”
I nodded. “That’s great. We appreciate it. If it’s okay with you, we’d like to start by talking to you for a few minutes.”
He smiled. “I figured as much. I took the liberty of scheduling myself first. But I do have a meeting in thirty minutes that requires my attendance.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Won’t take long.”
“What can I tell you?”
“Why don’t you start by telling us about yourself and how you came to work here.”
Gaston nodded and spent a few minutes explaining his background: “I got my law degree from Boston College in 1997, but I never practiced—never even joined the bar. I wanted to get into nonprofit work instead. I started working for a small foundation right there in Boston and, eventually, I became the executive director. In 2008 a recruiter contacted me on behalf of the Beatrice Thoms Memorial Foundation. I looked into it and decided that Seattle might be a great opportunity for me. I interviewed with Oliver and was fortunate enough to be selected. So I packed up my family, and we made the move all the way across the country.”
“And the move’s been good?”
He smiled. “It’s turned out to be a great decision—the Foundation does really meaningful work, and I’m very happy to be here. My wife and kids love it here too.”
I nodded. “Good. Tell me about your job here. You report to . . . ?”
“Technically, to the board. Day to day, of course, this means I answer to Oliver, since he’s the chairman and the most active board member—he and used to be Sophie.”
“As executive director, would you say you’re in overall charge of the Foundation?”
“The day-to-day operations, yes.”
“And that means . . .”
“Raising donations, making fund allocation suggestions to the board, compliance oversight, managing staff, reporting—all of these things.”
“And you stay busy? How many projects are there?” Toni asked.
“Fifty-six now as of today,” he said proudly. Fifty-seven in another three weeks.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s a lot of projects. It must be hard to keep track of them all.”
He shook his head. “Not too bad, really. I mean, if we were doing fifty-six all at one time, it’d be pandemonium. But that’s fifty-six cumulative, spread out over the last five years or so. Most of the projects are already complete.”
“What type of projects are they?” Toni asked.
“Water projects, health-care clinics, schoolhouses—that sort of thing. Anyway, once they’re finished and operational, they’re pretty easy for us to manage—mostly just annual reports then.”
“You must have a good staff,” Toni said.
He smiled. “We do, thank God. There are twenty-five of us here now, and you’re right: we’re good at what we do, if I say so myself. When I started, several of the staff had already been employed here since we opened up in Seattle—Robert, who you met, and Linda Ramos, our compliance director, who you’re going to meet in a little while, and a few others.”
I scribbled this information down onto my notepad, then I looked up. “Very impressive. I take it you’d say that the Foundation’s a good place to work.”
Gaston nodded. “Definitely. Sir Jacob basically owns the place. He controls the board.” He smiled. “That said, as far as I’m aware, he’s never actually exercised any control other than to appoint Oliver and then to appoint the girls to the board. He just sits back and lets them run it—seems happy that way. And he’s still our largest donor by far.”
“My official title is director of tax compliance,” the dark-haired woman sitting across from us said. I’d never stopped to imagine what a director of compliance and internal audit is supposed to look like, but seeing Linda Ramos, I’d have to say that she certainly looked the part.. She was a short, serious-looking woman, probably in her late twenties, maybe early thirties. She wore a light blue blouse over a navy skirt. Her dark hair was curled under in a shoulder-length bob. She sat across from us at the conference table, her arms folded in front of her, waiting patiently for us to begin our questions.
“Tell us about your position here,” I said.
She nodded. “Okay. Technically, my main job as DCIA is to make sure that all of the Foundation’s actions are in compliance with our IRS 501(c)(3) exempt status. Aside from the obvious altruistic goal of providing help to desperately needy people, one of the other reasons people choose to donate large sums of money through a Foundation like Beatrice Thoms Memorial is because they’re able to count the donation as a charitable deduction on their income tax returns. But that works only if we remain a qualified organization in the eyes of the IRS. So, in reality, my job is to make sure that all aspects of our organization are on the up-and-up, able to stand up to scrutiny from the IRS, from the auditors, whomever. I’m the person around here who reviews all of our procedures—operations, accounting, you name it—to make sure we’re good to go.”
We’d already talked to six other people since Eric Gaston left us and Linda was the last one on the schedule for the day. So far, we hadn’t learned much new. All the people we’d interviewed knew Sophie, but not particularly well. Apparently, although Sophie was friendly and well liked, she didn’t hang out too much with the office crowd—Ryan Crosby excepted. In addition, oddly enough, everyone except Gaston recognized the picture of the man named Josh—but no one knew him or knew how to get in touch with him. So far, we hadn’t picked up much. Maybe with Linda our luck would change.
“So you knew Sophie, then?” I asked.
She nodded. “Certainly. I mean, I wouldn’t say we were close friends, but we got along fine—we even went out together from time to time. Sophie was an impressive woman. She had a strong work ethic. In fact, she actually worked a lot harder than she had to, that’s for sure, given her situation.” Her tone was confident, not at all leery or guarded the way some people get around the police or around private detectives.
“When you say you went out together—what do you mean?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Lunches. Dinner once. We went to a movie once too. Last year.”
“Would Sophie talk to you about things? Other-than-work kind of things? Did the two of you have the kind of relationship where you’d confide in each other?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know . . . not really. I don’t think she had many friends. We talked a little, at least until she hooked up with Ryan Crosby. After Sophie started seeing Ryan, she was with him most of the time.” She paused, then added, “Her sister was in every once in a while. She’d come in, and she and Sophie would go to lunch, that sort of thing. They seemed close.”
“Do you know Nicki?” Toni asked.
“I’ve met her, obviously, but I’m afraid I don’t know her very well at all. She’s on the board and, occasionally, she even comes to the meetings. She used to hang out around here quite a bit. Not anymore, though.”
“When you and Sophie went out, did Nicki go with you?”
Linda shook her head. “Never. Nicki was never around when Sophie and I were together.”
I nodded and jotted this down, then I looked back up. “Let me ask you something else.” I placed the pho
to of Josh on the table. “Does this guy look familiar to you?”
She nodded immediately. “Sure. That’s Josh. I’ve seen him.”
“Josh? Do you know his last name?”
She shook her head. “Sorry. He was a friend of Sophie and Nicki’s.”
“Both of them?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Nicki too?” Toni said.
“Yeah, absolutely.”
Toni and I looked at each other for a second, then Toni continued. “Did he ever work here?”
Linda shook her head. “No.”
“I’m confused. Everyone around here seems to recognize this guy, even Oliver Ward. Everybody seems to recognize him, but nobody knows anything about him.”
“Maybe that’s because, like I said, he didn’t work here,” Linda said. “But his girlfriend did. Judie Lawton. Everyone else probably forgot—it was over a year ago. Or maybe they weren’t here at the time. Anyway, Judie needed a job. Sophie somehow knew Josh and through him, Judie. Sophie wasn’t one to not help if she could, so despite our reservations she got Judie a job as a bookkeeper here at the Foundation.” She shook her head. “Unfortunately, Judie Lawton is a completely clueless woman. She wouldn’t know a debit from a credit if it bit her on the butt. We had to get rid of her at the end of her ninety-day probation. But—while she was here—Josh would come around fairly often. I haven’t seen him for a long time, but back then, that’s when everybody saw him and got to know him.”
“This would have been . . .”
“Last summer. Summer of 2011.”
I nodded. “So when you had to let Judie go, how’d Sophie react?”
Linda smiled. “Relieved. Sophie was a smart girl—she wasn’t blind. She knew what was going on. I think she was glad to see it over, actually. Judie was a nice enough girl, but it was pretty painful watching her flounder about. It was better after she left.”
There was a line waiting to get out of the underground garage at the Beatrice Thoms Memorial building, and we were about the sixth vehicle in the queue. A steady stream of pedestrians on the sidewalk in front of the building kept walking past the driveway, and the lucky car at the head of the line had to hope that the flow of walkers magically parted at the same time the one-way automobile traffic on Pike had an opening. This didn’t happen often, hence the line. It was a few minutes before noon, and we were trying to jump up to Duke’s for Thursday chowder.
Carrie Wicks was singing the old classic “You Belong to Me” as we waited our turn. We hadn’t said much on the elevator on the way down or as we’d gotten into the Jeep, but Judie’s revelation that Nicki Thoms had lied to us about knowing Josh hung like the proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla from a chandelier. Toni knew this, of course, and she enjoyed making me squirm by feigning ignorance and not saying anything. Finally, I could take it no longer. “You’re dying to say it, so just go ahead and get it over with.”
“Say what?” she said, innocently, playing with me now. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Just go ahead . . .”
“Oh, would you be referring to the fact that your girlfriend was less than completely forthcoming with us?”
I fired her a dirty look. “My girlfriend? Where’s that coming from? She’s not my girlfriend, and I’m not sticking up for her.”
“Good. You’d better not be,” she sniffed. “Bottom line? Nicki stood there and said she didn’t know the guy. Now we know that’s a bold-assed lie. I want to know why.”
Chapter 11
“SO DO I NEED A LAWYER?” Nicki Thoms smiled as she slipped into a chair in Interview Room 4 on the sixth floor at SPD headquarters in downtown Seattle. After we’d left the Foundation, I called Ron to bring him up to date. He was as annoyed as we were. He called Nicki and basically demanded that she drop everything and haul her butt downtown for questioning.
Nicki looked quickly from Ron to Yoshi, to me, and then to Toni. “It looks like I’m facing quite the inquisition here.” Despite this observation, she seemed outwardly cool, not at all alarmed.
Ron placed a thick file on the table in front of him as we all took seats across from Nicki. “Thanks for coming in. To answer your question, let me just repeat what I’ve told you before—that is: you are not considered a suspect in your sister’s murder. That hasn’t changed.” He paused for a moment to allow the words to sink in before continuing. “But I want to tell you in the clearest terms possible that I expect your full cooperation in this investigation. I’m a little upset because I don’t think we’ve been getting it.”
“Really?” Nicki still seemed unconcerned. “What makes you say that?”
Ron stared at her for a moment. She stared right back. “You’ve been holding out on us. You held back important evidence from us when we talked to you earlier.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “I’ve done nothing of the sort.”
“Is that right?” Ron asked. “Then how do you explain this?” He slid the blown-up close-up of the man named Josh across the table in front of her.
She looked down and stared at the photo for a few moments. “What is this? Where’s this from?” she asked without looking up.
“It’s a blowup from this photo that you gave us on Monday,” I said. I reached over to Ron’s stack of photos, picked out the two group photos that included Sophie and this Josh character, and slid them across the table to Nicki. She flashed me a quick, nasty look, as if I’d betrayed her somehow, then she looked down at the pictures, straightening them out in front of her as she did so. She stared at one photo, then the other.
Ron continued. “Not only did you fail to provide us these photos when we interviewed you earlier—”
“Twice,” Yoshi interrupted.
“That’s right. Interviewed you twice, but when you finally did decide to give them to Danny here, you turned around and told him that you didn’t know who this guy was. But this is the same guy that you took at least two pictures of with your cell phone. He was in them, alongside Sophie. Don’t you think that that information might have been useful to us?”
“You never asked,” she fired back. Then, she nodded at me. “He did. How am I supposed to know what’s useful to you or not? You’re supposed to be the detective here. If you’d have asked, I’d have given them to you.”
Ron glowered at her for a second, then he looked over at Yoshi, as if trying to confirm Nicki’s statement. Yoshi shrugged.
He turned back to Nicki. “Even so,” he said, undeterred, “now we’ve come to learn from several sources that when they asked you, you told Danny and Toni you didn’t know this guy. That was an out-and-out lie. Is that somehow our fault too? Some other way Danny should have phrased the question, maybe?”
Nicki glared at him, without answering.
Ron continued. “It turns out that this guy’s girlfriend is named Judie Lawton, and she worked for your Foundation, for Christ’s sake. And this guy, who, by the way, is named Josh? He used to hang out at the Foundation office. While you were there! You actually know this man quite well, don’t you?”
She looked at the picture for a moment, then she looked up at Ron. Finally, there was just the beginning of a deer-in-the-headlights look of concern in her eyes—maybe the hard veneer was starting to crack. But she still said nothing.
Ron continued. “Nicki, let me ask you something else. Does it bother you maybe just a little bit that your sister’s murderer is still running around out there somewhere scot-free? Does that matter to you?”
She gave him a seriously nasty look. “Of course it bothers me,” she said indignantly. She paused for a moment. “Listen—I didn’t think he was important, alright?” She looked back down at the photo for a moment, then looked up. “You actually think he murdered Sophie?” She was somewhat incredulous as she tapped the picture.
“How the hell are we supposed to know?” Ron said impatiently. “We didn’t even know the guy existed—never even heard of him until a couple days ago. Apparently, he was a friend of y
ours and Sophie’s. Based on his prison ink, he no doubt has a somewhat dubious background. And you conveniently forgot to tell us about him? What the hell, Nicki? Until Danny showed us the picture you gave him, we’d never even seen him. And if Danny and Toni hadn’t had the gumption to keep digging into it further, we wouldn’t even know his first name or anything at all about him.” Ron was getting worked up. His voice was raised several notches above normal. “We wouldn’t know about Judie Lawton. As it is, we still don’t know his last name. So no, I can’t tell you if he might be a suspect, because we haven’t been able to check him out.” He shook his head and leaned forward. “I got to say, the fact that you’ve been sitting here lying to us while we’re in the middle of your sister’s murder investigation is a little disappointing, to put it mildly.”
“Never mind exposing yourself to legal risk for withholding evidence,” Yoshi said.
She glared at Yoshi. “I did not—”
“Stop!” Ron commanded. She spun to face him. “Listen, Nicki. That’s enough. No more games. You need to come clean. You need to help us move this investigation along now. If you know something—anything you haven’t told us—now’s your one and only chance to spill it. Stop playing at whatever it is you’re playing, and start telling us the damn truth. Otherwise, I guarantee you I’m going to charge you with obstruction, and I’m damn sure going to stop being so goddamned friendly!” Ron practically yelled out the last line.
Nicki stared at Ron for several seconds. Both were angry—two strong forces locked in a stare down. Then she cracked. She glanced at me and then turned and looked at the wall. She took a deep breath and brushed her hair back from her face with both hands. She bit her lower lip and turned back to the table where she looked back down at the photo for several seconds. Finally, she looked at Ron and nodded. “Alright. I apologize. To all of you. I do know him.” She paused, then added, “For the record, I have been perfectly honest and complete with everything I’ve said except as regards him.” She nodded toward the photo.
Mona Lisa Eyes (Danny Logan Mystery #4) Page 14