Prodigal

by T M Heron

  34

  Later that night I finally sleep in my own bed. Ava doesn’t know the house is ready yet and is still in Waikanae. Although Mother’s house was somewhat of a haven, and my house still has the shadows of strangers searching through it, I’m relieved to be home. I still don’t sleep well. Anger brings its own kind of energy.

  On Monday morning I’m back at work. However, having decided emphatically not to resign I am way too busy to work. While lying awake last night, trying not to think too hard about my jail experience and what happened with Savannah, I faced the reality that the fastest way out of my situation is to find who really murdered Jo.

  In normal circumstances I wouldn’t care. But now I have to find him, and I have only three weeks to do it. If I don’t find him within three weeks I will need to resign before Anthony has me voted out at the partner’s conference. I don’t allow myself to dwell on the ironies for too long and how Jo would laugh with delight if she knew.

  For a moment I stare at the ceiling and remember coming downstairs and finding Jo with her wide crimson smile. Throat cut from side to side. Thanks to me it must have been very easy for whoever did it, with Jo all sedated and compliant. A hunting knife, someone said. That should disqualify me straight away. I’d never harm an animal. What Warren did to those horses sickened me and I can’t afford to remember that right now.

  Too late, I already have.

  It’s a cliché, but I still feel grimy and dirty from my night at the station. Where I was cold and thirsty and desperate like a caged animal.

  That arrest could have been the beginning of the end. If Pacitto hadn’t been so hasty with his big hard-on for me that he deceived the judge and rushed the search warrant. I’m not going to get another second chance like that. From now on I need to be cautious.

  I sit at my stunning antique desk and consider my new all-consuming question: Who would want to kill Jo?

  A shadow passes my door and Ingrid Claire is standing in my office. Ingrid and her stomach-churning beauty and cool graciousness. Despite everything on my plate my chest tightens, my stomach goes tight, and I feel momentarily joyful. Then something inside me cowers, as if it can’t take any more difficulty, and my brain goes into the state of dysfunction that accompanies her presence.

  “Yes?” I say coldly, although it comes out warm and I’m aware I’m smiling in a disgustingly servile manner.

  She’s wearing a fitting woolen dress with fur at the sleeves and around the bottom of the hem. I have an almost physical battle with myself not to look at her legs.

  “I understand you were considering me for investigative work?”

  Here we go.

  “Carla has told me I’m not permitted to take any such engagement.” She sits down and places a stapled document on my desk.

  “What’s this?” I manage.

  “It’s my engagement letter. I’m an independent contractor. No one tells me what I can and can’t do.”

  I stand up and close the door. The thought of Ingrid actively involved in my quest excites me on so many levels I don’t know how to process it. “I need to find the person who killed my EA,” I say. “Last Friday I was set up for it. I’m already a person of interest with the cops and I don’t think they’re focusing much attention elsewhere. I didn’t do it.”

  I wait for a snide smile, but it doesn’t come. It’s desperately sad how familiar I’ve become to not being believed.

  “I believe you.”

  I briefly wonder if this is a trick. It seems too easy.

  “I think you’d have done a much better job.”

  In my desire to impress I almost contemplate bragging about the job I had planned. Instead I say, “They’re following me, and my phones are probably bugged. I can’t just move about freely doing everything for myself. That’s why I need you.”

  And at the end of this I’ll probably marry you, I think. I’ve no idea where that thought came from. It’s not ideal for someone like me to have a private investigator as a wife. But apart from that she’s perfect.

  I realize there’s been a lull in the conversation. “We can’t continue this conversation here,” I say.

  ◆◆◆

  If Ingrid wonders why we’ve scurried past an old man and a simpleton and the biggest wall of keys you’ve ever seen to have our inaugural meeting in a dank windowless room in the basement, she keeps it to herself.

  As she leans forward to retrieve a notebook her hair falls over her face. I stare at her and try to breathe normally.

  She looks up and catches me staring. “So how do you want to do this?”

  “How would you normally go about it?”

  “I’d give a friend on the force a call, see what they have. Talk to close relatives and friends. Talk to the employer, if they will.”

  “Well, let’s start with that – minus the employer.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  When she speaks, she has the uncanny ability to appear both gracious and patronizing. I’m sure it’s not intentional.

  “I’m going to set up a hotline and a $50,000 reward for information leading to a conviction,” I say. The irony is nut-crushingly painful. It was a similar reward for information that led to this whole mess in the first place.

  “It’s a risky endeavor to sink $50,000 into. The cops will hate you.”

  “The cops already hate me.”

  I’m not going to tell her it will be my mother’s $50,000, not mine. I’m also not going to say that the $20,000 offered by Dukie’s family would have very successfully led to the capture of Dukie’s murderer had Jo lived to tell her story. Nor will I add that the money is a last resort, because I find myself in a situation I can’t murder my way out of, and there’s a three-week deadline hanging over me. There will be all the time in the world time for partial honesty between us later, when we’re engaged.

  “You’ll get a lot of rubbish being called in for $50,000.”

  I shrug.

  “Well, if you’re dead certain, I can get a hotline set up for you.”

  As she talks my eyes are drawn to her mouth, and finally I see a glimpse of her teeth. They are perfectly shaped and pearl white. Teeth are important to me. I can normally make an immediate assessment of teeth when people smile, but I don’t think she’s ever smiled at me.

  I hand her a burner phone. “From here on we’ll do all our communicating on these. I’ll give you a new one weekly. We can assume my cell and office phones are bugged.”

  She nods and puts the phone on top of her notebook. Her teeth stay hidden.

  “You know, despite the circumstances I’m looking forward to working with you,” I say and subject her to a smile that showcases my own great teeth.

  “We won’t need to see a lot of each other with these,” she says.

  It’s not the response I was hoping for and a wave of anger washes through me. I force myself to ignore it. My future wife isn’t quite as supportive as I’d like, but I’m sure she’s capable of being warmer. I’m prepared to give her time for it to develop. A little, anyway.

  ◆◆◆

  No sooner do I return to my office than Finch strolls in unannounced and parks a gaunt hip against my side cabinet. “What were you doing with that investigator?”

  “Not your business, Henry.”

  “It’s got something to do with Jo, hasn’t it? You’re not going off and doing something stupid on your own account?”

  For a dull man Finch can be surprisingly shrewd. But really, it’s all about control and reputation. Finch still sees Bakers as his family firm and all the other partners as subordinates or interlopers. This delusion he lives in infuriates me. It doesn’t help with his late grandmother being a ‘Baker’s’ Baker. But I smother my fury, fix Finch with a rakish look and say nothing.

  “You should let the police do their job,” says Finch.

  I can see his skinny thigh and the sparse outline of his hip through the cheap fabric of his suit. Fragility of any kind in a man di
sgusts me.

  “The investigator,” Finch says stubbornly. “The redhead. You can’t use her anyway. She works for Bakers.”

  “She works for herself and contracts to Bakers, actually,” I say slowly. “Now, Henry, unless unbeknown to me some major restructure has taken place in which I now report to you, get the fuck out of my office.”

  Finch crosses paths with Anthony Hartman on his way out.

  “Firing on all cylinders, I see,” says Anthony. “How’s your house?”

  “It’s fine.” I don’t bother to try for sincerity. This is the prick who gave the order behind having my house searched and probably also dictated how much they roughed it up, which was a lot.

  “That’s a relief.” He smiles his magic smile. It’s so enticing I nearly find myself responding. Then I remember the real man behind it. What a psycho.

  “Have you thought any more about my offer? All of this can go away. I hear you didn’t fare too well in lockup.”

  “You were misinformed.”

  “I’d hate for them to search your office, take your laptop.”

  I say nothing, and he leaves. But my stomach is churning. No one got to search my office the night they searched my house because the tip-off, the false tip-off, related specifically to items buried at my house. But could Anthony somehow arrange an office search? Should I find somewhere else to hide the contents of my secret compartment? And how the hell do I get them out of the building if I’m being watched? Am I even being watched, or are they just messing with me? My watchers may be as real as the knife they dug up when they searched my house.

  And while I’m sitting in the car, arms stretched along the back of both seats, humming because I know it will annoy them, I have one of my most brilliant ideas yet.

  ◆◆◆

  Once back in my office I lock the door and pull down the blinds. The diary I stole from Jo has been sitting in my secret compartment all this time. This is fortuitous as otherwise the cops would have found it when they searched my house. Then it really would have been all over.

  As soon as I open it I feel a familiar wave of frustration wash over me. It reminds me of how I used to feel every day as I suffered Jo’s company. After all, who has an item of such a personal nature sitting on their work desk for anyone to look at? Jo, that’s who. That and the photo of her kid in her private-school uniform. The mere sight of those two items needled me on a daily basis.

  I open the cover and start paging through. There is very little writing in January. My blood pressure rises when I remember that Jo had most of January off as holiday. And why use personal time to keep a diary when she can whittle away at it in work time?

  When I start reviewing February my blood pressure rises further. Jo used her diary to record, among other things, my comings and goings, my moods, and the things I said to her. For a moment all the difficulty her death has cause me thus far seems worth it, just to have her gone. Cut down in her prime, if you can call it that.

  As I continue to page through the diary, I find more of myself in it than Jo. The woman had no life to speak of. She attended the secretary’s monthly get-together, probably for the free food. She watched school plays where no doubt she was shunned by the other parents. On Fridays she worked a half day to go all the way over town to physio for her RSI and her stupid limp, which I already knew.

  I’d like to give the diary to Ingrid to see if she can make more sense of it, but I don’t want her to see some of the things I’ve said and done to Jo over the course of Jo’s employment. I all but have a heart attack when I see the details of our little exchange in June, after she reported me to the cops, scrawled verbatim. Imagine if Pacitto had got his hands on this. But although the diary would be gold for Pacitto there is very little of interest in it for my purposes. It would appear that the only dynamic of noteworthy mention in Jo’s life was me.

  35

  On Tuesday morning Ingrid calls me on her burner phone to tell me I’m still the number-one person of interest for the police and there isn’t a number two.

  “What about the husband? Isn’t it always the husband?”

  I’m standing just outside my office. It’s undoubtedly bugged, and I’d hate to pass anything helpful along to the cops.

  “The husband has a rock-solid alibi. He and three friends were helicoptered to a remote area of bush in the Marlborough Sounds. They went hunting and weren’t lifted back until Tuesday night, when he found her.”

  “No other person of interest. Is there anyone they’ve crossed of the list?”

  “Her life consisted of work and home.”

  I find this ironic given how little effort Jo put into her work.

  “We need to look into her work life some more,” says Ingrid. “Her death wasn’t random. Nothing was taken from the house. She didn’t have a load of friends. It has to somehow be work-related.”

  I refrain from telling Ingrid that if she’d seen Jo’s house, she’d understand why nothing was taken.

  “I’ll review the files she was working on,” I offer. Although I don’t hold out much hope.

  “See if you can access her work phone records as well. The cops found nothing of note on her personal phone. They found nothing in her bank statements. What do you want done about the funeral?”

  “Oh yeah, Friday. I’d forgotten about that. What do you mean, done?”

  “I think we should video it.”

  “Oh, good idea. Do it. What’s happening with the hotline?”

  “It’s sorted. All calls will be fielded to a free-call number and all discussions will be taped. A bit like emergency services. Then every dialogue will be typed up and forwarded to you and me. We have two people manning the phone for the first two days, then it’s just one. The ad runs again on Saturday, and there’ll be two people again on the phones for the first two days, then one again. I’ve set it up initially to run for two weeks.”

  The end of the hotline period will be over half-way through the three weeks I’ve got to solve this thing before Anthony slays me at the partners’ conference. It sends a chill through me. I resolve not to think about time running out as it does nothing but make me feel helpless.

  I stroll out to Eliza’s desk — surely that can’t be bugged — and ask her to print out Jo’s scheduler and summarize by client and staff member all work done by Jo over the last six months.

  Eliza stares up at me with undiluted adoration.. Her eyes are disconcertingly intense. I note lately she’s very comfortable calling me “Jackson”, and without wanting to sound paranoid the way she says it, softly, intimately even, makes it sound like we’re a couple.

  “There is one more thing then, Eliza. Are you able to hack into our security system and get me a list of everyone working at Bakers the day Jo was killed?”

  It’s a good test as to whether Eliza can actually weasel her way around the labyrinth we call our IT systems. Given what she did when she started here, I have a little hope.

  I lower my voice. “I only want you to do this if you can guarantee to go in undetected.”

  A shadow crosses Eliza’s face. “Is this to do with Jo’s murder?”

  “Yes or no? Can you get into them?”

  “It’s possible, but it would be very slow,” she says. “An easier way, though, and almost immediate would be for me to access Mr. Hartman’s computer online. He would’ve liaised with the police. So he would have been the one to request that list of names from security.”

  I pat her arm. Leave my hand there for just a nanosecond too long as a reward. Watch her breath quicken. “Anthony didn’t get in until Monday afternoon. Henry Finch dealt with the police until then. Try his first. Oh, I nearly forgot. Can you phone HR and have them send up a copy of Jo’s CV?”

  I speak casually but I’m buzzing to discover Eliza can access the partners’ computers. The number of ways I can exploit this will be endless — providing I’m still here.

  ◆◆◆

  Within the hour Eliza has prepared a schedul
e of every job Jo was working on. She’s included the names of everyone involved on those jobs from partner level down to the typing pool. I stare at the schedule trying to decipher who might have been pissed off enough at Jo to cut her throat. And are the hard-working law-abiding professionals at Bakers even realistic suspects for Jo’s murder? Aside from me.

  I spend the next few hours whittling down the list of jobs Jo has worked on in order of importance. Then I cross off anything that doesn’t have a confidentiality rating of level three or higher. When I’m done, I have six jobs. They’re spread over three partners: Anthony Hartman, Leo Packer and Gordon Nesbitt. There are only two senior associates, Mel Kilbride and me, and all of the associates and solicitors and administration working under us. I’ve refined my search to thirty people, plus a few unknowns. And as suspected, no one stands out.

  I don’t feel optimistic any of this will have anything to do with why Jo was murdered. But it’s an angle the police aren’t covering as well as they could be as there’s not enough justifiable cause to give them reason to access our confidential files.

  Speaking of which, now I need to work out how to access some of those files. Many are accessible through the system, but Mel is assiduous in guarding his files. I’d normally just ask, but he’s been distant with me since Jo’s murder.

  Next, I waste more time cross-checking the list of people Jo had worked with against the list of people in the building on the day of her murder. But doubt is creeping into my mind and ruining my concentration. After all, if someone from Bakers was going to kill Jo why would they be foolish enough to do it after work? On a day they were also here? Casting a far more obvious net of suspicion over the firm, and therefore themselves?