by Sharon Pape
“You can’t materialize by accident, right?” she asked.
“I don’t believe so.”
She suppressed a groan. Why couldn’t he have simply said “‘right’”—a firm, unequivocal “‘right.’” “What if you were so focused on listening to a conversation that you let down your guard a bit—could it happen then?”
“I imagine almost anythin’ can happen given the proper circumstances, darlin’, but the odds are you’ve got nothin’ to worry about.”
And right then and there she started worrying.
Chapter 10
When Rory started calling the members of the troupe to set up interviews, the number one name on her list was Adam Caspian. According to the offhand comment his daughter had made, he was glad Brian was dead. That sounded like a man with a motive to Rory’s way of thinking. Now, if she could just tease a confession out of him, she wouldn’t have to bother interviewing anyone else; the case would be closed in record time. But when she reached Adam by phone, her hopes were quickly dashed.
“I heard Clarissa hired you,” he said after Rory identified herself. “She really believes her son was murdered, huh?” Apparently the troupe’s grapevine was as efficient as a posting on Facebook.
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Then I have some good news for you,” he said cheerfully.
“What’s that?” If it was a confession, Rory swore she’d go back to believing in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.
“You can cross Sophia and me off your list of possible suspects.”
So much for childhood fantasies. “Why would you assume you were on such a list?” she asked, thinking she might reap some useful information by playing dumb.
Adam chuckled as if he’d just heard a good joke. “Come on, Rory. How naïve do you think I am? Clarissa hires you to catch a killer, and out of the blue you call me. We’ve never said more than a few words to one another. Am I wrong? Did you call to ask me out to dinner or a movie?” The chuckle was still there behind his words.
“Okay,” she said, “so why is it I can cross you off this supposed list of mine?”
“You know what they say—location, location, location.” Adam was positively jolly. “And throw in an eyewitness for good measure.”
“You’ve definitely got my attention,” she said, wishing they were having this discussion in person so that she could read his face as well as his voice.
“Sophia and I were the last ones into the canyon,” he said, sobering quickly as he began to recount the details of that day. “And we were the first ones out when the flood hit.”
“Just a happy coincidence?”
“Not entirely. We’d been chatting with Jerry, our guide, on the walk to the canyon entrance. Sophia had asked him about the history of the area, and Jerry was obliging but a bit long-winded. Anyway, he was still answering her question as the rest of the group started filing inside, so we wound up being the last ones.” Adam paused, either for effect or because the horror of the day had seized him again. “We couldn’t have been there for more than a few minutes when the flood swept in. I credit Jerry with saving our lives. And now it seems we also have him to thank for providing us with an alibi.”
“You were lucky on several counts that day,” Rory said, thinking it all sounded too pat. “Would you mind if I called and spoke to this Jerry? You know, due diligence and all for my investigation.”
“No problem.” Adam’s buoyant tone was back as if he’d shaken off the memory the way Hobo shook the rain from his coat. “I actually took down his number in case something like this came up.” Talk about being prepared. Adam must have made a fine Boy Scout.
“So you’re just crossin’ the Caspians off the list?” Zeke asked incredulously after Rory told him about her conversation with Adam.
“Not ‘just,’ ” Rory came back. “I called the guide and had a long talk with him. He verified everything Adam told me and then some. If ever a job suited a person, his does. That man sure loves talking. I was even treated to a lesson about how the slot canyons were discovered before I was able to get off the phone.”
“Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but did it occur to you that maybe Adam paid him for his cooperation? I doubt tour guides up there on Indian land earn a heap of a lot. A chance to make some extra cash could be awfully tempting.”
“Of course I thought of that,” she said, annoyed by the defensiveness that immediately infiltrated her tone. “Jerry sounded very relaxed, not at all nervous or rehearsed.”
“Money can have that kind of calmin’ effect.”
“Short of kidnapping and torturing the man, how would you like me to make sure he was telling the truth?”
“By keeping Adam and his daughter on that list for now.”
Rory had to admit that what the marshal was suggesting made a certain amount of sense. But putting them back on the list made her feel like the investigation was moving in reverse, which it pretty much was.
After the Caspians, Rory had no particular order in which she wanted to conduct the rest of the interviews. As a result, the first actual interview was with Richard Ames, MD, simply because he was the first one to answer the phone when she called. She’d tried four of the other actors before him but wound up leaving four voice-mail messages. Either they were a busy bunch, or some of them were screening their calls. Technology wasn’t always the boon it was cracked up to be.
Although Richard wasn’t on her aunt’s list of those with known grudges against Brian, Rory couldn’t afford to ignore any Player who’d been in the canyon that day. She still didn’t believe Brian had been murdered, but Clarissa did, and she was the one paying the bills.
She arranged to meet Richard at his home in Lido Beach at seven o’clock that evening. He’d sounded surprised to hear from her and more surprised to learn that she’d been hired to investigate Brian’s death. It appeared the grapevine hadn’t reached him yet. Rory told him she just wanted to get his insights into Brian and his relationships with the other members of the troupe. She’d decided to use the same excuse with all the Players she interviewed. People opened up more easily when they weren’t on the defensive.
As soon as she hung up, she did a Google search on him. Apparently Richard Ames was a popular name on planet Earth. It was a good thing he was also a doctor. That narrowed the parameters substantially, leading her to Richard Ames, pathologist and member of the Way Off Broadway Players. From what she could see, there were no red flags. Nothing specific to jot down and inquire about when she talked to him.
Zeke had been keeping a low profile since she’d agreed to let him be her invisible fly on the wall, with “invisible” being the operative word. She still had some trepidation about opening that door to him, but in the interest of harmony she’d adopted a wait-and-see attitude. For his part, Zeke had been conserving energy in order to be at maximum readiness to play his new role. He’d worked out a signal to let Rory know when he was in the room—a gentle tap on the shoulder. They’d tested and refined it a dozen times, since tapping by remote-control energy was hardly an exact science. By the time Rory was satisfied that the pressure was enough to catch her attention without startling her, Zeke was grumbling under his breath about a princess and a pea. She let his words hang in the air without rebuke, proud of her self-restraint.
She arrived at the Ames’ home with a few minutes to spare, the trip south to Lido Beach having taken more than an hour in the last of the evening rush. The houses on the block were large and clearly expensive but built so closely together that it was hard to discern any beauty in the jumble of different architectural styles. Since land there was a commodity in short supply, if you wanted to be on the water you had to make sacrifices.
Richard’s two-story contemporary overlooked the calm waters of Reynold’s Channel, while a quarter-mile directly south of it, the waves of the Atlantic Ocean pounded the shore. Since it was only late April, the summer crowds were still months away, which meant parking was not a problem.
When Rory emerged from her car, it was fully dark, even though they were already on daylight saving time. A sharp wind was whipping off the ocean, heavy with salt and the pungent smell of low tide. She tugged the sides of her leather jacket together. She’d forgotten how much cooler the temperature on the south shore could be, a benefit only in the heat of summer. She climbed the bullnose-marble steps to the Ames’ front door and rang the bell.
To her relief, Richard answered the door in a matter of seconds. “Come in, come in,” he said. “I have hot water up for tea. It’s that sort of night, isn’t it?” He chattered on about the weather as he led her past a formal living room and dining room and down a wide center hallway to a gourmet kitchen that flowed into a spacious family room. Rory couldn’t help thinking that it was a lot of house for a widower whose only daughter was away at college—information Helene had eagerly imparted when Rory called her on the way to the interview.
“You have a beautiful home,” she said, accepting a seat in an armchair that faced a broad bank of windows. She was sure the view in front of her had to be spectacular during the day, but at night, with only a few, dull lights in the distance, it was like having a ringside seat at the edge of the abyss. When Zeke gently tapped her on the shoulder a moment later, she literally jumped several inches off her seat. For once, she couldn’t put the blame on him.
Luckily, Richard was in the kitchen with his back to her, busy making their tea and providing a lively little tutorial about the proper preparation of tea and the great American sin of using bags rather than leaves.
“Milk or lemon?” he inquired, turning to her.
“Just sugar, thank you.” She was surprised her voice wasn’t quivering like her insides.
Richard placed a cup on the table beside her. With his own cup in hand, he sat on the couch, with his back to the daunting view. Rory thought about asking if they could switch seats, but she didn’t know if he would be offended. In all likelihood he’d offered her what he considered the best seat in the house. So she picked up her cup instead and dutifully sipped the tea, proclaiming it superior to any she’d tasted before, although in reality she couldn’t detect much of a difference.
Richard beamed, the thin skin around his eyes crinkling like finely shattered glass. “Precisely my point. You’d be amazed by how many people can’t tell the difference.”
Rory shook her head, thinking she wouldn’t be amazed at all.
After several minutes of sipping tea and polite but inane conversation, she felt another tap on her shoulder. It took all of her willpower not to snap at Zeke out loud. She wanted to get on with the interview as much as he did. But if he didn’t work on his patience, he wouldn’t be accompanying her in the future. Courtesy might not count for much in his world, but in the world of the living, it was still held in fairly high esteem.
Rory waited for a natural break in the conversation, at which point she said politely, “We can get started—if that’s okay with you?”
“By all means.” Richard leaned back against the cushions as if he was settling in for an evening’s light entertainment.
She set down her cup and withdrew a small pad of paper and a pen from her handbag. When she looked up again, she focused on Richard’s face so that she wasn’t distracted by the barren darkness beyond him.
“How well did you know Brian?” she asked.
“Not as well as I should have, as it turned out. You’ve heard the saying ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’? ”
Talk about an attention grabber. That was quite an opener for someone being interviewed in a murder investigation. In her experience, even innocent people withheld that sort of comment for fear that it might be taken the wrong way. Either Richard had no reason to worry or he wanted to give her that impression.
“How do you mean?” She kept her tone neutral with a dash of ho-hum, as if she heard that sort of remark in every case she investigated. She called it her “you have nothing to fear from me” gambit.
“Over time, it became apparent to me that he wasn’t the person I thought he was,” Richard said. “I believe you’ll find that sentiment echoed by a number of the other Players.”
Rather than press him for details, she finished jotting a few notes then looked up at him expectantly. It was a subtle ploy that had served her well in the past. The interviewee almost always felt the need to fill the silence and answer the questioning look on her face.
Richard was no exception. “This is somewhat embarrassing for me,” he said, his cheeks and neck pinking up nicely in support of his disclaimer. “Brian told me that he’d invested in a green company, a start-up specializing in renewable power sources like solar and wind. He was very enthusiastic about it, dazzled me with statistics and projections. Gave me a copy of the company’s prospectus. It appears that even at my age, I’m still a naïve fool.” He looked down and wagged his head as if he were giving himself a silent scolding. “Although I daresay most people would be intrigued by the prospect of easy money. But that’s neither here nor there. I was so busy at work that instead of researching things for myself, I begged him to get me in on the ground floor too. I’m sure you can guess the rest—the company was stillborn. And I have mostly myself to blame.”
“That’s horrible,” Rory sympathized as she scribbled more notes. “After it all went south, did you try to verify what he’d told you about it?”
“Yes, well, I’m quite good at closing barn doors after the horses are long gone. In any case, I did find out that the proper papers had been filed by a company with that name. Bottom line—I could hire an attorney to try to recoup some of my losses, but the odds were against there being any money to recoup, which meant that I’d just wind up with big legal bills. So I licked my wounds in private and vowed not to be so damn trusting in the future.”
“Did he apologize to you, try to make it right?”
Richard laughed, a tight knot of a laugh with no humor. “Actually, he did a rather splendid ‘woe is me’ act and claimed he lost a lot more than I did. To listen to him you’d think we were just two fools caught up in the same despicable scam. Brian was a slick operator.”
There was that word “slick” again. “Do you know if anyone else in the troupe had business dealings with him?”
“I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. People tend to be pretty closemouthed when it comes to finances. And I was feeling so ashamed of being taken that I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up.”
“It must have been difficult seeing him and working with him since that happened,” she said. “I give you a lot of credit. I probably would have left the troupe or lashed out at him in a fit of rage.” She’d added the last to see his reaction. Sometimes that kind of commiseration was just enough to pop the cork on a magnum of bottled-up confession.
But Richard just shrugged. “Look, it’s not as if it left me destitute, and as I said—I blame myself most of all. Truth be told,” he added with a sheepish grin, “I couldn’t bear to leave the troupe. I do so love acting—all the strutting and fretting, you know.” He drained the last of his tea and set the cup down on the inlaid mahogany coffee table in front of him.
“You mentioned earlier that some of the other Players didn’t care for Brian either. Why was that?”
“Mostly soap-opera stuff—liaisons, heartbreak, the usual.”
“Nothing specific? Nothing that made you think one of them was heartbroken enough to be interested in revenge?”
“No, that didn’t even occur to me at the time of the flood. Let’s face it—what normal person hears that someone died in a flash flood and immediately thinks, ‘Aha, sounds like murder to me’?”
Rory would have loved to see Zeke’s expression at that moment. She was pretty sure he’d take exception to being classified as abnormal. Her next thought was that he’d damn well better not show his displeasure by tossing objects around the room. She breathed an internal sigh of relief when everything in the room went right on obeying the laws of phy
sics.
Richard seemed to be momentarily lost in thought. “I suppose I could pick the Player I think the likeliest to resort to such an extreme measure,” he said finally, “but it would be a rather arbitrary guess. And I’d probably be doing that person a grave injustice.” He chuckled. “Pun not intended but quite delightful nonethe—my apologies,” he cut himself off, his smile vanishing. “That was dreadful of me. I certainly didn’t mean to treat Brian’s death or your investigation as fodder for grade-school humor.”
In spite of Rory’s assurances that he was being too hard on himself, Richard looked chagrined and miserable. Given his mood and the fact that she’d run out of questions anyway, she wrapped up the interview and thanked him for his time. Just because he wasn’t devastated by Brian’s death, it didn’t automatically mean he was guilty. If that was how justice worked, a majority of the world’s population would be doing hard time.
When Rory climbed back in her car, it was well past rush hour, and the traffic had thinned out dramatically. With her radio tuned to her favorite FM station, Rory merged onto the Meadowbrook Parkway and was settling in for the trip home when the dashboard lights flickered, and she was no longer alone in her car.
Chapter 11
“Are you sure you want to be wasting your energy this way?” Rory asked the marshal, who was now occupying the passenger seat. Any time away from the house was problematic for Zeke, and he’d already spent more than an hour at the interview with Richard Ames. Although he didn’t expend as much energy when he was invisible and therefore didn’t need as much time to recoup, they still had a long list of suspects ahead of them.
“I’m not stayin’ long. Just wanted to get your thoughts on the doc while they were fresh.”
Rory shrugged. “He seems like a nice enough guy, pretty laid-back, and like he said himself—a bit naïve for his age.”