“Tucker, bottled water for you, too?”
“Sounds good,” he said.
She could hear the murmur of their voices as she went through the connecting door to Larry’s office. Inside the spacious room with its plush carpet, shiny mahogany desk and expensive furnishings, she paused. For an instant it almost seemed as if she could smell a lingering hint of Larry’s aftershave. Though he had spent increasingly less time here in recent months, this office—this entire sedate brick building on a tree-lined street—had meant a lot to him. It had been the first concrete proof of his accomplishments, a new structure built to look as if it had endured through the centuries. Visitors were always stunned to learn that the building was less than ten years old.
In an odd way, that summed up Larry. The image, the facade, were coldly calculated for effect. Few people knew the man underneath. She certainly hadn’t, and she had known him as well as anyone.
Born in a failing coal mining town on the western fringes of the state, he had developed a fire inside to achieve something extraordinary. In an ironic way his mother and father had fanned that flame through their own indifference to their poverty. They’d been stunned by the heights he’d attained.
His mother had died shortly after the dedication of this office, his father a year after Larry had been sworn in for his first term in the house of delegates. Neither had attended these events. Larry hadn’t invited them. Only later had Liz learned that the omissions had been deliberate. He’d been embarrassed by them. He hadn’t wanted anyone to see his humble beginnings. He’d preferred that his business associates and his constituents identify him with the generations-old respectability of the Swans of the historic Northern Neck.
Liz had never met Mrs. Chandler. His mother had died before she and Larry had been introduced. She had met his father only once, briefly, before the wedding. Shortly after the wedding, Martin Chandler had fallen gravely ill. Later Larry went alone to the funeral, taking less than half a day off from his second campaign to attend and then only because he’d understood that television cameras were bound to record the moment.
So many signs that he was emotionally bankrupt and she had missed them all, she thought sorrowfully as she retrieved the food from the refrigerator and carried it back to Roland’s office.
She found him and Tucker discussing baseball, of all things. Both, it turned out, were ardent fans of the Atlanta Braves, whose minor league players were based in Richmond. Either Tucker had already found out everything he needed to know from Roland or he’d determined that there was nothing to be learned.
She dispensed the food and sat back to try to figure out which. It took only moments to realize that Tucker was just cleverly putting Roland at ease. Once Larry’s partner had distractedly eaten half a dozen crackers with cheese on them and an apple, Tucker’s expression turned serious.
“Look,” he began, “to get back to the reason we came by, can you fill me in on how the company’s doing?”
“You’d be better off talking to the chief financial officer for that. Like I said before, I don’t pay a lot of attention to the business details.” Roland shrugged and pulled off a wry grin. “No head for numbers.”
“Surely Larry filled you in when there were ups and downs,” Tucker persisted. “You received financial disclosure reports, something, right?”
“I suppose I did,” Roland said, gazing helplessly at a row of file drawers along one wall. “I imagine Selena put them in there. She’s very efficient.”
“Selena is?”
“My secretary, Selena Velez.”
“She worked for Larry, too,” Liz told Tucker.
“She was a lot more useful to him than she was to me. About all I had her do was take messages and keep marketing off my back.”
“Did Larry keep any important papers in a safe?” Liz asked. “Or would everything be in his files?”
“Oh, no, there’s a safe,” Roland said at once. “State-of-art security. I lock a lot of my stuff in there. Corporate spying being what it is these days, Larry convinced me I had to be careful to protect whatever I was designing.”
“Could you show us?” Liz asked. “There are some papers of Larry’s I can’t seem to locate. I thought they might be here, locked away for safekeeping.”
“Sure,” Roland said, leading the way to what looked like a built-in bar in a small hallway between the two offices. He pressed a hidden button and the bar swung open, revealing the heavy steel door of a walk-in vault.
“Hold on,” he said sheepishly. “I have to check the combination.”
“You haven’t committed it to memory?” Tucker asked.
“It’s electronically programmed to change every few days. Larry set it up that way, because I tended to write the combination on scraps of paper, which wound up in the trash or sitting in the middle of my desk. He concluded that he had to have a way to counteract my forgetfulness.”
“How on earth do you figure out what it is if it’s always changing?” Liz asked.
“I keep the code in a secure file on my computer. Now if I can just find the piece of paper I used to get in there a couple of days ago, I should be able to figure this out.”
While Roland went to work out the current combination for the vault, Tucker looked at Liz. “Is he for real?”
“He’s brilliant and single-minded. It made him a perfect match for Larry, because he was completely willing to have Larry handle everything except the technological stuff.”
“So Larry wasn’t a technology whiz himself?”
“He could hold his own up to a point,” Liz said. “But Roland is definitely the genius behind the company’s success.”
“You don’t suppose he got tired of being the behind-the-scenes guy while your husband basked in all the glory, do you?”
Liz promptly shook her head. “Does he look as if he cares about that?”
“Were they fifty-fifty partners in terms of profits?” Tucker asked.
“I believe so, but you’d have to ask Roland.”
“Ask me what?” he said, coming back with a scrap of paper in hand. He worked the lock with nimble fingers and the heavy door swung open.
“What was your partnership agreement with Larry?” Tucker asked.
“We each owned an equal share of the stock, and between us we held controlling interest in the company. The remainder was sold publicly on the New York Stock Exchange starting last year. Before that we were on Nasdaq. Larry was ecstatic when we had enough assets to make the jump. He said it finally put us in a league with the big guys like Microsoft and AOL Time-Warner.”
“Any merger or takeover offers on the table?” Tucker asked.
“If there were, Larry would have turned them down flat. This company was his baby,” Roland said.
Liz nodded in agreement. “This company brought him the kind of respectability he’d craved. He would never have sold it.”
“Not even if he was short on cash for his next campaign?” Tucker persisted.
“Not even then,” Liz said.
“Could you have forced him to sell?” Tucker asked Roland.
Roland regarded him with complete bafflement. “Why would I?”
“Debts,” Tucker suggested. “The desire to move on to a new challenge?”
Roland laughed. “I’ve earned more money since we started up than I ever dreamed of having. I live a very simple life. No fancy car. No fancy house.” He gestured toward his clothes. “No designer clothes…and definitely no political aspirations.”
“What about a new challenge?”
“Every day around here is a challenge,” Roland insisted. He gestured toward the open vault. “Take a look around. Maybe you’ll find those papers you were looking for. If you don’t need me for anything else, I’m going to get back to work.”
Liz glanced at Tucker. “Any more questions for now?”
He shook his head. “No. Thanks for your time. We’ll let you know when we’re on our way out.”
“
Sure thing,” Roland said, his expression already distracted as he headed back to his computer.
“Any idea where we should start?” Liz asked, studying the unlabeled files stacked from floor to ceiling in the vault.
“Apparently Selena’s organizational skills didn’t extend to the safe,” Tucker commented. “Why don’t we start at the back. I’ll work my way around to the right, you go to the left.”
The search yielded incorporation papers, financial records, Security and Exchange Commission filings for the company’s initial stock offering. To Liz’s untrained eye, it seemed as if there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was when she came to the fifth stack that she realized that a thick manila envelope was sandwiched between the files. She pulled it free, broke the seal and extracted a sheaf of letters written on pale peach vellum. She recognized the handwriting on the envelopes at once.
“Tucker,” she said, extending the letters toward him with a trembling hand. “These are from Cynthia Miles to Larry. I don’t want to read them, but they could be important.”
Tucker regarded her worriedly. “You okay?”
“It’s like bumping up against the past. All those old feelings of hurt and disgust and anger that I’d thought were over came flooding back through me.”
“We’ll take these with us and I’ll look them over later. No need to do it now.” Handling them carefully by the edges, he stuffed them back in the envelope and set it aside.
“Why did you touch them that way?”
“Because there could be fingerprints we’d find helpful,” he explained. “You feeling any better now? How about some water?”
She shook her head, eyeing the envelope warily. “I’ll be fine. After all, none of it matters anymore, right?”
“That’s exactly right,” he said, reaching over to give her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Neither one of them can hurt you ever again.”
She drew in a deep breath and went back to sorting through the remaining files. She found absolutely nothing that offered so much as a clue, much less anything likely to incriminate anyone.
Tucker rocked back on his heels at the same time. “That’s that. I didn’t find a damned thing.”
“Me, either,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. I need some fresh air.”
“You head on outside. I’ll lock this vault and let Roland know we’re leaving.”
Liz accepted the offer and hurriedly left the building, relieved to be away from all the ghosts. She couldn’t help wondering, though, just how many more she would have to face before this investigation ended.
It was late when Tucker got back to Trinity Harbor. He’d followed Mary Elizabeth from Richmond to Swan Ridge, made sure that she got inside safely, then left before he risked a repeat of that kiss they’d shared just outside her Richmond house.
Since he was still wide-awake and wound up and the contents of those letters were nagging at him, he drove on to Montross, hoping to scare up Walker. He found him behind his desk. Like Roland Morgan, Walker was surrounded by littered coffee cups. Of course, being Walker, there were also several empty food containers, probably provided by an increasingly irritated Daisy. One of these days, Tucker knew, he was destined to hear a long tirade about how he’d dumped this case on her husband.
“Any wheels turning in that brain of yours?” he inquired as he sat down and propped his feet on the desk.
“Not that I’ve noticed,” Walker conceded.
“Maybe these will help,” Tucker suggested, tossing the envelope across to him.
“What is it?”
“A whole passel of letters from Cynthia Miles to Chandler.”
“Where’d you find them?” Walker asked suspiciously.
“In the safe at Chandler’s office,” Tucker told him. “Either the man was very sentimental and couldn’t bear to part with them or they’re blackmail attempts he wanted to hang on to.”
Walker whistled at the blackmail theory. “You haven’t read them?”
“I didn’t want to do it in front of Mary Elizabeth. Just the sight of them sent her tripping down memory lane to a very bad place.” He shrugged. “Besides, I figured the fewer fingerprints on them the better.”
“Ah, a cop’s instincts,” Walker said, searching Tucker’s drawer for a pair of tweezers.
“First, last and always,” Tucker confirmed. “Do I get to look over your shoulder?”
“How about I read them aloud?”
“As long as you can stomach it, I can,” Tucker agreed, leaning back and closing his eyes.
“Hey, wake up. These aren’t going to be some damned bedtime story,” Walker grumbled. He extracted the first letter from its pretty envelope and laid it flat on his desk. “Okay, here goes.
“‘My dearest…
I don’t know why you’re not taking my calls. I thought we had something really special between us. I know that I love you and want to be with you. I will never forgive your wife for keeping us apart. I understand why you feel you must stay with her, but really, Larry, you and I are such an extraordinary team. There are no limits to what we could accomplish together. Think about that, and dream of me tonight, as I will of you.
All my love,
Cynthia’”
“Now isn’t that pretty?” Tucker said. “I’m all misty over it.”
Walker rolled his eyes at the dripping sarcasm. “It’s dated November twelfth, six years ago.”
“Right after Chandler won his first election,” Tucker said. “That matches Mary Elizabeth’s story that she had Chandler fire the Miles woman right after the election.”
“Seems to,” Walker agreed.
The next three letters, dated for the next few weeks, were more of the same, appeals to Chandler to ditch Mary Elizabeth and team up with his former campaign manager for endless matrimonial bliss and the achievement of his ambitious political goals. Tucker also thought he detected an increasingly impatient edge to them. It was the fifth letter, though, in which the tone changed. Written a year later, it had a note of desperate hysteria to it.
Why won’t you even take my calls? I feel as if my whole world, my entire reason for being has collapsed. I have nowhere to turn. You’re the only man for me, yet clearly I am not the only woman for you. I saw you, Larry. I saw you with her. How could you do that to me? How could you take her to our special place? I can forgive you for many things, but not that. I will never forgive you for that.
“She didn’t sign this one,” Walker noted. “I wonder what his response was?”
“If he was half as smart as he was reported to be, he didn’t respond at all,” Tucker said. “He’d have been fueling her obvious obsession.”
“Let’s see,” Walker suggested, opening another letter dated only a few days later. In it, too, Cynthia berated Chandler for not contacting her. “Looks like you were right. He decided to stay the hell away from her.”
There were six more letters, some dated months apart, some only days, each one increasingly desperate. The last two were filled with more accusations about unnamed other women and with threats to get even.
“Isn’t this a nice, tidy package providing motive?” Tucker said when Walker had read them all.
“Just one problem,” Walker pointed out. “The last one was written two years ago. Why would she wait this long to make good on the threat?”
“Only one reason I can think of,” Tucker said, meeting Walker’s gaze.
“Chandler went back to her,” Walker guessed.
“Seems like the only logical answer to me,” Tucker agreed. “Clearly, ignoring her hadn’t worked. She was unstable and he needed to keep her quiet. The only way to accomplish that would be to throw her a bone, spend a little time with her.”
“I’ll talk to the county attorney tomorrow and see if these give us cause to search the Miles woman’s home to look for a weapon,” Walker said. “If not, at the very least, I can set up an interview. I have a whole slew of questions I’d like to ask her. You have any angles you’d l
ike me to explore beyond the obvious?”
Tucker thought back over the contents of all the letters, then nodded slowly. “Just one. Ask her to name some of the other women. Did you notice she was very careful to omit their names in every letter? Seems to me like she’d caught him with a whole slew of them, but maybe not. Maybe there was one in particular who pushed her over the edge because she thought it was serious.”
Walker raised an eyebrow at the suggestion. “More serious than his wife? Liz didn’t seem to make her too hysterical.”
“She’d already won against Mary Elizabeth,” Tucker said, recalling his conversation with Cynthia Miles. “Chandler was having his affair with Cynthia even after the wedding. She probably considered the marriage just a little bump in the road, a political strategy that would pay off with a win in November, which it did. The only thing she hadn’t counted on was being fired right afterward.”
“So, she did lose to Liz,” Walker pointed out.
“Only temporarily,” Tucker countered. “She believes to this day that the marriage was only a political maneuver, that Mary Elizabeth never really mattered to Chandler. The other women followed, proving once more that the marriage meant nothing to Chandler.”
“What I don’t understand is why the hell Liz didn’t dump him right after she found out about his first affair,” Walker said. “If I ever cheated on your sister, she’d be out the door in a flash, right after taking a strip out of my hide, more than likely.”
“That was my reaction, too,” Tucker said.
“And? I assume she told you why.”
“Because she didn’t want to admit having made a mistake, especially after she’d walked out on me to be with him. Her pride kicked in. She decided to suck it up and stay, because she thought she deserved it as punishment for hurting me. It took her five years to realize that there was nothing to be gained by that except misery.”
“Five years? I thought they’d been married six.”
Tucker nodded. “She decided the marriage was over a year ago. She’d moved out, but she didn’t make the break final until she got back from her trip to Europe the day before Chandler was killed.”
Along Came Trouble Page 18