by Rachel Brady
Silence lingered between us while I considered how to continue. Diana caught me off-guard with a discreet yawn.
“It looks like it was Dr. Platt’s neighbor that murdered him,” I said. “Not Claire. A phone number in his Caller ID log led me down that path. I thought you’d want to know that your help getting me into his house made a difference.”
“His neighbor?”
“The caregiver, actually.”
“That man that lives with William?” She looked stricken.
“You know him?”
She nodded, almost imperceptibly. “He helped Wendell here at the club once or twice.”
“That’s Kevin Burke. Guy’s been scamming William for all he has. By the looks of it, he’s taken plenty of other people too—including Daniel and Claire Gaston.” I debated telling Diana about Daniel’s murder and decided not to. “It seems Doctor Platt found out what was going on. I gave a full report to the police yesterday. They’ll take over from here.”
Diana raised her heavily ornamented fingers to her lips, visibly affected by my story.
I stood to go. “Take care of yourself. I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.”
She nodded. I was nearly to the door when she found her voice again.
“I’m the property custodian for that house,” she said behind me. “Tell me if there’s more I can do.”
“Somebody will call,” I said. As an afterthought, I pulled a card out of my purse and walked it over to her. “Thanks for not kicking me out of the club again.”
She pursed her lips, not quite a smile. I took it as my sign to leave.
Chapter Thirty-two
Jeannie, in glittery platform flip-flops, crossed Richard’s parking lot with her face lifted toward the late morning sun. She stole a glance at her watch. “We’re getting into prime tan time now. You promised to make this fast.”
A hot pink bow from her string bikini lay over the back of her fitted tee and bounced with each step.
Richard had phoned as we were leaving Vince’s neighborhood. I’d agreed to stop by the office—briefly—on our way to the shore.
“You and tanning,” I said. “I don’t see how you spend so much time in the sun and don’t have leather skin.”
“For one thing, I don’t buy cheap moisturizer at Walgreens.”
Her cover-up clothes were so tight they left nothing to the imagination.
“And how can you be ten years older than me with a body like that? I hate you.”
“Surgery,” she said. “Make it your friend.”
I opened the door to a community lobby Richard shared with a massage therapist and a financial planner. The transition to air conditioning gave me goose bumps.
Jeannie followed me down a hallway that led to our offices. “You’re such a Debbie Downer about women who have work done.” Behind me, her shoes were flipping and flopping. “Like Claire and that Diana woman…it doesn’t make us lesser people, you know. Just better looking than you.”
“Exactly.” We rounded a corner and found Richard at his desk. “More power to you.”
Richard perked up when he saw us. “Those employment apps you found at William’s house? I went to that store and asked if Sandy Diaz still worked there. It was only a hunch, but sure enough.”
“You talked to her?” I slid into a seat opposite his desk.
Jeannie tapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t sit.” Then to Richard, she added, “We can’t stay.”
Richard ignored her. “Add Sandy to the list of people Burke screwed over.”
I stood and jangled my keys. “What’s her story?”
“She was his girlfriend until about forty-five minutes ago. Works in Human Resources. Said Burke went back to school at U of H—totally false, I checked it out. He told her he was working on a telemarketing project for a class and asked if she’d copy applications for people the store didn’t hire. He wanted to recruit them for his project…they could earn easy money from home, and all that. She figured they were looking for work anyway and it helped him with his class, so every couple weeks she brought him a few more.”
“What’d he use them for?”
“Employment applications are a goldmine. Full name and address, birth date, Social Security Number, driver’s license number…all he has to do is apply for credit and have the cards sent wherever he wants. Scammers do this all the time. Max out the cards and pay the minimums on the bills.”
Jeannie looked incredulous. “What an ass.”
“I also went to the Heights and asked the neighbors about Saunders. The homeowner whose property backs up to his is the only one who knew him before his accident. Said he spent three years in brain injury rehab, most of it at a deluxe residential place.” Richard rubbed his fingertips and thumb together in the universal sign for “big bucks.” “Guy was lucky,” he continued. “Eventually he improved enough to come home, but he’ll always need supervised care.”
“How’d Burke get his hooks in?”
“Home care staff came in shifts for years until the hospital program was dropped in April. When that happened, he had a string of bad luck. His aunt, who coordinates his care, found a private agency, but most folks that came didn’t speak or understand English. Others couldn’t cook. Some missed shifts, leaving him alone for blocks of time throughout the day. Right now she’s torn between overseeing William’s care and looking after her sister in New Braunfels…end-stage cancer.”
I had a soft spot for William and didn’t like where I thought this was headed.
“Imagine her peace of mind when she found a charming, enthusiastic live-in replacement to bridge the gap for a few months while she tended to her sister.”
I felt my pulse quicken. “Are you kidding me? What about credentials and licensure?”
“Not sure. She’s juggling ailing relatives two hundred miles apart, all by herself. That’s a tall order for someone like you or me. Imagine doing it at eighty-four.”
Jeannie shook her head. “It sounds like Burke was a temporary solution. If she trusted him—”
“He could rob her nephew blind and get a paycheck for doing it.” The realization nauseated me.
“Anyway,” Richard said, “When I mentioned what was going on with Burke, this guy said two people on his street have been victimized by check washing this summer.”
“I have no idea what that means,” Jeannie said.
“I didn’t either.” Richard motioned toward his computer, where I figured he’d looked up the details. “Turns out, scammers steal outgoing mail—anything that looks like a bill being paid—and remove and alter the checks. They hold the signed check upside down to preserve the signature and dip it in chemicals to remove the ink everywhere else. Then they write in whatever amount and payee they want.”
I remembered the bleach and acetone in Burke’s work room. “Is there anything this guy didn’t try?”
“He knows a few tricks, that’s for sure. There’s also the cars. William Senior kept two vintage Mustangs. After he died, the cars never came out of the garage again until last spring.”
“When Burke moved in.” With each new detail, I felt angrier and more defensive about what this leech had done to William.
“Yep. He even added a new one, the car you saw in the Tone Zone footage. Neighbor says it came into circulation in May, a few weeks after Burke arrived on the scene.”
“How do you suppose he staged that e-mail from Claire to Platt?” Jeannie said.
“That was probably easy. I don’t think Claire was tech savvy.”
“She wasn’t,” I said. “Her son set up her e-mail. He told me she couldn’t do much on the computer without help.” I thought back to our Monday meeting in their River Oaks driveway. “Come to think of it, he said that her boyfriend helped her, too.”
Richard nodded. “You saw all that computer gear at Saunders’ house.”
“Yeah, and the bizarre spy watch with the USB port.”
“He’s slick, I’ll give him that
.”
The events were adding up, yet one detail bothered me. “How do you send an e-mail from your account and make it look like it’s from somebody else?”
“My guess is he did it from her account,” Richard said.
“But he wasn’t living there anymore when the message was sent.”
“I think he installed remote access software on her machine. As long as the computer stayed on, he could access it from anywhere.”
I didn’t buy it. “He wouldn’t have known her Yahoo password.”
“You knew it,” Jeannie said.
I paused, stuck. She had me.
“Somebody with those skills might even have used keylogging software,” Richard added. “I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
I thought about it. “If he knew how to do that, he’d have access to all their on-line passwords and accounts too.”
“You bet.”
“Okay,” I said. “So he sends threatening messages to Platt from Claire’s account to make it look like Claire’s an obsessed crazy woman. Say he deletes them from her Sent folder too. That would explain why I couldn’t find anything when I went through her e-mail on Wednesday. But surely Platt would be confused when he received these notes. He didn’t know her. Wouldn’t he respond? At least once to tell her she had the wrong guy? Burke couldn’t camp at her computer twenty-four hours a day. He’d be taking a big risk that she might receive something back from Platt.”
Richard leaned back. “I thought about that. He might have set up her account to treat mail from Platt as spam. It’d give him a little time to check and delete anything. I don’t know. He’s obviously smart. Been getting away with this, and worse, for a really long time.”
“The police have her computers now,” I said. “They’ll know whether remote access software was found.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Then why’d you bring it up?”
“Because it can also be uninstalled remotely.”
I did a little mental calendar work. “You’re suggesting he uninstalled anything incriminating before the search warrants were issued?”
“That’s one way he might have done it.”
“He obviously wasn’t afraid to come back to the house,” Jeannie said. “Balls of steel.”
“Emily solved that one for us yesterday when she found the Gastons’ new credit cards.”
His reasoning had passed mine and it took a moment for me to catch up.
“Of course,” I finally said. “The phone. Burke intercepted Daniel’s replacement cards in Monday’s mail and then hurried inside to activate them—a task he could only accomplish from the Gastons’ home phone. No cars were in the driveway so he thought the coast was clear. When I showed no signs of leaving, he acted like he’d come to feed Logan’s snake.”
Jeannie picked up my line of thought. “That explains what happened to the missing gym note too. With free access to the house and its computers, he could erase anything, paper trail or electronic.”
“Gotta hand it to the slime,” Richard said. “He had it all worked out.”
We paused, each mulling the new information.
Jeannie pounced. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said to Richard. “But if there’s nothing more, we’re late for the beach.” The look she gave me said she expected my full support.
“Fair enough,” he said. “Surf safe.”
We said goodbye to Richard and this time I followed Jeannie down the hall. Ninety minutes later, she worked on her tan while I walked ankle deep in froth, glad for a break from the case. It felt nice to finally have a quiet moment to think about the other things on my mind.
I listened to waves and gulls, watched light glint over the seas, and reflected on my paradoxical shortcomings as a mother and a girlfriend.
With Vince, it would be easy to share my emotions once I understood what they were. With Annette, the opposite. My boundless love for her was unequivocal, but the challenge was how to express it in a way she’d understand.
Warm ocean water rolled over my feet and, somehow, soothed me. For the first time since moving to Texas, I didn’t even mind the sun.
Chapter Thirty-three
After the beach, we stopped at a Sonic because Jeannie didn’t believe me when I told her there were still roller skating carhops. The issue settled, we sipped grape and orange slushies for the remainder of the trip, most of which we passed in contented silence, except for the occasional announcement of a brain freeze. By request, I’d left the windows down so it was too loud to talk anyway. And despite the highway wind rushing through the car—whipping my hair into tiny, unforgiving knots—it was still inhumanly hot, so I also left the air conditioner on. If a Hell existed for the ecologically calamitous, my name was on the list.
Exhausted from our day in the sun, I recognized the slight warmth and tightening of my skin, especially my face, and knew that soon I’d be pink. A cool shower and fresh clothes topped my list of Stuff I Want Right Now.
At the house, we split in different directions, slogging with only half our usual energy. Jeannie headed for the guest room and I turned for Vince’s. Cindy circled excitedly at my feet, stepping on my toes, and I knew she wanted to go out. So before cleaning up, I found a leash and clipped it to her collar. We headed out the front door for a jaunt around the block.
I checked my phone, an upgraded replacement the sales guy talked me into the night before.
There were no new messages, but I did have a few e-mails, only one of interest.
Emily,
It’s about Wendell. The gym closes today at 6:00. Could you come by after? I’ll be here until eight. The main entrance will be locked but I’ll leave the south door open.
Diana
Her interest in talking to me again was compelling. I hated typing on my phone so Diana got a quick “OK.” It seemed that no matter which way I angled the phone, its display was now dim and washed out. Exasperated, I shoved it into my pocket and hoped the condition was only a product of bright sunlight.
Cindy and I finished our walk and Jeannie was out of the shower when we returned. With a towel twisted on her head and another bound around her curves, she declared that her shower had been marvelous and that it was time for a nap.
“You smell good,” I said. “Peaches?”
She smiled. “More to life than Irish Spring, Em.”
Soon her hairdryer whirred. I took my own shower, longer than usual, and pulled on clean khaki shorts and a fitted tee. It was barely past five so I had time to kill before leaving for the club. I hauled my laptop to Vince’s bar, propped myself on a stool, and connected to his wireless network. Days had passed since I’d answered my e-mails and, with nothing else to do, now seemed the perfect time. But ten minutes in, fatigue overtook me. I rested my head on my arms at the bar and next thing I knew it was 6:15.
A quick peek down the hallway revealed Jeannie’s motionless legs on top of the quilt. I let her sleep, jotted a note, and left for the club.
***
Daylight was fading when I arrived. Westheimer’s traffic fumes were as thick as the humidity and, even though I’d parked near the familiar front entrance, I was in a mild snit because I didn’t know which way was south. I tried the side of the building to my left but there were no doors. I backtracked to the opposite end, which shared a wide alley with a running store. As promised, the door there was unlocked. I stepped into what must have been an employee lounge and weaved around tables as the door closed behind me.
The gym was partly lit. Though the corridors remained lighted, exercise rooms and spa nooks were dark and abandoned, doors closed, only black showing on the other side of their glass panes. Walking though the quiet passages reminded of my old job at BioTek and the times I’d stayed after hours to work alone. It’d freaked me out then and was still uncomfortable, similar to how I’d felt during the storm when I was stuck in Claire’s massive house all alone.
At the top of the stairs, faint but recognizable jazz mu
sic played in Diana’s office. The track leading to her door was in shadows but a wide triangle of light spilled onto its rubberized surface.
I stepped into her office and knew right away I was in trouble.
Nobody was inside, but Georgina—Annette’s faded, stuffed giraffe—sat propped on the desk’s front edge. An open ring box had been left beside the toy. Confused, I edged forward for a closer look, then felt the sick adrenaline rush of a trapped idiot. My wedding rings were inside, glinting under the overhead lights.
I didn’t reach for them, just turned and ran, but Burke was waiting at the top of the stairs. The sight of him brought me up short.
“Your friend is hard to miss.” He was ten yards away, blocking any chance of escape. “I saw her parked on my street yesterday.”
“You mean William’s street.”
He glared at me. “Because of you, I can never go home again.” His empty hands should have been a relief. They weren’t.
He stepped toward me and I backed up.
“Your scheme was so important that you killed innocent people to keep it going?” I glanced at the reception area below and considered jumping.
“I left you and your kid alone. You should have done the same for me. Now I have to move and start all over. It’s your fault.” He took a confident stride forward.
I turned and ran to the far end of the track. Burke surprised me and charged.
Behind me, his footfalls were muffled thuds on the rubber. They grew closer, and I knew that if I didn’t get off the track fast, he’d catch me before I reached the stairs. I thought about what he’d done to the other two people who’d caught onto his scam and knew I’d have to do something. Now.
I stopped, swung my legs over the steel banister and…dropped.
I seemed to hang in the air and, for that single instant, I thought I’d escaped.
Then I slammed into the floor below. My landing on the unforgiving marble was violent and I was too hurt to move right away. When I finally did, my knee and hip throbbed.
He looked down and shook his head. “That had to hurt.”