Grain of Truth (Innocence Unit Book 1)

by V. J. Chambers

  No one smiled back except Amos.

  * * *

  There was a knock on Elke’s door.

  She looked up too see Iain in the doorway. “Come in,” she said. She gestured to a seat in front of her desk.

  Iain sat down.

  “Is this about the bruises?” said Elke.

  “Oh, no, I haven’t made any more progress with that,” he said. “I was actually here because you wanted us to look for more suspects.”

  “Right. You have someone?”

  “Well, maybe,” he said. “I can’t say what it means, but I did want to tell you that I was looking over Tempest Mukherjee’s bank statement in the file, and I discovered a several withdrawals of cash from her personal account over the month leading up to the murder. The withdrawals are frequent and unlike her normal pattern of spending money. They add up to a fairly significant sum.”

  “You think that means something?”

  “It might,” he said.

  “Maybe she was spending more money on something than she usually would have. Maybe she had developed a bad habit. An addiction?”

  “Yes, possibly,” said Iain. “Or maybe it was all for one transaction, and she was taking it out in increments.”

  Elke tapped her chin. “If so, that probably wasn’t a legal transaction. If it was something above board, she wouldn’t have tried to hide it. But what would she have needed a huge chunk of cash for?”

  “Well, I’d be reaching here,” said Iain, “but it’s possible that she was hiring a contract killer.”

  Elke’s eyebrows shot up. “That is quite a leap. To kill who? Her husband?”

  “I guess so.”

  “If so, why was she killed as well?”

  “I don’t know,” said Iain. “Like I said, it’s a reach.”

  Elke sat back in her chair. “Well, maybe it went wrong somehow. Maybe she changed her mind and tried to fight them off and they shot her.”

  “She was sitting on the couch when she was shot,” said Iain. “Didn’t look like she was fighting.”

  “True,” said Elke. “All right, maybe she changed her mind and threatened to expose the killer’s identity. Maybe that’s why he shot her.”

  “That would make sense, I guess,” said Iain. “But there’s no evidence of any of this. It’s all conjecture.”

  “Right,” said Elke. “Still, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility. You and I both know that most murders are committed by people close to the victim. The original investigators went for the daughter because it’s most likely. But what if it was the mother? We need to find out if she had any reason to kill her husband. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.”

  “Do you want me to do more digging?”

  “You mean do I want you to interview anyone?”

  Iain’s face reddened a little bit.

  She smiled. “I’ll let you know.”

  He nodded. “Listen, I’m sorry if—”

  She held up a hand. “Don’t apologize. I don’t think I’ve given you any indication that I’m displeased with your work, have I?”

  “No,” he said. He smiled. “Thank you, Ms. Lawrence.”

  She smiled too.

  He left, and then Elke went down the hall and asked Frankie to look into Tempest.

  “The mother?” Frankie was horrified. “What would her motive be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Elke. “See if you can find anything.”

  Frankie made a face, but she nodded. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, Elke got a call that Saanvi had requested to talk to her again. This time, she drove out to the prison on her own, without Iain. She thought she could use the time to think over the case.

  But the joke was on her, because she spent all her time thinking about Felix and how pathetic he’d been when she spoke to him the night before. Even though she had meant what she said, that the marriage was over, she was still raw over the entire exchange. She didn’t feel guilty, because she knew she’d done what she had to do. But she still felt for Felix. She was still half in love with him, even after everything. She thought that feeling should have turned off a long time ago. And yet, somehow, it hadn’t.

  At least it was only half in love, she decided.

  But she wondered if she should be doing anything for him. She hadn’t been in touch with his parents since the search warrant. Before, they had all been on the same side, sure that Felix was innocent. But now, with the truth laid out, Elke wasn’t sure what to say to them. They were good people. She imagined they were going through hell right now. But she was going through hell too. She didn’t know if she had it in her to console them or to provide support. She needed a support system herself, not to be support for other people.

  But she kept going back and forth about contacting them all the way to the prison.

  No conclusions drawn, she tried to put it out of her mind as she went in to see Saanvi.

  The room was the same as it had been last time. Small, bland, windowless. Elke sat down across from the other woman. “You’re not my client. I don’t work for you. Don’t get some idea that I’ll come every time you summon me,” she said to Saanvi.

  Saanvi didn’t react other than to shrug. “This will be the only time, I imagine.”

  “All right,” said Elke. “Well, now that we’ve got that out of the way, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?”

  “I had a letter from Kevin,” said Saanvi. “They let us write to each other, and he wrote me about you.”

  “Okay?” Elke had no idea where this was going.

  “You’ve gotten his hopes up,” said Saanvi. “He thinks we’re actually going to get out of here. I don’t like it. Don’t do that. Don’t promise him things. I don’t want him crushed again. He’s been through too much. He doesn’t know how to turn it off like I do. He still thinks that there could be a happy ending, and there can’t be.”

  Elke narrowed her eyes. “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s what I know.”

  “Is it because you really are guilty? Did you shoot your parents?”

  “No,” said Saanvi quietly.

  “Well, maybe you just watched. Maybe Kevin did it.”

  Saanvi’s face tightened. “No,” she said more forcefully. She clenched her hands into fists. “No, of course not. And don’t think you can make me confess to it. I went through something like twenty straight hours of interrogation and they tried every way from Sunday to get me to say I did it. But I never broke. I never gave them what they wanted, and I won’t give it to you.”

  “Broke?” said Elke. “Why would you say it that way?”

  “Because it felt like that,” said Saanvi. “I was tired and scared and grieving. And they badgered me and yelled at me, and I started to feel as if I didn’t know what was real anymore. They would say things to me like, ‘Maybe you did it, but you don’t remember. Maybe you’ve blocked it out.’ And I would wonder if that was true. It was incredibly hard to stay strong, to keep believing the truth.”

  “And what is the truth?”

  “That I didn’t do it.”

  Elke was quiet.

  “At first my parents’ death seemed surreal,” said Saanvi. “I thought it was a nightmare, and that I’d wake up and my father would be drinking coffee and my mother would be cooking pancakes in the kitchen. But I never woke up, because it all really happened. Someone killed them, and they blamed me for it. And whoever that person was not only robbed my parents of their lives, but also their child. I know that would hurt my mom and dad if they knew. Some people take comfort in the idea of an afterlife, but not me. I don’t want them to know that I’m here, that their only child will die in prison, that their legacy was cut off by whoever killed them. I hope they have no idea.”

  Elke pressed her lips together. She didn’t know what to say to that, and the force of the despair in the thought seemed to roll into her like a boulder.

>   “Whoever killed my parents took my life, and they took Kevin’s life, and they took the life of his parents. They stole from all of us.” Saanvi shook her head. “I could be angry about it, but it drains me to be angry. Just like it drains me to have hope. I need to survive as best I can. I can’t be drained if I want to survive. I have to shut all that down. But Kevin, he’s never figured out how to shut down. He just keeps hoping and feeling and letting everything drain out of him. He’s like an open wound. He’s fragile. Please, don’t make him any promises.”

  “I haven’t,” said Elke. She regarded Saanvi with sympathy. This girl really was innocent, wasn’t she? How horrible. Elke reached across the table to pat Saanvi’s arm.

  Saanvi recoiled. “What the hell was that?”

  “We’re going to get to the bottom of this case,” said Elke. “We’re going to find out what really happened that night. And we’re going to find proof. That I can promise you.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Elke started back the hallway toward her office.

  Iain poked his head out of his office. “Where have you been?”

  “I went to talk to Saanvi,” said Elke. “She said she wanted to talk.”

  He fell into step with her. “About what?”

  “About how we shouldn’t get Kevin’s hopes up, because she worries about him,” she said. “Apparently, Saanvi doesn’t think we’re going to get her out of there. But we are. I think she’s innocent.”

  “You weren’t sure yesterday, what changed? Did you find some new evidence?”

  “No, it’s just… a feeling,” said Elke.

  Iain made a disapproving noise.

  “Sorry, I know you don’t think feelings mean anything, but I do,” said Elke. “Humans have emotions and intuition for a reason. We evolved them, and they aren’t completely unreliable all the time. You might not understand how it works, but I do trust my own gut.”

  Iain didn’t say anything.

  They reached her office. She stopped. “What have you been doing? Any more suspects? Anything on the bruises?”

  “I’ve been thinking we should go over the other suspects again,” he said. “I get the feeling that the first investigation wasn’t done very thoroughly.”

  “You and me both,” she said. “I can’t get over Kevin’s and Saanvi’s alibis. Both people said they were out most of the evening, and it seems as if that was dismissed. More and more, it feels like the investigating officers had their suspects, and they tried to make the crime fit the suspects, not the other way around.”

  “Well, I’m thinking about the student, Rory Gutierrez,” he said.

  “She also had an alibi,” said Elke.

  “You know how I feel about alibis,” he said. “Unless they’re backed up by tangible evidence, they’re hearsay.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Right, of course. Alibis mean nothing.”

  “Besides, this alibi Gutierrez had, it’s only her roommate, who might have lied for her.”

  “I suppose. Still, I don’t know how much time to concentrate on her. Her motive seems thin to me. Do people really commit double homicide over a bad grade?”

  “Maybe,” said Iain. “Apparently, that failing grade was going to keep her from graduating.”

  “But killing him wouldn’t have solved that problem.”

  “No,” he said. “But when people commit murder, it almost never makes sense.”

  She gave him a funny look. “What are you talking about, of course it does.”

  “Whatever their motive, it’s almost never worth the risk of getting caught,” he said. “When people do it, they aren’t thinking clearly. Or they’re psychopaths.”

  She rubbed her temples. “All right, it doesn’t matter if she has a motive? Because if we didn’t look at motive, no one would have looked at her at all.”

  Iain considered this. “Well, that’s a good point. Maybe I have to do some more thinking about motive. But it doesn’t matter. I still think we should look into both her and the white supremacists again.”

  “I already told you to go back over the case and look for new leads,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. “But when I brought you what I found about Tempest Mukherjee, you told me not to pursue it. So, I just want to be sure it’s all right to pursue anything I find on the other suspects.”

  “Have you found something?”

  “Not yet, but if I do, should I come to you with it, or should I keep digging into it until I get to the bottom of it?”

  “Knock yourself out, Hudson,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “Dig as much as you’d like.”

  * * *

  “All right, well how long is he going to be in solitary?” said Elke into the phone. She paused. “Really? That long, huh?” She glared at the ceiling of her office. “No,” she said. “No, there’s nothing else you can help me with, thank you.”

  Thanks for nothing, she added silently as she hung up the phone.

  So, she wasn’t going to be able to have an interview with Jeremy Squires for a while yet.

  Maybe it didn’t matter. They were waiting for the DNA results, after all. It was quite possible that she was overcomplicating everything for no good reason. But she couldn’t simply sit around twiddling her thumbs. It wasn’t in her makeup. She needed to stay busy. And not just because of the fact that she was always trying to hide from her thoughts about Felix, but because she liked to be busy.

  She opened up the case file. Time to go through it again. She needed to know this case inside and outside, the way she did when she was preparing for a trial. She took a deep breath, and began to read.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Iain read through the transcript of the interview with Gutierrez’s roommate. It was short, and the officers hadn’t kept her there very long.

  According to the roommate, whose name was Mariah Williamson, Gutierrez had come home that evening around eight. The two had watched TV together and then gone to bed around midnight, which was when the 911 call was being made. If it was true, then Gutierrez couldn’t have committed the murder.

  The officers interviewing her hadn’t pressed too much, but they had asked if Williamson was sure. They said it sounded like a typical evening to them, and typical evenings tended to run together. Could she be sure this evening was the one in question?

  “Yes,” Williamson had said. It was that evening, because she remembered that they had watched an episode of Timetracks together at 9:00. She remembered because Gutierrez didn’t like the show and had made fun of it the entire time.

  Iain shut the file right away and picked up his phone. He didn’t expect the number from twenty-five years ago to still be good for Williamson, but it didn’t hurt to try.

  The phone rang a few times and then someone picked up. “Hello?”

  “Hello, I’m looking for Mariah Williamson.”

  “I think you have the wrong number.”

  “Oh, sorry.” He hung up. Yeah, that had been a long shot. She’d been in college back then, she would have moved. He turned to his computer and looked her up. Maybe she’d have a listing in the phone book?

  No. But that wasn’t uncommon. Lots of people only had their cell phones these days. Iain was one of them. He kept searching.

  He found her in the police database, which was comprised of various public records like the DMV and Vital Statistics, but the phone number there was the same one he’d just tried. She must never have updated it.

  More searching.

  Within seconds, a social media profile filled his screen. Williamson hadn’t listed her phone number publicly, but if necessary, he might be able to contact her through the website. But he wasn’t down for the count yet. He clicked through to her friends list. He went through three or four people before he found someone who had their phone number listed.

  He called it.

  The phone rang and rang. And went to voicemail.

  Damn it.

  He went through the list some more. Six more n
ames down and then he found another phone number. He dialed that. This time, someone answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi there, this is Detective Iain Hudson with the Haven Hills Conviction Review Unit. I’m calling because I’m trying to make contact with Mariah Williamson.”

  “Uh…” The person on the other line sputtered. “How did you get my phone number?”

  “Facebook. It’s important that I speak to Ms. Williamson. Do you have a phone number for her?”

  “I… I guess. Is she in trouble?”

  “No, no,” he said. “She may have important information for a case, however. I really need to speak with her.”

  “Right, okay.”

  “So, what’s the number?”

  The person rattled it off, and Iain took it down. He did all right in conversations like this, when he was looking for information, when everything was straightforward.

  But now he was going to have to call Williamson, and that conversation might not go as smoothly. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.

  He thought about putting it off. Maybe he should take a break, go to the snack machine on the floor below them. Maybe he should go through the rest of the case file before he called.

  Don’t be a coward, he told himself.

  Right. He could do this. It would be straightforward. There was no reason for it not to be.

  He dialed Williamson’s number.

  It rang.

  And rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Mariah Williamson?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “I’m Detective Iain Hudson with the Haven Hills Conviction Review Unit. I’m calling about the Mukherjee case from twenty-five years ago. Do you remember talking to the police then about your roommate Rory Gutierrez?”

  “Uh… wow. Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “That case was solved.”

  “I just need to go over something simple with you, if I could.”

  “Well, this isn’t really a good time.”

  “It’ll really only take a few moments,” he said. “It’s just a simple thing.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now.”