The Harry Starke Series: Books 7-9 (The Harry Starke Series Boxed Set Book 3)

by Blair Howard

  She reached down and took the file from her portfolio and handed it to me.

  “Okay,” I said mildly. “Let’s try to act like the grownups we are. You’re an attorney. A bit sleazy, but a good one. Just take a look at these photos and tell me what you think.”

  I handed them to him. He took them, glanced quickly through them, then tossed them down on the table in front of me.

  “As I said: an accident.”

  I shook my head in mock exasperation.

  “Heath come on. Look, I’m not saying it was you that killed him, but somebody did, and there were only three people that could have done it: you and Harrison and Warren. Have another look.” I picked up the top photo and threw it across the table at him. He flinched and let it fall to the floor.

  “It’s….” I paused, shook my head, then continued. “Whichever one of you arranged the scene to look like that wasn’t the lawyer he is today. Jeez, Heath. It’s the most obvious case of staging I’ve ever seen. You guys, one of you, maybe all three of you, got away with it then, but this is 2017 for Christ’s sake. Look at it, man. Look where the damned gun is. It’s a friggin’ 12-gauge. There’s no way it could have gone off and landed where it is, not even if he’d committed suicide, which he didn’t. You know it and I know it. One of you placed it right there.” I hammered my fingertip on the topmost image left on the table.

  He sat for a moment, staring stoically at me, then looked at his watch, and then sighed and, seemingly without a concern in the world, asked, “You done, Starke? If not, please get done, because I have places to be.”

  I picked up my beer, leaned back in my chair, and stared at him, right in the eyes; he never flinched. He stared right back at me, an enigmatic smile on his lips.

  Finally, he pushed his chair back and made to rise to his feet.

  He was halfway up when I said, “Heath, was Ellis Warren having an affair with Nicholson’s wife?”

  He paused, still halfway out of his seat, seemed about to speak, but instead he stood upright, shook his head, and began to turn away.

  “Okay,” I said. “You win, but before you go, do me a favor….”

  “As if,” he snarled.

  I smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I know, but take these with you anyway.” I handed him the pile of photos. “And that one on the floor. Take another look at them and think on it. If you didn’t do it, Heath, it had to be one of the other two. That puts you in a better position than me: I have three suspects; you, on the other hand, have only two. Look at the photographs. Which one of them do you think it is?”

  “Screw you, Starke,” he said angrily, and started to turn away, then he changed his mind and picked up the photos, including the one on the floor. He looked at me, screwed up his face, pointed at me with the bunched up photos, shook his head, and then turned and walked quickly out of the lounge and down the stairs. The man was in a hurry.

  “What does that mean?” Jacque asked, once he was out of earshot.

  “Not a damned thing,” I said thoughtfully.

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not sure I do either. He’s one clever SOB, though, and nothing he does is ever as it seems. He’s difficult to read; sly, wily, and a master of deception.”

  “But if he took the photographs, surely that means….”

  “That he didn’t do it? You might think so, but knowing him as I do, it could mean just the opposite, that he did do it and took the photos to throw us off track.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “What do you think, Harry? Was it him, or Harrison, or the other guy? Wow, how do you do it? I’m so confused I can’t see straight.”

  I smiled at her. “What do I think? Nothing yet. How do I do what I do? You know how. I observe and try to read people, suspects. I gather the facts, analyze them, sort through the evidence, use the science, and think it through, logically, step by step. My next step? I’m hungry. Let’s go find August. I need him to do me a favor.”

  Chapter 17

  Thursday, January 12, 1:30 p.m.

  It was almost one thirty when Jacque and I got back to the office. I asked her to try to get hold of Judge Warren, and then I told her to hold my calls. I was of two minds about what to do next. I needed to talk to Warren, and quickly. I debated whether or not to just head out the door and go visit him in his office, unannounced, and was about to do just that when Jacque knocked on the door and leaned in.

  “Judge Warren is on the phone,” she said. “He doesn’t sound happy.”

  I smiled at her, nodded, and lifted the handset from its cradle.

  “Ellis,” I said loudly, my voice nothing but friendly. “I was hoping you’d call. How are you?”

  “I didn’t call. Your secretary called me. What the hell are you doing, Harry, digging up old trash?” He sounded reasonable enough.

  “That must mean you’ve heard from Alex or Heath,” I said.

  “Both of them, damn it. I’ve had ’em both on the phone, and they’re pissed, and I don’t blame them. The Nicholson thing was put to bed more’n fifteen years ago. There’s nothing there.”

  “You may well be right, Ellis, but Helen asked me to look into it and I said I would. Do you have a few minutes when I could come by and talk to you?”

  “No, Harry. I don’t. I have a full case load and I don’t have time to revisit the long-dead past. You can say what you have to now, on the phone, then let me get back to the important stuff.”

  “Have it your way, Ellis. I’ve been to the site, and I’ve looked at the records and the photographs. It wasn’t an accident. One of you killed him and staged it to look like it was an accident.”

  He was silent for a moment, then said, “That’s a load of hogwash. I was there. I saw it. He tripped and fell. It’s as simple as that, and after all this time there’s nothing and no one to say any different.”

  “You’re wrong, Ellis. I have a box full of evidence that says so, and the photos, the ones taken of the body. One of you shot him; that’s a fact. Was it you, Ellis?”

  “Goddamn it, Harry. Of course I didn’t. We—Alex, Heath, and me—we were all together when we found him. Well, Heath found him first, but it was only by a couple of seconds. There’s no way he, or any of us, could have killed Peter. It’s… it’s crazy, that’s what it is. All you’re going to do is stir up a whole hornet’s nest of controversy and smear our reputations, and I won’t have it. Do you hear?”

  “Yeah, I hear you, but it’s not enough. I’m convinced the scene was staged, and so is Doc Sheddon and Detective Ron Fowler. In fact, both he and his partner, Wade Brewer, said so at the time, but Hands and Dr. Bowden would have none of it. There wasn’t even an investigation, for Pete’s sake—no pun intended. Bowden took one look and that was it. Ellis, the man wasn’t onsite even ten minutes, and Hands… well, you know all about him, right?” He didn’t answer, so I continued, “I have the photographs, my own personal opinion of what happened, and four independent expert opinions to back it up. So I’ll ask you again: Did you, or did you not conspire with Myers and Harrison to murder Peter Nicholson?”

  “Not that I care, but are you recording this conversation, Harry?”

  “No, Ellis. This conversation is just between you and me…. So, did you?”

  “Not only no, but hell no.”

  “Okay, so let me ask you this: You married Nicholson’s widow in 2004; were you having an affair with her when he died?”

  “You… you son of a bitch. How dare you.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He hung up.

  I sat quietly for a moment, thinking. I’d spoken to all three men, and I still had no idea what had happened in Prentice Cooper that day. I looked at my watch. Almost two o’clock. I got up, went to get coffee, and then sat back down behind my desk. I sipped on the coffee and stirred the photos on my desk with my free hand, willing them to talk to me. They remained silent and, look as I might, they told me no more than I already knew.

  I sighed and pick
ed up the sleeve of DVDs and flipped through them until I found the one with Brewer’s interview with Ellis Warren on it. I slipped it into the computer, clicked the mouse, picked up my cup of coffee, and then settled back in my seat to watch.

  It was very short.

  They were in an interview room, a much younger Ellis Warren, Brewer, and Fowler. Brewer did most of the talking; Fowler took notes, and Warren said as little as possible.

  I ran the video through, then again, and then one more time. By the time the final run was finished, I’d figured that Warren owned less than two minutes out of the ten. He was asked to describe how they found the body, and he did so, in about a half dozen sentences. The rest of the questions he answered with a yes or a no or an I don’t know. It was quite a performance.

  It was basically the same story Alex Harrison had told me. They were supposed to meet at the trailhead at four o’clock that afternoon. Warren was on his way when he heard first one shot and then, a couple of minutes later, another. He figured it was hunters. Then he heard Myers shouting and he ran to see what was happening. He found Harrison and Myers standing beside the body just a short distance down the trail. Warren checked his vital signs while Harrison called it in. Myers continued to the trailhead by himself to meet the first responders. Warren and Harrison waited by the body. The sheriff’s officers and TWRA showed up fifteen minutes later, the ME and an ambulance twenty minutes after that.

  I ejected the disk and loaded in the one containing Myers’s interview. It was almost identical. Only the verbiage was slightly different. I smiled to myself as I loaded up the third DVD, the Harrison interview; I figured I knew exactly what was coming, and I was right. More of the same. Coincidence? I didn’t think so.

  Sons of bitches. They got together and made sure their stories matched. Now why would they do that? Hmmm. Motive, that’s what I need. Was Warren having an affair with Mary Ann Nicholson? If so, that might be a reason to off Peter. I wonder what Ronnie was able to find out.

  I picked up the phone and buzzed him. “Hey, Ronnie. Were you able to do the financials I asked for?”

  He had.

  He walked into my office just a couple of minutes later with a laptop in the crook of his arm and sat down, still typing with his free hand. Finally he stopped and looked up.

  “I just sent you a file. It should be on your desktop and iPad. It’s pretty big, but I can give you the basics. You want to take notes?”

  I did. I opened the desk drawer, removed a yellow legal pad, and set it in front of me.

  “Shoot. What do you have?”

  “Okay. So all four of them were heavily invested in the NASDAC when the bubble burst.”

  “Bubble? You’re talking about that dot-com thing, right?”

  “Yes. Are you familiar with what happened?”

  “Eeeh, sort of. I know a whole lot of people lost a whole lot of money. The mechanics of it… no.”

  “Well then, I’ll give you the short version. It all began in the mid–1990s. The Internet was coming into its own and people had begun to realize its potential for making money… mostly by selling things online. Companies were formed and some were wildly successful, some were not; nevertheless, most of them went public, so the NASDAQ became something of a rollercoaster. In 1996 the NASDAQ stock index was at six hundred; by 2000 it had reached more than five thousand, all because of the new dot-com companies, many of them run by kids barely out of college. It was a bubble because many of the companies lacked clear business plans—and some of the biggest companies had no earnings, and I mean none. Take Pets.com, for instance, an online pet products retailer. It was losing money even before it went public. When it did, it raised billions of dollars.” He paused and shook his head. “They say that at the peak of the bubble in 1999, just before the collapse, a new millionaire was being created every sixty seconds.

  “By early 2000, the reality was clear and investors realized that the ‘dream’ was a speculative bubble. By mid–2000, the NASDAQ was down more than three thousand points, close to two thousand. Panic selling ensued and the stock market’s value lost trillions of dollars. By mid–2002, the NASDAQ had plunged to eight hundred. Hundreds of companies were wiped out. It was a time of great wailing and gnashing of teeth, and our four heroes were caught in the middle of it, big time.”

  “That’s quite a story,” I said. “So they lost money, a lot of money, right?”

  “Two of them did, but—”

  “Don’t tell me. Peter Nicholson didn’t.”

  Ronnie nodded. “Not only did he not lose money, he made a killing. How he saw it coming, I don’t know, but he shorted several high-end stocks and cleaned up. Why he didn’t tell his friends, I don’t know…. Maybe he did tell them. Maybe they just didn’t believe the bubble was about to burst. If so, they weren’t alone. Many didn’t, and lost everything.”

  “So how much did they lose?”

  “Warren came off best. He wasn’t as heavily invested as the other two, and he actually made money when the bubble burst. They were all into dozens of odd and ends, but most of their money was invested in two main stocks: Pets.com and Webvan.com. Warren lost his ass on Pets.com, but he more than made up for it when he shorted Webvan; he ended up making almost $30,000, but Myers lost $72,000 and Harrison just under $90,000. Not vast sums of money, but these guys weren’t wealthy, not then, and both Harrison and Myers had borrowed most of their investment capital. Myers, of course, has since made a fortune; Harrison, not so much, but he has managed to get free and clear.”

  “So, one way or another,” I said, “all three had motive enough to do away with him. How much was Nicholson worth when he died?”

  “Not as much as you’d think. He made some good trades, like I said, but he also made a lot of bad ones. His net worth at the time of his death was just over $900,000, but that included the home, which was valued at $300,000. There were also the two insurance policies: one for half a million, the other for $750,00. Mary Ann Nicholson inherited everything. That’s about it….” He paused for a moment, then said, “Like I said, Myers and Harrison recovered, though Harrison had taken out a second mortgage to cover his investment. He cleared that up, finally, in 2012. I pulled credit histories on all three. They’re in good standing with scores ranging from 756—Harrison—to Warren’s 803.”

  “Okay, thanks Ronnie. I’ll take it from here, at least for now. Would you mind asking Heather to join me, please?”

  “Heather,” I asked as she took her seat, “were you able to find anything on Warren and Mary Ann?”

  “Oh yeah, plenty,” she said. “They were having an affair all right. Warren was married at the time of Nicholson’s death. He has a son by his first wife. The son’s name is Michael and he’s twenty years old, still living with his mother. I spent some time with the ex-wife, Rachel. More about that in a minute, but first….” She flipped back and forth through several pages on her iPad.

  “Before I talked to Rachel Warren I did a little digging. I made the rounds of the Nicholson’s neighbors. It didn’t long before it was pretty clear that something was going on between Warren and Mary Ann. One lady—” she paused and consulted her notes “—a Mrs. Pat Lister, jokingly said that Warren spent more time at the Nicholson home than Nicholson himself did. I say jokingly, but then she went on to say that she may have been exaggerating some, but it wasn’t that far from the truth. She saw Warren’s car parked out front at all hours—mornings or afternoons while Nicholson was at work, evenings when he was out of town—so it seems they didn’t make it a big secret, but that all stopped after Nicholson died, although his car was there almost constantly the week after, then… only once in a while. Maybe they got smart and decided to quiet it down for a while.” She reached for her glass of water, sipped from it, then continued.

  “Rachel Warren is… well, she married again back in 2009, to a Jonathan Stutz, but she hasn’t gotten over what happened to her. Warren dropped her like a hot rock; divorced her in late 2003 citing irreconcilab
le differences. She never saw it coming. She knew that Warren and Nicholson had been best friends since fifth grade, that they were inseparable, so she thought little of her husband spending so much time at their house. She said that after Peter’s death, Warren became reclusive, surly, but again she thought she understood what was going on, that he’d been deeply affected by his friend’s death. When he packed his bags and walked out of the door that day she was, in her own words, dumbfounded. She tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t see her, wouldn’t answer her calls or messages. She even turned up at his office a couple times, but wasn’t allowed in. The final blow came when he married Mary Ann. It was only then that she realized that they must have been having an affair, even before Nicholson’s death, but for how long she couldn’t even guess.

  “Warren married Mary Ann in March 2004, just twenty-two months after Peter’s death. They bought a house on Riverview, settled down, and kept a low profile. Over the next three years they had two children. The eldest, Catherine, was born in September 2004, just six months after they married. Ellis Jr. came a year later.”

  I sighed, dropped my pen on the pad, leaned back in my chair, threaded my fingers behind my neck, and stared up at the chandelier. It was a story I’d heard many times before in one form or another.

  “There’s more,” Heather said.

  “Oh yeah?” I asked, picking up the pen.

  “I talked to some of Peter Nicholson’s friends. It seems everyone knew about the affair but him, at least up until one of his friends and colleagues, Richie Dillon, filled him in. They were in the bar at Appleby’s having an after-work drink when things turned, as they always do,” she said dryly, “to the opposite sex. Apparently, Nicholson told Dillon that he hadn’t had sex with his wife for six months, that she was always making excuses not to. It was then that Dillon told him about Warren. That was about a month before the so-called accident.”

  “No kidding?” I’ve heard that one before too. Everybody in town knows about it but the poor sucker whose spouse is screwing around.