The Last Thing She Said

by Lauren Carr

  “It is a beautiful place you have, Matheson.” Kevin folded the handkerchief he had use to wipe his jeans and placed it into his pocket. “I’ve gotta hand it to you. All this fresh air would give me hives.”

  “It’s not for everyone.” With a grin, Chris went into the stall and proceeded to loosen the straps on Traveler’s saddle. “I assume Ripley told you.”

  Focused on the visitors, Sterling sat in the stall’s opening.

  “That you’ve been friends with a woman the whole world has been searching for the last forty years and you never knew it. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I was seven years old when Mercedes Livingston disappeared. At that age, I was more interested in becoming a Jedi knight than looking for missing authors.” Chris pulled the saddle off the horse. As he stepped over Sterling, Kevin and Ripley parted to allow him room to step into the aisle. “My mother had been Shannon’s best friend for almost four decades, and she didn’t even know it.” He carried the saddle into the tack room to put away.

  “The real irony in all this is that Chris’s father was one of the first detectives on the case.” Ripley scooped up a small tiger-striped cat scampering into the stall to protect it from being accidentally trampled by Traveler’s big hooves.

  “He was called in when Mercedes and George Livingston were first reported missing, but by the time he got to Shepherdstown, the feds were already on the scene and taking the lead.” Chris emerged from the tack room with a heavy towel.

  “That would be me.” Kevin held up a hand with a mocking expression of guilt before wiping down an old barn stool with his handkerchief. Once he was finished, he sat down and folded his arms. “That’s a very interesting story. You see, I ended up on the case totally by circumstance. I was dating this sweet young lady, who worked as an assistant to an executive with Billingsley’s corporation. Red hair. Big blue eyes.” He held up his hands to form a circle to illustrate. With a shake of his head, he repeated. “Sweetest girl.”

  “Do you remember her name?” Chris asked.

  “Peggy. North was her maiden name, before it became Crane. She ended up being my second wife.” Kevin smiled softly at the memory. “I had just divorced my first wife. Peggy and I had met on a blind date. Things were going well. When she ended up at the Bavarian Inn for a conference, she invited me to join her, all expenses paid. She was an attractive young woman. Elegant resort. How could I say no?”

  Ripley agreed. “How could you?”

  “Imagine my surprise when at breakfast, I ran into an old classmate of mine from boarding school.” Kevin chuckled at the memory.

  “Boarding school?” Chris stepped out of the stall. Who else had been in boarding school?

  “Unlike most agents, I joined the FBI out of a sense of public duty,” Kevin said. “Anyway, that’s irrelevant to the issue. You want to know how the feds ended up on the case so fast. Well, I ran into my old chum Gavin Fallon.”

  “From what we’ve found out, Fallon’s public relations firm coordinated the conference,” Chris said.

  “That’s right. When George Livingston was nowhere around to give his big presentation after the banquet, they realized no one had seen him since he had left to have dinner with his wife. Then, it was discovered that she was missing, as well. Next thing I know, Gavin Fallon was knocking on my hotel room door asking me to do my thing.”

  “What did you do?” Ripley asked.

  “Checked and secured his suite,” Kevin said with a lift of his shoulder. “Questioned witnesses to narrow down who had seen him last. Put out a BOLO on Mercedes Livingston’s rental car. At first, we assumed they had gotten into a car accident. Remember, back then, they didn’t have cell phones. If they’d gotten stuck in a ditch in the middle of nowhere, they’d have no way to let anyone know they were in trouble.”

  “If Fallon thought it was nothing more than a car accident,” Chris asked, “why did he feel compelled to bring in the FBI?”

  “Simply because I was there,” Kevin said. “Plus, I was a known quantity in their circle. They could trust me to be discreet and not allow the local police and media to blow things out of proportion. That’s why I pulled rank when the locals showed up.” He threw up his hands with a laugh. “I fully expected the Livingstons to ride up in a tow truck any minute and for everyone to have a hearty laugh over a big deal being made out of nothing.”

  “But that wasn’t what happened,” Ripley said. “When Horace Billingsley got the ransom demand in the middle of the night, you ended up investigating the crime of the century.”

  “Had Billingsley been contacted about Mercedes being missing before the ransom demand?” Chris asked.

  “No.” Kevin frowned. “I felt terrible about that, but that was Gavin’s call. At that point, we had no idea there had been an actual crime. It was decided to keep that news from Billingsley until they were found. Unfortunately, he found out when the kidnappers called him at three o’clock in the morning.”

  “Half a million dollars for his daughter and son-in-law,” Chris said. “But they didn’t have Mercedes because she hadn’t been abducted.”

  “How’d she do it?” Kevin asked Chris.

  Chris laid the heavy towel across Traveler’s sweaty back and went around to his head to loosen the straps on his bridle. “It was simple. She walked away and never looked back.”

  “I’m finding that very hard to believe. Damn it, Matheson. I’ve been investigating the Livingston case for the last forty years. Half a mil disappeared right under our noses. It took years for my career to recover from that. Now I find out it was all a set up.”

  Chris slipped the bridle off the horse and hung it on a hook next to the stall door. “Mercedes didn’t have anything to do with George’s abduction or his murder. Nor did she extort money from her father. She was a best-selling author with her own fortune.”

  “Which she siphoned out of her and her husband’s joint account into an off-shore account,” Ripley said while stifling a giggle from the cat nuzzling her jaw.

  “Our auditors told us Livingston’s books were all on the up and up,” Kevin said.

  “We have a witness who said George had discovered the missing money that weekend and fired one of his employees,” Chris said. “He was calling for a complete audit. Sounds like a motive for murder to me.”

  “Lucille Del Vecchio. But she was cleared … at least of the kidnapping.” Kevin rubbed the back of his neck. “What you’re telling me turns this whole case upside down. It never occurred to us that Mercedes Livingston was the perp.”

  “Mercedes was no perp.”

  “Well, she certainly wasn’t a victim if she made off with a ton of money from her murdered husband’s account,” Kevin said. “With him dead, he can’t exactly go after her, can he?”

  “It was their joint account,” Chris said. “Hollywood had paid her seven figures for the movie rights to her book. She’d made over a million in book royalties. In her letter, it says she only took one-point-three million. That’s a fraction of what was rightfully hers.”

  “Only?” Kevin chuckled. “If one of my wives took one-point-three million from our joint account and ran off with another man, I’d chase her down to the ends of the earth.” He dismissed the conversation with a wave of his hand. “I can see that you were quite fond of Mercedes. After all, she was a family friend. But you do know one of the primary rules of investigation. Follow the money.”

  “With all due respect, Crane, there’s another rule that comes before the follow-the-money rule. Establish”—Chris ticked off on his fingers—”motive, means, and opportunity.”

  “Motive,” Kevin said, “Mercedes wanted out of a loveless marriage to be with the man she loved.”

  “Why not just divorce him?” Ripley asked while rubbing her face into the kitten’s fur.

  “Since she made so much being a rich and famous author, she�
��d lose too much in community property,” Kevin said.

  “She lost more than that walking away,” Chris pointed out while toweling Traveler’s face. “Multiple homes. Stocks. Investments. Savings. Not to mention the copyright for her book, which still brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Plus, since she was presumed dead, she couldn’t make any claim to George’s estate. He was a company vice president and came from old money.”

  “That’s right,” Ripley said. “George Livingston had money of his own, and Mercedes was entitled to that as his wife.”

  “She walked away from all of that,” Chris said.

  Kevin frowned.

  “Maybe George Livingston got wind of her intention to leave him,” Ripley said while cuddling the purring cat. “He wasn’t going to let her go without a fight. He went to confront her before she left town. Things got physical and she killed him.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Kevin said.

  “Means.” Chris held up a second finger to join the first one. “What was the cause of death?”

  “All they found were his skeletal remains,” Kevin said. “ME determined that he had been strangled.”

  “Then anyone with hands and the knowledge of how to do it could have killed him.” Chris held up three fingers on one hand while rubbing Travelers’s neck with the other. “Opportunity.”

  “Hill House is a half hour from Shepherdstown and multiple witnesses said that George Livingston told them he was meeting his wife for dinner,” Kevin said with a grin. “The last time he was seen alive he was getting into the red Camaro that she had rented.”

  “Do you have any proof that the car he was climbing into was the exact same car that Mercedes had rented?” Chris asked. “Or was it just identical to the one she had rented?”

  Kevin frowned.

  “I didn’t think so,” Chris said. “Witnesses saw Mercedes leaving Hill House on foot at twenty after six and walking down the hill in the direction of Historic Harpers Ferry. She wasn’t driving. Were the keys in the car when it was found in the river the morning after the disappearances?”

  “In the ignition,” Kevin said.

  “Which means the killer had access to both the keys and the car.”

  “Which points to Mercedes Livingston.”

  “She could have left the keys in the car,” Chris said. “If she was walking away and didn’t intend to come back, why take steps to secure the rental car?”

  “Would George Livingston have gotten into the car with just anyone?” Ripley asked.

  “Depends on who was behind the wheel. Even so, Mercedes Livingston had an airtight alibi for when the ransom was dropped the next day.” Chris draped the moist towel across the top of the stall wall to dry.

  “That being?” Kevin asked.

  “Mercedes and her new husband were five hours away at a roadside hotel in Ocean City,” Chris said. “Mom helped her children pack up her house yesterday. They found a honeymoon photo album that Shannon had put together. It has the front-page of a local newspaper on the Sunday morning that they arrived and a picture of them with the desk clerk who checked them in. There is also a picture of them with the justice of the peace who married them on Monday morning. In the background is a wall clock with the time of nine-twenty-five.”

  “Monday morning? How did the justice of the peace not see that she was Mercedes Livingston?” Kevin asked. “Her kidnapping as national news by then.”

  “She’d cut her hair short and dyed it dark brown,” Chris said. “The point is that they were on the other side of Maryland when the ransom drop went down Sunday night.”

  “Unless they did all of that to establish alibis between road trips back and forth to pick up the ransom,” Kevin said.

  Ripley cringed. “But then when you go back to motive, Mercedes would have benefited more if she had just divorced George—even if she had to give up half of everything.”

  “She could have killed George in the heat of the moment and gotten help in dumping the body and collecting the ransom while she established an alibi for herself and her lover,” Kevin said.

  “When it comes right down to it,” Chris said while leading Traveler out of the stall and out into the pasture. “The Livingston case was not a kidnapping and murder. It was murder and extortion.”

  Ripley and Kevin followed Chris as he led the horse out to the pasture, green with fresh grass, next to the barn. Sterling laid down just inside the gate to eye the herd of horses, who lifted their heads to watch while Chris detached the lead to let Traveler loose.

  “Watch what he does,” Chris told them while latching the gate.

  With a whinny, Traveler broke into a gallop toward the herd. After running several feet, he dropped to the ground and rolled over onto his back. Feet up in the air, he grunted and squirmed with pleasure.

  “He does that every time,” Chris said with a chuckle before leading them back to the barn.

  “I guess we need to go back to the beginning and take a fresh look at this. Let’s start with reading our latest witness statement,” Kevin said. “When can I read the letter?”

  “When you give me a copy of your case file.”

  Kevin stopped at the barn door. “In case you didn’t know, I retired from the FBI twenty years ago. I don’t have the case file.”

  With a chuckle, Chris folded his arms and leaned against the doorframe. “If you don’t have a copy of the case file, then what good is the letter going to do you?”

  With a grumble, the retired agent narrowed his eyes.

  “Agents don’t ever make copies of case files to take home to work on their own time,” Ripley said with a sarcastic note while cradling the cat.

  “Especially those cases that got under their skin,” Chris said with a shake of his head.

  “What do you intend to do with that letter?” Kevin asked.

  “Find out who killed George Livingston. It was Shannon’s dying wish. I can’t not look into it.”

  Kevin scoffed. “Don’t waste your time, young man. You’ll find yourself in way over your head.”

  Chris concealed his surprise. It had been years since he’d been referred to as “young man.” But then, the Geezers called him “kid.”

  “George Livingston was murdered forty years ago,” Kevin said.

  “Cold cases get solved every day,” Chris said.

  “I have a whole agency—teams of licensed private investigators trained in the latest techniques to bust open these types of cases. You’re just one man with no one except a dog and a horse to help you.”

  Chris shot a glance at Ripley. When she opened her mouth to respond, he shook his head slightly. She remained silent.

  “Maybe you’re right, Crane,” Chris said with a broad grin. “You’ve got your fancy company with a ton of employees with all of their security clearances, and all I’ve got is a dog, a horse, and grit on my side.”

  “I’m glad you see things my way.” Kevin held out his hand. “So give me that letter.”

  “After I get a copy of your case file.”

  The two men stared each other down. The corner of Chris’s lip turned upward.

  “Okay.” Kevin finally relented. “I’ll give you a copy of my case file, but” –he held up his finger—“you’ve got to keep me in the loop about any and everything you uncover. Retired or not, this is my case. You won’t believe the work I’ve put into it over the years. Now that there’s a break,”—he shook his head.—“you can’t deny me the chance to be there at the end. Do you understand?”

  “Understood,” Chris said. “Just one more question.”

  “What about?”

  “When George Livingston first went missing, and you were talking to witnesses at the Bavarian to find out when he was seen last, what did his mistress say?”

  Kevin’s face turned white. He blinked. Then,
his expression turned blank. “Excuse me.”

  “George’s mistress?”

  “George was faithful to his wife. He never had any mistress.”

  “Ah, but since we now know that Mercedes was out of the area, then we know that she couldn’t have been driving the rental car that George was seen climbing into. He’d told witnesses that he was going to dinner with his wife. That wasn’t what Mercedes Livingston was telling her people in Shepherdstown. She was telling them she was going for drinks. Who would George be meeting that he didn’t want anyone to know about?” He grinned. “A mistress.”

  “Well, if George Livingston had a mistress, he did a very good job of hiding her because our investigation, and we turned Shepherdstown upside down, did not shake out any mistress.” Crane hurried back through the barn.

  With a shake of her head, Ripley placed the cat she had been holding into Chris’s arms. “You have no intention of sharing anything with him, do you?”

  A thin smile crossed Chris’s lips.

  Helen checked the time on her cruiser’s clock as she turned off Skyline Drive into her driveway. She had one hour and fifteen minutes to check in on Sierra, change her clothes, and get to Harpers Ferry in time for the book club meeting. Hoping she wouldn’t walk into a battle between the father and daughter, Helen grabbed her briefcase and hurried into the house.

  The pleasant scent of Thomas’s parmesan chicken cutlets hit her when she walked through the door. While delicious, the secret family recipe had been a sore point during their marriage because Thomas’s mother refused to pass on the recipe to her. He was permitted to cook it, but Helen wasn’t.

  Thomas greeted Helen at the door with a glass of chardonnay. “A welcome home to the lady of the house.” He flashed her a charming smile.

  Hesitant, Helen took the wineglass. Behind him, she saw that he was preparing garlic toast to put into the oven. “I hope you didn’t go to a lot of trouble to make all of this for me.”

  “It’s for the family. I realized that one of the mistakes we made was to not have dinner together on a regular basis.”