Burning Justice (13 page)

I
met
with Tony Royce three days later at Flo’s Diner, a greasy spoon just off the highway. Our meeting at the pizza place had been cancelled since Tony was busy processing Evangeline. It was just as well. I didn’t get released from the hospital until after seven that night anyway.

Flo’s was a throwback from the early 2000s known for their quick service. It was a bit out of the way, and that’s why I figured Tony picked it. He probably didn’t want Hale to see us meeting.

I’d almost canceled. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see this supposed evidence he had from my mother’s case. What good could it do? But the promise of Tony’s boyish grin and the answers to more questions about the Barrows case won out. It still stung that I didn’t get any recognition from the cops for catching the bad guy, but I was used to that.

We sat in a booth in the back corner, the kind with red Naugahyde seats that squeaked as you moved and an aluminum-edged table with a white and gold flecked Formica top.

The place was crowded. The murmur of diners and clanking of flatware on thick restaurant grade china provided a muffled backdrop for our conversation. It was breakfast time and the smell of crisp bacon made me second-guess my decision to skip the food.

We ordered coffees and passed the time with the usual idle chit-chat, waiting for our drinks to be delivered before we got down to the real reason for the meeting.

“You look good,” Tony said, then backtracked when he saw my pinch-browed expression. “I mean, it’s nice to see you outside of crime scenes, funeral parlors and hospitals.”

“Thanks, I think.” I laughed, eliciting a frown from Artemis who was sitting on a chrome swivel stool at the counter. He’d insisted on positioning himself here ahead of time so he could keep an eye on me ‘just in case’ Tony tried ‘something’. He said his computer programs picked up a ‘vibe’, but he was acting a lot like he was jealous. I humored him, figuring it was better to have input on his plan rather than have him randomly show up and stare in the window at us.

My gaze drifted out the window where my PTV gleamed in the sun. As I watched, it looked like the right headlight blinked on for a split second, giving the impression the vehicle was winking at me. Must have been an optical illusion. Probably just the reflection of the sun off the glass door of the diner as it swung open to let another customer in.

I turned my attention back to Tony, my heart giving a teeny jump at seeing him across the table from me. I didn’t go out a lot and it was kind of nice to have coffee with someone. It was
almost
like a date. I wondered if Tony felt the same way.

As I gazed into his gray eyes, I realized I should probably turn the conversation toward the business at hand before Artemis did something crazy. I wasn’t in the market for a boyfriend and I still had unanswered questions about the Barrows case.

I noticed the pink-aproned waitress heading our way with two mugs and my taste buds started dancing in anticipation of the creamy latte I had ordered. She slid a mug in front of me. It was filled with watery brown liquid.

“I’m sorry. I ordered a
caramel latte
.” I tilted the mug in her direction. “This looks like something else.”

A pained expression crossed her face. “I’m sorry, ma’am. We don’t have the fancy latte machines here. All we have is that thing over there and it doesn’t always do as it's told.”

She jerked her head in the direction of the corner and I slid my eyes over to see a shiny, chrome Mr. Caffeine. I could have sworn it winked at me.

My spirits sank. “Oh. I know how they can be. I’ll just drink this.”

I took a sip of the weak, tepid brew. It tasted like dirty dishwater. I glared at the Mr. Caffeine while I went over my questions about the case in my head.

“Have you guys been able to get any more information out of Evangeline Barrows?” I asked.

“She’s tried to cut a deal with us, full disclosure on everything David did at Barrows Investments in exchange for a lenient sentence on the murder. Naturally, she’s making it sound as if David was the mastermind and she had no choice but to go along with him, but my feeling is she was just as bad as him. She’s the vindictive type—seems pissed off that David overdid the clue dropping and that’s what got them caught.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“The lies about the Harrisons and telling you that Jenny was at Nathan’s after the fire. She said those were not necessary.”

“Sounds like David is in a boatload of trouble. I guess you can’t trust anyone these days, not even your murder accomplice.”

Tony laughed. “That’s for sure and now that Nathan is recovering, he’s made sure she won’t get any money for lawyers.”

I was happy Nathan was going to make a full recovery physically, but mentally, he’d probably be in bad shape for a while. I couldn't imagine having your wife and brother conspiring to frame you for embezzlement and murder and then trying to kill you was something you recovered from too easily.

“That was quite an elaborate scheme she worked up. She must have been planning that for a while. I wonder if she ever really loved Nathan.” I said.

“I don't think so. Sadly, she hooked up with him because he was rich. Then she discovered David was embezzling money and she hooked up with him. The two of them hatched this plan to blame it all on Nathan.”

“It was a pretty involved plan.”

“It was. She put a lot of time into the details, including the one about hiring you.”

“I wondered about that. Why
did
she hire me?”

“She knew of your reputation. Their plan was to set things up so that you
thought
you were following Nathan. Except it would really be David disguised as Nathan. Then they would orchestrate it so you witnessed him doing incriminating things. She was initially going to have you do surveillance that night out by the boat. You would see her, Nathan and Jenny walking to the boat. Then, later on, after you had gone home, they would set the boat on fire. Your testimony that you’d been tailing Nathan and what you had seen would have gone a long way toward nailing him.”

I pressed my lips together. “She must have been pissed when I didn’t want to take the case. That explains why she shoved the money through my door and insisted I look into it.”

“She hoped that you’d change your mind. When you didn’t call her back that night, she decided to go ahead with it anyway. She’d already planted the seed that Nathan was trying to kill her in your office and she knew you’d tell that to the cops. It was almost as good as having you accept her offer.” Tony smiled and looked at me with something akin to admiration. “Turns out it was a mistake for her to try to force you to take the money. It made you continue with the investigation. If it wasn’t for your persistence, she might have gotten away with it.”

Finally, some recognition. “So, she was always going to kill Jenny? How did she manage to get Jenny to have those cheek implants. That seems like it was the key to her plan.”

“It turns out she and Jenny knew each other from before. They’d done a few scams together in the past. Evangeline had changed her name and come up here to make a new start … or run a new scam. She was still in contact with Jenny and roped her in by telling Jenny she needed her help to run a scam on Nathan. She promised to cut Jenny in. That’s how she got Jenny to pretend to be their domestic helper and to have the cosmetic surgery.”

I frowned. “What kind of scam was that?”

“She told Jenny it was the terms of the pre-nup that if Nathan cheated on her, she got a large amount of money. So, Jenny had to pose as their domestic helper to establish that Nathan knew her. Evangeline had the cheek implants done and told Jenny that it was at Nathan’s insistence. She claimed Nathan liked high cheekbones in his women. She made Jenny get them, too, and told her that she had forged the checks with Nathan’s name, making it appear as if Nathan was paying for the surgery. Something a rich man might do for the woman he was having an affair with. And it served a dual purpose—she’d be able to switch the patient numbers later and make it look like
she
was the one who had perished in the fire and it would be one other thing to show that Nathan was having an affair with Jenny.”

“And the whole time, she had poor Nathan believing she was just doing all that because she was friends with Jenny. I feel sorry for him, but I’m also pretty mad she tried to use
me
to make her scam more believable and make an innocent man look guilty.” No wonder I thought she’d been lying to me in my office. She had! And my instincts to not take the case had been spot on. My lips curled in a smug smile—even though Evangeline had tried to use me to get away with murder, in the end I’d been the one who had exposed her.

“That’s right. And David, too. He knew exactly who you were when you went over to Nathan’s with that neighbor of yours. In fact, they were almost counting on you going there.”

I grimaced. “Oh, you knew I went there?”

“Not until Evangeline told us. She said that David used the opportunity to try to gloss over Nathan’s statement that Jenny and Evangeline were friends. And later, at the wake, he told you the lie about the neighbors at the cabin.” Tony leveled me with a look. “By the way, Hale took a dim view of you going over there to visit Nathan, especially since it was under false pretenses.”

I shrugged. “Just another day in the life of a private investigator. But it turns out David and Evangeline tried to get a little too tricky. That lie about the people at the cabin is one of the things that tripped them up.”

“I guess David didn’t expect the Harrisons to talk to the police. Evangeline said they don’t usually like to cooperate with the cops and figured we would need some sort of subpoena to get them to talk.”

I remembered how suspicious and tight-lipped Rhoda Harrison had been. I could see why David had made that assumption. “If they weren’t murderers, I’d almost admire their aptitude for planning.”

“They thought of everything. Evangeline upped the amount on her life insurance policy, electronically signing in as Nathan so it would appear as if he'd done it. She also bought the tickets the morning after the boat fire in his name. She wanted to make it look like he was planning a quick getaway with Jenny.”

“Right. She would be the only one with access and passwords to Nathan’s accounts but everyone thought she was dead, so we’d all assume it was Nathan.”

Royce sipped his coffee. “And she even went to great lengths to make it seem like Jenny was still alive.”

“That’s right! Jenny’s neighbor saw her in the hall with a suitcase the day after the fire.” I didn’t mention the part about how we’d seen Jenny, or who we thought was Jenny, on the super shuttle station video.

“Yep. She’d had Jenny cut her hair in that unusual trendy fashion and then bought a wig to match so that she could impersonate her later on. We found the wig receipt in her hotel room, along with eighty grand in cash and some diamonds.”

“Eighty grand in cash? From the safety deposit box?” I remembered Artemis’s estimation that the weight reduction was the same as a hundred grand. Apparently, he hadn’t figured in the weight of a few diamonds.

“How do you now about the safety deposit box?”

Artemis coughed over at the counter and I resisted looking in his direction.

“Oh, I have my ways...”

Tony looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I hoped he wasn’t trying to figure out if I’d crossed the line in some of my investigation techniques. But instead of a scowl like Hale would’ve had, Tony’s face cracked in a smile of appreciation. “It must be nice to be able to get things done without the complication of police department red-tape.”

“It sure is. But I always try to stay within the limits of the law,” I said, just in case.

“The safety deposit box was another mistake. Only Nathan and Evangeline had access to it. By the rules of the bank, anyone with thumbprint access can get in but there is no record of actually
whose
thumbprint was used. Evangeline figured everyone thought she was dead, so cleaning it out could do double duty for her—they would assume Nathan was the one taking everything out to make a getaway and Evangeline could pocket all the money.”

“I still don’t get why she would go to the trouble of faking her own death. It seems like it would have been easier just to get rid of Nathan. Then she would inherit everything he had.”

“She figured that was too risky. Especially with her background. If anyone became suspicious about Nathan’s death and started to investigate, it would look bad for her. And you know how it is, the spouse is always the one we look at first.”

“Right just like how we looked at Nathan first for Evangeline’s death.” I took a sip from the mug. It still tasted like old dishwater. “Did they intend to kill Nathan all along?”

Royce shook his head. “No. They had hoped that Nathan would be arrested for Evangeline’s death. Jenny had no friends or family, so they figured it would look like she disappeared. Evangeline’s plan was to just change her identity. She’d done it many times before. And after making it look like Nathan was the one embezzling from the company, she and David would take off to parts unknown. He’d already moved a small fortune from Barrows Investments into a satellite account, so Evangeline didn’t mind pretending she was dead and walking away from everything she had with Nathan.”

“There’s one thing that I can't figure out,” I said. “Grindley said he saw two women and a man going out to the boat that night. I figured it was Evangeline, Jenny and David. But how did they get Jenny to stay on the boat and then blow it up?”

“Jenny thought she was in on the scam with both David and Evangeline. Evangeline staged the fight with Nathan so he would take off for the cabin. That’s where he always retreated to when they fought. Then they drugged Jenny. Apparently, Jenny was starting to get restless and they had to speed up their plan before she ruined things.”

I remembered Gerta saying she’d heard Jenny and Evangeline fighting. Jenny must have confronted Evangeline and they argued. “So that’s why they were lurching. Jenny couldn’t even walk.”