Hot Money (13 page)

“She went where?” Liza suddenly blurted, drawing a warning glance from Michael.

“What?” Molly demanded.

Michael finally thanked the disappointed housekeeper and said good night. He turned around. “It seems that Mrs. MacDonald is in Europe. Paris, possibly. Maybe Rome. Could be London.”

“In other words, she’s skipped the country.”

“Indeed.”

“That certainly puts a new wrinkle into things, doesn’t it?” Molly muttered.

“It’s certainly beginning to make her look guilty as hell, especially if these vague travel plans of hers were made in the past forty-eight hours or so. Any clue who her travel agent might be?”

Liza retrieved her overstuffed notebook and thumbed through it. “Here’s the woman most everyone in Coral Gables society circles uses. I can’t swear that Patrice did, but it’s worth a shot.”

“I don’t suppose you have her home number,” Michael said.

“Of course,” Liza said. “What good is a travel agent if you can’t get her in the middle of the night?”

“Obviously Patrice is of the same mind,” Molly noted as Michael dialed the number on his cellular phone. She listened intently to his conversation with the travel agent. It wasn’t going nearly as well as he might have liked.

“No, ma’am,” he said politely, but firmly. “You don’t have the same sort of privileged information situation that an attorney would have. You can make this difficult, but I will get a subpoena. Your boss might not like the fact that an employee did not cooperate with the police, especially when that fact is likely to turn up splashed all over tomorrow morning’s newspaper.”

Molly grinned at the thought of Michael actually divulging information to Ted Ryan intentionally. Fortunately, it appeared it wouldn’t come to that. He was murmuring approvingly at whatever the woman was telling him. “Yes, thank you. You’ve been a tremendous help.”

As soon as he’d hung up, he said, “London. It was the first flight the agent could get her on Monday.”

“Then it hadn’t been planned.”

“Nope. In fact, the poor old girl had to fly coach.”

Molly tried to envision Patrice MacDonald murdering Tessa, then jetting off to hide out in some cottage in the Cotswolds or having afternoon tea at some swank London hotel. It was a difficult image to conjure up. However, if Patrice actually had intentionally left the rest of them to muster up alibis and undergo police interrogations, Molly could think of a few hundred people who might want to buy round-trip tickets to England themselves just so they could tell Patrice what they thought of her before dragging her back for prosecution.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Liza said, echoing Molly’s thoughts. “Patrice doesn’t strike me as the sort of woman who’d skip the country to avoid being charged with a crime. She’s so arro-gant, she’d be convinced she could hire a hotshot defense lawyer and beat the rap.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Michael said, already punching in what Molly suspected was Detective Abrams’s number.

“Will he fly over to question her?” Molly asked when he’d explained the situation to the Miami detective and hung up again.

“If he eventually has enough evidence against her, yes. If it’s all circumstantial—and for the moment it is—he figures the brass will want him to wait until he digs up something more solid before going after a woman with her standing in the community.”

“Like what? A witness who saw her club Tessa with that candlestick?” Molly said derisively. “We already know no one saw that.”

“Do we?” Michael said.

Molly’s gaze narrowed. “Is there a witness?”

“Let’s just say that no one has come forward at this time. That doesn’t mean that someone didn’t see the murderer and Tessa together instants before the crime and just hasn’t put the two things together yet. Or perhaps he or she is holding out to protect the killer.”

“So we just sit around and wait?” Liza said dejectedly.

Molly shared her impatience. “Couldn’t we do something in the meantime? Maybe give Patrice a call?” she suggested hopefully.

“Absolutely not,” Michael said.

“But we could sound her out, see what her mood is, determine if she’s on the run.”

Michael grinned despite himself. “You sound like a bad TV script.”

Liza scowled at him. “It is entirely possible that she simply decided to go on a shopping spree or that she hadn’t had a decent scone in months. Maybe she’s merely soothing her ego after the way Clark Dupree betrayed her. That sounds more like Patrice.”

“Why are you making excuses for her?” Michael asked. “A few minutes ago you were ready to hang her.”

“We weren’t ready to hang her,” Molly retorted defensively, knowing full well that they had been. They had latched on to Patrice as the killer faster than old Roger had made his unexpected moves on Liza. “We just got caught up in the way all the evidence was pointing. Now that we’ve had time to think it through, it doesn’t make sense. I can’t see a woman like Patrice clubbing Tessa over the head and shoving her into the bay to die.”

“I hope you won’t mind if I don’t report your change of heart to Detective Abrams,” Michael said.

The remark seemed a little snide to Molly. “Maybe you should. He shouldn’t waste all his energy chasing the wrong suspect, while the real murderer gets away.”

While all three adults in the car scowled at each other, Brian scrambled from the back of the wagon to the front. “Are we ever gonna eat?” he inquired plaintively. “I’m starved.”

“Soon,” Molly murmured distractedly. “Liza, did Patrice take off like this all the time?”

“I have no idea.”

Michael nodded reluctantly. “You’re wondering if this is just the way she deals with any little upset in her life, by taking a European holiday?”

“Exactly. Maybe the travel agent could tell you that.”

“I’ll try,” he said and called the woman back. He apologized for intruding again on her evening. “I just got to wondering if Mrs. MacDonald was in the habit of taking unexpected trips like this.”

Apparently the answer was a terse and emphatic no.

“She’s never been this impulsive, then?” he said. “Okay, thanks. By the way, what was the name of the hotel where you said she always stays in London? Got it,” he said, scribbling it down. “Thanks.”

He met Liza and Molly’s disappointed gazes evenly. “She has never taken a vacation without meticulously planning it ahead of time. The travel agent said she was thoroughly flustered when she called Monday morning and insisted only that she be on a flight by that night. She didn’t even seem to care where it took her. Nor, by the way, did she book the return flight. The ticket is open-ended.”

“Let Liza call her,” Molly coaxed, more convinced than ever that Patrice hadn’t fled to escape prosecution for Tessa’s murder. “Patrice would stare down any judge or jury that tried to convict her. On the other hand, flight might well be the response of a woman whose pride was in tatters. Liza might be able to get her to open up. She could say she was calling about committee business that couldn’t wait.” Molly glanced at Liza. “Couldn’t you even manufacture an emergency meeting of the coalition board? Patrice wouldn’t miss that.”

“I could,” Liza said, regarding Michael intently. “I was going to schedule one for the end of this week or the beginning of next anyway. I could tell her that, ask when would be best for her. That would tell us when she plans to be back. What do you think?”

After several moments of thoughtful deliberation, he held out the slip of paper and the cellular phone. “Give it a try.”

Liza took down the name of the London hotel, but shook her head. “Not now. With the time difference it’s the middle of the night. With all the traveling I do, she knows I’d know that and wouldn’t risk waking her unless something dreadful had happened. We don’t want her getting suspicious and running, if she is guilty.”

“You’re right,” Michael agreed. “You’ll call her first thing in the morning, then?”

“First thing, her time,” Liza said. “I’m never in bed before two or three in the morning anyway. She ought to be sipping her morning tea about then.”

“You’ll beep me?” he said. “No matter what time it is?”

Liza grinned at him. “You’ll be the first to know.” She glanced at Molly. “Or at least the second.”

“First,” he insisted.

“You could hear the news together,” she suggested with a sly wink as she slid out of the car. “Bye-bye. Enjoy your dinner.”

Molly glanced at Michael to see how he was taking Liza’s innuendo. His lips were twitching, as if he was trying very hard to control a grin.

“First your son, now your best friend,” he said idly. “A man could begin to wonder if the whole family intends to gang up on him.”

“Not mine,” Molly said with absolute certainty, imagining her parents’ outrage at the mere idea of her being married to a lowly cop. “They’re still holding out for me to stop all this independent foolishness and go back to Hal.”

Michael regarded her in astonishment. “They took his side in the divorce?”

“They took his side from the day I met him. In fact, that probably had a lot to do with why we got married in the first place. They were ecstatic that a man of his obvious promise and ambition wanted me.” Since she couldn’t hide her bitterness over that, she glanced pointedly at Brian, who was playing with one of his hand-held computer games. “Could we talk about something else, please?”

Michael reached across and squeezed her hand. The sympathetic gesture immediately brought the sting of tears to her eyes. Apparently he saw them.

“Molly?” he said gently. “You okay?”

She gave him a watery, forced smile. “Just terrific. I’ll be even better once I have a plateful of pasta in front of me. Comfort food, right?”

“So they say,” he said. “I always thought it was black beans and rice.”

She grinned at the cultural variations between them. “In actual fact, I always reach for hot, yeasty bread. I can remember our housekeeper baking every Friday so we’d have homemade bread and rolls for the weekend. She used to let me sit in the kitchen. Later, whenever I felt down or lonely, that’s where I’d go and Arnetta would pull out the flour and the yeast and start baking up a storm.” It occurred to her that she wouldn’t mind sitting in that kitchen right now with Arnetta mothering her.

“I’m surprised you don’t bake bread yourself, then.”

“I do,” she surprised him by saying. Then she chuckled. “Mostly, it’s inedible. Just ask Brian.”

“Ask Brian what?” he chimed in from the back as they pulled into the crowded restaurant parking lot just off South Dixie Highway.

“If my homemade bread is any good.”

“Yuck,” he said succinctly. “But it smells pretty good.”

“Talk about damning with faint praise,” Molly grumbled, but her spirits were slowly improving, as if just thinking about the housekeeper who’d been her surrogate mother had calmed her fears about Hal’s threats. Unfortunately, just as they were sitting down to the much delayed dinner, and just as she was pushing thoughts of her ex-husband out of her mind again, Michael brought everything back.

“Have you considered sitting down and talking with the jerk?” he asked reasonably.

Molly glanced at Brian, worried about his reaction to the start of this particular conversation. He was busy with the garlic roll he’d snatched up first thing to stave off starvation. He seemed far more interested in consuming the entire basket of rolls than in anything they might have to say.

“Wouldn’t talking to DeWitt be better than a court fight?” Michael prodded.

“I don’t have any idea what I could say to Hal that I haven’t said already,” Molly responded. “Besides, we never talk anymore. We argue. He attacks and I respond. It escalates from there. You’ve seen us in action yourself.”

“I’ve also seen you be pretty persuasive when you set your mind to it.”

“I wasn’t able to persuade you to help me find Tessa Lafferty’s killer,” she reminded him. “It took Detective Abrams to do that.”

“That’s different.” He leaned closer and touched her cheek. “Talk to the man, Molly. You connected once. Surely neither of you has changed so much that you can’t manage to see eye to eye on something as important as Brian.”

Molly wondered about that. She had changed tremendously since the days when she was a naive college girl who’d tumbled head over heels in love with handsome, self-confident Hal DeWitt. He had possessed all the strength and certainty that she hadn’t. It was only after she’d grown up, pretty much against his will, and discovered that she had a mind of her own that they’d begun to have problems.

“If you want her to see my dad, does that mean you and Mom aren’t gonna get married?” Brian demanded indignantly once he’d polished off the entire basket of rolls, a salad, and two slices of pizza.

Molly winced at the blunt question.

“We’ll talk about that another time,” Michael told him, apparently unflustered by Brian’s enthusiasm for that particular solution. “Let’s see how things go.”

“You won’t forget?” Brian prodded, apparently well aware of how any conversation Molly might have with his father was likely to go.

Michael met his gaze evenly, man to man. “Have you ever known me to forget a promise?”

Satisfied, Brian nodded. “Okay.”

It seemed that the evening was destined to end with a lot of promises on the line. Reluctantly taking Michael’s advice to heart after he’d left her to do some more soul-searching, she dialed Hal’s home number.

“We need to talk,” she announced without preamble. “Can you meet me in the Grove?”

To her amazement, he didn’t argue. “When?”

“A half hour at Cocowalk.”

“What about Brian?”

Molly resented the accusing tone of the question, but under the circumstances she supposed it was a fair one. “Liza will watch him. I’ll meet you in front and we’ll see which place has a quiet table.”

Only when they were seated across from each other did she note the worry lines creasing his brow, the shadows beneath his clear blue eyes. He’d given up trying to disguise his receding hairline, which actually seemed sort of sexy on him.

“You look lousy,” she told him.

A faint smile tugged at his lips. “Is that supposed to win me over?”