The deepest kill, p.15
The Deepest Kill, page 15
Ellie found herself nodding. Martin valued peace and privacy, and of course what he valued, the household valued. Ellie hadn’t had any idea what his daughter had looked like or that she was married or that she was pregnant until the disappearance. So it didn’t seem odd that Kayla wouldn’t recognize the son-in-law of the third-richest man in the country.
But surely once Ashley disappeared—
“My girlfriend didn’t have any idea who he was either, and the three of us wound up hanging out in the hotel bar until all hours. He asked if he could see me again, really polite. So of course I said sure.”
She stole another guilty glance at Ashley’s father. Martin said nothing, and the FBI agent didn’t either. He had advised her not to speak, and because she chose to anyway this speech counted as “spontaneous statements.” Therefore it should be admissible in court, if it came to that. Ellie figured Michael must be scrambling back and forth in his mind—was he blowing the case by not terminating this impromptu interview, or would it be okay? They formed three witnesses to say the statements were spontaneous, but three witnesses for the prosecution who would easily be portrayed by defense as biased. Would “the Kia interrogation” go down in FBI history as brilliant or a brilliantly effed-up blot on his career? She felt for the agent, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. In the enclosed space of the small car it felt as if Kayla had burst like a geyser and turned the air to steam. Ellie wiped beads of sweat from the back of her neck.
“So we started going out, but—God, I should have known something was up!” A change came over her voice, a note of regret mixed with annoyance. “It was almost always during the day. Maisie at Ulta told me, that’s a red flag, you sure he ain’t two-timing? But he said he worked evenings at OakTree, that he was on a project with another guy who was kinda eccentric and wouldn’t come in until late—that was probably all a lie, wasn’t it?” she suddenly demanded of Ellie, without giving her a chance to respond even if she could think of something to say. “How could I have been so stupid? Everything was there. I never met his friends. He could come over to my teeny little apartment but I never went to his, nooo—he said he roomed with two other coders and had no privacy.” She reconsidered this in light of the new information. “Does he even have an apartment?” she asked, again of Ellie.
“In—a way.” If you could consider a wing of the Post estate as an “apartment.”
“I figured he was sleeping”—Kayla gulped—“at the unit even though you’re not supposed to do that there, but it’s not as if they’re going to check. I felt sorry for him. Seriously? He drove a Bugatti but he had to share a crappy apartment? He said he won the car in a poker game. And I believed him!”
She wound down for another stop sign.
Martin spoke, calmly now. “I think I remember you.”
Kayla’s head whirled around, bones audibly cracking, then faced front again just as abruptly. “You do?”
“At the Ritz, yes. It was the GS12 phone. Who let you in? It was a closed event.”
The smooth voice didn’t fool her—the head of whichever security guard she and her friend had finessed would roll if she gave them up, and she spoke firmly to say she didn’t remember. “I wasn’t paying attention to the party, only the free food . . . eat a little, flirt a little, go home. But then I met Greg.”
Despite her agitation, her face softened at the memory.
“He was so nice. I wore my pink Donna Karan A-line dress, the one with the ruffles, though . . . it’s not really Donna Karan, and it was kinda a mistake because it’s too low-cut on me and those tech guys act like they’re still in college at a toga party, but Greg didn’t stare at my boobs once. He listened. I talked more than he did. On our first date he came to my door with three-dozen pink roses, he said because I’d been wearing a pink dress and because red would be too presumptuous. But that time I was wearing a red dress and we both laughed and laughed.”
Ellie watched her losing herself in the memory until the pickup behind them blew its horn, long and hard. The light had changed to green.
Kayla drove on. “He really was respectful. We didn’t have sex until—”
“Miss Parker,” Michael interrupted again. “It would be best if this could wait for a more formal setting.”
“I know, I know—and it is Miss, you know. I’m not married.”
She stole another look at the face in her rearview mirror as if seeking confirmation that she had been a victim, not a player. She didn’t get it from Greg’s father-in-law, so she doubled down: “I just want to make it clear, I didn’t know he was married. I swear I didn’t know.”
Ellie wanted to pat the girl’s hand and make soothing noises, assure her that of course she hadn’t. But that might encourage her to talk more when she should stop, and besides, Ellie didn’t feel entirely sure of Kayla. The quaver had left her voice and in its place, a sort of definite quality made the words feel slightly rehearsed.
But of course they should have been—in the two weeks since Ashley’s disappearance, Kayla must have realized the world would find her. Not if, only when.
As if she could hear Ellie’s thoughts, Kayla continued. “I’d seen the news about Ashley, right away. I thought it was really sad, but I never connected Greg to it, other than working at OakTree. I never saw him on the news, not at first.”
“He didn’t want to talk to the media,” Martin said, “until I made him.”
Ellie glanced round at him. His face could have been carved from granite, unmoving and cold.
“It was almost a week later . . . my day off, I was puttering around, washing some dishes, and had the TV on. A news break came on about Ashley still being lost at sea. I thought that’s such an old-fashioned way to put it—and then Greg was on the screen, making a statement, asking for help!” Here Kayla gave a gasping sob, put her hand to her mouth, then made a sharp turn onto Goodlette, pulling in too tightly behind a dump truck. Despite its tattered fabric covering, its load of sand blew steadily out of its dump box. Ellie couldn’t see it but could hear the nonstop rain of hard, tiny grains. “I thought, okay, maybe that’s Greg’s sister, but then I thought no, he’s an only child, well, maybe it’s a neighbor—I couldn’t believe it when it said he was the husband!” The word came out as a slight wail, and then the geyser pulsed again as tears flowed anew. “That has never happened to me! I’ve dated guys who were jerks, who had arrest records, who lied and said they didn’t live with their parents, who lied and said they were executives when they worked in the mail room, but I’ve never had one lie about being married!
“And oh, we had such a fight! I called him immediately, he didn’t answer. I called for two hours and then finally I went to the storage unit. I knew he’d have to come back there eventually and I would damn well wait until he did. I’d call in sick to work for a week if I had to, but he was going to see me.”
“How did you get in?” Martin suddenly thought to ask.
“I have the code. And a key to the unit.”
Ellie glanced at him again. So much for his triple encryption and door that could bear up under a bazooka. Greg had simply lowered the drawbridge and let a major security risk walk right in.
“About five that afternoon he walked in, pretending like he knew I’d figure out to meet him there. He didn’t try to deny it, I’ll give him that—he immediately said he couldn’t answer my calls because he’d had to destroy the phone we used, there were too many people around him all the time.”
Martin jumped on this. “What did he do with the phone?”
“Miss Parker—” Michael tried again.
“Do you have a lawyer?” Ellie asked her.
Martin burst out “Carr!”—to remind her who she worked for and how that was not Kayla Parker.
Ellie didn’t care. Kayla’s rights had to be protected, or else the considerable mountain of information she possessed might be tossed right out on the courthouse steps.
Kayla said, “Me? Like, my own lawyer? Of course not. No! Anyway Greg said he soaked the phone in his fish tank, and then tossed it out his window on the way to the unit. And . . . he said he hadn’t meant to lie to me.”
From the very first moment? Ellie thought. When he’d taken off his wedding ring at a company function? She wondered where Ashley had been that night. She wouldn’t have been pregnant at that time, close to a year ago.
“I was so angry. But he said . . . he just . . . he and Ashley . . .”
Don’t, Ellie silently warned, tell Ashley’s father how Greg described his child as an overbearing harpy who “didn’t understand him.”
She didn’t. “But I know he didn’t do anything to her. He really cared about her. He couldn’t leave her alone during the pregnancy, that’s why he hadn’t told me about her or her about me. He wanted to wait at least until the baby came, to get her through that.”
What a prince, Ellie thought.
“And he was with me that day. The whole day!”
“Which day?” Michael asked, probably unable to help himself.
“The day she disappeared. We were at his unit. I had that day off too, and I wasn’t feeling that great—my cold was beginning then—so usually we’d go to the beach or Tin City or the casino, get dinner on Fifth or something, but I wanted to curl up and drink coffee and binge-watch The Haunting of Hill House. I love scary movies,” she confided to Ellie. “So we were there from, like, early, before lunch, until—I don’t know, dinnertime; he was starving but I had no appetite. I just wanted to cuddle. That was the last time we—well, never mind.”
A convenient little alibi, Ellie thought. If it was true. Kayla and Greg had had two weeks to work on it.
But the young woman seemed genuinely outraged that Greg had lied to her, that he had betrayed her so. She had nothing to gain from Ashley’s death that Ellie could see . . . surely Martin had the real money tied up in an airtight prenup, so even if Kayla walked down the aisle with Greg in the future, it wouldn’t net her anything close to Ashley’s assets.
So, no reason to invent an alibi for a killer—other than love. And a girl who wore earrings in the shape of butterflies might believe in love.
Mercifully, the trip had ended. “Pull in here,” Michael instructed.
“The police department?” Kayla squeaked, and Ellie wondered where she’d thought they’d been heading—Starbucks?
Too bad. She really could use some coffee.
Chapter 25
By the time Ellie had been returned to the SecuritySite U Store It to retrieve the rental, mercifully unmolested in the fracas, heavy clouds made the sky unnaturally dim. And by the time she made the drive through rush hour traffic back to the temporary Locard headquarters—i.e., Paul and Joanna’s house—people in Seoul were waking up to find out that Greg Anderson had a mistress, and that mistress had provided an alibi for the day of Ashley’s murder.
“Toldja so,” Rachael said, stirring something in a pot on the stove.
“No, you said he was lying. You didn’t specify it was about a mistress.”
“Oldest story in the book. There’s probably a blurb about it written in cuneiform on a stone tablet somewhere. New love, but still chained to the ball and an in-law who wielded so much power that losing your job would be the easiest part of the divorce.”
Ellie rushed to clarify what had become, to her, the more pressing topic: “Are you cooking?”
“Woman does not live by stale crackers alone. At least not this woman.”
“You are my new best friend.”
“You mean I wasn’t already? I stopped at a grocery on my way back from the ME’s office—we’re positive that pole made the indentation in the vertebra. All characteristics match. The blow was more or less straight on, and angled slightly upward.”
“But the food.”
“Did you hear what—”
“Yes, the right pole. Great job. But I can’t focus when my stomach wants to somersault over to the stove and dive in.”
“Can’t.” Rachael replaced the lid on the pot, turned the burner’s temperature down, and turned around to lean her back against the counter. “It’s just some beef with okra, but it needs to simmer a good forty-five minutes.”
“Agony.”
“You’ll survive.”
Just then a bolt of lightning lit up the dim sky, so bright it seemed a camera flash had gone off in the breakfast nook.
“Dayam!” Rachael burst out. “What—was that lightning? Or have the media mounted a frontal assault?”
“Lightning.”
“And . . . it does that every day?”
“No. Only in the rainy season.”
Ellie’s boss squinted at her, as if scanning for sarcasm and not entirely sure of her results. But she said only, “What about the money? Is there a huge life insurance policy? Does Greg get a share of the Post estate in the event of Ashley’s death?”
“No. Martin confirmed that for me on the way back to the storage unit,” Ellie told her. The brilliant man had seemed to be thinking things through aloud, and not caring if she or the nice patrol officer who chauffeured them overheard. “Greg doesn’t benefit financially from Ashley’s death, period. Martin had insisted on a prenup—and if there’s one thing I think we’ve learned from this family, it’s that if Martin insists, then that’s what happens—and Ashley didn’t even have life insurance. Martin thought it was a waste of money, which I guess makes sense. It’s hardly as if the Posts wouldn’t be able to afford a funeral or the baby’s college tuition.”
“Huh. So why kill her? Not to mention your own child . . . that’s pretty damn cold. Though if he is that cold, he might have figured once the baby was born he’d never get away from the Posts. He’d be tied up with them forever.”
“I don’t know.” Ellie heard a note of hopelessness in her own voice. “It’s a marriage, so who knows. Maybe Ashley was not the sweet girl she seemed. Maybe he’s not the overgrown frat boy he seems. Maybe he was a Chinese plant the whole time.”
“A what?”
Ellie slumped into a chair. “There’s a lot of high tech here that any company in the world would kill to get their hands on. Maybe Greg secretly worked for EntreRobotics and told them where to find her. They tried to snatch the laptop, she struggled, they killed her.”
“Maybe Ashley secretly worked for EntreRobotics, and Martin killed her.”
Ellie protested: “Uh-uh, no way. In a fit of anger, maybe, but a premeditated plan, no. Ashley was the most important thing in his life, hands down. More than his wife, more than his company.”
“So a betrayal would be that much more—”
“Maybe. But I doubt it. It would really help to know what was on Ashley’s laptop, but there’s no trace of it, and even if someone could tell me, I wouldn’t know what they were talking about.”
Rachael took a seat as well, and told her that the Locard secretary, Carrie, had called to give the results of the swabs they had overnighted.
“They’re done already?”
“The chem prof let his students do a cage match between the GC-mass spec and the FTIR on that sticky stuff you found on the boat.”
“Who won?”
A gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer worked by “volatizing” the sample, turning it to a gas, and then using a second, inert gas to inject the sample through a capillary column filled with a solid substance. Different compounds became separated as each type took a longer or shorter period to get through this column. As the compounds exited, the mass spectrometer took over, ionizing them and separating these ions further by their mass-to-charge ratios. The end result became a series of peaks showing the quantities of the different compounds.
The Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer, on the other hand, didn’t need to destroy the sample and only measured the way different chemical bonds in the sample absorbed or transmitted infrared light. From this it could show the presence of different and common “functional groups” such as a carbon-oxygen double bond or a cyclic ketone.
The GC-MS was better at showing the small components of the substance while the FTIR illustrated more how the components worked together. Results from the first resembled more a series of skinny bar graphs and the second, an EKG. Either result would be compared to a library of spectra to identify the substance.
Real-life results, of course, weren’t as they appeared on television shows. The spectra might tell them that their sample was latex paint. It wouldn’t tell them that this particular paint was Behr Marquee One-Coat in Heirloom Rose. They also didn’t have a handy hack into Behr’s sales database to tell them how many gallons had been sold in Naples, Florida, through which stores, and to whom.
But Ellie would take what she could get.
“I’d say the FTIR won by a nose.” Rachael turned her tablet screen toward Ellie to show her the results. “Your sticky stuff seems to be polyvinyl alcohol. Nothing exotic.”
“Sutures?” PVA had long been used for surgical stitches. The water-soluble strings would eventually be absorbed by the body after incisions had healed.
“Dissolving sutures—or dissolving balloon strings.”
“Balloons?”
Rachael ignored this. “That’s one of the uses, but there are so many. PVA strengthens textile yarns or makes paper more resistant to oils. Apparently the students got a kick out of it, insisted that Carrie tell us they used it to make slime in middle school science class.”
“Slime.”
“Yep.”
“Never saw the attraction of that stuff, myself.”
“Danton loves it. Mama says if she has to clean it out of the carpet one more time she’s going to have me banned from Target.”
Ellie stared at the screen, as if the jagged rise and fall of the spectra could tell her what, if anything, this meant. “The boat floated around for a week; any sort of debris could have blown in or out. Ashley had probably brought snacks—”
