“So divorce would be out as far as she’s concerned,” Marvin surmised, “but she’ll come into a bundle when he dies, the same way she did with Jack Loveday.”
“Not as much as she thinks,” I said. “According to Helen, Roger did a change of beneficiary on his life-insurance policy last summer, something Shelley may or may not be aware of. There’s a chance he might also have rewritten his will. That means the only way for her to make out financially is for Roger to die. She did so when Jack Loveday died, and she may be expecting the same kind of windfall when Roger kicks off, but as for the wellness check? I think it’s safe to say that Shelley Adams is a very capable liar. If some young patrol officer showed up to do a wellness check, she’d have him eating out of her hand and believing up was down in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
“What about notifying Roger’s daughter about what’s going on?” Marvin asked.
“I was holding off on that, waiting for the DNA results on Jared to turn up. If the Eklutna homicide victim turns out to be Chris Danielson, I intend to give her a full report. At that point it won’t matter, because AST will be on the case and I’ll be out of it. By then any number of people will be parked at the Adams house asking all kinds of difficult questions. When Danitza turns up, she’ll be one of many.”
“About that DNA profile,” Marvin said. “Do you think Harry Raines could have it in hand as early as Monday?”
“Most likely,” I replied. “I have a lot of faith in the lab tech who’s handling it at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab.”
“Well, then,” Marvin concluded, “if you and I are going to solve this thing before the AST comes around sticking their noses in my business, we’d better get busy, because we only have tomorrow . . .” He paused long enough to glance at his wrist. “Make that today, to get her done.”
I could write a book about law-enforcement turf wars, the kind of interjurisdictional wrangling that occurs when local cop shops and outside agencies are forced to work together. The local guys tend to regard the outsiders as unwelcome intruders, while the outsiders more often than not consider themselves as experts sent down from above to school local yokels in the finer points of how to get their jobs done. The only thing those warring factions share in common is an utter contempt for private investigators. In other words, in this situation—with two competing agencies and a private eye involved—the working dynamic for me was going to be crap.
“You’ve got that right,” I agreed, “Sunday’s it. That’s all we’ve got. By Monday it’ll turn into a free-for-all.”
At that point in the discussion, I did a recap of my mental reconstruction of Chris Danielson’s murder, and Marvin listened to every word with rapt attention.
“Your suppositions on how it all went down make sense,” he agreed once I’d finished. “If the homicide occurred on a spur-of-the-moment basis and within walking distance of Zig’s Place, the perpetrator would have needed to remove the victim from the crime scene in a hurry. You and I both know that head wounds bleed like crazy. By the time the victim’s body was wrestled into a waiting vehicle, it would have been a bloody mess, as would the killer.”
“Right,” I assented.
“On the assumption that Shelley Adams is our doer, I’ll check with the department of licensing to see if I can find out what vehicles were registered to Jack and Shelley Loveday back then. With enough bleach and elbow grease, you can scrub away blood evidence until it’s invisible to the naked eye, but a spray with luminol can make it pop even years after the fact. On the off chance that the vehicle in question is still in existence . . .”
We both knew that when it came to expecting the vehicle to still be around this long after the fact, the words “off chance” counted as a gross understatement.
Marvin let the rest of his sentence go unfinished while he jotted a reminder into his notebook, but I knew he was right as far as the luminol was concerned. I once witnessed a case where it lit up like crazy at a crime scene that was more than a decade old. And although Marvin’s strategy of attempting to track down the Lovedays’ former vehicles was a good one, to my way of thinking it didn’t go far enough.
“You should probably do the same for any vehicles registered to Roger and Eileen Adams at the time as well,” I suggested. “If Roger dispatched Shelley to deliver the payoff money, he might have let her use one of his vehicles rather than her own.”
“Good point,” Marvin agreed.
Our discussion ended just after 2:00 a.m. Once Marvin was gone, I was utterly fagged. I stripped off my clothes and flopped into bed. The caffeine we’d swilled down had absolutely zero effect. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. The next thing I knew, it was 7:00 a.m., and the phone on the bedside table was ringing off the hook. I was hoping for an early-morning wake-up call from Mel. Unfortunately, the landline phone in my room didn’t come equipped with caller ID.
“So what’s the deal?” Twink demanded irritably once I picked up the receiver. “Am I hauling your ass back to Anchorage today or not?”
I started to say, “Well, good morning to you, too,” but thought better of it. Twink already sounded pissed, and that kind of response would have lit her up even more.
“A few other things have come up,” I answered once I got my head in the game. “There are some additional people I need to interview.” Including your brother. That’s what I thought without saying it aloud. “If you need to get back home, I can probably rent a car here and get myself back to Anchorage once I finish up.”
“Like hell you will,” Twink snarled. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth, and so far our relationship has lasted longer than one of my marriages, but I said I’d get you back and forth, and I will.”
I thought maybe she was kidding about the marriage bit but didn’t dare ask.
“Just checked my friend’s fridge,” Twink continued. “Believe me, the cupboard is bare, so you’re taking me to breakfast at Zig’s Place. I’ll be at the hotel to pick you up in ten minutes flat. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Ten it is.”
Thirty minutes later Twink and I were both ensconced in a booth at Zig’s Place. On Sunday mornings in Homer, it was clearly the go-to destination. The restaurant was jammed with customers, and uniformed staff members were working their butts off.
We both had coffee. Twink ordered the Sunday special—ham and eggs with hash browns and a short stack of buttermilk pancakes on the side. I settled for bacon, eggs, and toast—hold the hash browns. Twink devoured her food with a level of enthusiasm that reminded me of the “starving children in China” line my mother always used when she was trying to guilt me into cleaning my plate. As I watched Twink polish hers off, I suspected that if she hadn’t been a chain smoker, she would have been a very large woman, which, pound for pound, would have made her that much scarier than she already was.