There was tape marking everything, but I picked out the small muddy ridges on the otherwise dusty floor that must have come from Brad’s boots.
“Why would he do that?”
“I can think of some reasons. Not necessarily good ones. Maybe the front door was locked, so while she looked for the key he went around the back to see if those doors were open. Maybe he sent her into the house first, then went back, got his wrench, and came in the back door in order to sneak up on her and surprise her.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” I said.
“Maybe he wanted to look at the moonlight on the ocean.”
“You never know,” I said.
One of Ireland’s officers was waving him down from across the room. He excused himself and went over to him. I stood for a while longer, looking at the body, wondering about the footprints. James came over to me. She wore a gray London Fog trench coat over her black pantsuit. Stylish as always, except she wore a winter hat in Celtics green with the awful logo of the little Irish leprechaun spinning a basketball on his finger.
“What’d you find out?” I asked her.
“All signs point to Daggett. Time of death was probably twelve hours ago, which means he could be pretty far away.”
“He’ll get caught,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said.
I told her about the footprints that came in from the front and from the back as well. She thought about it for a moment. “Makes sense. He brings her here to kill her but he can’t walk in with a big wrench in his hand. So he makes an excuse to return to the truck, gets the wrench, then runs around to the back of the house. Sliding doors were probably already unlocked. What makes less sense is how he talked her into coming to the house at all. I mean, if he told her he wanted to talk, they could’ve talked in the truck. It’s not like this place is warm and comfortable.”
“Yeah, I know. That bothers me, too.”
We stood for a moment quietly. Then I said, “Have you seen the view? Out the back.”
“No,” she said. Together, we walked toward the sliding glass doors that led to a stone patio, and through them out into the beautiful fall day. The view was stunning. The house was on a bluff directly over the Atlantic. You could see miles in all directions.
“Was that going to be a pool, you think?” James asked about the wide hole dug in the sloping back lawn.
“That’d be my guess,” I said.
“It’s all a little bit obscene. Not the location, but the size of the house. It looks more like a hotel than a place for a couple with no kids.”
I stepped out farther and turned back and looked up at the beige facade of the house. The second floor was lined with little balconies. One for every bedroom, I guessed. There was a built-in fireplace on the stone patio, and a place for a grill and a minifridge. I wondered what would happen to this place. If someone would swoop in and pay to have it finished, or if it would just languish and rot, become a luxury home for a colony of bats or raccoons.
“Another thing,” James said. She was still looking out at the ocean. “If our assumption is correct, if Miranda Severson talked Brad Daggett into killing her husband, he must have done it thinking he would come into all of this wealth eventually.”
“Maybe he was in love with her, James. Don’t be cynical.”
“Whatever. It doesn’t change my point, which is why does he kill Miranda less than a week after killing her husband? I mean, she’s the reason he’s doing all this. Killing her means it all goes away. No more money, no more sex.”
“Yeah, it’s strange. There could be lots of reasons, though. He panics, thinks Miranda is going to turn him in.”
“If that’s the case, then why not just run instead of killing her first and then running?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he acted alone. Maybe he’d fallen in love with Miranda, thought that killing the husband would make her fall into his arms. When that didn’t immediately work, he killed Miranda so no one else could have her.”
“I thought of that,” James said, “but if that was the case, then how’d he get Miranda to agree to come here with him?”
“Well, we’ll find out. They’ll get him soon. Twenty-four hours, tops. In the meantime, we’ve got a case to build. I’m going to go talk with this Polly Greenier, Brad’s alibi for Friday night.”
“You need me?”
“I always need you,” I said. “But I can manage Polly. Something makes me think that as soon as I tell her we have a positive ID on Brad down in Boston her alibi will break.”