They sought vengeance, p.2
They Sought Vengeance, page 2
“She died five years ago.” Karen’s lips compressed into a thin line.
“Oh, I’m sorry. So it’s just you and your brothers now? And was anyone living in the same household as your father? Or was he alone?”
“Logan is living there. And household staff. We all come and go as we please; we have our own keys. And we were all home for a family dinner the night he died. Mom had always insisted on having a dinner once every month or so, and we’ve tried to keep that up, even if it’s just the five of us.” She sighed and looked away from him. “It’s a little suspicious that he would die suddenly right after having dinner with us.”
“Right after? While you were there?”
“That night. When everyone had gone home. He died… in his sleep, I guess. In his own bed.”
Zachary nodded. He wrote down Karen’s name and Logan’s, trying to keep his printing tidy enough that he would be able to read it later, but not take so long that she grew impatient with him.
“So there is you, and Logan; tell me something about each of you. And your birth order.”
Karen sat back, her posture relaxing. This was more familiar ground. She had talked about herself and her brothers many times before.
“Alex is the oldest, then Eddie, then me, and Logan is the baby.”
“Which is why he is the only one still at home.”
“He wasn’t. He moved out when he went to college. But… things didn’t work out. He ended up dropping out and going back home again. If it had been me…” Karen trailed off, thinking about it. “I would have found a job so I could afford my own apartment instead of going back there. I think it was a bad choice.”
“What is Logan like?”
“Well, he’s the baby of the family, so a little bit spoiled. Actually, maybe a lot spoiled by my mom, but not by Dad. Unless it was because Mom insisted on something. You know, if she told him he had to let Logan do something. But he would only do it grudgingly, under protest. Loud protests, so that everyone knew it was not his idea.”
“Was he verbally abusive?”
“I suppose. We never really thought about it that way. Or I didn’t, anyway. I just thought of it as Dad being right, because he was always right. If he got after me for something… then I knew that I was in the wrong, because there was no way he was. Now that I’m older, I have more perspective, I guess… yes. He was.”
“Was there physical abuse as well?”
“No, I don’t think so. I mean… he would grab one of the boys and force them to do what he wanted them to. But that’s just part of parenting. I don’t remember him ever causing any kind of injuries. Not that I knew about. I don’t remember any hitting or anything that might have done permanent damage. Just… being rough and forceful.”
“Was there any other reason that Logan was spoiled, other than being the youngest in the family?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was he sick a lot? Your mom had a hard time getting pregnant again and knew he would be the last baby? He looked more like her side of the family?”
“Oh.” Karen was nodding, thinking about it but already sure of her answer. “Yeah… I guess it was a hard birth, and he was born early. He had learning disabilities. I remember he was in speech therapy before he was five. He was awkward physically, just the kind of kid that gets bullied at school for being different. A dweeb or a baby. So there were a lot of reasons for Mom to want to protect him and make things easier on him.”
“Right.” Zachary nodded, reflecting on his own learning disabilities and behavioral problems when he had been in school. His mother had not been the nurturing type and he had not gotten therapy in the earlier years that might have set him on the right course. And when the family had dissolved and he had landed in foster care, group homes, and institutions, there had been no one to spoil or protect him. He’d already been identified as a bad kid, and the foster parents and other adults responsible for his care or education had not gone easy on him.
“I guess I didn’t understand that as a kid,” Karen said with an embarrassed smile, “I never understood why he got out of responsibilities and was allowed to get away with stuff that I never would have. And why he got all of the attention and help when I was told to work harder.”
“Even if she had explained, you probably would have been too young to understand.” Zachary hoped this would let her off the hook as far as her guilt toward her brother went. “And they were probably of the school of thought that he should look and act like everyone else as much as possible so you didn’t see all of the differences.”
“Maybe. I expect more of myself now, but I still catch myself thinking of him as a spoiled brat. That he just needs to quit messing around and work harder, like I was told to.”
“What was he going to college for?”
“I don’t think he had decided. Just some kind of general upgrading to start with. But he couldn’t handle it. I should be more sympathetic about it than I am.”
“And then there are… Alex and Eddie,” Zachary prompted.
“Right. Alex and Eddie.” Karen closed her eyes for a moment, gathering her thoughts. “Alex is the eldest, always the perfect one. The good son who got straight A’s and followed all of the rules and did what was expected of him without question. He was the one who got all of the attention and praise from Dad… but I’m starting to wonder if he was treated differently in private. If things were said that none of us the rest of us knew about.”
Zachary nodded.
Karen went on, “Eddie was a wild card. He was always a bit of a rebel. Always trying to get away with things.” She looked up at Zachary, her blue eyes wide with worry. “I don’t see how it could be any of us. I know it must have been, but it just doesn’t make any sense. I can’t see any of my brothers doing anything to hurt Dad. Even if they were just trying to make him sick and not kill him. I can’t wrap my mind around it.”
3
Leave that to me,” Zachary told her. “Don’t worry about it or even think about it. Don’t give your brothers any reason to think that you might suspect one of them. If you are right and it was murder, then you need to keep that in mind when you are dealing with them.”
“They wouldn’t kill me,” Karen said with a laugh of disbelief. “Why would they? What would they have to gain?”
“Well… the same as proving that one of you killed him. An extra portion of the estate, divided up among the remaining heirs. Depending on the terms of your father’s will, of course, and yours, if you have one.”
She colored a little and looked away from Zachary, appearing to watch a young couple a few tables away from them. He wasn’t sure whether it was embarrassment that she didn’t have a will, or that she did. A lot of young people didn’t feel the need for one, and having a will would mean that she was in the minority among her peers.
“I really don’t think that I have anything to fear from my brothers. If they killed Dad… well, that’s not the same as coming after me for something. For money.” She shook her head.
“You don’t believe that their motive for killing your father was money?”
“Well… I mean, I guess it would be. None of us are exactly crying in our coffee about getting our inheritance early.”
“Just… tread lightly. I wouldn’t want to put you in harm’s way. Let me do the investigating, and stay well out of it yourself.”
“I guess since that’s what we’re paying you for, I can just stay back and let you take care of it.”
Zachary nodded his agreement. “So Alex was the perfectionist. What is he like now? What did he become?”
“He’s a lawyer. Corporate, not wills and estates. He made that really clear. Big files, companies with a lot of money. Wears expensive suits that he pretends he can afford, even though he isn’t getting any of the family money yet and I guess junior lawyers don’t make all that much. He’s lucky that he doesn’t have a huge school debt to worry about. Mom and Dad paid for his education at top-notch schools.”
Zachary wrote down that Alex was a lawyer.
“Eddie is an inventor. I guess. I can’t show you anything that he’s invented. I think it’s all really high-tech stuff. Or maybe it just sounds advanced because he’s conning everyone into thinking that he’s smarter than them and isn’t actually speaking gobbledygook. There’s a lot of chemistry involved, if I understand correctly, but I don’t know how you can invent something with chemicals.”
“And Eddie wasn’t as close to your father as Alex?”
“No one was as close to Dad as Alex. I think they should have just stopped having kids at one. There wasn’t any need for the rest of us and, clearly, Dad didn’t care about the rest of us. Only about Alex.”
Lots of jealousy going on there. Karen’s conclusion might or might not be true, but it was clear that there were years of resentment behind her statement.
“What do you do?”
She breathed heavily and looked outside like she was either waiting for someone or trying to chart the best escape route. “I am… a nurse.”
“That’s great. I love nurses.” Zachary’s face got hot after blurting this out. Poor impulse control. It sounded all wrong.
But it made Karen laugh and pulled her out of plotting her escape route to look at him again with fresh eyes. “You love nurses?”
“I don’t mean that in any improper way… I think nurses are great. They’re the backbone of our medical system. I’ve had… a number of hospital stays, and I’m always so grateful for the nurses who are so caring and diligent and take care of all of the day-to-day stuff. I don’t know what I would have done without them.”
Karen looked like she was trying to suppress her smile, but she couldn’t hide it. She flushed a little more. “Well, that’s very sweet of you. What have you been in the hospital for?”
“Different things…” Zachary didn’t want to disclose most of them. “A couple of years ago… I was in a pretty bad car crash. I had a spinal cord injury, but once the swelling went down, I was able to move again. But being absolutely helpless during that time… able to understand everything that was going on but unable to get up and walk around and do all the other things I needed to do to take care of myself… it was really hard. Not just physically, but emotionally. The nurses were so kind and compassionate and helped to take the sting out of doing the things for me that I couldn’t do for myself.”
She impulsively put her hand over his on the table. “Thank you! It’s so nice to hear things like that. Nurses get such a bad rap so much of the time, and I don’t know why. The ones that I have worked with have been great. But… full disclosure… being a nurse is not what I wanted out of life.”
“Oh.” Zachary nodded. “You had other plans?”
“I wanted to be a doctor. Alex was a lawyer, Eddie was a ground-breaking scientist, and I wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t see any reason I shouldn’t be able to perform just as well as they had.”
Zachary nodded, encouraging her to go on.
“Well… Dad paid for Alex and Eddie to go to school. He paid for it all. They both became really good at what they do—I’ll give them that—but they wouldn’t have had the opportunities they did if they’d had to earn everything on their own or get scholarships to cover it. They worked hard but wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the money.”
“But your father wouldn’t pay for your education?”
“Oh, he did. But he wouldn’t pay for me to be a doctor. He paid for nursing school.”
“He didn’t even let you try?”
Karen shook her head. “Didn’t even let me try. He said that I’d make a really good nurse, and I am a really good nurse. But I could have made it as a doctor. I know I could have.”
“Wow. I can understand you being upset about that. Was it because… he was sexist? He didn’t think that women would make good doctors?”
“No, it’s worse than that. He’ll see a female doctor. He agrees that some of them are excellent. He just didn’t think that I had the aptitude.”
Zachary winced. “Oh, I’m sorry. That’s…” He shook his head slowly. “What a slap in the face.”
“Yeah, it was. And it still is. I can’t let it go. I know I would have made a good doctor, and he took that away from me.”
Karen had apparently not considered putting herself through medical school, as she said Alex or Eddie could have done. She had gone through nursing school and had settled for that.
“Are you still practicing?” Zachary asked, deciding to steer away from any discussion of what might have been if she had made other choices.
“Yes, part-time. But I probably won’t once I get the inheritance and don’t have to work to support myself. I have two sons. So I have them to take care of, as well as trying to help earn enough for the family to be comfortable. My husband, Dawson, doesn’t quite make enough for us to be able to do the things that we want to. We could survive without my income, but not much more than that. I like to be able to do… family vacations, enroll the boys in classes that will help them to get ahead in life, or take just because they are fun. But I couldn’t do it on my own, and neither can Dawson.”
“Things will change when you get your inheritance.”
Karen nodded, watching Zachary scratch a few words into his notepad. She probably knew exactly what suspicions he was making note of. She had, after all, admitted that she was a suspect, equal to her brothers in this one thing.
“Do you have phone numbers for each of your brothers? And is there a time that I could come see the house? Where your father lived when… it happened.”
“Well, yes, but… what do you think you’re going to discover there? The police didn’t see anything suspicious or out of place in his room, so they only took a cursory look around the house. But people have been through there. We all have access to the house. So if one of us poisoned him… we wouldn’t leave the evidence there. We would have cleaned it up by now.”
“I would still like to get a feel for the house and its layout. What opportunities people had. Or… there are other possibilities as well.”
“That he wasn’t killed, you mean?” Karen asked. “That it was just natural causes?”
“Well, that remains a possibility. But also… that it was an accident, suicide, or perpetrated by someone outside the household. Someone not in the family. In which case, they wouldn’t have had access after your father died to remove any evidence.”
“Oh. I suppose. But there are maids and other household staff. Everything will have been cleaned up and put away by now.”
“That’s fine. I’ll look at it in whatever shape it is in. You never know what ideas it might trigger.”
Karen nodded. She didn’t seem to be opposed to his going to see the house. She only wanted to know what point there was in looking at a scene that had potentially already been contaminated by a dozen or more people.
A question that part of Zachary’s brain agreed with. What point was there in going to the scene of the crime?
4
Zachary had been busy uploading his handwritten notes to the cloud and typing out the various questions and avenues of investigation he needed to pursue when Kenzie got home from work, and he hadn’t paid her much attention. He’d said hello and asked her about her day, but he couldn’t remember her answer, which probably meant that he’d been too focused on his work and hadn’t paid any attention to what she had said.
He was trying to be more organized in his work habits, with Heather making suggestions and keeping him on track the best she could. Both of her kids had ADHD, so she had a lot of experience helping them stay on top of their schoolwork and studies. He set up a project for the new case and added his initial tasks into it. Then he remembered that he still had to send Karen a revised rate sheet so she could pay him the initial deposit. He shouldn’t be doing any other work before he received that money, or he could get burned. How many times had he taken a client at his word that payment was on its way and gotten deeply into the investigation, only to find out that it had never been sent? Pulling out of a case once he’d gotten into it was almost impossible. Once focused on uncovering the truth, it was painful to withdraw, even if he knew he wasn’t being paid.
He added the retainer to the project’s task list and gave it the highest priority, then closed his laptop lid, forcing himself to disengage from the case and turn his attention to Kenzie. He sat on the couch for a moment, watching her as she moved around the kitchen preparing their dinner. Her spiraling dark hair bounced when she walked. Her red lipstick was unsmudged and her expression was pleasant even when focused on something else. She noticed Zachary watching her.
“Hey, welcome back.”
Zachary was about to say that he hadn’t been out, then realized that she was referring to his mental state. His face warmed and he rolled his eyes about his own state of distraction. “Sorry about that. I picked up a new case.”
“I figured you must have. You haven’t been that hyperfocused since Luke’s case.”
“Yeah.” Despite TV’s depiction of private investigators always working on exciting, life-and-death, vitally important cases, Zachary’s bread and butter was more routine tasks like skip tracing, insurance fraud investigation, background searches for corporations hiring new high-level staff, and other tedious computer work. Heather enjoyed helping with that, so they split the more prosaic stuff between them.
He really should call Joss, his oldest sister, to check in and see how they were doing. When Luke had been released from jail, Zachary had hoped that things would go back to normal, that Luke would have learned his lesson and decided to stay close to home and follow Joss’s rules, and there would be no more concerns about his returning to his addictions or to his former life working with a human trafficking ring.
But Luke was not the type of person who was happy staying at home and living a boring, law-abiding life. Joss had warned Zachary from the beginning that it would be difficult for Luke to let go of the life he had led previously, and she had been right. Luke craved excitement, people around him, the lights and music of clubs, and the praise of his bosses in the trafficking ring as much as or more than he did the drugs and alcohol he was addicted to.
“Oh, I’m sorry. So it’s just you and your brothers now? And was anyone living in the same household as your father? Or was he alone?”
“Logan is living there. And household staff. We all come and go as we please; we have our own keys. And we were all home for a family dinner the night he died. Mom had always insisted on having a dinner once every month or so, and we’ve tried to keep that up, even if it’s just the five of us.” She sighed and looked away from him. “It’s a little suspicious that he would die suddenly right after having dinner with us.”
“Right after? While you were there?”
“That night. When everyone had gone home. He died… in his sleep, I guess. In his own bed.”
Zachary nodded. He wrote down Karen’s name and Logan’s, trying to keep his printing tidy enough that he would be able to read it later, but not take so long that she grew impatient with him.
“So there is you, and Logan; tell me something about each of you. And your birth order.”
Karen sat back, her posture relaxing. This was more familiar ground. She had talked about herself and her brothers many times before.
“Alex is the oldest, then Eddie, then me, and Logan is the baby.”
“Which is why he is the only one still at home.”
“He wasn’t. He moved out when he went to college. But… things didn’t work out. He ended up dropping out and going back home again. If it had been me…” Karen trailed off, thinking about it. “I would have found a job so I could afford my own apartment instead of going back there. I think it was a bad choice.”
“What is Logan like?”
“Well, he’s the baby of the family, so a little bit spoiled. Actually, maybe a lot spoiled by my mom, but not by Dad. Unless it was because Mom insisted on something. You know, if she told him he had to let Logan do something. But he would only do it grudgingly, under protest. Loud protests, so that everyone knew it was not his idea.”
“Was he verbally abusive?”
“I suppose. We never really thought about it that way. Or I didn’t, anyway. I just thought of it as Dad being right, because he was always right. If he got after me for something… then I knew that I was in the wrong, because there was no way he was. Now that I’m older, I have more perspective, I guess… yes. He was.”
“Was there physical abuse as well?”
“No, I don’t think so. I mean… he would grab one of the boys and force them to do what he wanted them to. But that’s just part of parenting. I don’t remember him ever causing any kind of injuries. Not that I knew about. I don’t remember any hitting or anything that might have done permanent damage. Just… being rough and forceful.”
“Was there any other reason that Logan was spoiled, other than being the youngest in the family?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was he sick a lot? Your mom had a hard time getting pregnant again and knew he would be the last baby? He looked more like her side of the family?”
“Oh.” Karen was nodding, thinking about it but already sure of her answer. “Yeah… I guess it was a hard birth, and he was born early. He had learning disabilities. I remember he was in speech therapy before he was five. He was awkward physically, just the kind of kid that gets bullied at school for being different. A dweeb or a baby. So there were a lot of reasons for Mom to want to protect him and make things easier on him.”
“Right.” Zachary nodded, reflecting on his own learning disabilities and behavioral problems when he had been in school. His mother had not been the nurturing type and he had not gotten therapy in the earlier years that might have set him on the right course. And when the family had dissolved and he had landed in foster care, group homes, and institutions, there had been no one to spoil or protect him. He’d already been identified as a bad kid, and the foster parents and other adults responsible for his care or education had not gone easy on him.
“I guess I didn’t understand that as a kid,” Karen said with an embarrassed smile, “I never understood why he got out of responsibilities and was allowed to get away with stuff that I never would have. And why he got all of the attention and help when I was told to work harder.”
“Even if she had explained, you probably would have been too young to understand.” Zachary hoped this would let her off the hook as far as her guilt toward her brother went. “And they were probably of the school of thought that he should look and act like everyone else as much as possible so you didn’t see all of the differences.”
“Maybe. I expect more of myself now, but I still catch myself thinking of him as a spoiled brat. That he just needs to quit messing around and work harder, like I was told to.”
“What was he going to college for?”
“I don’t think he had decided. Just some kind of general upgrading to start with. But he couldn’t handle it. I should be more sympathetic about it than I am.”
“And then there are… Alex and Eddie,” Zachary prompted.
“Right. Alex and Eddie.” Karen closed her eyes for a moment, gathering her thoughts. “Alex is the eldest, always the perfect one. The good son who got straight A’s and followed all of the rules and did what was expected of him without question. He was the one who got all of the attention and praise from Dad… but I’m starting to wonder if he was treated differently in private. If things were said that none of us the rest of us knew about.”
Zachary nodded.
Karen went on, “Eddie was a wild card. He was always a bit of a rebel. Always trying to get away with things.” She looked up at Zachary, her blue eyes wide with worry. “I don’t see how it could be any of us. I know it must have been, but it just doesn’t make any sense. I can’t see any of my brothers doing anything to hurt Dad. Even if they were just trying to make him sick and not kill him. I can’t wrap my mind around it.”
3
Leave that to me,” Zachary told her. “Don’t worry about it or even think about it. Don’t give your brothers any reason to think that you might suspect one of them. If you are right and it was murder, then you need to keep that in mind when you are dealing with them.”
“They wouldn’t kill me,” Karen said with a laugh of disbelief. “Why would they? What would they have to gain?”
“Well… the same as proving that one of you killed him. An extra portion of the estate, divided up among the remaining heirs. Depending on the terms of your father’s will, of course, and yours, if you have one.”
She colored a little and looked away from Zachary, appearing to watch a young couple a few tables away from them. He wasn’t sure whether it was embarrassment that she didn’t have a will, or that she did. A lot of young people didn’t feel the need for one, and having a will would mean that she was in the minority among her peers.
“I really don’t think that I have anything to fear from my brothers. If they killed Dad… well, that’s not the same as coming after me for something. For money.” She shook her head.
“You don’t believe that their motive for killing your father was money?”
“Well… I mean, I guess it would be. None of us are exactly crying in our coffee about getting our inheritance early.”
“Just… tread lightly. I wouldn’t want to put you in harm’s way. Let me do the investigating, and stay well out of it yourself.”
“I guess since that’s what we’re paying you for, I can just stay back and let you take care of it.”
Zachary nodded his agreement. “So Alex was the perfectionist. What is he like now? What did he become?”
“He’s a lawyer. Corporate, not wills and estates. He made that really clear. Big files, companies with a lot of money. Wears expensive suits that he pretends he can afford, even though he isn’t getting any of the family money yet and I guess junior lawyers don’t make all that much. He’s lucky that he doesn’t have a huge school debt to worry about. Mom and Dad paid for his education at top-notch schools.”
Zachary wrote down that Alex was a lawyer.
“Eddie is an inventor. I guess. I can’t show you anything that he’s invented. I think it’s all really high-tech stuff. Or maybe it just sounds advanced because he’s conning everyone into thinking that he’s smarter than them and isn’t actually speaking gobbledygook. There’s a lot of chemistry involved, if I understand correctly, but I don’t know how you can invent something with chemicals.”
“And Eddie wasn’t as close to your father as Alex?”
“No one was as close to Dad as Alex. I think they should have just stopped having kids at one. There wasn’t any need for the rest of us and, clearly, Dad didn’t care about the rest of us. Only about Alex.”
Lots of jealousy going on there. Karen’s conclusion might or might not be true, but it was clear that there were years of resentment behind her statement.
“What do you do?”
She breathed heavily and looked outside like she was either waiting for someone or trying to chart the best escape route. “I am… a nurse.”
“That’s great. I love nurses.” Zachary’s face got hot after blurting this out. Poor impulse control. It sounded all wrong.
But it made Karen laugh and pulled her out of plotting her escape route to look at him again with fresh eyes. “You love nurses?”
“I don’t mean that in any improper way… I think nurses are great. They’re the backbone of our medical system. I’ve had… a number of hospital stays, and I’m always so grateful for the nurses who are so caring and diligent and take care of all of the day-to-day stuff. I don’t know what I would have done without them.”
Karen looked like she was trying to suppress her smile, but she couldn’t hide it. She flushed a little more. “Well, that’s very sweet of you. What have you been in the hospital for?”
“Different things…” Zachary didn’t want to disclose most of them. “A couple of years ago… I was in a pretty bad car crash. I had a spinal cord injury, but once the swelling went down, I was able to move again. But being absolutely helpless during that time… able to understand everything that was going on but unable to get up and walk around and do all the other things I needed to do to take care of myself… it was really hard. Not just physically, but emotionally. The nurses were so kind and compassionate and helped to take the sting out of doing the things for me that I couldn’t do for myself.”
She impulsively put her hand over his on the table. “Thank you! It’s so nice to hear things like that. Nurses get such a bad rap so much of the time, and I don’t know why. The ones that I have worked with have been great. But… full disclosure… being a nurse is not what I wanted out of life.”
“Oh.” Zachary nodded. “You had other plans?”
“I wanted to be a doctor. Alex was a lawyer, Eddie was a ground-breaking scientist, and I wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t see any reason I shouldn’t be able to perform just as well as they had.”
Zachary nodded, encouraging her to go on.
“Well… Dad paid for Alex and Eddie to go to school. He paid for it all. They both became really good at what they do—I’ll give them that—but they wouldn’t have had the opportunities they did if they’d had to earn everything on their own or get scholarships to cover it. They worked hard but wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the money.”
“But your father wouldn’t pay for your education?”
“Oh, he did. But he wouldn’t pay for me to be a doctor. He paid for nursing school.”
“He didn’t even let you try?”
Karen shook her head. “Didn’t even let me try. He said that I’d make a really good nurse, and I am a really good nurse. But I could have made it as a doctor. I know I could have.”
“Wow. I can understand you being upset about that. Was it because… he was sexist? He didn’t think that women would make good doctors?”
“No, it’s worse than that. He’ll see a female doctor. He agrees that some of them are excellent. He just didn’t think that I had the aptitude.”
Zachary winced. “Oh, I’m sorry. That’s…” He shook his head slowly. “What a slap in the face.”
“Yeah, it was. And it still is. I can’t let it go. I know I would have made a good doctor, and he took that away from me.”
Karen had apparently not considered putting herself through medical school, as she said Alex or Eddie could have done. She had gone through nursing school and had settled for that.
“Are you still practicing?” Zachary asked, deciding to steer away from any discussion of what might have been if she had made other choices.
“Yes, part-time. But I probably won’t once I get the inheritance and don’t have to work to support myself. I have two sons. So I have them to take care of, as well as trying to help earn enough for the family to be comfortable. My husband, Dawson, doesn’t quite make enough for us to be able to do the things that we want to. We could survive without my income, but not much more than that. I like to be able to do… family vacations, enroll the boys in classes that will help them to get ahead in life, or take just because they are fun. But I couldn’t do it on my own, and neither can Dawson.”
“Things will change when you get your inheritance.”
Karen nodded, watching Zachary scratch a few words into his notepad. She probably knew exactly what suspicions he was making note of. She had, after all, admitted that she was a suspect, equal to her brothers in this one thing.
“Do you have phone numbers for each of your brothers? And is there a time that I could come see the house? Where your father lived when… it happened.”
“Well, yes, but… what do you think you’re going to discover there? The police didn’t see anything suspicious or out of place in his room, so they only took a cursory look around the house. But people have been through there. We all have access to the house. So if one of us poisoned him… we wouldn’t leave the evidence there. We would have cleaned it up by now.”
“I would still like to get a feel for the house and its layout. What opportunities people had. Or… there are other possibilities as well.”
“That he wasn’t killed, you mean?” Karen asked. “That it was just natural causes?”
“Well, that remains a possibility. But also… that it was an accident, suicide, or perpetrated by someone outside the household. Someone not in the family. In which case, they wouldn’t have had access after your father died to remove any evidence.”
“Oh. I suppose. But there are maids and other household staff. Everything will have been cleaned up and put away by now.”
“That’s fine. I’ll look at it in whatever shape it is in. You never know what ideas it might trigger.”
Karen nodded. She didn’t seem to be opposed to his going to see the house. She only wanted to know what point there was in looking at a scene that had potentially already been contaminated by a dozen or more people.
A question that part of Zachary’s brain agreed with. What point was there in going to the scene of the crime?
4
Zachary had been busy uploading his handwritten notes to the cloud and typing out the various questions and avenues of investigation he needed to pursue when Kenzie got home from work, and he hadn’t paid her much attention. He’d said hello and asked her about her day, but he couldn’t remember her answer, which probably meant that he’d been too focused on his work and hadn’t paid any attention to what she had said.
He was trying to be more organized in his work habits, with Heather making suggestions and keeping him on track the best she could. Both of her kids had ADHD, so she had a lot of experience helping them stay on top of their schoolwork and studies. He set up a project for the new case and added his initial tasks into it. Then he remembered that he still had to send Karen a revised rate sheet so she could pay him the initial deposit. He shouldn’t be doing any other work before he received that money, or he could get burned. How many times had he taken a client at his word that payment was on its way and gotten deeply into the investigation, only to find out that it had never been sent? Pulling out of a case once he’d gotten into it was almost impossible. Once focused on uncovering the truth, it was painful to withdraw, even if he knew he wasn’t being paid.
He added the retainer to the project’s task list and gave it the highest priority, then closed his laptop lid, forcing himself to disengage from the case and turn his attention to Kenzie. He sat on the couch for a moment, watching her as she moved around the kitchen preparing their dinner. Her spiraling dark hair bounced when she walked. Her red lipstick was unsmudged and her expression was pleasant even when focused on something else. She noticed Zachary watching her.
“Hey, welcome back.”
Zachary was about to say that he hadn’t been out, then realized that she was referring to his mental state. His face warmed and he rolled his eyes about his own state of distraction. “Sorry about that. I picked up a new case.”
“I figured you must have. You haven’t been that hyperfocused since Luke’s case.”
“Yeah.” Despite TV’s depiction of private investigators always working on exciting, life-and-death, vitally important cases, Zachary’s bread and butter was more routine tasks like skip tracing, insurance fraud investigation, background searches for corporations hiring new high-level staff, and other tedious computer work. Heather enjoyed helping with that, so they split the more prosaic stuff between them.
He really should call Joss, his oldest sister, to check in and see how they were doing. When Luke had been released from jail, Zachary had hoped that things would go back to normal, that Luke would have learned his lesson and decided to stay close to home and follow Joss’s rules, and there would be no more concerns about his returning to his addictions or to his former life working with a human trafficking ring.
But Luke was not the type of person who was happy staying at home and living a boring, law-abiding life. Joss had warned Zachary from the beginning that it would be difficult for Luke to let go of the life he had led previously, and she had been right. Luke craved excitement, people around him, the lights and music of clubs, and the praise of his bosses in the trafficking ring as much as or more than he did the drugs and alcohol he was addicted to.
