“Well, there you are,” Anne said, hurrying across the lobby before she could get herself a cappuccino. “Where’s Conor?”
“He’s with Tom and Joe. They’re working on a lead.”
“Mike is anxious to talk to him,” Anne said. “And his calls go straight to voicemail.”
“Why is Mike anxious?” Kate asked.
“You know him. He can’t relax until he knows everyone is all right. He was worried about Garrett bringing Conor into the station for questioning.”
“From what I hear, it went well,” Kate said.
Conor’s uncle Mike walked over with a tall, strong-looking man appearing to be in his early fifties.
“Kate, this is Leo Kennedy, the lawyer I told Conor about,” Mike said.
“Hello, Leo,” Kate said.
“Nice to meet you, Kate,” Leo said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get back in time to go with Conor to the police barracks—I’m on vacation, and I was out fishing on my boat.” He swiveled his head, and Kate noticed that he had the same Irish American sunburned skin as the Reids, along with curly brown hair and eyes the color of Galway Bay.
“Sorry you’re interrupting your vacation,” Kate said. “He’s with his brother and a friend, working on the case.”
“That concerns me, Kate,” Mike said. “Joe is a Rhode Island detective. He might be Conor’s friend, but this is an active investigation. Garrett Milne very much considers Conor a suspect, whether Joe does or not. I want to catch Conor before he says anything he shouldn’t to Joe.”
Good luck with that, Kate thought. “Conor has never turned away from a homicide investigation in his life,” she said. “Don’t expect him to start now. Especially with this one.”
“He won’t be able to investigate anything if he winds up in custody,” Leo said.
“Mike,” Kate said. “Given what happened at our dinner, Garrett has it in for Conor. He heard his girlfriend say that she and Conor have a child. I think he’s acting out of jealousy. It’s no basis for him to suspect Conor of anything.”
She was shaking as she spoke. She thought of how she had linked Belinda and Suzanne through the place cards and quill pen, and in spite of Conor’s denial, she couldn’t get the idea of Suzanne, with her blue eyes, out of her mind.
She had also started to wonder whether Garrett, who had been staying in the same room as Belinda, knew some of these things too. And whether he was ignoring—burying—them to make Conor his scapegoat.
“I’ll have my investigator look into Garrett,” Mike said. “And whyever he might be going after Conor.”
“You have an investigator?” Kate asked.
“Yes. Anne,” he said and chuckled. “Well, and the rest of our crew. Now that I’m retired, I’ve been branching out. We’re kind of like private detectives, sometimes working parallel to the police, other times in a completely different direction.”
“In this case, looking into Garrett Milne, it’s most certainly in a different direction,” Leo said. “The police will want no part of going after him.”
“A lot of jurisdictions take care of their own,” Mike said. “Cops don’t investigate cops. Mainly, I’d like to hear everything possible about his girlfriend. Belinda is the murder victim—she’s the key to everything.”
“She lived next door to Conor in New London when they were kids,” Kate said. “And then she seemed to fall off the face of the earth. Just disappeared, when she was very young.”
“Maybe she went away to school,” Anne said.
“I didn’t get that feeling,” Kate said. “Another thing—she was married once, and her husband died.”
An older couple approached, and the man raised his hand in greeting. Then he and the woman hugged Anne and Mike, and Mike introduced them.
“Kate, I’d like you to meet two of Anne’s and my dearest friends,” Mike said. “Edward and Nola Aldrich.”
“Lovely to meet you,” Nola said, and Kate shook hands with her and Edward.
“Listen, Kate,” Mike said. “We are here to help Conor. You can count on all of us—we’ll put our heads together.”
“Leo doesn’t talk about his cases, but most of them wind up in the news,” Nola said. “So we do a lot of hypotheticals. Of course, the media is full of plenty of unsolved crimes, so mostly we just talk about them. I teach a course in criminal behavior at Brown, and some of my students are very good at profiling. Honestly, I learn a lot from them.”
