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CHAPTER 27
Tate waited.
Parked on the street across from the long, low building of the sheriff’s department, he sat in his Toyota. While sipping now-cold takeout coffee he picked up from a kiosk two blocks over, he kept one eye on the building where Kara was being interviewed. Even though he was busy, catching up on phone calls, responding to email, researching the Internet, he checked the time every ten minutes.
She’d been inside for over an hour and he was getting antsy, turning the engine on and off to warm the interior as snow began to fall again, big, fat flakes that melted on the hood of his SUV. He would have loved to have been a part of it, but she’d told him it was something she had to do alone. Besides, he was certain the cops wouldn’t have allowed him in.
While sitting here, he’d managed a couple of phone interviews, including one with Silas Dean. Samuel Senior’s former partner had been livid at the intrusion, at the “insinuation,” and had threatened a lawsuit, sputtering, “You, the rag you work for and anyone associated with this damned case will regret ruining my reputation. I mean it. I’m sick to the back teeth from this. It was bad enough that I was associated with Samuel McIntyre—let me tell you the guy had shit for brains, and go ahead, quote me on that—but that’s all there was to it. I wasn’t anywhere near the McIntyre place that night and I have witnesses to the fact.” He’d then rattled off several family members who could vouch for him. The same had been true for the night Margrove was murdered. The alibis, though thin, had checked out.
Tate scratched Dean from the suspect list.
Next, Tate had pulled up Merritt Margrove’s will, a copy of which he’d found scanned to the jump drive he’d discovered in the dead man’s office. As expected, everything he owned went to his wife with one exception. Margrove had taken out a million-dollar insurance policy. Kara McIntyre was listed as the beneficiary.
That was odd.
Or maybe not.
Margrove had been skimming from the estate for years, living off Kara’s inheritance. Both he and Faiza Donner had submitted bills to the estate with obviously inflated costs for their charge. In Faiza’s case, she’d padded the cost of nannies and private schools, dance lessons and horseback riding camps, expensive trips, her own time, the upkeep of both the house in Portland and the one on the mountain and so on and so forth. Margrove’s attorney’s fees seemed exorbitant and spanned two decades. Added to that the lawyer had made some bad investments with the inheritance. On top of Kara’s care and legal fees, Margrove had scraped off attorney’s and consultation fees especially earmarked for Jonas McIntyre, and paid for expenses out of the same McIntyre account, charging trips and meals and hotel rooms to the estate as he tried to find a way to get Jonas’s conviction overturned. There had even been a new car “noted for Kara McIntyre” when she’d turned sixteen, though the title to the Cadillac had never been registered in Kara’s name.
Both Faiza Donner and Merritt Margrove had worked the court system and probably could be sued, civilly and possibly criminally.
Tate drummed his fingers against the top of the steering wheel. It was almost as if they’d been depleting the fortune together. Either separately or in tandem.
Margrove, apparently, had felt some guilt and taken out the insurance policy, then, within two years, had borrowed against it.
“The best-laid plans,” Tate said, and turned on the engine again.
He thought about that as traffic passed, vehicles pulled in and out of the county parking lots, and people bundled in jackets, hats, scarves and boots bustled in and out of the buildings.
His phone rang and he saw it was Connell, returning his call.
“You got my message?” Tate asked, clicking on.
“Yeah, I did. So here’s the rundown,” Connell said. From the sound of background noise, the muffled rumble of an engine and rush of air, Tate figured Connell was driving. “I checked and you’re right, the McIntyres’ estate has been drained. There are loans against the property in the West Hills, big loans, hard money borrowed from private lenders. High interest. Large payments.”
“But the property was for the kids,” Tate said as a van for a painting company tried to squeeze into the parking spot in front of him.
“Between Merritt Margrove and Faiza Donner, they had control of the money. It was left to the surviving kids. Jonas had to forfeit his share as he was in prison, and Kara wasn’t of age until this year. It was odd in a way, because usually it’s twenty-five or thirty, or some multiple of five years, but for whatever reason, her parents chose twenty-eight.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Tate said, but it did, he’d seen the will and the way he’d read it was that if all of the McIntyre kids were deceased or incarcerated, the estate, after paying all expenses, would go to next of kin, in this case, Faiza Donner. Sam McIntyre had no siblings and his parents were dead. Faiza was the only member of Zelda’s family who was still alive.
The bad feeling that had been with him ever since reading the will grew as the van wedged into the small spot and the driver climbed out to jog across the road and head into a county records building located in the same complex as the sheriff’s department. “What about the house in the mountains?”
“For sale. Outrageous price. Not much interest. Who wants to pay millions for some house where a massacre took place?”
“A rich nutcase with a macabre sense of humor, maybe. Someone who likes to shock or is into trophies of a kind so he’s got bragging rights. You know the kind: a freak with more money than brains.”
Connell barked out a laugh. “We both know a few of those. So far, though, no one’s shown any interest. The place has been with four different Realtors in about as many years, but not a single offer.”
“It’ll sell. If the price is right.”
“Anything will. Look, I gotta go. I’m on the road. I’ll check in later.” Connell ended the connection, and Tate took a sip of his cold coffee, rolled down the window and poured the dregs onto the street just as a delivery truck belching exhaust rolled past.
As he put up the window again, he checked his watch and wondered for the hundredth time how the interview was going. She had insisted she could handle it, that she had nothing to hide, and that she would do anything she could to see that Merritt Margrove’s murderer was captured and brought to justice.
Once again, even though she’d picked up Jonas at Margrove’s place in the mountains, she’d defended him, insisting he wasn’t the killer. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she’d protested when, just last night, Tate had suggested her prick of a brother, an ex-con, just might lie. “Why would he kill the man who got him out of prison? And why would he expose himself and get in the car with me?”
“He wanted you to drive him away from the crime scene.”
