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Alvarez focused on the son. “Okay. Lars, why don’t you tell me everything about finding the purse? Was there anything else in it or around it?”
“No.” He caught a warning glance from his mother. “No.”
“God hears everything,” she reminded him. “He sees everything.”
Lars swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. “Okay, maybe there were a couple bucks inside.” His head actually seemed to shrink into his neck.
“A couple?” his mother sneered. “How much is a couple?”
“I dunno. Sixty . . . maybe eighty.”
“Oh my God!” His mother’s hands fell onto her lap. To Alvarez, she said, “Can you believe it?” Before Alvarez could answer, Elaine turned on her son again. “So, what was it, Lars? How much did you steal? And from a dead woman!”
Lars’s head snapped up. “I didn’t know she was dead! Not then!”
She wasn’t derailed. “So, was it sixty or eighty, or maybe a hundred?”
“Eighty,” the kid answered quickly.
Alvarez suspected he’d shaved the amount and that Lars was smart enough to hide the extent of his theft, giving his mother a large enough amount to make it believable, but less than what he’d really pocketed.
“You’ll have to tell your father and work off the debt. You’ll pay the family back or if they don’t want it, give it to the church, after you tell Preacher Miller what you’ve done. You can start by shoveling the snow off the walkway, which you should do for free anyway!” She folded her hands over the long skirt that covered her legs. “There are lots of projects Lars can tackle. We can’t stay in the house, anyway. It’s much too expensive now that I’m a single mother.”
Before Mrs. Bender could launch into another diatribe about the sins of her ex, Alvarez cut her off. “Let me ask Lars a few questions,” she suggested, then turned to the boy. “Tell me about finding the purse and this phone. Other than picking it up, did you touch it? Use it?”
He looked absolutely miserable. “Maybe.”
“Answer her with the truth!” his mother almost screeched.
Alvarez held up a hand. “Please, Mrs. Bender.”
The detective had a teenaged son who lived with his adoptive parents. Even though she’d just recently reconnected with Gabe, she understood that the boy was far from perfect and had already had a brush or two with the law. The same, it seemed, held true for Lars, but thoughtless teenaged stunts were not always a precursor to a life of crime.
“Let Lars speak.”
The kid did. The fingers of one hand working over the fist of another, he answered her questions one by one. She found out that he’d swiped the phone and the cash out of the purse. He’d found nothing else inside or around the bag and seen nothing that would help. Yes, he’d made a call or two on the phone, tried to download an app, but was unable without Calypso Pope’s user ID and password, and he’d gone on the Internet where he’d entered some chat rooms and surfed a bit.
By the time his mother had marshaled him out of the office, Alvarez had learned little, but since she knew the approximate time of death, and when the purse had presumably been lost, she would be able to figure out who was the last person Calypso called or texted.
Grabbing her jacket, she walked to Pescoli’s office where she found her partner at her desk reading an old case file, the box on the floor open, the lid propped against the wall.
“What’s that?”
“I told you about Hattie Grayson and her insistence that Bart’s death wasn’t a suicide.”
Alvarez asked, “Don’t you have enough to do?”
Pescoli snorted. “I should have never told Hattie I’d look into it, but I did, and now I can’t just ignore the file or she’ll be calling every day.” She set the file on her messy desk.
How Pescoli could ever find anything on a work surface cluttered with notes, cups, pens, and papers Alvarez didn’t understand.
“I imagine I’ll run into Hattie at the funeral on Saturday, and she’ll be asking me about Bart’s suicide and make some ridiculous connection to Dan’s murder. I thought I’d better read over the old reports, you know, get my ducks in a row.” Pescoli rolled back her chair. “Anything new?”
Alvarez held up the cell phone in its plastic bag. “The kid who found it seems to have a little bit of larceny in his blood and his God-fearing mother is having nothing of it.”
“Good thing,” Pescoli said.
“Yeah, I’m glad to have the phone, but the mother—”Alvarez shook her head. “Let’s just call Elaine Bender a piece of work and leave it at that.” She brought her partner up to speed as Pescoli donned a pair of gloves and took out the phone.
