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“Did you visit them out there?”
“No. I never knew them. They had a small farm. They died in a mudslide when my mom was little. It swept the entire property away, the house, barn, everything. Her parents’ bodies were never found. She was at school or she would have
been killed too. After that she went to an orphanage. Then came east when she was an adult.”
“How did your parents meet?”
Jules’s features softened. “It was sort of romantic, actually. My dad was working in Maryland, right out of college. My mom worked as a waitress at a café near there. She was putting herself through college. Some of the people at Dad’s work would go there for breakfast and lunch. She would wait on him and they struck up a friendship. Mom was a knockout back then and I’m pretty sure she had plenty of suitors. When she got off work one night he was waiting in the parking lot with flowers and tickets to a play at the National Theater. Needless to say, they hit it off. The rest is history.”
“Very nice. So your mom didn’t come from money?”
“From money? No, not that I know of. Why?”
“Just something somebody said. It’s not important.”
He closed the album.
“Anything else?” asked Jules.
“Have you heard from Natalie?”
Jules nodded. “She sounded okay. She said she was so sorry for everything.”
“And what did you say to that?”
Jules shrugged. “I hate what she did. I mean, it totally destroyed our family. But she’s still my sister.”
“I get that. Family is family.”
He rose.
She said, “Have you found who killed Cissy?”
“Not yet. Still working on it.”
“I don’t understand any of this, I really don’t.”
“Well, you wouldn’t be alone on that.”
Decker left the house, then turned around to look at its exterior.
He should have seen this before, he knew. He had two possible conclusions. Now he just had to see which one was right.
CHAPTER
66
“EIGHT HUNDRED and forty-nine thousand dollars,” said Milligan. “They closed on the property a little over thirty-five years ago. Tax tables show it’s worth probably four times that now, and even more on the open market. Wish I had that kind of asset in my retirement future.”
Decker looked over his shoulder. They were in Milligan’s office at the WFO.
Decker had returned home the previous night and apologized to Jamison for walking out. She had, in turn, apologized to him for her comments.
“We’re all under a lot of pressure,” she’d said. “But you probably more than anybody else. I didn’t mean to add to your burden.”
And they had left it at that.
Decker looked at the computer screen and said, “Thirty-five years ago. Couple years after Jules was born.”
“Right.”
“And Dabney was still working at the NSA?”
“Right. He’d been there about four years by then, started right out of college. He left to start his own firm six years later.”
“Do we know what his salary was at NSA?”
“Ballpark, yes, and to jump to answering your obvious next question, it could not have supported the purchase of that house. So at age twenty-six he bought a mansion. Definitely should have been a red flag for someone.”
“Do we know if they paid cash or took on debt?”
“That’s the rub. The documents I found showed that they put four hundred thousand down and financed the rest. His wife had a job back then too. She worked at a real estate firm as a Realtor.”
“Could her income have covered it?”
“Not all of it, no. Not even combined with his. But where did the four-hundred-thousand-dollar down payment come from? You would think the NSA would have asked the same question.”
“Maybe they did, and it was satisfactorily answered,” replied Decker.
“Maybe,” said Milligan. “And we can try to ask them, but my experience is you don’t get fast answers from those guys, if you get answers at all. Bogart’s been trying to get them to respond to questions about Dabney, and so far all he’s gotten back is silence.” He looked at Decker. “What made you think about all this?”
“Big, expensive house purchased by a young couple without a lot of money. Pretty basic.”
“I guess we should have seen that too. But it’s all perspective, I suppose. Dabney was super-successful over the years and his house just sort of fit the picture of that success. I didn’t think about the timing of the purchase all those years ago.”
“Cecilia Randall also told me that Dabney bought a yellow Porsche around the same time as they closed on the house. And she said that she thought Mrs. Dabney came from money, the way she dressed and conducted herself. Now, Jules did tell me that Ellie’s parents were killed in a mudslide and she was sent to an orphanage. Maybe she got compensation from that. But if that were the case, why would you be working as a waitress to put yourself through college?”
“You wouldn’t,” replied Milligan.
“So if we can find out the source of the money maybe we can figure out what happened all these years later.”
“You think they’re connected?”
“I think they have to be.”
“Dabney was at NSA. He certainly would have had access to classified material. And then he starts his own firm. I know we were speculating that he only recently committed espionage to help Natalie. But do you think he might have been spying all these years?”
“Hard to say. He might have worked with Berkshire over three decades ago and then quit spying for some reason. And somehow turned back to her all these years later to sell the secrets and get the payoff to help his daughter. That might solve the question of why we could show no connection between them. We didn’t look back three decades.”
“I think you might be on the right track, Decker.”
“On the other hand, Dabney couldn’t have killed Cecilia Randall. He was already dead.”
“We don’t know for sure that her murder is connected. It might just be a random killing.”
Decker shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“If he has been a spy all this time, it’s not going to be easy for his family to learn this, not after everything else they’ve been through.”
