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Chapter35
SHE DID NOT LOOKREMOTELYPLEASEDto see him again.
“I’m going out now,” Mitzi Gardiner said from the partially open front door of her beautiful home.
She was dressed immaculately in a pleated skirt, nylons, and low-heeled pumps. Her white blouse had an open collar. Around her neck was a string of small pearls. She had a dark, short-waisted jacket on over the blouse. Her hair had not a strand out of place. Her makeup and lipstick looked professionally applied. She could be presiding over a board meeting at a Fortune 500 company.
“We can wait then or come back another time,” said Decker, who was once more struck by her transformation from an emaciated and perpetually strung-out drug addict. “But it won’t take long if you can make the time now.”
She eyed him and then Mars, who smiled pleasantly back at her.
She frowned and looked at her watch. “I can give you five minutes.”
She led them through the house and into a book-lined library. She closed the doors behind them and indicated seats. They quickly sat down on a small couch.
She sat down across from them.
“Well?” she said, staring at him.
He said, “Thanks for agreeing to see us now.”
“Five minutes,” she said. “Then I have a meeting I need to get to. An important one.”
Decker cleared his throat. The questioning would have to be delicate. It was hard because his preferred approach was to figuratively grab a suspect by the neck with a line of queries.
“We’re running down some leads and it occurred to us that your father might have been framed.”
Gardiner sat back and looked coolly at him. “So you intimated on your last visit. And I told you that you were barking up the wrong tree, if you remember.”
“By the way, when I left here to drive back to Burlington after speaking with you before, someone tried to kill me.”
She sat up, looking genuinely shocked. “I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with that.”
“No, not at all. I just wanted you to know because you may want to be on your guard.”
“Thank you for your warning. But I carry a gun with me when I’m out.”
“Really, why is that?”
“Because I’m wealthy, Agent Decker. And people who aren’t want to take things away from you. I know that better than most, having once been on the other side of the glass looking in.”
“Have you had problems with that in the past?”
“I don’t think that has anything to do with your investigation.” She tapped her watch. “And the clock is running on your time to question me.”
Decker plunged in. “There is a substantial time discrepancy in what happened thirteen years ago. That has changed my understanding of the case.”
“What time discrepancy? And why didn’t someone see it back then?”
“It was just overlooked. But the time of the victims’ deaths and the 911 call to police? It doesn’t make sense.”
She sat back. “All right. I guess I’ll take your word for that. But why would that cause you to come to see me?”
“Your father had scratches on his arms. The police concluded that those scratches were caused by Abigail Richards fighting for her life while your father strangled her.”
“Do we really have to go through this?” she said irritably.
“When your father was arrested, he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a jacket over it.”
