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“So,” Kit said, relieved that the young woman could be eliminated from the suspect list, “someone either had her key card or a copy. Is that possible?”
Jeff nodded. “It is. All of the ID numbers attached to the key cards are in the personnel file, which I haven’t been able to access yet. But once I have that info, I can tell you which card was used—her assigned card or a copy.”
“Go back in there,” Navarro said wearily. “At least make him tell you how to access the information on the server.”
Kit suddenly felt as drained as Navarro sounded, despite getting a full night’s sleep. “Will do.”
Chapter Fourteen
San Diego PD, San Diego, California
Wednesday, November 9, 12:30 p.m.
Sam settled into a chair in the observation room adjacent to where they’d watched Adler’s interrogation, readying himself for the interrogation of Faye Evans. The woman was sitting at a table in the interview room on the other side of the glass, clearly irate. They’d kept her waiting since eight a.m.
Sam had hoped she wasn’t guilty, but Adler’s confession had left little doubt. The man had photos and recorded messages, all of which he’d eventually shared.
It had taken quite a while to wheedle the confession and necessary server passwords out of Archie Adler. The young man’s lawyer had proven savvy enough to demand that a deal be drafted first, so they’d had to call the prosecutor’s office.
Sam had been relieved when the prosecutor who’d turned up was his best friend, Joel Haley. The other prosecutors were good, of course, but Sam trusted Joel to treat this case right. Joel had been thorough, but eventually he and Adler’s lawyer had come to an acceptable deal and Adler had spilled everything he knew about the thefts.
Crawford had been stealing from the Shady Oaks operating fund for years before Adler had figured out his scheme and wanted in. It was less money for Crawford, but he’d had little choice.
Joel dropped into the chair beside him. “Pretty interesting, huh?”
“Much better to be on this side of the glass,” Sam said wryly. He’d been questioned as a possible suspect during Kit’s big serial killer case six months ago. It had been how they’d met and, while he was glad to have met Kit McKittrick, he didn’t want to be on the other side of the glass ever again.
“I guess so. So I take it that everyone was surprised about JoAnne Tremblay.”
“Oh yeah.” One of the biggest bombshells of Adler’s disclosure was that Crawford had started his stealing after catching JoAnne Tremblay, the director before Selma Waite, dipping into the facility’s money on a regular basis. Crawford had demanded a cut and the previous director had been forced to agree. “I knew Mrs. Tremblay. She was the one who signed off on my volunteering. I never would have expected a woman whose favorite song was ‘Love Letters in the Sand’ to be an embezzler.”
“What’s ‘Love Letters in the Sand’?” Joel asked.
Detective Goddard took the chair on the other side of Sam. “Pat Boone. One of my great-aunts had the album.”
Joel huffed a laugh. “Wow. Still waters.”
“Exactly.” Goddard smoothed his tie. “I’m hoping that Evans knows more about the stolen coins than she’s let on. Adler didn’t seem to think so, but he also didn’t know that Evans and Crawford had been meeting up.”
They hadn’t proven that yet, but the emails Jeff Mansfield had uncovered were so bizarrely written that they had to be some kind of private code between the two. There were the reminders to bring an umbrella on a sunny day, but also reminders to avoid construction traffic on a certain street downtown that had no construction—and hadn’t for the past year. There were a number of inquiries about the state of the roses in Evans’s front yard, but there were no roses there. So something was going on.
“Fingers crossed,” Goddard said. “I don’t know that Evans killed Crawford, though. Her alibi checks out for his TOD. She was caught by traffic cams exiting the freeway at midnight near her mother’s residence in Temecula. Ironically, her mother lives in a continuing care facility there. Not as high-priced as Shady Oaks, but it’s still a hefty monthly payment.”
“A motive for robbery,” Joel mused. “She could have driven back, killed Crawford, taken the coins, then returned to Temecula, avoiding the traffic cams.”
“Possibly,” Goddard agreed, “but she’s also too short to have been the person to leave Shady Oaks with the coins. She could have killed Crawford, though, then taken the coins. That’s more likely.”
“She could have been the woman in his motel room,” Sam said, “but I swear that if they were lovers, they were good actors. Just watching them, they were consistently irritated with each other. I can’t see them stopping snarling at each other long enough to do anything.”
“Crawford did successfully lie to his friends for ten years,” Connor said as he joined them, brushing a few crumbs from his tie. They’d broken for lunch after Adler’s interview, which had left Evans waiting in the adjacent interview room for another forty-five minutes. She’d been there since eight a.m. and had to be hungry.
Kit had suggested the delay. She wanted Evans mad enough to slip and say something incriminating. From the look on Evans’s face at the moment, Kit had achieved at least part of her goal. Evans was pissed off.
“That’s true,” Sam conceded. “But even though I was only there a few times a month, I never heard a peep from the residents about them being together. If there had been even a spark, it would have been all over Shady Oaks in a single day. I love the residents, but they are among the worst gossips I’ve ever met.”
Connor grinned slyly. “They’re already whispering about a certain shrink and a certain detective.”
Sam gave Connor a sharp look of reproof. “Detective.” Because that wasn’t okay. Connor was discussing Kit’s private life like it was nothing more than a football game.
