Page 23 of The Best Lawyer
“How are you?” I asked. “Is there anything I can get for you?”
“I have everything I need,” she answered. “At least everything I would need in here. Don’t worry about me. I look worse than I feel. Promise. Things are settling into a routine of sorts. I’ve even made a friend. I’ll be okay. As long as there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
I pulled a thick file out of my bag. It contained copies of the relevant portions of Tom’s HR files.
“How are Joe and Emma?” Katy asked.
“Okay, I think. For obvious reasons, I haven’t been talking to them very much. We’re working your case out of my house. I don’t see any scenario where Joe isn’t called as a witness at trial. I need to be careful of even the appearance of impropriety.”
“Plus, you’ve got to be pretty angry with him,” she said. “And with me.”
“I’m trying to focus on the matter at hand.”
“I love you, Cass,” she said. “I still think of you as my sister. I know I’ve burned some pretty big bridges with you and Matt, and Vangie. There were a lot of reasons Joe and I broke up. I take the blame for most of them. But not all of them.”
I put a hand up. “Let’s not do this, okay? Today I’m your lawyer, not your former sister-in-law. And I wouldn’t even be that if I didn’t care.”
“Okay.”
I thumbed through a few of the pages from Tom’s WDTN file. “I need to understand Tom’s reasons for leaving Detroit. It puzzles me why he’d voluntarily leave a higher-paying job in a bigger market to come down here to Delphi. Did he ever talk to you about it?”
“Sure,” she said. “If you want to call it a mid-life crisis, that was part of it. He was forty-two years old. For a man in the news business, that’s nothing. If he’d been a woman, that’s when they start putting you out to pasture. But he said he wasn’t satisfied with the direction things were going at WDTN. When WLAN offered him the job, it came with some perks that appealed to him. He’d get more airtime. They were going to basically let him run the sports desk any way he wanted. And he didn’t like how cutthroat things were in Detroit.”
I considered her answer. Then I flipped one of the pages so she could read it. “This is what’s giving me pause,” I said. “Three weeks before Tom handed in his resignation, he was given a promotion at WDTN. Did you know that? They were going to move him off weekends. It came with a significant pay raise. He would have been pulling in an extra thirty grand a year. Whereas the job here at WLAN-7 had him earning forty grand less. Does that make sense to you?”
She shrugged. “We didn’t talk about money very much. Tom had been a bachelor for a long time, though, Cass. He never had kids. He inherited quite a bit when his parents passed away. He was frugal. He could afford to pay cash for the house he lived in. I think he figured money wasn’t the only thing.”
“Sure,” I said. “Only, doesn’t it seem strange to you that he accepted the promotion? Then he turned around and resigned rather abruptly. I can’t find anything in the file to explain why.”
“Why does it matter? This was years ago. What could it possibly have to do with him getting killed?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing. It just seems like a major life event for him and I can’t quite understand the logic.”
“What are you getting at?”
“It’s just a hunch. I’m going to keep at it. I’m just wondering if something might have happened that forced Tom to resign.”
Katy shook her head. “He never said anything about that. And he was happy here. He didn’t like living in the city. Delphi was more his speed. He grew up in a smaller town.”
“There’s something else,” I said. “Something more recent.”
I pulled out a stapled pack of papers. It contained printouts of several emails Tom received at WLAN. I showed them to Katy.
She rested her chin on her palm and flipped through the pages with her other hand. She didn’t appear shocked or bothered by what she was reading.
“Tom always said this came with the territory,” she said as she handed the papers back to me.
“Those aren’t your typical fan letters though,” I said. “He got snail mail letters too. One of them contained a pair of women’s underwear. The sender of those emails seemed to grow increasingly hostile that Tom wasn’t replying. She calls herself Sugar Bear. She says she knows where he lives. Did Tom ever tell you about her?”
“No. I mean, not specifically. And he never got letters addressed to the house. As far as I’m aware, nobody knew where we lived. I mean, not the general public.”
“It’s a small town though. You can never really know who knows whom.”
“Do you really think one of these crackpots would have gone so far as to break into my house and kill Tom?” She recoiled. “How? The police keep saying no windows were broken and all the other doors were still locked.”
“This person, Sugar Bear. She shows up in emails she sent to Tom while he was with WDTN in Detroit, too. They got pretty creepy and personal. While they weren’t overt threats, there was some serious crossing of boundaries. What bothers me is that neither Detective DePaul nor anyone else bothered running any of this down.”
“That surprises you?” Katy said. “I don’t think Sharon DePaul did any investigating at all. She assumed I’m the one who killed my own husband and that’s that.”
