Page 67 of Wicked Games
“I will. Thank Walker for me. I’ll talk to you later.”
“I’ll check in soon. Bye.”
“Bye.”
I go into the kitchen and pour more coffee into my mug. We thought it was likely, but it’s still a punch to the gut to know it’s true. That Brooke’s dead. She and Hattie knew who killed Theo and he’s covering his tracks.
They won’t catch the assholes now. They got rid of the gun and they’ll go underground. No one else knows anything, and he and the others who helped him kidnap Theo can run to Mexico and live like kings off of five million dollars.
It doesn’t matter if they were working for someone or not. Everything the cops find from today on will lead to a dead end.
It’s not the closure I needed, but it’s the only one I’m gonna get.
I call LaSalle back. “It’s Lockwood,” I say when he answers.
“You heard,” he says, muffling a cough.
“Yeah. I was on the phone with Violet when you called. Another leak in the police department, right?” I ask, but I’m not as angry about it as I was before.
“Could be. Hard to compete when you got a reporter who can pay up. What do you know?”
“That my ex-wife’s dead.” I say it without choking. If I have any tears left for Brooke, I’ll cry them later. “That you found Jenkins’s gun. That some woman had it. That’s about it, but there’s not much more to know, is there?”
I walk across the living room and look out the patio doors. I can’t see Avery. She could be in bed cuddling with Winnie for all I know. I can’t be mad at her for that. I like sleeping with Winnie too. I guess when we’re back in the city we’re getting a dog.
“Might be. We have the woman in custody. A Cynthia Crandall.”
“She used to work for me,” I say, surprised. “She was one of my executive assistants, but she had a drinking problem and started coming to work drunk. I paid for her to go to rehab and told her if she cleaned up she could have her job back. I never heard from her again.”
“She didn’t clean up.”
“No, it doesn’t sound like she did. Not if she was squatting in a bar. Did she see anything?”
“We haven’t questioned her yet—she’s in a holding cell drying out. But yes, she had Jenkins’s gun, and the bullet that killed Mrs. Lockwood, I mean, Mrs. Vale, matched. The only prints on it were hers and there was gunpowder residue on the muzzle and her hands.”
“That doesn’t mean she killed Brooke.”
“No, it doesn’t. Once she’s sober, she can tell us if she saw anything. More than likely not as these guys have been careful about choosing places that are out of the way and don’t have working cameras, and the parking lot of that bar is the same. Mrs. Vale was killed in her car, so I’ve got a guy looking at traffic cam footage now. They had to have gotten her there somehow. We’ll find something.”
“Then all we can do is wait.” I head back into the kitchen and sip my coffee. Even with the decent night’s sleep I got last night, this conversation is dragging me down, and I’m exhausted.
“Don’t you have anything else to ask?” LaSalle’s voice is sharp.
I frown. I don’t care for his tone. Especially since he’s been in charge of this case since day one and hasn’t done a fucking thing that would help find Theo’s killer. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”
“Aren’t you curious as to why one of your employees was the one who had Jenkins’s gun? Why she happened to be there?”
“It sounds like it’s just a coin—” I stop. As Avery and I talked about yesterday, there are too many of those.
“A coincidence. Right. I’ll decide that for myself after I question her. Hopefully I can get some answers out of her before she lawyers up. She worked for you, so she must be educated? Knows her rights? Did you sleep with her?”
“Being that she was working for me while I was married to Brooke, she’d say I did,” I say bitterly.
“Then Mrs. Vale knew her too.”
“Yes. Brooke would come up to see me every once in a while, but she usually avoided my office. I didn’t notice at the time, and I only learned recently that it was because she didn’t want to run into Violet.”
LaSalle coughs. “I can’t decide if this is too tidy or too messy. I’ll be in touch.”
