Dirty Secrets Read online

  “She lives in California. It was only eight thirty there.”

  Harris nodded, took out his notebook and jotted it all down. “All right. Any way to prove where you were between midnight and one?”

  “No. I’m divorced, so I have no wife to verify my alibi.” And Mona wouldn’t have if she had been there, Christopher thought grimly. “I did do some research on the University’s online library between twelve and one. The server records should verify it.”

  Harris turned to Tanya. “And you, Miss Meyer?”

  Tanya was white-faced and trembling. “I was home sick. My aunt can tell you.”

  “Your aunt was awake all night?”

  “She came in once, when I was throwing up in the bathroom. I don’t know exactly what time it was, but it was before one a.m.”

  “All right. Mr. Bass?”

  Nate jolted. “I was with my girlfriend. All night,” he said meaningfully. “You can ask her yourself. Look, man, I don’t even own a car and the buses don’t run that late.”

  “Relax, Mr. Bass. I’m just asking questions.” He turned to Ian. “Mr. Delenn. I understand you’re here on a student visa from the UK. Where exactly are you from?”

  Ian clenched his fists at his sides. “I’m from Glasgow, but what does my student visa have to do with anything?”

  Harris shrugged. “So where were you that night, Mr. Delenn?”

  Ian pursed his lips. “Home. Alone. No girlfriend, no daughter, no bloody mother to call long distance, so nobody to confirm my alibi.” The last words were muttered from behind clenched teeth.

  Harris nodded benignly, as if not even noticing Ian’s anger. “Thank you all. Professor, who else has one of those key cards that you all wear around your neck?”

  Christopher shook his head. “Only us. And my boss, Dr. Stossel. He’s the department chair. But he’s out of the country at a symposium.”

  “Who can I contact for a record of key card use for that door?”

  “Try the IT department,” Christopher answered wearily. “They’re the guys who come when it breaks down and we can’t get in.”

  Harris stood up. “Thank you. Please stay available in case I have other questions.”

  “In other words,” Ian gritted, “don’t leave town.”

  Christopher shot him a quelling look. “Be quiet, Ian. You’re not helping. Detective, when can we get back to work in the lab?” The door was still crisscrossed with yellow crime scene tape.

  “When we’re done investigating.”

  Christopher held up his hand to stop Ian from making what would likely have been another antagonistic comment. “Detective. We have a contract with the US Department of Agriculture. I understand that you need to keep your scene protected, but we need to give our sponsor notice if we’re going to be late with our deadline.”

  Harris frowned. “Should be by the end of the week.” He headed for the door.

  “Thank you. And Detective?” Christopher waited until Harris turned around. “When will you release Darrell’s body? I promised his mother I would handle the burial arrangements.” Something flickered in Harris’s eyes. Controlled compassion.

  “The ME signed the paperwork this morning. The body should be released before noon. I’ll show myself out.”

  Christopher sighed. “Looks like we’re taking a break, gang. Catch up on your other classes. Get some sleep. Go down to the beach and catch some sun. But don’t talk to the press. Please. This is bad enough without us contributing more to it.”

  Tanya and Nate filed out. Ian remained and Christopher waited patiently for the young man to have his say. “Professor, something’s been bothering me. I, for one, am not surprised that the detective thinks Darrell was murdered. I knew he’d be too careful to have an accident like that and the idea of him committin’ suicide is just damn ludicrous. I was thinking . . . Do you remember last month when we had that break-in?”

  A sharp pain arced up Christopher’s neck as his muscles tensed. “Yeah, I do.” Three of their gas chromatograph machines had been destroyed, and with it countless soil samples that had been painstakingly prepared. “We haven’t regenerated that data.”

  “Professor, those samples were Darrell’s. That they may be connected is not somethin’ we can ignore.”

  The pain in his neck spiked sharper. “Hell. I’ll let Harris know.”

  * * *

  Cincinnati, Monday, February 22, 10:30 a.m.

  “Hot chocolate break?”

  Emma looked up from a box of Will’s old college books to see a tray rising from the hole in the attic floor, Kate’s hands keeping it steady. Crawling across the attic floor, Emma took the tray and set it on the floor. “You’re too tall to fit up here.”

  “Spoken like a short person.” Kate climbed the rest of the way up and sat cross-legged and hunched, looking around with interest. “Your attic looks bigger than mine.”

  “Because mine’s not as full of junk as yours,” Emma said and took a mug of steaming cocoa from the tray. “This is good.”

  “Thank you.” Kate regarded her over the rim of her mug. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve survived the trauma of being kidnapped,” Emma replied dryly.

  “I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been desperate. You wouldn’t come home when I asked. And you were never in danger for a minute.” She grinned. “But wasn’t Linda wonderful? You never suspected a thing.”

  “No, I didn’t. And if you ever do anything like that again, I’m calling the cops.”

  “I hope I won’t have to,” Kate said pointedly, then sobered. “So how are you, Em?”

  Emma looked away. “I’m all right. The past few days have been hard, going through his things.” She looked back at Kate’s concerned face and forced her lips into a rueful smile. “I wouldn’t have believed clothes could hold a man’s scent for more than a year.” But they could. Emma hadn’t known just how badly a heart could break until she’d pulled one of Will’s sweaters from a drawer and . . . smelled him.

  She’d held back the tears until that moment, but smelling his woodsy cologne was somehow worse than everything else. The dam had broken then and Will’s sweater became a crying rag. Kate had raced to her side and held her through the torrent and when the weeping had passed, Kate pressed a hot cloth to her face and popped aspirin down her throat to take the edge off the resulting headache. But the headache was long gone now, in its place a . . . peace, a relief she’d long seen in the clients she’d counseled over the years as they too had come to grips with their loss, with having to refind their place in the world without that special person.

  Kate gripped her hand and squeezed hard. “But you needed to do it, Emma. I couldn’t stand watching you hide any longer. This is your home. You need to live here, not in hotels or in New York. You needed to grieve.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Emma said thoughtfully, fixing her gaze out the attic window where snowflakes were silently falling. “I know you think I hadn’t grieved Will because I wouldn’t come home.” She shrugged. “I didn’t think I had either. But I did, in my own way. Every time I went to bed alone in a strange hotel, I missed him. Every time his favorite show came on TV or I heard one of his favorite songs on the radio, I missed him. But every day it got a little easier. Eventually, I stopped reaching for him in the night. I stopped listening for him to call my name in a crowd. Friday night was the first time I’d slept in our bed since he died. And . . .” She drew a breath. “I missed him. But it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.”

  Kate’s eyes were shiny. “I’m sorry, Em.”

  “So am I.” She sighed and crawled back to the box of books she’d been cataloging. “I found the newspaper clippings, by the way. Clever, hiding them in with the bag of peanut M&M’s you brought with you.”

  Kate bit her lip. “I was half-hoping you would find them
and half-hoping you wouldn’t. I didn’t know if you’d kept up with the case.”

  Emma stared down in the box of books, controlling a sudden rush of grief and helpless rage. “I checked the Post online every day from wherever I was. And the detective called when the trial started.” The trial of the nineteen-year-old that had walked into a convenience store with a loaded gun and changed her life forever. “I was ready to come back if they needed me to testify, but the store video gave the police all the evidence they needed. The police were really wonderful. They faxed a letter to me when I was in LA last year. It was from the mother of the little boy Will pushed out of the way.” Will had saved the child, putting himself in the path of the robber’s bullet instead. Emma’s voice softened, trembled. “The mother was . . . very grateful.”

  “She testified,” Kate said quietly. “The mother, that is. She was a very convincing eyewitness. She had the jury in tears when she told how Will saved her little boy.”

  Emma blinked at Kate. “You went to the trial?”

  “Every damn day. I figured it was the least I could do for you.”

  Emma’s eyes stung. “Oh, Kate.”

  “I cheered when they sentenced the bastard to life without parole,” Kate said forcefully. “He’ll never touch anyone else.”

  “Which is justice, but small consolation.” Emma pulled Will’s books from the box, needing to change the subject before she started crying again. “I wonder how much the used bookstore would pay for these?”

  Kate’s eyes narrowed, but she went along with the subject change. “Not much. You might do better to donate them to the library or to the Salvation Army along with his clothes.” She scooted to another pile of boxes. “What’s all this?”

  Emma cocked her head. “No idea. Open it and see.”

  Kate ripped the tape off the box flaps and laughed out loud. “Lookee here. It’s your old high school yearbooks. This one’s from 1989.”

  Emma groaned. “My junior year.”

  “What was your maiden name?”

  “Kate, please . . . Oh, hell. You’ll pester me until I tell you. It was Wilson.”

  Kate flipped pages and let out another laugh. “Look at you. Your glasses were bigger than your whole face. Here, look.”

  “I don’t want to.” Emma shuddered. “I remember keenly. I was a nerd.”

  “You were not. You were cute. What’s this?” Kate waved a folded sheet of paper.

  Emma glanced up from yet another box of Will’s books. “I have no idea. Read it.”

  “Oh my,” Kate murmured. “Oh my, oh my. Emma, you never told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That you’d had a torrid romance in high school.”

  Emma’s eyes widened. “Because I didn’t. Will was the first man I ever dated and I didn’t meet him till college. What is that?”

  “It fell out of the yearbook.” Kate waggled her brows. “It starts with `Emma, my love’ and ends with “All my love, Christopher.’”

  Emma carefully put down the book she’d pulled from the box. “Excuse me? Did you say Christopher?”

  “I certainly did. ‘Emma, mi querida.’” Kate looked up, her eyes twinkling. “That means ‘my love.’”

  “I took six years of Spanish in junior high and high school, so I know what ‘mi querida’ means,” Emma said impatiently. “What else does it say?”

  “‘I’ve sat next to you for two years and only now have the courage to tell you what’s in my heart. We danced last night and for the first time my dreams became real.’”

  Emma closed her eyes, remembering both Christopher Walker and that one dance. “It was our junior prom and we’d gone together. As friends.”

  Kate hummed. “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s true. That’s what I thought at first anyway. But that night he asked me to dance and . . . I wondered.” Emma bit her lower lip. “He was my best guy-friend. We were lab partners in chemistry and we took Spanish together, too. Our seats were always assigned next to each other, since both our names started with W. He broke up with his girlfriend the week before the prom and I’d never had a boyfriend, so we decided to go together.”

  Kate tapped his yearbook photo. “He’s cute with all that curly brown hair. Nice eyes, too. Kind of skinny, though.”

  “He was six feet tall and all arms and legs,” Emma said fondly, then paused and frowned. “Well, is there more, or does he stop there?”

  Kate blinked. “You mean you’ve really never seen this letter? Holy Moses. Okay. Here’s the rest. `When I held you in my arms I let myself hope that you might feel the same way. I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, but if you let yourself, you might find we have more in common than you realize.’” Kate lowered the letter, brows raised. “You argued with him?”

  “About everything. World politics, movies, football . . . Sometimes I’d stand on a chair to argue with him nose to nose. I never knew . . . never dreamed he felt that way.”

  “I’d say that’s a given.” Kate shook the notebook paper dramatically. “But there’s more. `I think we could have something special. I love your mind and your heart. But above all else I treasure your friendship. I haven’t said anything before now because I’ve been terrified I’d lose you. If friends is all you want us to be, then that will have to be enough. If you say nothing, I’ll know you just want to stay friends. But if you want more, I’ll be waiting. All my love, Christopher.’” Kate let out a breath. “Oh my, oh my.”

  Emma clasped her hand to her heart, felt it beating hard. “Oh, Kate, I never said a word. I must have hurt him so badly. How could I have missed this letter?”

  “It fell out of two pages that were stuck together. Emma, you look like I hit you.”

  “I should be hit. Kate, I broke his heart.”

  “I’m sure he’s recovered by now,” Kate said wryly. “It’s been seventeen years.”

  Emma shook her head, her thoughts spinning. “You don’t understand, Kate. I sat next to him in Spanish class the next year. I never said a word and after a few weeks, he dropped the class. Said he wanted to take band. Play the trombone of all things. He must have been so mad at me.”

  “Emma, this was another lifetime ago. You can’t change this.”

  Emma frowned, picked up Will’s old college book. “This was another lifetime ago, Kate. This is what I can’t change. I can’t bring Will back. But I can change how Christopher feels. How he remembers me and himself. I can’t go on letting him think he was rejected all those years ago, or worse, that I was too cruel to acknowledge his feelings. Hell, I thought I felt a spark when we danced that one time, but I was so inexperienced, I didn’t know how to pursue it. And when he dropped Spanish, I thought it was because I’d danced too close that night. I compulsed about it for weeks.”

  “You? Compulsing about something? Say it isn’t so.”

  “This is serious, Kate. I have to do something about this.”

  Kate looked worried. “Like what? Find him?”

  “Maybe.” Emma sat up straighter. “Maybe I will.”

  Kate also sat up straighter and bumped her head on the attic roof. “Bad idea, Em,” she said, rubbing her head. “Really, really bad idea. Maybe he’s married. You don’t want to barge in on his marriage. Old flames make current wives very mad. Trust me.”

  “Then I’ll hire a private detective to find out. If he’s married, I’ll leave it alone. If he’s not, I’ll have the detective ask him to call me. If he does, great. If not . . . well, the decision will be in his hands this time.”

  “Em, this is your grief talking. Don’t do this.”

  “Maybe it is my grief. All I know is that I feel something besides lonely for the first time in a year. As luck would have it, what I feel is shame. I broke a boy’s heart and I never even knew. Look, Kate, what harm could it possibly do to have a private detective poke
around? God knows I can afford it. Between Will’s life insurance and royalties on Bite-Sized, I have more money than I’ll ever need.”

  Kate sighed. “If he’s married, you walk away. Promise me, Em.”

  Emma raised three fingers. “Promise. Scout’s Honor.”

  * * *

  St. Pete, Monday, February 22, 2:40 p.m.

  Detective Wes Harris hung up the phone with a thoughtful frown.

  “Well?” His captain perched on the edge of Harris’s desk. “Walker must have had something pretty important to tell you. He’s left five messages since nine a.m.”

  “He said that they’d had a break-in last month. Some samples were destroyed that belonged to the Roberts kid. Apparently the female grad student, Tanya Meyer, had her ID stolen. That’s how the vandals got in the lab.”

  “Coincidence?” Captain Thomas asked.

  Harris shrugged. “Maybe. Unlikely.”

  “Walker? What about him?”

  “He’s got a solid alibi. Besides, my gut says he didn’t do it. I was there when he told the mother. He cried right along with her and if it wasn’t genuine, the Professor deserves an Oscar. His grad students I’m not so sure about. On one hand, they’d know how not to goof the cyanide concentrations of the stomach and cup. But then again, they might have purposely made the mistake thinking it would shield them from suspicion. I’ll watch them.”

  “Any video cameras around?”

  Harris sighed. “Yep, but somebody had turned them off. I’m looking into that, too. I’ve got the lab checking out the kid’s notebook. It all looked like Greek to me, but they’ll be able to read it. All of their alibis check out, although Nate Bass’s girlfriend sounded a little too rehearsed. I did get the printout of the key card reader. Nobody besides Darrell Roberts came in or out of the lab between the time Tanya Meyer left and Walker showed up. Whoever came in, Roberts opened the door and let him in.”

  Captain Thomas stood up. “Find out who else is a player here. Check out the kid’s family, his friends outside of school. Let’s get a few suspects on the board, Wes.”