In Self Defense (18 page)

“And it gives me someone I can really talk to,” Clare said, smiling at her friend.

It didn’t take much convincing to get Nina to stay for dinner.  They ate in the breakfast room with the children, and then they took their coffee into the library.

“How is it going?” her confidante asked, sinking into the same leather chair that Erin had occupied not three hours earlier.

Clare sighed.  “It’s hard,” she said.  “Being alone, on my own, for the first time in my life, really.  Even when Richard wasn’t here, he was still here, if you know what I mean.”

“I’d like to say that it’ll get better, it just takes time, but I’m not sure that’s what you want to hear,” Nina said.  “Of course, in my case, my exes aren’t dead -- just deadbeats.  After I got rid of them, life got better very quickly.”

“Oh dear, you really are too much,” Clare exclaimed, laughing in spite of herself.

“There,” her friend said with satisfaction, “at least I got a chuckle out of you.”

They began talking about Thornburgh House then, Nina filling her in on all the latest gossip, and about the manuscript Nina had brought that Clare was going to be reading, and about a new author that Nina had discovered.  They were on their second cups of coffee when they heard the doorbell ring, and a moment later, Doreen brought James Lilly into the library.

“Why James, how nice to see you,” Clare said graciously, although it was just past eight o’clock, and an odd time for him to be calling.  “Nina and I are having coffee.  Will you join us?”

“No, but thank you for asking,” he said, smiling a bit shyly at the two women.  “I didn’t mean to interrupt.  I really just stopped in to say good-bye.”

“You’re not interrupting” Clare assured him.  “But what do you mean, goodbye?  Are you going away?”

“I’m going to be leaving Nicolaidis Industries.”

His announcement clearly took Clare by surprise.  “Leaving?  Good heavens, why would you do a thing like that?”

“Well, there’s a new CEO running the place now, and he has his own assistant, who’s been with him for years, that he wants to keep,” James explained.  “I certainly don’t blame him, but that means there really isn’t any place for me.”

“But you’ve been a wonderful employee, and not one we can afford to lose,” Clare said firmly.  “Surely, we can find something else for you.  I’ll talk to Doug Potter about it, personally.  In fact, I think I’ll call him right now.”  She started to get up.

“Oh, no, please don’t,” James said, stopping her.  “He’s already offered.”

“Then I don’t understand – why are you leaving?” she asked.

“Well, the thing is,” he said with a diffident shrug of his shoulders, “once you’ve been the assistant to the CEO, it’s kind of hard to go backwards.”

The light finally dawned.  “You mean because it might be seen as some sort of a demotion?”

“I don’t see as how it could be anything else, really,” he said.  “But don’t get me wrong.  These things happen and there are no hard feelings.  I’ve had some wonderful years at Nicolaidis.  Your husband gave me the chance to learn, and I learned a lot.  And I’ll be able to take all that experience with me to my next position.  I’ll always be grateful, to him and to the company.”

“But it isn’t just my husband who depended on you,” Clare reminded him ruefully.  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve come to depend on you, too.”

“Oh, and you still can,” he declared earnestly.  “Any time you need anything.  It doesn’t matter where I am.  Just call me.  Please.  Even if you don’t need anything, even if you just feel like talking.  I’ll always be available to you.”

“Why, thank you, James,” Clare responded.  “That’s really very sweet of you.”

“And whenever you’re ready to go back to doing your charity work,” he said in a rush, “I want you to know that my tuxedo will be clean and pressed and waiting, if you need it -- uh -- I mean, need me . . . I mean, need me in it -- to accompany you somewhere.”

Nina listened to the exchange with interest.  James Lilly was such a nice fellow, and he and Clare seemed to get on so well, it was a shame she had to lose him, too.  Ripples, she thought.  One thing happened that led to something else that led to something else, and it just kept going.  Nothing was ever simple. Nothing ever stayed the same.

“Are you going to be leaving the company right away?” she heard Clare ask.

“I’ve given my notice,” he said.  “I’ve been asked to bring Mr. Potter’s assistant up to speed, which of course I’ll do.  But that should only take a few weeks.  Meantime, I’m going to be sending out my resume.”

“I don’t know what to say, James,” Clare said finally.  “Except I hate that we’re going to lose you, and I wish you all the luck in the world.”

“Oh, I don’t need luck,” he drawled with a big grin and a little twinkle in his eye.  “I’ve got a glowing recommendation from the new CEO, not to mention most of the rest of senior management.”

“You know what?” Nina said when he was gone.  “I don’t think you’ve seen the last of him.”

“Really?  What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know,” her friend replied.  “Just a feeling, I guess.  Or maybe it was something I sensed in his manner that was maybe a little more than just friendly.”

“Nonsense,” Clare said, even as she blushed.

“Oh don’t worry, I’m not matchmaking.  I just think you’ve become friends, and friends are something you need right now.  You know that.  And I think James knows it, too.”

“Really?”

“Mark my words,” Nina asserted.  “If you don’t call him soon, he’ll be calling you.”

Eight

Clare stared at the two detectives she knew, and a third man she didn’t know, who stood on the other side of her front door at just past four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon.

“I don’t understand,” she said with a puzzled frown.  “What does this mean?”

“It means we need to come back into the house,” Erin told her.  “We need to take another look at the scene of the shooting.  We’ll be looking around outside again as well.”

“Why?”

“Because we have some new concerns.”

“Does this mean the case isn’t closed anymore?”

“I’m afraid not,” Erin confirmed.  “It’s been reopened.”

“My children are at home,” Clare told them.  “I don’t want them to be upset.”

“We’ll be as quick and as unobtrusive as possible.”

***

They began outside, Erin, Dusty, and Eddie Ridenour, the crime scene investigator, with his black bag in hand, walking around the Tudor mansion, looking at it from all angles.

“Let’s go back over everything we didn’t see any reason to follow up on the first time around,” Dusty suggested.  “What’s the first thing you remember?”

“We didn’t see a vehicle,” Erin said, replaying that night in her mind’s eye.  “The car drove in and didn’t drive back out, but it wasn’t visible when we got up here.”

“Which we now know was because Richard Durant put it in the garage.”

“All right, let’s take a look.”

They walked around to the side of the house.  The garage door was closed, but there was a side entrance that was unlocked, and they let themselves in.  Richard’s Mercedes sat in one of the three bays, the Plymouth Voyager in another.  In the third space, where Clare’s bright red BMW had once sat, was a new dark green Toyota Camry.

“So he drives in -- and what?” Erin mused.

“He gets out of his car and goes into the house, just like he always did, I assume,” Dusty said.

“But the alarm was on.  He would have had to disarm it.  Which means he had to have been able to do that from out here.”

The two detectives and the investigator made their way to the door that opened into the house.  Sure enough, a small keypad, a duplicate of the one at the front door, was installed beside it.  The little red light was off.  Eddie opened his bag, snapped on a pair of latex gloves, and began processing the keypad for fingerprints.

“So he sees the red light, he turns off the alarm, and then he goes into the house, just like he’s done thousands of times before,” Dusty said.  “What does that tell us?”

“It tells us that whoever it was who walked into Clare Durant’s bedroom knew what the code to turn off the alarm was before he came into the house,” Erin replied.

Her partner nodded.  “It also tells us that, not only didn’t
we
hear the alarm go off, Clare Durant didn’t hear it, either.”

“Could she have taken the chance, though?” Erin wondered.  “Just because she didn’t hear the alarm doesn’t mean the stalker couldn’t have found a way to get in.  We’d told her, on any number of occasions, how clever he was.  She had no way of knowing whether he could have disabled the system somehow.”

“True enough,” Dusty agreed.

“Still,” Erin said, switching sides, as she frequently did when working on cases, “shouldn’t it have given her pause, if just for a second or two?  What if it had been her friend Nina coming into her room?  Or what if the housekeeper had come back early from her day off, and just wanted to check on her?  Doreen is devoted to the family, and under the circumstances, that wouldn’t have been unreasonable.  Clare had the gun.  She had the element of surprise.  Why not determine who it was -- or who it wasn’t -- before pulling the trigger?”

“Fear does things to people, sometimes, distorts perceptions,” Dusty suggested.

“Agreed,” Erin murmured.  But she was already walking away from the door and back toward the Mercedes.  The windows were tinted.  She couldn’t see anything of the interior.  “Eddie,” she called.  “Would you come do your thing here, too?”

The CSU investigator obliged, ever so carefully picking the prints off every door before finally opening one of the rear ones, and letting her look inside.  “Don’t touch,” he cautioned.  “Just look.”

Erin smiled at the admonition, but, while Eddie set about dusting the inside of the car, she just looked.  The Mercedes was surprisingly clean.  No old drink cups, no used Kleenex, no cigarette butts, no newspaper or notepaper, no trash whatsoever, not even a trash receptacle, nothing that spoke of the vehicle being used for regular commuting.  Richard Durant had obviously been a fastidious man.  The only thing she found in the black leather interior was a brown leather briefcase, resting just behind the driver’s seat.

“Pop the trunk for me, please, Eddie, will you?” she requested.  He did so, and she glanced inside.  Except for a spare tire and some tools, the trunk was empty.  She stood there, looking at the car, for a long, thoughtful moment.

“Maybe that’s what’s been bothering me,” she said finally.

“What?” Dusty asked.

“If you’re going out of town for a few days,” she replied, “what do you usually take with you?”

Dusty thought for a moment.  “A suitcase,” he said.

“Exactly,” Erin said.  “So where is it?  We didn’t find it with the body.  It isn’t in the car.  What happened to it?”

“I don’t know,” Dusty conceded, “but why don’t we go find out?”

The master bedroom was pristine.  No trace remained of the terrible tragedy that had occurred less than three weeks earlier.  Not a drop of blood, not an errant bullet hole, nothing.  Someone had gone to considerable lengths to make it seem as though the gruesome incident of that October night had simply never happened.

“We’re interested in your husband’s suitcase,” Erin told Clare.

“His suitcase?” Clare repeated blankly.

“Yes, the one he took with him on his trip to Vermont.  We assume he brought it back.”

“Oh that,” Clare said.  “It’s in the closet.”

Dusty walked over to the closet and opened the door.  The right side of the huge walk-in was completely empty.  Not a hangar, not a shoebox, not so much as a handkerchief remained, while the left side was still filled with suits and ties and shirts and shoes that Richard Durant would never wear again.  A brown leather suitcase rested on a shelf.

“Is this the one?” the detective asked.  Clare nodded.  Dusty snapped on a pair of latex gloves and carefully removed the suitcase from the closet.  “How did it get here?” he asked.

“I must have put it there,” Clare told him.