Cooking Spirits: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (Angie Amalfi Mysteries) (24 page)

Chapter 25

AS PAAVO WENT back to investigating
the
Wyndom
and Bedford murders, he also thought about
Angie’s conviction that Carol Steed killed the Flemings out of jealousy. It was
a plausible motive and a common one.

What made his murder cases strange was that the lovers,
Marilee and Taylor, weren’t the ones murdered. Instead, Gaia was a victim,
which made no sense.

Clearly, Marilee and Gaia didn’t like each other, but if
every family member who didn’t get along with others killed them, the country
would be awash in blood.

Even if Marilee killed Gaia, he saw no reason for her to
have killed Taylor. Marilee loved him. Gaia was the jealous one.

And he didn’t believe two different murderers were involved.

He flipped through the case’s files when something jumped
out at him from
Yosh’s
interview with the bartender.

He sat down at
Yosh’s
desk to
discuss his thoughts with his partner.
Yosh
agreed
with the premise, but so far it was pure conjecture. They had no proof.

Before long,
Yosh
left for home.
Paavo stayed to bring Angie’s business card case to the crime scene unit along
with her set of fingerprints and the old case file from the Fleming murders. He
explained to the crime scene technician that once he eliminated Angie’s prints,
those remaining belonged to Carol Steed.

The tech needed to see if Steed’s prints had been found at
the Fleming crime scene.

As he headed back to Homicide, he passed the forensics
laboratory, which gave him an idea.

Before doing anything, he called Ray Larson in Jenner. The
old man had been pretty proud of his observation skills. Paavo put them to a
test.

Larson gave Paavo a quick answer.

Paavo then turned his step toward the Medical Examiner’s
office. Evelyn Ramirez was still at work. She seemed to put in even more hours
on the job than he did.

He asked Ramirez to pull samples of Gaia’s hair from hair
brushes found in her house, and then samples of what had been determined to be
Gaia’s hair from the freezer.

The DNA of identical twins, like everything else about them,
was essentially identical. Hair, however, was an exception. Hair was made from
protein, metabolized amino acids from the foods eaten. As hair grew, it became
a record of the amino acids that had been used in its creation.

In that way, the protein in hair gave a history of the diet
of the person whose hair was studied. Not only could foods from a marine vs. a
terrestrial environment be identified, but also the kinds of terrestrial
plants, complex proteins and meats eaten could be determined.

“I’m desperate, Evelyn,” he said. “I’d like a forensic hair
analysis on follicles from both samples.”

“Why?” Ramirez asked.

“Gaia was a vegetarian. I’ve been told her sister was not.”

Ramirez raised her eyebrows. “I see. It’s worth a try.”

She agreed to get on it right away. She warned him that the
analysis might take some time to complete.

Back at his desk, Paavo leaned back in his chair, hands
intertwined behind his head. Both Gaia
Wyndom
and
Carol Steed were loners, intelligent, unhappy with their lives, and potentially
mentally ill. People around them knew they needed help, but didn’t know how to
give it to them without their consent. They hadn’t done anything illegal as far
as others knew—even though some may have held the unspoken suspicion that Gaia
had been behind her parents’ deaths, and Carol behind her husband’s.

Because of their intelligence, they were able to come up
with plans that allowed them to get away with murder…almost.

Years ago, before his job took away most of his free time,
Paavo had been a voracious reader. He thought now of the first line from
Anna
Karenina,
which he read as a young man trying to understand families and
women since he grew up pretty well isolated from both. It said, “All happy
families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

And those were both very unhappy families.

o0o

The next day, a little before noon, Paavo received the
results of the analysis from Dr. Ramirez. She must have stayed up all night
running the test. He owed her, big time.

He and
Yosh
drove to Marilee’s
cabin in
Lagunitas
.

Marilee let them into the house and immediately began to
scoop up the cats from the great room.

“You don’t have to shut them away,” Paavo said. “Those are
Gaia’s cats, aren’t they?”

“No,” Marilee said.

“Gaia loved her cats. Everyone said so. Her vet told us they
were two little gray and white tuxedo cats, brothers, eight-years old. She
wouldn’t have left them alone and unfed even if she had committed suicide. She
never would have hurt them, and I can’t see her giving them away.”

Marilee put them in the back porch and shut the door, then
turned towards Paavo, arms folded. “Those are my cats and no one else’s!”

“The cats have microchips in them. Something tells me the
chips in those cats would match Gaia’s.”

Her voice turned low and lethal. “You will not touch my
cats! What is this about?”

Paavo went over to the sofa and sat.

Yosh
quietly backed up to a wall
out of Marilee’s line of vision, folded his arms, and listened.

“Did you know,” Paavo began, “that Gaia was in love with
Taylor?”

Marilee gave a harsh, hacking laugh,
then
sat in a stiff-backed chair facing him.
“Love?
Childish infatuation was more like it. Anyway, I’m the one who told you about
it, if I remember correctly.”

“You said he once tried to kiss her in the office. Of
course, he immediately knew she wasn’t you.”

Her eyes hardened. “I never said that. And anyway, who
cares? Why are you bothering me with this old news, Inspector?”

“Taylor could never be fooled by Gaia pretending to be you,”
Paavo said. “Everyone who knew her said Gaia was just about the most boring
woman they had ever come across, while everyone who knew you, Marilee, said you
were vivacious and fun. You have imagination. Look at your books, your house.
The art work you have here, the sculptures. Everything about you reeks of
interest and of life. Gaia could never fool anyone that she was you.”

Marilee’s face reddened. She stood. “I’m sure she never
tried to! Now, I’d like you to leave, Inspector.”

“Actually, you’re wrong,” Paavo said, leaning back with his
arm flung across the back of the sofa. “Taylor told a friend that Gaia once
pretended to be Marilee. Taylor said he found her pathetic and disgusting.”

“No!”

“Yes! He knew. That weekend at the beach cabin—the last
weekend he was alive—Gaia was there instead of you. She pretended to be you,
but even she knew she couldn’t pull it off. Taylor left a day early, on
Saturday instead of Sunday. He was so upset that instead of going home, he went
to his favorite bar in the Financial District. His usual bartender wasn’t there
that night, so he had no one to tell exactly what had happened. But he didn’t
need to tell anyone because his actions said it all. He left the cabin, left
Gaia alone. Anyone of us could put two-and-two together and understand how
Taylor felt about Gaia trying to fool him.”

“No!” Marilee screamed.

“He must have found her pathetic. He probably hated Gaia
then, swore he would have her fired. She’d lose him and everything that meant
anything to her.”

Yosh
walked into the great room
from the kitchen area. “No meat,” he said.

Marilee spun around to face him, as if she’d forgotten he
was there.

“No meat in the refrigerator?” Paavo said. “How can that be,
when everyone knows Marilee likes meat? She and Taylor often grilled sausages,
hotdogs, and big juicy hamburgers at the beach house.”

“I’ve decided to eat healthier,” Marilee said, backing away
from
Yosh
as her eyes darted between the two
detectives.

“Oh?
Since when?”
Paavo asked.
“Since two weeks ago?”

She slowly sat down again, her voice little more than a
whisper. “No, that’s not true.”

“It is true. Gaia pretended to be Marilee with Taylor. Not
only that, but she moved here, into your house, used your shampoos, wore your
clothes, burned your incense. Then she went to the cabin and met Taylor. But
smells and clothes weren’t enough. He left.

“Somehow Gaia convinced him to meet her in San
Francisco—maybe by pretending to be Marilee again, maybe telling him crazy Gaia
might harm them both. However she did it, she convinced him to meet her in an
alley. There, still pretending to be Marilee, Gaia threw herself in his arms,
and then stabbed him. She was a big woman, and she was strong.”

“How terrible of her!”
Marilee’s
chest heaved with emotion. She turned pale and appeared faint. “I always knew
something was wrong with her, but I didn’t think it was that serious.”

“That isn’t the half of it,” Paavo said. “Looking back at
what happened to your parents, I can’t help but wonder about their accident.”

Marilee’s eyes widened.
“My parents?”

“In Gaia’s home, we could find no photos, photo albums, or
anything else about your parents, as if she wanted to erase them from her mind.
Your parents were killed when their car went out of control on the way home
from Jenner, but your father was a slow and cautious driver, and he knew that
road well. The car caught fire, so little was done to investigate the accident.
Was it truly an accident, or had the car been tampered with?”

When she didn’t answer, he continued. “We also know that
Gaia hated Marilee. I wondered how every trace of ‘
Urda
’
had been eliminated from government databases, until I learned that Thomas
Greenburg had first been known as a hacker. He could hack into
anything—including government databases. Gaia gave him $300,000 to obliterate
any trace of
Urda
. That’s a lot of hatred. It was
odd, everyone said, how simple Gaia’s job was at Zygog, and that she was one of
the few people allowed
to come and go
as she wished
there.”

“I know nothing about that,” she said.

He stood. “You should…because you’re Gaia. You hated
Marilee, hated having an identical twin
who
was more
liked, more loved, more
alive
than you had ever been. Both of you lived
in a symbiosis of hate.
Intimate hate.”

She clutched the chair arms. “No, you’ve got it all wrong!”

He paced as he spoke. “The way I see it, Marilee began all this
as a grand joke on a hated twin. First she stole the man you loved. You must
have decided you could make it work for you at first, since you cut your hair
to look like Marilee’s. Maybe because Taylor now paid some attention to you at
work—you shared secret smiles or whatever. It was more than you ever had in
your life, and it might have been enough.”

The woman bowed her head, shut her eyes, and covered her
face with her hands. “It’s not true,” she whispered.

“Two weeks ago, everything changed. Maybe what started out
as a joke turned into love for Marilee as
well.
What
happened, Gaia? Did she tell you she planned to confess everything to Taylor?
Tell him she wasn’t the woman he worked with, but an identical twin sister? You
knew that once she did, Taylor wouldn’t care about you any longer, and your
quiet, secret little love life would fall apart. But Marilee, who you hated,
would be happy.”

Paavo continued, “You couldn’t have that. You bought the
freezer, invited Marilee to your house, and probably slipped her enough
sleeping pills to subdue her so you could then force her to take a lethal dose.
You put her in the freezer, and probably would have left her there except for
one thing. When you went to the cabin to meet Taylor, he knew something was
terribly wrong. You weren’t the woman he loved. He returned to San Francisco,
troubled and confused. You knew he would start asking questions. Evidence that
you had a twin, and that you killed her, could eventually come out. So you had
no choice but to kill Taylor as well.

“You could have gone on, gone back to living as Gaia and
probably it would have been damned difficult to figure out who killed Taylor.
But you hated your life, and had always envied your sister’s. So you decided to
become Marilee. You put Marilee into a hot tub of water where her frozen corpse
defrosted. That was why the medical examiner had such a difficult time
assessing the time of death. You knew that eventually someone would look for
Gaia and find her body.

“But you couldn’t leave your cats to starve. You brought
them here.”

Yosh
stepped a bit closer, ready
to move if she tried to escape.

Paavo stood. “Gaia
Wyndom
, you’re
under arrest for the murders of Marilee Wisdom, aka
Urda
Lee
Wyndom
, and Taylor Bedford. You have the right to
remain silent…”

“No!” she screamed over Paavo’s statement of her rights.
“It’s not true! I’m not Gaia! I’m Marilee!”

When he finished the Miranda rights, he added, “An analysis
of hair shows that the person found dead in the bathtub was a meat eater, while
you, Gaia, proudly proclaim yourself a vegetarian. Now that you’re under
arrest, we’ll have your fingerprints. Identical twins don’t have the same
fingerprints. Your deception will be unmasked. You can count on it. Let’s go.”
Paavo took her arm, making her stand, and hand-cuffed her.

“Wait!” She looked around, wild-eyed. “You can’t do this!
What about my cats? They need me!”

He hustled her out the door.

“They need me!” she cried, with tears running down her
cheeks.