Double Cross (6 page)
Kacey nodded.
“You’re a brave kid. I’m sorry about your father. He was a good man. My wife and I used to watch him on TV whenever we played hooky from church on Sunday morning. He seemed like a regular guy.”
Kacey’s face reddened. She looked down and rubbed her hands on the legs of her jeans. By the time she looked up and spoke, her voice was steady, polite, and uncharacteristically formal. “Thank you. My father was a regular guy. I miss him very much.”
No one spoke for a few moments. Ferrell cleared his throat. “Okay, uh, let’s get back to Ms. Hovden, then. Had she been depressed?”
“Not that I know of,” Kacey said. I could see her face relax as the conversation moved to another subject.
I held up a hand. “Before you get too far along, I think we know why Elise did this.”
He seemed irritated that I was cutting short his interrogation. “Okay, why?”
“Elise was responsible for winding up the business affairs of Simon Mason Ministries after Simon’s murder. The auditors found that nearly half a million dollars was missing. It looks as if she was embezzling money. Two nights ago I called Elise and told her what the auditors had found. We agreed to meet here this morning at eight.”
He rubbed his jaw. “So, she got caught with her hand in the collection plate, and she knew it.”
“It looks that way.”
Sandra, who had been standing to the side with her hands in her pockets, stepped forward and nodded toward the note in Ferrell’s hand. “Okay, so the note she left makes sense. I have to ask this again, though. Did either of you tear the bottom off of it?” She watched us intently.
Kacey sat up straight. “Of course not. We didn’t even touch the note. Why would we do that?”
“Hold on, Ms. Mason,” Sandra said. “Nobody is accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to figure out what happened. The fact is that you two found the note, and part of the paper is obviously missing. Do you know where the bottom half of the sheet is?”
“We have no idea,” I said. “We never even picked it up off the desk, and neither did you. Officer Ferrell was the first person who touched it.”
Sandra looked at Ferrell, whose neck reddened. He shot me a sideways look, and I knew our roller-coaster relationship was back on the down track.
“So what?” he said. “It’s not like this is a murder scene. No one’s going to be dusting for prints or anything.”
I was sure happy to hear him confirm that.
He walked over and placed the note back on the desktop, then leaned back on the desk’s edge. “I’d say your church has got itself a scandal brewing, Ms. Mason. I guess that’s your business, though, not the Lewisville Police Department’s.”
Kacey stood. “If our auditors can’t find the money, we’ll be the first to issue a press release. The financial affairs of Dad’s ministry have always been transparent, and that’s not going to change now. Do you need us for anything else?”
Behind us, Michael muttered, “Atta girl.”
Sandra smiled. “I guess not.”
Ferrell straightened up. “But I’d like to—”
“That will be all, Ms. Mason,” Sandra said. “You two are free to go.” She turned her back on Ferrell. “We’ll call you if we need any more information. By the way, did Ms. Hovden have any relatives in the area? She mentioned her mother in the note. Someone will need to notify her or some other next of kin.”
“I think her mom lives in the Fort Worth area,” Kacey said.
Sandra took her notepad and pen out of her shirt pocket. “Do you know how to contact her?”
“I can call the ministry’s offices. They probably have her listed on personnel records as a contact person.” Kacey pulled her phone out of her pocket. Within a few minutes she had a telephone number. She clicked off the phone. “Who makes that sort of call to her mother under these circumstances?”
“That’s up to you. You can call now, or we can take the body to the hospital morgue and they’ll call her. If you call now, she might want to make arrangements for having the body taken straight to a funeral home. I doubt if there will be an autopsy unless the mother requests it. It’s not required in this country.”
I turned toward Kacey. “Have you ever met her mom?”
“A couple of times at the church. She was very proud of Elise. I remember that. This will kill her.”
“It’s up to you, Kace. Maybe you should just let the morgue call.”
She tilted her head back and closed her eyes. “Elise worked for Dad. Her mother should hear this from me rather than from a complete stranger.” She turned and walked toward the back door.
I couldn’t have been prouder. “Do you want me to come out with you?”
“No, I’ll handle it.” She moved around the broken glass, opened the door, and stepped out onto the back deck.
Through the windows we could see her pacing for a couple of minutes, her lips moving as if she were rehearsing, before she raised the phone and tapped in the number.
While Kacey was outside, I revisited the laptop issue with Officer Ferrell. “You said you checked the trunk of Elise’s car. Did you look under the seats? Maybe she had her laptop on the floor and it slid under somehow.”
Ferrell sighed. “I told you before, there wasn’t any laptop. We went over the interior, the trunk, everything. Why is her laptop so important to you?”
I leaned forward with my hands on my knees. “Do you think it’s odd that we found a computer-generated note, but no computer?”
He shrugged. “Not really. She must have printed the note somewhere else—at the office or anywhere, for that matter.”
As we spoke, Michael walked around the couch and over to the desk. He leaned over to read the note. When he finished reading, he rubbed his ear between his thumb and forefinger and looked out the picture window. I wondered whether he was thinking the same thing I was.
It struck me as odd that Elise would print a suicide note at the office and then bring it home to kill herself. On the other hand, she had a logical motive to kill herself, and there was no sign at all that anyone else was involved. Everything except the note made perfect sense. I shook my head. I needed to stop trying to create drama where there was none.
“I was curious about the laptop because it belonged to Simon Mason Ministries, and it could have ministry records on it,” I said. “We’d like to recover it if we can.”
Sandra scribbled in her notepad. “I’m making a note. We’ll let you know if it turns up.”
Kacey came back into the house chewing her lip. “Well, that was pretty awful.” She turned to Ferrell. “Do you know where they’re taking her body?”
“Lewisville Memorial, I assume. She should be at the hospital within a half hour or so.”
“I’ll call her mother back in a few minutes and tell her. She’s pretty confused. It’s probably best if they do just take Elise to the hospital morgue for now.”
“You know,” Ferrell said, “before you leave, I want you to tell me the whole story one more time—about how you found her. We need to be sure we’ve got this straight.” He pointed toward Sandra’s notepad. “Would you take some notes, Sandra?”
Sandra frowned. Her eyes said,
Take your own notes,
but she said nothing.
Take your own notes,
but she said nothing.
Ferrell pointed to the glass on the floor by the back door. “Let’s start with that. Tell me one more time how the door got busted.”
Kacey recounted how she had heard the car engine running and took them through the entire story. Meanwhile, my eyes focused on the writing table in the corner. A computer-generated suicide note with the bottom torn off, and no computer anywhere to be found. It all seemed so—
“Ms. Pasbury, how did you break the glass without cutting your hand?”
I shook my head. “The door? Oh, I wrapped my jacket around my hand. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression, but I’ve popped windows before.”
Over by the writing desk, Michael, who was still looking out the window, coughed into his hand.
Ferrell raised an eyebrow.
“I run a private security company,” I said, projecting my voice toward Michael.
From that point Ferrell directed his questioning toward me. I kept my answers short, because I wanted to get out of there. I needed time to think.
Elise was dead, and despite my rocky relationship with her, it was a sad thing. She had always struck me as the type who never quite fit in; the one who never got called on the phone to go out with the girls. I wished I had made more of an effort, but I suppose that was what everyone said in this type of situation.
Despite my unease over the laptop, the rational side of my brain knew that her suicide made perfect sense. Still, as Ferrell continued to beat me down with a monotonous string of questions, something in my stomach told me there was more to this story than what we had found on Elise’s writing table.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
KACEY AND I MET Elise’s mother at the hospital at one o’clock that afternoon. In the meantime Michael went back to his office and told me to call him if I needed anything. We were at the hospital until 3:30, and we did our best to help Elise’s mom get started on the arrangements for the funeral. During the drive back, Kacey and I made an effort to reminisce about our times with Elise but without a great deal of success.
We wanted to show her respect. In fact, we wanted to be heartbroken. If nothing else, it would have made us feel better about ourselves. Elise, though, was the type of person who made others want to duck and run. Each time Kacey and I tried to conjure a wistful memory of her, our thoughts scattered in the opposite direction.
From a practical standpoint, since Elise had been in charge of winding up the affairs of Simon’s ministry, her death placed a new burden on Kacey. She would have to report about the embezzlement to the ministry’s board. The board members had historically served in a purely advisory capacity, because Simon and Elise ran everything. Now that both of the top executives were gone, the board would have no choice but to play a bigger role.
We agreed that it would be best to enlist Brandon Henckel, the ministry’s former accountant, who had discovered the missing money in the first place, to help wind up the ministry’s affairs. He had the training and the knowledge. Though a brilliant guy, Brandon had more neuroses than Bart Simpson. He had recently given up accounting and was now leading what he euphemistically liked to call “a less structured life.” He was essentially a full-time computer gamer and part-time inquisitive hacker.
Like me, he was a recovering alcoholic and served as my recovery partner in the church’s rehabilitation program. By 5:30, Kacey and I had called him and filled him in on Elise’s death. We then made the necessary calls to inform key employees.
When we finished the calls, we realized that we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. We made a quick run to the wing shop around the corner for some takeout. Once back, we finally had a chance to sit down and kick off our shoes. I had just turned on the television when the doorbell rang.
Kacey sighed and licked her fingers. “I’ll get it.” She placed a half-eaten wing on her plate.
“If it looks like a reporter, either shoot him or don’t answer it.”
She gave me a thumbs-up and headed for the front door. As I watched her walk out of the room, I thought of how many times her father had given me the same thumbs-up, and I wondered for the thousandth time how a daughter could be any more like her father than Kacey was like Simon.
I heard the front door open and close, and then muffled voices. A few moments later I was gnawing the last few bits of meat from a chicken bone when Kacey came back into the room. “It’s for you.”
I set my plate on the coffee table and wiped my hands on a paper napkin. “Who is it?”
She shrugged. “Some lady. She said you would be happy to see her.”
“Are you sure it’s not a reporter?”
“She didn’t look like a reporter to me.”
Rather than walk down the hallway to get to the door, I circled through the dining room, in the hope that I could get a glimpse of a car through the front window. I stopped by the dining room table and squinted out into the fading sunlight. In front of the house was a blazing red Cadillac coupe. I didn’t recognize it, but whoever owned it sure had a cool car.
I turned the corner into the foyer, where a tall, slender woman with unnaturally black hair stood with the back of her cashmere overcoat toward me. She had picked up a lamp from the credenza near the front door and was holding it upside down, studying the base, as if searching for a price tag. Even from ten feet away, I picked up her perfume, which could best be described as flowering talc.
I cleared my throat.
She set the vase down and turned to me. “I was just admiring your lovely house. My, you’ve done well for yourself, haven’t you?” She smiled, revealing off-white teeth that were the slightest bit crooked in front. She appeared to be about fifty years old. Her heavy eye shadow and thick blush gave her a creepy Bette Davis look, but as I studied her face I noted her strong jaw and slender nose. With an hour or so of makeup instruction, she could be strikingly pretty.
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