Heads You Lose (32 page)

“Congratulations.”

Lacey then downed the entire mug of champagne and brought out the whiskey. A bad mix, no doubt, but after the day she’d had, the only option.

That night, Lacey’s mind kept working at the mystery even as her body slept. By morning a new theory had formed. She called Sook to confirm her worst fears.

“What happens if I die?” Lacey asked.

“I’d be heartbroken,” Sook replied.

“I mean, what would happen to my money if I were to die suddenly.”

“Do you have a will?”

“No.”

“Then it would go to your closest relative. Paul.”

“Say I die, Paul gets my money, and then Paul dies. What happens then?”

“I take it Paul doesn’t have a will.”

“No.”

“I’m not sure what would happen then,” Sook replied.

“What if Paul was married?”

“Then everything would go to his wife.”

Lacey opened her nightstand drawer to make sure the gun was where she left it.

“You still there, Lacey?” Sook asked.

“I think I know who our killer is.”

NOTES:

Dave,

I assure you there was nothing passive-aggressive in my incrimination of Brandy. It just fits, if you think about it.

I’m too tired to make threats, suggestions, or even to offer encouragement. I don’t know what it is about us that makes working together so painful.

I’d like you to take this next chapter seriously and work within the confines of what we have already written. Of course, you’ll do whatever you want. While you’re thinking of ways to screw with me, remember this: Your next chapter is your last.

On a happy note, we’re in the home stretch, Dave. Soon we will be free of each other.

Lisa

Lisa,

Our troubles don’t seem like such a mystery to me. We have different values and standards. For example, is an anonymous note composed of letters cut out of magazines and newspapers really the best we can do? What’s next, THE KILLER WAS CALLING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE?

Since you haven’t taken up any of the leads I established in my last chapter, I guess I’ll have to lay everything out myself. I may not have the luxury of the final word, but I have a feeling I’m not going to need it.

Dave

CHAPTER 30

After the call from Sook, Lacey had realized that Paul wouldn’t be in real danger until he married Brandy—or until Brandy found out he knew her secret. So she let the couple sleep off their champagne. She’d give Paul the news when his fiancée was at a safe distance.

Paul woke with a smile on his face and Irving purring on his chest. Next to him was a note from Brandy to come up to Tulac whenever he got up. They were supposed to spend the day planning their wedding. Hangover aside, he felt great, and he knew it wasn’t just the engagement or the Babalato windfall. Lacey’s half-packed suitcase meant she was finally ready to give up her investigations and skip town. He looked forward to the day he could stop worrying about her.

Marv Babalato might be a problem when he discovered the truth about the property, Paul thought, but that would take a while. And even then, what could Marv do? He’d bought the place under a fraudulent pretense. The more Paul dealt with him, the more he seemed like a garden-variety opportunist, not a homicidal avenger. Irving half opened his eyes, and after a while, Paul got up.

Brandy was out when he got to her place, so he used the key she’d given him the night before. A note on her TV said she’d be back by noon, but it was already almost one. He started worrying about her, and before long he was worrying about everything. Was he crazy to think everything was fine? Only a few weeks ago, she was pretending to be an entirely different person. Was he rushing into things? On an impulse he went into her bedroom and sat down at her computer. Her e-mail account was password-protected, but he nailed it on the third try, with
vonshtupp,
a reference to her favorite
Blazing Saddles
character.
⁴⁶

He opened her Sent folder and started scanning for the dates he’d been collecting alibis for, starting with the pre-dawn hours of September fourth. He ignored the e-mails from earlier that evening and found three after midnight. Around one a.m. there was one to her friend Candi about how tortured she was about deceiving him with the ditz routine. “I think he might be the one,” it said. Paul felt queasy as he moved on to the next message Brandy had sent:

Hey 0.5 bro,

Where are you? Haven’t heard from you in a while. I hope you know I’m not mad at you. Just let me know you’re OK if you get a chance. Love, B

Paul checked the time stamp: 2:33 a.m. Brandy had been home when Hart’s body was moved, and apparently had no idea he was already dead. Then the monitor’s reflection darkened.

“Find what you were looking for?” Brandy said.

Paul swiveled on her chair to face her.

“I guess you’re also wondering,” she continued, “whether your fiancée also killed your best friend and his cousin. And then, just because she was getting a taste for it, took a knife to the new doctor.”

“Brandy—”

“Let me break it down for you, Paul. The Wednesday when Harry Lakes was shot I was with your
sister
. Then this Monday, when Doc Egan was killed, I was at the monthly Quorum Group meeting over in Easternville.” Quorum was her brainiac club—a fact Paul had discovered, he realized with shame, during an earlier snooping session.

She went to her desk and showed him the flyer.

“I can download the meeting minutes if you like,” she continued coolly. “You can read all about my ideas on autopoiesis. As for Terry’s tower, I have no alibi beyond my utter uselessness with tools. So I guess I must have done that one.”

“I’m so sorry,” Paul said. “I’m just . . . everything
might
be so perfect, I guess it almost feels too good to be true. Maybe I don’t feel like I deserve all this.”

“You do,” Brandy said.

Paul had expected a more sustained tongue-lashing. “Uh, you’re not mad?” he asked.

“Well, I did pretend to be a low-mental throughout the beginning of our relationship. Maybe now we can call it even?”

Paul wasn’t buying it. “You’re not miffed that your fiancé figured out your password and went through your e-mail?”

Brandy sat down on the bed and put her head in her hands.

“Oh shit,” said Paul.

“I do have a confession to make,” she said to the floor. Her voice was shaking. “I can’t marry you until you know the truth. And you probably won’t want to marry me after you do.”

“What is it? We can work it out, no matter what it is. Please, talk to me.”

“I want you to know I had the best possible reasons for killing them,” she said. “You have to believe that.”

Paul managed two words: “Killing who?”

She was sobbing now. “Your plants.”

When he’d recovered, Paul got up and embraced her.

“I just want better things for you,” she said into his chest. “I don’t want us to have to lie to anyone about anything.”

“Funny way to go about it,” said Paul, trying to muster some indignation. He failed.

“It’s just a job,” he said. “We’ll figure it out. We have plenty of time, plenty of money, plenty of options. For now, how about this: Next time you want me to do something, tell me.”

“And the next time you want to know something about me,” Brandy said, “ask me.”

“Deal.”

“You know, it’s strange,” Brandy said. “When Lacey was grilling me about my alibis, she didn’t seem to realize that she and I were actually
together
during the Harry Lakes killing.”

“She’s not the investigator she thinks she is.” Paul replied.

Later they went to work on the guest list for the wedding. It was shaping up to be a paltry collection of locals, some of whom were probably too freaked out by now to even leave their houses. Both Paul and Brandy started wondering whether a visit to a courthouse with a witness or two was a better idea. Their planning was interrupted by the telephone.

Brandy picked up. “Hello? That was fast. Give it to me. No, you don’t need to explain variable number tandem repeats. Just give me the results. Really? Are you sure? No, I don’t know what it means. Thanks, Max. I’ll be in touch.”

She hung up the phone and jotted down a sequence of numbers below their wedding list.

“Who was that?” Paul asked.

“Max,” Brandy replied. “A friend from Quorum Group. He’s the guy from the crime lab.”

“What’s going on?”

“Call Lacey. She’s going to want to hear this.”

An hour later, Lacey was sitting on Brandy’s plush pink couch, tapping her foot silently on the shag carpet, waiting for Brandy and Paul to come out of Brandy’s bedroom.

“You said you had a break in the case,” Lacey finally called out. “Spill it.”

Paul and Brandy were giggling when they entered the living room and squeezed into a loveseat across from Lacey.

“You do it,” a beaming Paul told Brandy.

Brandy cleared her throat. “Paul said you got the envelope from Doc Holland, a.k.a. Doc Egan’s father, just a week ago. But Sheriff Ed seems to believe Holland was the guy in the exploding plane. I knew both of those couldn’t be true; I wanted to know if either one was. So I tested the envelope against the DNA from the crash site.”

Lacey’s foot stopped tapping and burrowed deep into the shag. She didn’t know where to start—the stolen envelope or Brandy’s sudden forensic expertise. She went with the latter. “How the hell did you get DNA from the crash site?” she finally said.

“I didn’t. My friend Max works at the crime lab,” Brandy replied.

“I see. How convenient,” Lacey said.

“What can I say? He owed me a favor. So I gave Max the envelope you received from Holland. He just called with the results.”

“I thought DNA testing took weeks,” Lacey replied.

“I put a rush on it,” Brandy replied.
⁴⁷

“Okay, assuming all this is true, what do we know?” Lacey asked.

“The DNA from the dead pilot and the envelope weren’t an exact match, but they were close. In fact, they indicated paternity. Turns out the pilot was the
father
of the envelope-licker.”

Lacey responded with a blank look.

Brandy spoke slowly, as though to a child. “That means it
was
Doc Holland who died in the plane crash. And it was his son, Doc Egan, who sent you the letter.”

After a long pause, all Lacey could say was, “So much for my top suspect. But we still don’t know who Doc Holland really was.”

Brandy sighed. “This is the easy part. As you learned from Ilsa Sund-strom a week ago, the real Dr. Herman Holland was born in 1921. If you’d followed up, you’d know that he lived and practiced up in Orendale until his death in 1980.”

“So?”

“So when Paul found out that the fake Holland was Egan’s dad, I did some research, starting with anyone named Egan who’d lived in Orendale. I found a Roy Egan born in 1946. He served as a medic in Vietnam and then racked up a minor police record, mostly check fraud and failure to pay child support. From 1980 on, there are no traces of the man.”

“So you’re saying Roy Egan killed the real Herman Holland and took his name?” Lacey asked.

“Well done, Lacey. That’s possible, but according to the coroner’s report, the real doctor died of natural causes. That can be faked, of course, but my best guess is that Egan Senior just recognized an opportunity when Holland died. For twenty years he had a good thing going in Mercer. Then his past caught up with him.”

“But how did Egan Junior find his father?” Lacey asked.

“No idea,” said Brandy. “With both parties dead, we’ll probably never get all the facts straight.”
⁴⁸

“But I still don’t get what the docs had to do with the killings of Hart, Terry, or Harry,” Lacey said.

“Join the club,” Paul replied. “Now you know everything we do.” He put a consoling hand on Lacey’s shoulder. “In terms of the investigation, at least.”

“I need a drink,” said Lacey. “I’ll be at the Timberline.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea, Lace?” Paul asked, but she was already out the door.

On the drive back to Mercer, Lacey realized that what she needed, much more than a drink, was answers. Now that she knew “Doc Holland” had died even before Hart’s body was returned to their property, the only remaining suspects she could think of were the Babalatos. She felt sick. Fat bank account or not, she had to know before she could break free of the town. She pulled into the sheriff’s station.

Inside Sheriff Ed’s office, he gave her a tentative but warm hug.

“Lacey, how you holdin’ up today?” He looked pretty rattled himself.

“So far so good,” Lacey lied.