Mischief 24/7 (29 page)

“He didn’t like that she was black?” Jade asked him as he fell silent for a few moments.

“I don’t know about that, I’d not like to believe that. He didn’t like that she wasn’t Melodie. Melodie was perfect. The former Olympic swimmer. Beautiful, intelligent, well-spoken, daughter of a good family. We’d always known I’d go into politics eventually. Melodie would make the perfect wife for a politician. We looked good together. I loved her. She was a good person.”

“But you kept seeing Tarin?”

“But I kept seeing Tarin, yes. Even after the wedding. I’m not proud of that fact, but there was just something about her. She was
so
…
so free.”

“You paid for her dental work,” Court said quietly.

“I did. I paid for her apartment, too, miserable as it was. She’d allow the dental work, but she hated that I paid for her apartment, so she refused to move out of this small, miserable place above a beauty shop. I hated sneaking around, I hated all of it.”

“You were hiding from Melodie,” Jade said, nodding her head. “I’m a private investigator, Mr. Brainard. I’ve seen lots of love nests paid for by married men. Tarin White was far from taking advantage of you.”

“It was the other way around, Ms. Sunshine. May I call you Jade?”

Jade nodded her agreement. Anything to keep the man talking.

“Thank you, Jade. Please call me Joshua. What was I saying? Oh, yes, it was the other way around. For three years Tarin and I snuck around like criminals, until I’d finally had enough. I wanted to marry her. But only two days after I told her I was going to leave Melodie, and to hell with any idea of a political career, she was gone. I went to the apartment and she wasn’t there. She didn’t leave a note, nothing. She was just gone. I never saw her again.”

Jade bit her lips together as she looked at Court for assistance.

“But she did show up again, Joshua,” he said helpfully. “She showed up several months later, as one of the victims of the Fishtown Strangler. Excuse me, alleged victim.”

“Alleged victim.” Joshua Brainard looked at Court levelly, and then at Jade, figuratively pinning her to the chair with his intense blue gaze. “Now I see what you’re after. This has nothing to do with the fact that I’m running for mayor.”

“It never did, Joshua. We couldn’t care less about your political ambitions,” Jade said, believing she could almost hear the proverbial penny drop inside the man’s brain as he finally came to the correct conclusion.

“But you’re wrong. I did
not
kill Tarin. I loved her. I know what you’re trying to do here. You’re trying to say that I killed Tarin and then I killed Melodie and Teddy Sunshine to keep from having my first crime exposed. Not the affair, a murder. I’m not an idiot, I can see where this is going. I’m no saint, either, and I’ll admit to that. I cheated on my wife. Hell, I never should have married

Melodie. It wasn’t fair to her. It wasn’t fair to me. But I did not
kill
anybody.”

Joshua had raised his voice, and Rockne got to his feet, barking his displeasure at being woken up. Jessica would say he was coming to Jade’s defense, but Jade knew better.

“Let me take him outside, Joshua. I’ll be right back. Come on, Rockne, let’s go see Jessica.” She walked back through the foyer, pretending not to notice Leslie standing there, his massive arms folded across his chest.

Jessica must have been watching for her, because she met her at the open gate, her expression eager. “So? Did he react? Did Rockne make him sneeze? Did he tell you to get him out of the house?”

“He rubbed Rockne behind the ears and Underdog here lay down with his head on the man’s shoe to take a nap. He said he’d never had a pet, but that’s because somebody else in the family was allergic to animals. Happy now?”

“Not really, no. Who else in the family? It’s the natural follow-up question. You did ask, right?”

“Wrong. It was a stupid idea and I don’t know why I listened to you.”

“What’s up, Jade? Isn’t it going well in there? Because it’s starting to rain out here, in case you didn’t notice, and I could still go in there with you and—”

“He’s lying,” Jade interrupted. “You remember how you said you can tell someone is lying if their eyes go left and down? I ask him a question and his eyes keep going left and down, so he’s got to be lying. Except that my gut tells me he’s telling the truth.”

“Uh, about that?”

Jade had already turned to head back up the drive; she wasn’t sure she could trust Court to be content making small talk until she got back. She turned to her sister impatiently. “About what?”

“About the shifting-left-and-down thing,” Jessica said, smiling weakly. “I think I had that wrong.”

Jade stomped back down the drive. “You think you had that wrong? What do you mean, you think you had that wrong?”

“Down girl,” Jessica said, holding up her hands defensively. “Okay, okay, I know I had it wrong. Right brain, left brain—it gets confusing. But I think when someone looks left and down, they’re examining their memory maybe? Not looking for a lie. Is that a problem?”

“A problem?” Jade wanted to scream. “No. Not a problem. I shouldn’t be relying on that kind of hocus-pocus stuff, anyway.”

“Except you said your gut’s telling you he’s telling the truth, and what’s that if not hocus-pocus, and maybe gastric juices?” Jessica reminded her. “So now what? We’ve been wrong all along?”

Jade shook her head, shaking off that idea. “No, we can’t be wrong. Teddy was on to something. He had to be, or he and Melodie Brainard wouldn’t be dead. I’ve got to get back in there.”

Leslie was still
standing in the foyer, but now he was smiling. That smile gave Jade a bad feeling as she walked past him, back into the room where Joshua and Court waited for her. It was as if Leslie knew that she was striking out and that the Brainards had won.

Both men were standing at the French doors, looking out over the pool where Melodie Brainard’s body had been discovered. Joshua had his glass again, and the two men seemed almost friendly, which was weird.

“Who found her?” she heard Court ask as she joined them.

“The housekeeper,” Joshua said. “The woman’d been out for the evening, and when she came home, she wanted to get a drink of water and… and the window over the kitchen sink looks out onto the pool. Melodie always liked to keep the area lit. The housekeeper has since quit and gone back to Guatemala, saying it wasn’t safe here, but I can put you in contact with her if you feel it’s necessary.”

“I’m sure if the police allowed her to leave, they were satisfied with her story,” Jade said, also looking out over the pool, its surface broken by large, plopping drops of rain, imagining what it must have been like to see a body floating in that beautiful, clear blue water. Probably as bad as seeing your father’s brains blown all over knotty pine… “Who do you think killed your wife, Joshua?”

“I’m sorry,” Joshua said, returning to his seat. “The police are confident your father killed Melodie. My affair all those years ago has nothing to do with Melodie’s murder. Your protests to the contrary, I think Teddy Sunshine discovered that Tarin and I had had an affair, and he was trying to blackmail us. I wouldn’t see him, Melodie said or did something to make him angry, and he strangled her. Having once been an honorable man, he couldn’t live with the fact that he’d taken a life, and he went home and shot himself. Family loyalty is one thing, Jade. But facts are facts.”

Again, Jade believed him. Was he that good at being sincere, or did he also believe he was telling the truth? She had no choice but to pull out her last weapon.

“Well, thank you for seeing us, and for your honesty,” she said, holding out her right hand.

“You’re welcome. Let’s hope we’ve settled something here tonight. And again, I know your pain. We’ve both suffered a great loss.”

Still holding on to his hand, Jade said, “Yes, I agree. Tell me, though. What happened to the baby?”

His hand didn’t tighten on hers. He didn’t drop his hand back to his side. In fact, he didn’t react at all. “I beg your pardon? What baby?”

She let go of his hand and feigned innocence—Jessica, without the
girls.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. You didn’t know?”

Joshua looked from Jade to Court and then back to Jade. “What’s going on here? What are you talking about? I told your sister that Melodie and I couldn’t have children. There was no baby.”

“We’re not talking about you and Melodie,” Jade said, pushing on because there was no going back now. “I don’t have my notes with me, so I can’t be exact here, but the autopsy report showed that Tarin had given birth only a couple of months before she died. My notes also show that, counting backward as we all do, Tarin had to have been pregnant when she left that apartment you set her up in and say is the last place you saw her. So what baby, Joshua?
Your
baby.”

“No,” he said quietly. “No, that’s not possible. She wouldn’t have… she never…
oh, my God.
” He sat down all at once, as if his legs couldn’t support him, and looked up at Jade and Court, his eyes tortured. “Where? Where’s the baby now? No, not a baby, not anymore. Where’s my child? Tarin left me. She was out on the streets, she was prostituting herself and got herself killed. Wasn’t that bad enough? What did Tarin do with my child? Is that what your father learned? Was he trying to tell me I had a child somewhere? Where? Did she give the baby up? Is the child in some foster home or been adopted? I have to know!”

“We don’t know,” Jade replied. She believed him; nobody could fake that kind of shock. She’d just delivered one hell of a blow to the man. “Not for certain. But we do have a theory. Teddy had a theory. Joshua, I sincerely apologize for believing that you killed Tarin. But now you have to help us. We still have a lot of questions.”

“Ask me anything,” he said, collecting himself. “I don’t know how I can help. My God,
Tarin.

Why didn’t she come to me? Why did she go out on the streets like that?”

Jade racked her brain for a question, one of the loose ends that had been bothering her, settling on, “Your father was a part of the mayoral task force set up to catch the Fishtown Strangler. Did you ask him to join it? Because you can see how we might think that’s how you knew the MO of the serial killer and then imitated him when you killed Tarin.”

“I did
not
kill… I’m sorry, you’re only explaining how you came to your conclusions. What was the question? Oh, my father and the mayoral commission. Yes, Dad was on that. He’s always been active in the community, that’s not a secret. And yes, when Tarin became one of the victims I did read any files he brought home, hoping to learn more about what had happened to her, where she’d gone, where she’d been living.” His eyes got hard. “I didn’t use the files as a primer for murdering the woman I loved, the woman you’re telling me was the mother of my child. That’s obscene.”

“Teddy believed it, though, we think. We think that’s why he wanted to get close to you, and to Melodie.” Jade looked to Court, who just nodded. “We know that the night Teddy was killed he had been to see your wife, and that she gave him a hairbrush, which he put in a plastic bag and took home with him.”

“What? Why? I don’t understand.” “We think we do. We think Teddy wanted to see if you were a match to another cold case he’d been working on all these years. We believed that Melodie then told you what she’d done and you strangled her the way you did Tarin, and then killed Teddy in order to get back that hairbrush.” “That’s insane. It’s… it’s just insane.” “So you say. We were trying to solve a murder, Joshua, several murders. We gathered facts, we reached… conclusions. The Baby in the Dumpster case,” Court said, carefully putting himself between Jade and Joshua, just in case the man reacted violently. “Teddy believed—we’d come to believe—that the murdered baby was your son, Joshua.”

“No,” Joshua said, his expressive eyes now showing unimaginable horror. “No. That couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.”

Jade took up where Court had left off. “We concluded that Tarin had decided to blackmail you by threatening to go to your wife and show her your baby, and that you killed them both, staging Tarin’s murder to look like she was just another victim of the Fishtown Strangler, and then storing your own son’s body in a freezer somewhere for several months so that when the body was found, nobody would connect dead baby to dead mother. I’m sorry, Joshua. But you can see why we decided you were the most likely suspect. It’s even why we brought Rockne here tonight. Rockne was locked out of Teddy’s office that night, and my sister Jessica thought it was because the killer was allergic to dogs. But you’re not.”

“No, Jade, I’m not,” Joshua said dully, getting up from the couch and walked over to the French doors once more, standing with his back to the room. He stayed there for a full minute, then another minute, while Jade and Court watched, and then, finally, he turned to face them once more.

He looked as if he’d aged twenty years in those two minutes. “No,
I’m
not allergic to dogs. I think I need you both to leave now. If you’ll please excuse me. Leslie will show you out.”

“Court…” Jade said, putting her hand on his arm as Joshua brushed past them, heading for the foyer, “what do we do now?”

“Follow him?”

By the time Joshua had reached the bottom of the stairs, he seemed to have come out of whatever tightly wound mode he’d been in, and was calling for his father. Each word he said was louder than the last one, the tone more frantic, fiercer, a man rapidly losing all control. “Dad? Dad! Where are you? Goddamn it,
where are you? What have you done?”
He put his hand on the railing and ran up the staircase.

Leslie put his wide frame in front of Jade and Court to stop them from following. “Time to go,” he said, his voice deep, coming from somewhere low in his belly.

“Yes, I think so, too,” Court said, and the next thing Jade knew, Leslie was on his back, his eyes rolling up into his head as he lost consciousness.

“How—”

Court pulled out his cell phone and called Matt, told him to get Bear Man and come to the house, to make sure Leslie stayed where he was and to alert the police while he was at it. He then took Jade’s hand and they ran for the stairs. “I saw you take down that guy in the hotel bar the night we met, remember? I couldn’t have a wife who could do that when I couldn’t, so I took few lessons. It’s a man thing, I guess.”