Playing Dead (17 page)

Her father’s written plea was far more compelling than his restraint at trial. She felt emotion in this letter. Fifteen years earlier, he had seemed to exist on autopilot.

Oliver was dead. Where was Frank Lowe? How could she prove her father was innocent?

“Working late?”

She jumped and pivoted in her chair. Mitch sat up in her bed watching her.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said.

“It’s nearly three. You need sleep, sweetheart.” He patted the spot next to him.

She refolded the letter and put it under her keyboard, turned off the monitor, and went back to her bedroom. She slid between the sheets and Mitch took her into his arms.

“You’re tense.”

“I’m an insomniac.”

He kissed her neck and pulled her to him so their bodies were spooned together. She snuggled against him, not wanting him to know anything was wrong. Showing Mitch the letter would risk his freedom and safety. Claire wouldn’t do that.

She couldn’t do that to the man she was falling in love with.

FIFTEEN

Guilt washed over Mitch as he rifled carefully through Claire’s desk.

She’d left before seven—took a quick shower and asked him to lock the door when he left. She said she had an appointment in Davis.

Davis.
While her appointment could be innocent, related to her job with Rogan-Caruso, it was an odd coincidence that Oliver Maddox had lived and gone to school in Davis.

Mitch’s gut said there was something else going on. She’d been deeply upset and preoccupied when she’d come back to bed at three in the morning. What had happened?

He found nothing about her father. No day book, no messages, nothing. On her computer monitor was a bright green sticky note with CLAIRE written across it. He didn’t know what had gone with that note. It was not her handwriting.

He booted up her computer and first checked her e-mail. Nothing in the last forty-eight hours struck him as suspicious—most was work-related. He checked her browser history. It automatically erased every twenty-four hours, and Mitch didn’t have the technical skills to retrieve her old e-mails and web history from the hard drive. But what he saw gave him pause. Last night she spent time on the UC Davis website, including a page with Professor Don Collier’s class schedule. Collier was Maddox’s advisor. He’d been interviewed as part of the missing person investigation months ago.

Claire was surfing Collier’s pages. Had she learned that Maddox was dead? Had he come to see her? While looking into Tom O’Brien’s conviction, Maddox would likely have spoken with everyone who knew O’Brien, including his daughter.

Claire had also looked up the address of the Davis Police Department. Yesterday afternoon she had been at the Western Innocence Project website.

She’d done searches on not only Don Collier and Oliver Maddox, but Chase Taverton. Mitch wrote everything down, then realized he was late to meet Steve. He left, taking care to leave everything exactly as Claire had left it.

Claire had somehow been in contact with her father, Mitch was certain. He prayed he could keep her out of hot water, but feared she was already simmering.

Claire rushed to Davis, driving recklessly to make it before Collier’s eight a.m. class. She risked a ticket by parking illegally and ran to the campus building where Collier’s criminal law class was scheduled to begin in five minutes. If he was already inside, she was screwed. She knew what he looked like from his photo on the website, and suddenly realized that he was walking right in front of her. He certainly played the part of law professor: pressed slacks, button-down shirt, no tie, and a tweed—who wore tweed anymore?—jacket with leather patches on the sleeves.

“Professor!” she called.

He glanced over his shoulder at her, slowed his pace. “Are you in my class? We’re almost late.”

“Actually, I’m Claire O’Brien. I called you yesterday.”

He stopped walking. “You didn’t need to visit in person. The phone would have sufficed.”

She flashed her identification. “I’m a private investigator looking into Oliver Maddox’s disappearance. I understand that you were his advisor.”

He raised an eyebrow. “So you’re here because you’re a PI, not because you’re a felon’s daughter?”

If he was trying to throw her off her game, it was a good effort, but she’d withstood far worse over the last fifteen years. “I work for Rogan-Caruso Protective Services, Professor. My job always comes first.”

He nodded. Rogan-Caruso had a certain reputation, Claire knew, and she used it without remorse. “So,” she continued, “I understand that you were the last person to see Oliver before he disappeared.”

“You understand wrong.” He gave a dramatic sigh, and Claire’s instincts went on high alert. Collier avoided looking her square in the eyes and she watched him closely.

“I never saw Oliver that day,” he said. “We had a meeting scheduled on Monday morning but he never showed. I assumed he’d forgotten. His girlfriend came to me on Wednesday to see if I’d heard from him because he wasn’t answering his phone and he’d missed classes. I told her I hadn’t talked to him since the Thursday before. She then said she was going to talk to the police. They spoke with me, and I told them what I just told you. You could have saved a trip if you had read the missing person report.”

“That wasn’t my only question,” Claire said. She didn’t like Collier. He was too slick, too highbrow, too unconcerned about one of his students missing. And his answers were too perfect.

She said, “How did you feel when Oliver told you he thought you were wrong in rejecting my father’s case for the Western Innocence Project?”

“I—I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I spoke with Randolph Sizemore yesterday and you’re the attorney who reviewed the case evidence in the Thomas O’Brien trial and determined that there was no sufficient cause to have the Project look into filing an appeal. I thought it was ironic that Oliver picked that case to investigate. Did he share his findings with you?”

“No. I never discussed it with him after our initial conversation where I explained my reasoning.”

Claire saw in his averted eyes that he was flat-out lying. He moved ever so slightly left to right, looking for escape. A thin line of sweat formed on his scalp.

“Yet he was writing his thesis on this case.” She continued to push. “He believed Chase Taverton was the intended victim, and my mother was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which pretty much throws the prosecution’s claim that it was a crime of passion out the window. Change the motive, and a whole world of suspects emerge.”

“I think you’re a desperate young woman trying to cling to the false hope that your father is innocent of two brutal murders.”

“Why are you lying?” Claire said, hackles raised. Collier went on the offensive when cornered; so did she. She tried to slow her heart rate, but she was angry.

“If you don’t leave, I will call for security.”

“I’m not stopping you from getting to class.” She glanced at her watch, mostly to prevent herself from decking him. “You’re already late.”

He glared at her, turned, and walked briskly to the lecture hall.

Claire went back to her Jeep and took several deep breaths to calm down. She rested her hot head on the steering wheel. Maybe she’d played him wrong. Maybe she should have gone in all honey and sweetness and asked if he had a copy of Oliver’s thesis, or his notes.

Collier would never have given them to her. If he was involved in Oliver’s disappearance, he had either hidden or destroyed everything Oliver had shared about the case. But why would a college professor be involved in hiding information about her father’s case? Why would he even care? Or maybe he was just a touchy, crabby guy. Had she misread his reactions to her questions?

Might Collier lie because he’d made a mistake in reviewing her dad’s case and his weak ego couldn’t handle it? There had to be something else, something more.

The key was finding out more than just who wanted Chase Taverton dead. Who had the means and the
motive
to kill Chase Taverton? Claire had to learn everything she could about her mother’s dead lover if she was going to figure this out.

Time was her problem. Fifteen years had passed since the murders. Memories faded. People moved or died. Criminals whom Taverton prosecuted might not even remember the man who put them away. Unless, of course, they had been involved in his murder.

Was Taverton involved in any gang- or mob-related prosecutions? Sacramento didn’t have a “mob” problem in the traditional way New York and Chicago and, to a lesser degree, nearby San Francisco did. But there was a powerful criminal Russian community in Sacramento and Stockton. But would they or any other petty criminal have set up such an elaborate frame?

She pulled out her father’s letter. Frank Lowe. She knew nothing about him except what her father said: that he was someone Chase Taverton had cut a deal with. How would Lowe be able to clear her father?

Was he dead, like Oliver?

She needed to see the evidence against her father. She was an investigator and while she didn’t investigate murder, she knew what was staged and what was real. Like Ben Holman’s arson. Obviously arson, staged to look like a theft.

Claire broke out in a sweat. Her father’s guilt made sense on the surface, but there were so many layers when Chase Taverton was added to the equation as more than her mother’s lover. There was a damn good chance that everyone had drawn the wrong conclusions. And Claire saw a new reality, one where she’d been deadly wrong.

Claire now saw flaws in the prosecution’s argument. Flaws that a good defense attorney should have exploited. Or was she seeing the flaws only because she
wanted
her father to be innocent? She rubbed her temples, feeling the pressure of a growing tension headache.

A criminal lawyer named Prescott had represented her father. She made a note to track him down and find out what, if anything, he knew or remembered from the trial, perhaps something that Claire had been too catatonic to notice at the time.

She had told the truth on the stand. The whole truth as she’d seen it. That alone may not have been enough to convict her father, but it had destroyed his life.

She would discover the truth about that terrible day no matter what it took. Once and for all, Claire had to know for certain that her father was guilty . . . or innocent.

SIXTEEN

Mitch had only worked in the Sacramento regional FBI office for two years, but until now he hadn’t had reason to observe an autopsy at the county coroner’s office. Generally, the FBI simply reviewed the reports if they were involved. But Mitch wanted to be hands-on. Steve came along.

Deputy Clarkston greeted Mitch and Steve when they arrived. “Thanks for letting us come,” Steve said diplomatically.

Clarkston shrugged. “You did the heavy lifting yesterday. If you want to watch the autopsy, fine by me. My boss said whatever you need, to help. But we’re working the case, just so you know.”

“Good,” Steve said when Mitch wanted to argue. “We’ll give you whatever help you need, but it’s all yours.”

Clarkston relaxed and opened the door to the observation room.

The small room was cramped for three broad-shouldered cops. They stood, pushing the two chairs to the corners. A television high in one corner was blank. Mitch flicked a switch and static ensued.

Clarkston tapped on the window and caught the attention of a young forensic pathologist. He turned on the mic. “Can we get a visual here? And we will need two copies of the tape.”

She nodded and switched on the camera above the body.

The pathologists all wore face masks, gowns, gloves, and booties, but that was the extent of their protective clothing. The three of them in the room were all women.

Mitch wanted to tell Steve what he’d learned from Claire’s computer, but the information had been obtained illegally. Meg would have a meltdown: She was a stickler for constitutional law. You don’t bend the rules—any of them.

Mitch glanced at the dead body. They would have confirmation within the hour—the dental records from his hometown dentist had been overnighted and the chief pathologist was off right now comparing the corpse’s dental X-rays to those of Maddox.

Just last night he’d promised Steve that he would keep nothing from him, nothing that could jeopardize the capture of Thomas O’Brien. But what did he know now, really? Claire had done a few Google searches on the principals of the case. What did that tell them? It wasn’t illegal for Claire to look into her father’s case.

But Mitch knew there was more to it than that.

The external exam now over, the internal exam was beginning. The senior pathologist made the first incision.

Maddox’s body was pale, the skin having dissolved. The body was a lumpy mass of human Jell-O. Because it had been in fresh, cold water, putrefaction had slowed, but bacteria had still done severe damage. If Maddox had drowned, there was no way to prove it. Only through external investigation—accident site, damage to the car, mental state of the victim prior to disappearance—could they determine it had been an accident rather than murder. A bullet would be nice, Mitch thought, but there had been no obvious wounds on the body when they’d bagged him underwater yesterday.

And looking at the body now, Mitch couldn’t see anything obvious. There were no visible wounds that would indicate cause of death. No bullet or knife wounds. But with the skin slippage and advanced putrefaction, obvious wounds might be unnoticeable.

Mitch watched in silence as the pathologists removed and weighed organs that no longer had the color and shape they should have. How they knew what section was the heart and what was the lungs, he didn’t know.

When the senior pathologist removed the brain, she said, “Now this is interesting.”

“What?” Mitch asked.

She pulled the camera in closer and Mitch focused on the television screen over his head. “See it?”

“No.” All Mitch saw was a lump of dark mass that had the basic form of a brain.

“Here.” She took a scalpel and touched a section of the brain that was a slightly different color than the remainder.