William Andrews looked away from the faces around the conference table, checked his watch inconspicuously, and scribbled a brief note, which he passed to his secretary. “Call my wife. Leave word that I’ll be late.” Then his attention went back to the issue at hand—advertisers who had cut their spending. Kim Annuzio had a boggling array of figures and charts. Most of the cuts, she was demonstrating, were cyclical and were offset by other increases. The hard-core declines seemed to come from just two cable systems.
“Anyone know why?” Andrews asked.
His secretary slipped back into the room and leaned close to him, whispering that his wife was away for the evening. He immediately lost interest in the revenue shortfall.
“Where?” he whispered.
“She didn’t say. Just that you could call her cell phone.”
“Well, call,” he ordered, and then turned back to the meeting.
The woman returned, this time with a note that she left next to him. “Her phone is turned off. I left a message for her to call you.” He folded the paper into his pocket and switched his attention back to the meeting.
It was another hour before they broke up. As they were filing out, Robert Leavitt suggested that Andrews pay a visit to the offending cable systems. Andrews nodded curtly. “Someone should,” he said. But his mind was elsewhere. “Any calls?” he asked as he passed his secretary. There were none.
He phoned the apartment and got Mrs. McCarty, who could tell him only that Jane had called. “Did she have an overnight bag?” he demanded, and she assured him that his wife didn’t. “Just a shoulder bag,” Mrs. McCarty reported. He tried the cell phone and got her mailbox. He was puzzled but not really alarmed. Jane was bright and independent, clearly able to decide to spend the night with friends. He knew he had been busy, hardly home at all—and distracted when he was. It made sense that she’d welcome an opportunity for a bit of conversation.
But she wasn’t generally careless. It was unlike her to turn her phone off, particularly when she had asked him to call her. He packed the report they had just discussed into his briefcase and had his secretary alert his driver.
At home, he took a sandwich into his office but found he was too distracted to get into the numbers and charts. He called Mrs. McCarty and asked her to repeat the message Jane had left. Then he went down to the main telephone set and scrolled down to check for the number she had called from. He recognized the Connecticut area code. No problem! He dialed her office, and her secretary said she had been in. He was switched to Roscoe Taylor, who greeted him cordially and said that Jane was probably out on an interview. Andrews called her apartment and got her voice, promising to call back. As the evening wore on, he made two more tries to her cell phone, sure that she would notice it was off and would turn it back on. He was angry. If her phone had run down or broken, she could have found another phone and called.
Jane was on the Northway, passing Lake George in the Adirondack foothills. Fatigue was setting in, but she had to admit that she welcomed the distraction. Since France, she had thought of nothing but the sauna and the woman in the hospital—the same woman her husband had visited. She had churned up all the possibilities, running one scenario after another. It was relaxing to concentrate on something else, even if it was only the boring task of driving.
But now, as she got closer to the answers she had to find, Jane went back to rerunning the possibilities one more time. The woman near the opera house was certainly Selina Royce. She lived openly and, given the ease with which Roscoe had located her, made no effort to hide her identity. It was also certain that she had a relationship with her husband. The detective’s report left no doubts that they had been lovers. And he was still paying her bills. Why? There were two possibilities she could think of. Either he was ensuring her silence, in which case he might not still love her, or he was ensuring her lifestyle, in which case he probably did still love her. Or, at least, felt responsible for her.
Those were facts. William Andrews had a lover, and Kay Parker knew about it. Maybe Kay had confronted him, laughed when he asked for his freedom, and told him he would be her prisoner forever. Or maybe Kay had given him a hint at just how much a divorce was going to cost him. Either way, both her husband and his mistress had motives for murder.
But that was where things became iffy. It was pure speculation to suggest that William and Selina had planned Kay’s death. Maybe Kay had decided to do away with her rival. Or perhaps it was Bill alone who planned to get rid of Kay. These were the questions that had to be answered.
Those answers would shed light on the present issues. Why, if he loved Selina, would he have married her? Roscoe had suggested that it was to “keep her on the sidelines,” but that sounded much too manipulative. Through it all, Jane felt that Andrews really loved her. Maybe it was her ego, or perhaps just a case of wishful thinking, but she couldn’t believe that all their intimate moments had been part of a ruse. But if he loved her, why would he be keeping Selina? If it was only because he needed her to keep his secret, then why wouldn’t he tell Jane about her?
The more she thought about it, the more important it seemed to find out who had visited the house in the Adirondacks, and in what order they had arrived. She needed to know whether Selina was actually at the house or at the Bass Inn business meeting, which would have put her in the neighborhood. It was also important to know whether Andrews had brought his wife with him to the chalet or whether she had gone up on her own. The first would imply that Selina was the unexpected intruder. The other would imply that Kay had decided to catch them in each other’s arms. And if, indeed, Selina wasn’t at the meeting or at the house, then Andrews would have acted alone in killing his wife.
She remembered that her husband had also been wounded, proof that he had been behind his wife when the fatal shot was fired. But that was Robert Leavitt’s spin on the events. Could it be that Kay had fired first, only wounding her target, and that Bill had then taken the gun away from her? Or could his wounds have been faked? Leavitt would have no problem testifying that his boss had been wounded, and Andrews had more than enough clout to create a fake medical record.
How could she get the information she needed? Bob Leavitt would know who had attended the meeting, but that wasn’t information he would be likely to share. Nor would any of the other top executives talk to her about a subject they had kept secret for so long. Would the airline that the company used still have records of who had been aboard flights to the Adirondack meeting? Would they have kept them all these years? She would have to find the rules and regulations for passenger lists. Another question: How did Selina get away from the crime scene? According to Leavitt’s statement, all the attendees had left for New York. So if Selina had been at the chalet when the murder occurred, she would have needed special arrangements for her escape—a private flight, a car rental, a taxi to a train. Would any of that have been recorded? But Jane realized that she couldn’t be sure the crime had actually been committed that morning. It might have been the previous evening, which would have allowed Selina to leave with the other executives. It could have been at any time! There was no postmortem examination of the body, and no medical examiner had been involved.
In fact, the available lines of inquiry were few. The police records of the investigation probably held much more information than she had been able to access online. They might give her leads, or names of people whom the police had contacted. The records of the inn would be crucial, if a small, cozy inn bothered to keep records. Then there were Kay’s computer files, which might list her plans for that day. For Kay’s computer records, she would need to go back to the apartment. She could do that innocently enough if she went back now, without a lengthy and suspicious absence. For the other answers, she would need to spend a few days near the crime scene or find someone to go there for her.
Jane turned on the cell phone and dialed the apartment. Mrs. McCarty answered and put her through to her husband without even being asked to. “He wants to talk to you,” she said, and he picked up instantly.
“Hi, I’ve missed you,” he said casually.
She rattled off a quick story about a friend coming into town and then explained that she had left her cell phone off. “I feel like an idiot,” she apologized. “I hope you weren’t worried.”
“No, but now I can call the CIA and tell them to call off the search. When will you be home?”
“Tomorrow,” she answered, and then asked, “Are you going to be in town?” He said that he was but would probably be late. Jane promised to hold dinner for him.
It had sounded natural enough. She didn’t detect any hint of suspicion, although she knew she would have to come up with a name or two to explain her overnight stay. She drove north past Lake George and on to the Olympic Village at Lake Placid. Then she headed west, climbing higher into the Adirondacks, toward Lake Saranac.
The time of the murder and the timing of the business meeting were looming as important pieces of information. According to Leavitt’s testimony, the meeting had adjourned the night before. Apparently Leavitt had arranged transportation to a local airport for the attendees, or had them ferried out by helicopter. He had stayed behind with the limo he used to drive up the mountain road to Andrews’s rescue. Why? If Kay and Bill were planning to stay behind for a day of skiing, wouldn’t Leavitt have been more valuable back at the office? Quite clearly, Andrews didn’t need him there just to provide transportation. His helicopter or his jet would have come back for him. So why did Leavitt stay on in the inn?
But suppose Kay had been killed the previous night. Then anyone who was at the meeting could have been involved. Perhaps one of the executives. Most likely Selina, who would be faced with losing her position and her lover. In one case, Kay Parker was alone with William Andrews. In the other, Kay would have been alone in the house while her husband was conducting a business meeting down at the inn. Anyone could have left the meeting and driven up the mountain to kill her.
But then Jane corrected herself. No, in the scenario Leavitt testified to, he was the only one with a car. How would one of the others have gotten to the chalet? And how would Bill have been wounded?
Of course! It had to be Selina. If she killed Kay, then Bill certainly could have engineered a cover story. But that still left open the question of how Selina would have gotten to her victim.
Jane reached Saranac and passed the small executive airport where the corporate jet might have landed. It was clearly possible that on learning of his wife’s murder, Andrews sent all his people— including Selina Royce—away to protect them from suspicion. But then why stay himself? And why would—
Wait a minute! There was another question. How would both Kay and Selina have gotten up to Mountain Ridge? After reading her detective’s reports, would the great Kay Parker have consented to her husband’s mistress tagging along on the flight? Was it likely that Kay would stay put in the chalet, knowing that Selina was at a meeting with her husband just down the road? So if Kay was there, wasn’t it more likely that Selina wasn’t even close to the chalet? Bill probably wouldn’t have allowed her to go to the meeting. And if she wasn’t there, then she couldn’t be the killer. In fact, she couldn’t even have been a witness to the killing, which made her being a blackmailer that much more improbable. The more questions she asked herself, the closer Jane was coming to her most dreaded conclusion. Bill had to have killed his wife. And Selina had remained all these years his lover.
Mountain Ridge turned out to be a simple crossroads with a few buildings, functioning as an occasional convenience store for the vacation lodges and camps. She passed a police station, probably the one that had responded to Robert Leavitt’s call. A mile farther south was the Bass Inn where, according to Leavitt’s testimony, the business meeting was held. That’s where Leavitt had spent the night and taken William Andrews’s panicky call from his mountain retreat.
She pulled into the inn, found the lobby empty, and waited until a manager appeared behind the desk.
“I don’t have a reservation,” she began, but he cut her off with a laugh.
“In bass season, you need a reservation. But after the foliage, all you need is a credit card.” He explained that most of the inn was closed. “We open weekends during the ski season, but other than that, we don’t even keep help on. Just me and the wife take care of what needs taking care of.”
Her credit card said “J. J. Warren,” so that was the name she used to check in. “I was here seven or eight years ago,” she said casually as she filled out the reservation form.
“Is that so? You don’t look like a bass fisherman!” They both laughed.
“I was here for a business meeting. A few of us flew in one day and flew out that night. About this time of year! I suppose management didn’t want us to have any distractions.”
“We don’t get a lot of business meetings,” he said. “Unless it’s a bunch of big shots who say they’re going away on business but are really interested in the fishing. I suppose they can have a meeting around the fire and talk a little business so they can write the trip off. But this time of year they’re probably holding their business meetings in Las Vegas. Or maybe Hawaii.”
“No, this really was business,” Jane countered. “I was with Andrews Global Network. We all traveled so much that we had to go to strange places just to get together.” “Oh yeah,” he said. “Andrews is that rich young fellow lives up on the mountain. His wife was killed up here, wasn’t she?”
Jane nodded. “Tragic! She was a society woman. Very attractive.”
“So I’ve heard.” He came around the desk and picked up Jane’s small bag. “He comes up in a helicopter from time to time. At least, that’s what I was told when I asked around about the helicopter. Never met him, but I’ve heard about him.”
She tried not to make it sound like an interrogation. “He doesn’t stay here? I thought this was his landing site.”
“No. He lands up at his house and flies from there. Brings his kids every once in a while.”
“I think his wife was killed the weekend we were here for the meeting. Is that possible?”
“Not likely,” the manager said. “I remember the state police were in and out when that happened. They sort of took over the place. I don’t remember that we had any guests, except the reporters who came pouring in from all over the state.”
She tried to hand him a tip, but he pulled back. “No, showing you to your room is the least I can do. There isn’t much else we can offer.”
Jane put the money back in her pocket. “Bet if you check your records, you’ll find that I was here the weekend that murder took place. That was before I got married. My maiden name was Selina Royce.”