SEVENTEEN

 

 

September 18th, 2016

Las Vegas, Nevada

 

AFTER THE BREAKFAST meeting, Annie headed back to the office to work on more computer searches to see if she could get any patterns out of all the cases besides the obvious ones of dates and age.

Andor headed to police headquarters to brief the chief on what they were doing and Lott and Julia went to pay a visit to Paul Vaughan’s sister. They had talked to her a year before and got the ledger that led to the one grave, but now they had a bunch more to ask her.

They had called her and she had said she would be glad to talk with them again and gave them her new address.

Lott pulled up in front of the suburban home in what looked like an upscale neighborhood. He had no idea how Jennifer Season afforded such a place. Her husband, a card dealer on the strip, had died twenty years before of cancer, fairly close to the same time as Paul had killed himself.

Jennifer and Paul’s family had no money that Annie’s computer people could find either.

But Lott knew that just the HOA dues on this house had to be high, considering the subdivision. So Lott made a mental note to have Annie really dig into Jennifer’s money source. At this point he was grasping for straws. Any straw.

As they climbed out in to the morning air that smelled of mown lawns and wet dirt, Julia said, “Swanky digs.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Lott said, looking around. The modern street was very silent, all the blinds closed. Everything was perfectly kept up and not even a child’s toy remained on the grass. Nothing actually was moving at all and it felt more like a tomb than a neighborhood.

On the way from breakfast, he and Julia had decided they would approach Jennifer with the story that they were trying to clear her brother’s name. That the journal had been planted.

Jennifer must have heard them coming because she opened the front door just as they stepped on the front porch.

She was a woman in her fifties, dressed in jeans and a silk blouse. She was trim and slightly muscled. She had on what looked like fur slippers and had her hair up and tied back. She had on a little too much makeup, mostly in a failed attempt to cover some lines under and around her eyes. Lott thought it made her look more like a raccoon.

“Welcome detectives,” she said, her voice slightly gravelly, more than likely from too many cigarettes. Lott remembered the last time they had been to her previous home, down off the strip, she had been chain-smoking. This home was a large step up from that house.

She invited them in and offered them something to drink.

Lott and Julia both declined.

She indicated they should sit at her dining room table and they all did.

The inside of the house replicated the outside. Everything in perfect order, best real-wood floors, best furniture, a massive chef’s kitchen.

Lott decided he would lead off as they got settled.

“Mrs. Season, we’re working on clearing your brother’s name on this case with the four dead women.”

She seemed honestly surprised at that. “I always knew Paul could have nothing to do with the deaths of those women. He couldn’t kill anything and he never wrote a word in a journal in his life. That’s why I called you when I found it.”

Julia nodded. “That’s what we now believe. But we are trying to figure out how that journal got into Paul’s things.”

Jennifer shook her head. “He lived alone in a house down near the university. That’s where he killed himself and after everything with my husband passing, all I did was pack up Paul’s things that were there. The journal was down in the middle of a box of his stuff, so it had to have been in his things when he died. The police at the time never saw it I guess.”

Julia wrote in her notebook. They had found that having one of them write stuff down, even though they already knew it, sometimes made a person being interviewed open up, feel more important. Human nature that when your words had enough value to be written down, you wanted to say more.

“Are your parents still alive?” Julia asked.

Jennifer shook her head. “Both died in a car wreck when I was twenty-two and Paul was twenty.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Julia said.

Jennifer shrugged. “Mother was driving, fell asleep at the wheel on the way back from San Francisco. I was in the car and barely survived. I was in the hospital for a month. It was very traumatic for Paul. For me as well.”

“I can imagine,” Lott said.

Something was feeling very wrong about all this, but darned if he could put his finger on any of it. His little voice was shouting that they needed to dig a lot deeper into this family than they already had.

And figure out where her money was coming from exactly.

After a few more questions, Lott and Julia stood.

On the way to the door, Julia said, “We’ll let you know when we clear Paul’s name.”

Lott was watching Jennifer’s face and just a twitch of a smile hit the corner of her lipstick-covered lips. Then she said, “Thank you, Detectives, for the good work.”

As he and Julia climbed back into the Cadillac and he started it, he turned to Julia. “Did you get the sense she was laughing at us?”

“That good work comment,” Julia said, “was superstar sarcastic levels.”

“So what are we missing?” Lott asked as he headed down the rich, suburban street.

“Everything,” Julia said. “Clearly everything.”