sixteen

“I know why Alaina needs Andrew alive!”

Death frowned. “What?”

There was a long silence from the other end of the phone line. “Cameron? Hello?”

“Wren?” Cam said finally. “Your voice sounds funny.”

“This isn’t Wren. It’s Death. Wren’s in the shower. What are you talking about?”

“Why are you answering Wren’s phone? This is Wren’s phone, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s Wren’s phone. I answered it because you’ve called three times in the last five minutes. I thought it must be urgent and Wren’s in the shower.”

“Oh. You tricked me!”

“I didn’t trick you. You started talking before I could say hello.”

Behind Death, the bathroom door opened. He turned as Wren emerged in shorts and a T-shirt, a towel wrapped around her head. She gave him a questioning look and he held up her phone. “It’s Cameron. He knows why Alaina needs Andrew alive?”

Wren’s mouth tightened and she took the phone. “You suck at conspiracy, Cam.” She listened. “Tricked you how?” She tucked the phone against her shoulder and addressed Death. “He says it’s a voodoo, ex-Marine, mojo thing.”

“Right. Well,” he gestured vaguely behind him, “I’ll just take my mojo in the kitchen, if you need anything.”

He went in the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. He was just pouring out the first cup when Wren came in carrying her laptop and sat at the table. Death gave her the cup of coffee he’d just poured and fixed himself another one. She waited until he took the chair across from her to speak.

“I didn’t want you to go off half-cocked, come up with a bunch of wild ideas, get your hopes up, and set yourself up for a fall. That’s all.”

“And you thought I would?”

“Well, that’s what Annie and I have been doing.”

“You still don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he said, though the curiosity was eating at him.

“I think it’s maybe hit the point where you need to know.”

“Okay, then.”

She opened her computer and fiddled with the keys for a few seconds.

“That auction Annie and I went to was just up the street from the Greys’ house. Alaina was there. She bought an antique steamer trunk and Annie and I carried it home for her. To get a peek inside her house, you know?”

“Nosy girls,” he teased. “What did you see?”

“Andrew and Alaina’s wedding portrait. This is the photograph it was painted from.”

She turned the computer so he could see the screen and Death’s breath caught in his throat. He was sure his heart skipped at least one beat. “Randy?”

He took several long minutes to process this. “Andrew Grey looks … a lot … like Randy.”

Wren got up, came around the table, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He leaned into her and she rubbed his back. “So what kind of half-cocked, wild ideas did you come up with?” he finally asked her.

“Oh, all kinds. DNA experiments, cloning, Randy being a secret Einstadt heir, space aliens, body snatchers …” She went back to her seat and pulled the computer aside so she could look at him directly. “We’ve been researching Andrew and Alaina Grey. She’s his fifth wife. He has a reputation for not being a very nice person, but she’s stayed married to him for almost ten years. Part of that, or all of that, is probably because she signed a really stupid pre-nup. It said that, if she left him, she had to be able to prove infidelity or cruelty on his part or she’d get nothing. And even if she did prove something, she’d have to return everything he’d ever given her and pay back any money he’d let her have. One source suggests that he paid her brother’s way through medical school, so we’re probably talking a couple of hundred thousand dollars.”

Death drained his coffee. He reached back to the counter and snagged the pot so he could refill his cup. He had a feeling he was going to be needing a lot of coffee. “Go on.”

“Andrew collapsed at his country club almost fifteen months ago. He was rushed to a private hospital and Alaina’s brother was his personal physician. For four months he was kept completely incommunicado. No one saw him but Alaina and his private medical team.”

“That’s not entirely unusual.”

“No, I know. But his third wife, Leilani Moran, thought it was suspicious. So much so that she filed a lawsuit demanding access to him. She’s the mother of his only two children and she claimed that as giving her the right to know how he was. They settled the lawsuit out of court when Alaina finally let her visit Andrew, three days after Randy died.”

“So you’re thinking—let me see if I follow you—you’re thinking that Andrew died but Alaina didn’t want anyone to know about it. She saw Randy’s picture in the paper, saw the resemblance, and arranged to have Randy kidnapped and Andrew’s body left in his place.”

“There are a whole lot of logistic problems with that. I know there are. But, yeah. That’s what we were thinking.”

“How would she kidnap him? How would she keep him prisoner all this time? Randy’s a smart guy. He’d figure out a way to get out, or to get a message out.”

Wren gave him a worried, pitying look, and he knew she’d caught the present tense. He’d used it on purpose though, not so much latching onto a new idea as finally surrendering to an old one. This is what he’d been thinking since the moment he knew about the second badge. It wasn’t his brother’s body. It was an imposter. His brother was alive.

“Annie suggested hypnosis, but I thought drugs were more likely. We talked to the mail carrier who delivers on that street. She’s seen him in the garden a couple of times. She says he acts vague and confused, and he’s changed. He seems nice now. But she hasn’t really talked to him. Alaina never lets him out of her sight.”

“But why would Alaina need Andrew alive?”

“I didn’t know,” Wren said.

“But now you do?”

“Leilani’s lawsuit. Cameron got copies of the transcript from one of the hearings. See, Andrew figured the women were only marrying him for his money, so he decided to make it a competition. He gave Alaina and each of his exes a copy of his will. The one who stayed married to him the longest is the one who inherits.”

“And that’s Leilani?”

“It is right now. Tomorrow Alaina ties her record and Thursday Alaina becomes the heir.”

_____

Wren sniffed. Something was starting to burn. There was flour on the counter and a mixing bowl in the sink and Death’s grandmother’s rolling pin lay in the dish drainer, wiped clean rather than submersed, to protect the ball bearings. She jumped up and grabbed a hot pad and pulled a pan of biscuits out of the oven. They were a little dark, but still perfectly edible. She found a trivet for the hot pan and set it down to cool.

Death, staring off into space, didn’t seem to notice.

She transferred the hot biscuits to a plate and set it on the table, got butter and jam and honey out to go with them, and returned to her seat. “What do we do now?” she asked.

Death shook himself. “We’ve got to find out if it’s really Randy and, if it is, we’ve got to rescue him. They can’t be planning to keep him around as Andrew forever, and after Thursday they won’t need him any more.”

“You think they’d kill him?”

“I wouldn’t take a chance that they might not.”

“So how do we find out if it’s really him? Couldn’t we just call the police and tell them what we suspect? Because if it’s really him then it’s kidnapping and that’s a crime. They’d have to investigate a crime, wouldn’t they?”

“Would they?” Death sighed. “It’s a farfetched theory. You said that yourself. Don’t you think the police would think I was just grasping at straws? That I couldn’t cope with losing my brother and latched on to the physical resemblance between him and Andrew to hatch some wild fantasy that he was still alive.”

“Yeah, but—”

“But? Dad was a cop, Wren. Believe me when I tell you this. Cops hear everything, from ghosts to aliens to government conspiracies. They get pretty skeptical pretty fast.” He saw the plate on the table in front of him. “Oh, you made biscuits!” he said, snagging one.

“Um, no, actually, you made biscuits.”

“Oh, yeah. I did. I forgot.” He opened it and buttered it and Wren helped herself to one. “The Greys are rich, too. That gives Alaina a lot of leverage. It probably shouldn’t, but realistically, it does. We need to find some way to prove that it’s him.”

“Maybe we could get Leilani involved?” Wren suggested. “If Andrew really is dead, then she’s being swindled out of her inheritance. Plus, she’s rich too, so that’d give her leverage.”

“Maybe. But I still think a judge is more apt to think she’s just being mercenary.”

“You’re right.” Wren fiddled with her own biscuit. “They’d probably accuse her of playing on your grief to further her own ends. I wish Madeline hadn’t had the body cremated.”

“You and me both.”

“There must be something.”

They lapsed into a companionable silence, eating biscuits and drinking coffee, both thinking but neither coming up with anything. When Death’s phone rang, they both jumped. He glanced at the caller ID and looked up, meeting Wren’s eyes.

“Sophie Depardieu.” He answered it. “Hello?” Wren listened in on his end of the conversation.

“Yeah, great … the sooner, the better … okay, we’ll be there. See you then.”

He hung up and set the phone down carefully. “That might have been our break right there.”

“Oh?”

“The autopsy report is ready. Sophie can meet us at two this afternoon to review it. We’ll go over it with a fine-tooth comb. If it was really Andrew Grey and not Randy who died, there must be something in that report that will tell us so.”

_____

“Before we start,” Death said, “we have something to show you.”

Wren had printed out Andrew and Alaina’s wedding picture and the picture of Andrew that Annie had Photoshopped and she handed them across the desk one at a time.

“The man in this picture is Andrew Grey,” Death told Sophie as she studied the first one. “His family owns the Einstadt Brewery and there is a secret tunnel that leads to the room where Randy supposedly died.”

Sophie frowned. “Supposedly? Death—”

“Wait,” Wren said, “there’s more. The plywood hiding the tunnel has been disturbed within the last year or so. Andrew collapsed four months before Randy died and hasn’t been seen publicly since. We’ve also learned that, because of the terms of his will, if he died before tomorrow his third wife would inherit his estate instead of his current wife.”

“Rowdy’s wife ran Andrew’s picture through Photoshop,” Death said. “This is what he’d look like without a beard and with Randy’s hair color and uniform.” Sophie gasped audibly upon seeing the picture, but then she lay both photographs face down on her desk and clasped her hands on top of them.

“You said that Andrew collapsed four months before Randy died,” she pointed out. “Don’t you think we would have noticed if we were looking at a four-month-old corpse?”

“We figured he must have just been very ill for that time, or maybe they were keeping him on life support.”

She was already shaking her head before he’d finished speaking.

“I can tell you right now, that’s not the case. I know how much you want for your brother to not be dead, Death. I understand. But, I’m sorry, frankly I think you’ve gone completely off the rails. First of all, the aortic aneurysm that killed Randy was not something that would cause a long, lingering illness. It was pretty much instantly fatal. And any sort of long-term medical intervention would have been very, very obvious. Weight loss, changes in skin tone and coloring, needle marks, the presence of a feeding tube … anyone in this building would have spotted it a mile away. Hell, even the paramedics who tried to revive Randy would have seen it.

“I’m sorry,” her voice was firm, sympathetic but intractable. “It’s just not possible. You’re going to have to accept that Randy’s gone.”

“Then there’s some other explanation,” Death said stubbornly. “That body was Andrew Grey. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Sophie opened her mouth to argue, but Wren intervened. “Why don’t we just go over the autopsy report and see if there’s anything in there that stands out?”

The ME glanced at her, then gave her a small nod. She pulled a file folder over to the center of her desk, deliberately placing it on top of the pictures, and opened it. “Well,” she said, “first off, Randy was a regular blood donor, so we know his blood type. That matches.”

“Randy was O+,” Death said. “It’s the most common blood type in the U.S.”

“True,” Sophie conceded. She read farther down the page. “He was in good health apart from the aneurysm. Do you know what that is, by the way?”

Death nodded, but Wren hesitated. “I’m not entirely clear on that,” she admitted.

“An aortic aneurysm is when the aorta dilates to more than one-and-a-half times its normal size. This weakens the walls of the aorta and if it ruptures, as Randy’s did, massive hemorrhaging can lead to shock and death within minutes.”

“Shouldn’t there have been some signs or symptoms?”

“He might have experienced a little pain from time to time, but if he did he probably shrugged it off as a pulled muscle or a cramp or something.” She went back to the file. “His blood sugar was really high, but that’s probably because he had nothing in his stomach but a little alcohol and a lot of sweet tea.”

“No, that’s wrong!” Wren pounced. “He spent the night before at Annie and Rowdy’s house and they made him eat breakfast.”

“They might have served him breakfast,” Sophie said, “but he didn’t eat it. Wren, it doesn’t mean anything. Randy was a champion at getting rid of food without eating it. He came to dinner at my house once when my aunt was visiting. She has this horrible cabbage casserole she always makes and he totally charmed her by apparently putting away three helpings of it. I didn’t figure out what he’d done until the next day, when I suddenly had the gassiest dog in the universe.”

The sound of rustling paper drew their attention to Death. He had snagged a sheet from the open file and now he sat staring at it, trembling so badly that the paper shook in his hand. He looked up and met Sophie’s eyes. “This is the dental record.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And you matched this to the body? There’s absolutely no mistake about that?”

“Yes,” she said, gently but emphatically. She sorted through the file for another page. “This is the dental X-ray taken of the corpse. You can see that they match.”

Death smiled. It started slowly and built, like a tsunami, until he was grinning so broadly that it hurt.

“This is not my brother’s dental record.”

Sophie sat back in her chair and huffed in exasperation. “Yes. It is. We got it from his dentist. You can see his name on it, right there.”

“I don’t care whose name is on it. This isn’t Randy’s file.” He turned it around so she could see. “You see this? It says his upper teeth are all original, one filling and a crown on a back molar.”

“Yes, and?”

“And Randy’s left canine is an implant. I still have the scar where the original was surgically removed from my arm.” He rolled up his right sleeve and flexed an impressive bicep at them. A small, thin white line slanted down at an angle three inches below his shoulder.”

“He bit you?” Sophie was completely nonplussed.

“Not on purpose. We were playing punch football.”

“Punch football?” Wren asked.

“It’s like touch football, but manlier.”

“Yeah, it would be.”

“But how could someone have altered the dental record?” Sophie persisted, still not ready to buy into the idea.

“I don’t know. I’ll find out.”

“I don’t even know what to say,” Sophie said helplessly. “This is all just so fantastic. How …?” She trailed off, holding her hands up with her fingers splayed in a questioning gesture.

“I don’t know,” Death said again. “I don’t know and I don’t care. The answers are there and we’ll look until we find them. The only thing that matters is, my brother’s alive.”