“She was shot in the face?” Highsmith asked.
He had that catatonic stare rookies get at their first exposure to unspeakable violence. It’s a pure expression. It can’t be faked. A cold gust of wind swept grit off the road and circled the Saab. Billy wasn’t moved by Highsmith’s reaction. Neither did he dismiss it.
Highsmith struggled for words. “Did she suffer?”
“I can’t say. But she knew her baby would die. That’s suffering.”
Highsmith looked like he was going into shock. His gaze wandered from the road to the diner and stayed there. “She told me she came here on Saturdays with her dad and cousins. She loved it. I bought the place as a wedding present. We were going to fix up the house and use it on weekends. A friend in Chicago wants to leave his law practice and move here to open a restaurant for the casino trade. I told him I would give him the diner.”
He took a breath. “Even if it turned out I was wrong about the embezzlement, I figured Caroline would never forgive me for thinking the worst of her family. Then I left her at the altar. My life with her was over. My job in Memphis was gone. My future in Chicago was pretty well screwed. I spent a day and a half doing chores around here trying to decide what to do.
“I decided to go back to Memphis and figure things out from there. I was almost to the highway when my mobile started to light up with texts. I pulled off the road expecting a blast from Caroline, but the first was Rosalyn’s statement to the attorneys about Caroline’s death. I assumed she’d been in an accident on the way to Airlee until I brought up a news article about her murder. I sat there unable to breathe. I read more texts. One was your request for Sharma’s harassment file. That made me check the Shelby County ‘Who’s In Jail’ site to see if you’d had him arrested. When he wasn’t on the list I called his answering service. They indicated he was still taking appointments. The son of a bitch was free. Walking around.”
He brushed his fingers over his forehead. “I wanted to get my hands on him and make him confess. Not my best thinking. I drove to town instead. Went straight to your place. You made it clear there was nothing I could do about Sharma. I thought about the embezzlement scheme and wondered if that was somehow connected to Caroline’s murder.”
“Is that the angle you mentioned last night?”
Highsmith nodded. “First I had to prove the embezzlement had taken place. The firm’s database showed the files I needed were in Caroline’s office. There were twenty-three of them. I searched her office, but the files were gone.”
Billy knew why. Rosalyn had removed them. He noticed Zelda watching them through the diner’s front window. He waved for her to join them. She picked her way through clumps of wet leaves, her arms hugging her chest as if she was cold.
“All done?” she asked.
“Almost. Those twenty-three files you mentioned. Is there something unusual about them?”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Are they different from other client files?”
“Sure. The attorneys can go into the database and look at the preliminary documents within the files, but you need a password for access to the entire file. That’s why when Robert asked to see the physical files and I mentioned it to—”
Billy interrupted her. “Who has that password?” He didn’t want Highsmith to know Caroline had been upset he’d asked for the files.
“Saunders, Rosalyn, Caroline, and Martin have their own passwords.”
“Why Martin?”
“He personally supervises those trust accounts.”
“Do you have a password?” Highsmith asked.
She hooted. “They don’t trust me to turn off the lights.” She rubbed her hands briskly up and down her arms. “Let’s talk about this someplace warm.”
Billy gave her the car keys. “Turn on the heat. I’ll buy you dinner later, but for now I need you to wait in the car. We won’t be long.”
“If we don’t leave in fifteen minutes, I’ll miss the tap dance class I teach at the Y,” she said.
“I’ll tell the manager you were assisting me in a murder investigation. This is important.”
She took the keys.
Shadows lengthened as he walked with Highsmith through the pine trees to the tiny house where he and his uncle had once lived. The white clapboard siding needed to be scraped and painted. Plywood had been fitted into the bathroom window frame to replace broken glass. The porch sagged in the middle. Other than that the place looked in pretty good shape.
The shotgun house consisted of a front room with the only bedroom directly behind that, a walk-through bathroom, and then the kitchen where he and his uncle brewed coffee before opening the diner at 5:30 am. Uncle Kane had added a lean-to mudroom on the back of the house that they’d converted into his bedroom. He kept his clothes and a few of his mother’s keepsakes stored in a footlocker beside the bed. For company, he tacked up a poster of his hero, home run king Hank Aaron at his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982. The mudroom was where he’d slept until he left for his freshman year at Ole Miss.
Highsmith unlocked the front door and flipped the light switch. He’d moved the furniture around. The sofa was pushed against the wall opposite the wood stove, and the chair had been turned toward an old General Electric TV that was set on top of three wood onion crates. Billy could smell pine cleaner in the bathroom and the paint cans sitting on newspaper in the bedroom. On the table beside the chair sat a bottle of eighteen-year-old Laphroaig Scotch.
He’d forgotten the silence of this house. On the barge he was surrounded by horn blasts from the Memphis Queen II as she leaves the dock, the clack-clack of semis rolling over the new bridge’s expansion joints, and the drumming sound of trains on the track fifty yards away. It felt odd to be in the settling quiet of this place, a house where he hadn’t been welcome since the day he’d told his uncle that he had quit law school.
He crossed his arms and leaned his back against the wall next to the door. “Tell me about this embezzlement scheme.”
Highsmith regarded him. “You want all the details?”
He nodded. Enough to catch you lying.
Highsmith sat on the arm of the sofa. “The first client Rosalyn assigned me was a teenager named Tarek Merkle. A hotel balcony railing gave way and dumped the kid two stories onto concrete. That put him in a wheelchair for life. Rosalyn got him a four-million-dollar settlement and put it in a trust for his benefit with Martin Lee serving as trustee. Tarek’s parents bought a wheelchair van so he wouldn’t feel limited by his impairment. Last spring he lost control of the van and rear-ended a car stopped in a turn lane. The driver died, a mother of four.
“The computer chip the cops removed from the van indicated he’d been doing sixty-eight in a forty zone. Tarek was charged with vehicular homicide. However, the case hinged on that computer chip, which might not be admissible as evidence. At least that would be my contention. The dead woman’s husband couldn’t sue the trust directly because Rosalyn had included a spendthrift clause. With four kids, the husband desperately needed money. Tarek was terrified he’d go to prison. Not a good outcome on either side.
“When I took the case, I checked the balance of Tarek’s trust. It was almost two and a half million. I suggested to the ADA that if they dropped the charges because of reasonable doubt, Tarek’s trust would pay the family a million dollars. That got everyone’s attention. The ADA and the family’s attorney wanted the balance in the trust verified before he would take it to the judge. I checked the account again on Friday. There was a little over seven hundred thousand. Over 1.7 million was missing.”
Billy whistled. “Computer error?”
“You’d hope so, but I’ve seen this before. I asked the family a few discreet questions. They weren’t aware of the loss, which isn’t unusual. Discrepancies in the balance can go undetected because the trustee doesn’t report to the court. The transactions can be made so complicated most beneficiaries can’t tell they’re being screwed. A lot of them don’t even look at the statements.
“I figured Martin was behind this. I gave Rosalyn and Saunders a temporary pass because they wouldn’t question information on annual reports coming from their own son or check the balance of the account. But my assumption changed.”
“Why?”
“Before I went to Rosalyn with the numbers, I did some digging. It’s an old firm so it has hundreds of clients with trusts. I wrote queries for all trusts in the firm’s database that specified the bank as trustee. Two kinds of beneficiaries are the easiest sheep to shear. The first are those who have no relatives to monitor the reports. Second are those with no beneficiary to receive a windfall.
“I spent the weekend sorting the list I had created with my queries of relatives of the trust beneficiary. For the majority of those trusts, the field came up empty. Then I looked for a check box called ‘final distribution made’ and found trusts that showed no distribution. No distribution. All those trusts had minimal balances, just enough to keep the trusts from being cleared and keeping the absence of distribution from being challenged.”
“What did that tell you?”
“Something happened to the remaining assets of those trusts. As trustee, Martin could easily have stolen them. I also searched for trusts where Saunders or Rosalyn had drafted the trust instrument. There were twenty-three of those files on site. What shocked me was that Caroline had been named as a backup attorney on seven of the most recent ones, meaning she could represent the trust in court. That made me suspicious she’d known what was going on.
“On Monday morning I asked Zelda to pull those files and send them to my office. She said they were sequestered and unavailable even to me as a partner. That sent red flags flying. Caroline could be part of the scheme, and I was to marry her that night.”
Billy didn’t want to believe any of this, certainly not that Caroline might have been involved. “So far I hear more speculation than fact. How is this connected to Caroline’s murder?”
“I wanted to believe she had moved the files to her office because she had her own suspicions. If she’d confronted Martin on Monday and threatened to expose him, I’m sure he would’ve done anything to prevent it, including kill her.”
“That’s a leap.”
“Not when you consider that this morning my ability to remotely access the firm’s database was revoked. Martin is in charge of the firm’s IT. Only he could have done that. I went to the office. Rosalyn called me in and said she had decided to eliminate my litigation department. She wrote me a $50,000 severance check, asked for my key, and told me to clear out my desk immediately.”
Billy came off the wall and went to the window to think. “I’m sure you’ve prosecuted similar cases in Chicago. You know what evidence you need to persuade a DA.”
“I can’t go in with a hunch. I need those files, but Martin has probably destroyed them by now.”
“What about the funds missing from the Merkle account? That’s the foundation for your case.”
“The balance is back to 2.5 million. I’m sure Martin has altered the records to cover the earlier withdrawal. My best chance to pursue this is if he’s forgotten to delete the backup on those sequestered files.”
“Would the DA act on the information you have?” Billy asked.
“Not a chance. I understand the ramifications of going after a family like the Lees. He wants to keep his job.”
“That’s quite a story.” Billy noted the clean floors, fresh paint on the walls, and the empty bottle of scotch, everything the way Highsmith had described it. He’d spent time here and left tracks down to the paint smear on the sleeve of his jacket. There was no cell service and no landline, so that part of his story worked.
They heard Zelda’s footsteps on the porch. Bad timing.
Highsmith scowled. “Detective, this isn’t over by a long shot.”
“It sure isn’t.”
“Hey, guys, I have to use the bathroom,” Zelda called. Billy opened the door. She joined them, glancing around the front room. “I’ve always been curious about this place. It’ll be great when it’s fixed up.”
She looked at Highsmith. “Has he accused you of murder yet? He pinned me with it on the drive over.”
Shut up, Zelda, he thought.
“The bathroom’s through there,” Highsmith said.
She looked from Highsmith to him. “It feels pretty grim in here. Is everything all right?”
“We’re good except for one thing,” Billy said. He took out his mobile. “Stand up straight for the camera, Mr. Highsmith.” He took the photo. The flash went off.