Chapter Forty-One

On her knees in Sam’s closet, Jessie taped closed the last box of her sister’s belongings. Some she would keep, others she’d give to Nina. The rest would go to charity. Her father had told her to take care of everything but the furniture and housewares, and now she had.

She stood and went into the bedroom. Darkness had come while she’d worked in the closet, but a filmy brightness shone through the windows from the falling and fallen snow. As beautiful as it looked, as peaceful and serene, she wished it would stop. She wanted to leave in the morning. To go home and put everything that had happened here behind her. She closed the blinds and switched on one of the bedside lamps, remembering the night she’d stood in that same spot, pointing a gun at Senator Talmont. She shuddered at the memory. Now it seemed surreal.

Just as she added the box to the stack at the top of the stairs, her cell phone rang. She glanced at the Caller ID.

Nina. Her stomach clenched. Maybe she had the information about Ian’s blood type.

“Hey.” Jessie heard traffic in the background.

“Long day.” Nina’s voice had an edge too sharp for Jessie’s liking. “I’m headed underground to the Metro so I might lose you. Meet me at Teaism.”

“The one up here?”

“Yeah. Just a couple of blocks from you, across Connecticut on R Street. I’m on my way.”

“In this snow?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Sophie?”

“With the sitter. I’ll see you—” Nina lost her signal.

Jessie got to Teaism before Nina. From the outside, the converted townhouse looked like lots of others, but the inside was serenely Japanese. Jessie bought two chai teas and sat at one of the silkwood tables next to a window.

She fidgeted and worried, exotic tea and Japanese serenity doing little to ease her mind. What did Nina have to tell her that she couldn’t say on the phone—that would take her away from her child?

Nina bustled in the door and stomped the snow off the boots Jessie had watched her put on this morning. The tight look on her face was fair warning. She caught Jessie’s gaze, strode to the table, and unzipped her coat.

“Damn Metro.” She untied her scarf and pulled her lime-green knit hat from her head. “They keep raising fares, and service gets worse, and the waits get longer, and will they ever teach the train operators how to brake? I swear, they’ll make you puke.” She slumped down onto the chair.

Jessie knew to let Nina rant when she got in a mood like this. She scrunched her nose and nodded toward Nina’s cup. “Chai?”

“Thanks.” Nina sucked in a breath and exhaled with drama. She closed her eyes, as if to shut out the Metro anger and switch gears to something else.

Jessie wondered if she wouldn’t rather hear more about the Metro.

Nina shrugged off her coat, took a sip of her tea, and winced. “Hot.” She looked out the window for a long moment, then focused her gaze on Jessie. “It wasn’t Ian. He wasn’t the man Sam was with the night she died.”

Jessie’s stomach sank. She buried her face in her hands while the idea settled in her mind. Disappointment drained what little energy she’d regained since she’d left Helena’s, and she dragged her fingers down her face. “You’re sure?”

“That’s the same thing you asked me when I told you about Sam.” Nina said snippily. “I’m sorry, but I’m sure.”

“I’m not questioning you, it’s just not the news I wanted to hear. I’d convinced myself that it was Ian. That this nightmare was over.”

“Ian had Type O blood,” Nina said. “Type Os are nonsecretors. Our guy’s a Type B secretor. Nowhere near the same.”

“How did Ian die?”

“He injected himself with succinylcholine.”

“Sux? The lethal injection drug?”

“That’s the one.” Nina propped her elbows on the table. “The drug itself metabolizes pretty quickly, but we found metabolites in his blood. Normally that wouldn’t be enough to confirm the cause of death, but he had a fresh injection site and the used syringe was found near his body.”

“That’s a horrible way to die.”

“Muscle paralysis that prevents all movement—even breathing. Not the way I’d choose to go.”

“So you think he committed suicide?” Jessie asked.

“All the evidence isn’t in yet, but it looks like he might have.”

“They’re reporting it on the news like it’s a no-question case, and everyone else seems to think the same thing.” Jessie told Nina about her visit to Helena’s, about Philippe and Elizabeth stopping by, and about her father being there.

A snowplow rumbled past on the street outside, its blade scraping on the pavement.

“Ian’s so-called suicide seems too convenient,” Nina said. “And that whole group is incestuous. Your father led you to think they were his sworn enemies, and there they all were, drinking martinis together while I was looking through my microscope at what was left of Ian.”

“Helena was the only one drinking.”

“You know what I mean.” Nina looked wired-tired.

Jessie imagined her up during the nights with Sophie teething and fussing, working all day, and now dealing with the headache of Jessie’s situation. She would be edgy, too.

“If what Ian wrote isn’t true, I can’t believe Helena or my father would be all right with the police thinking that it is.”

“Why not?” Nina asked.

Jessie shook her head and shrugged.

“Someone didn’t want Sam’s murder investigated,” Nina said. “Now someone doesn’t want Ian’s death investigated. The best strategy would be to link them both together and cancel out one with the other.”

Jessie gave this some thought. “And I confirmed the connection when I talked to Detective Davenport last night.”

Nina nodded. “Yep.”

“It’s déjà vu, with a twist. Sam’s was a murder framed as a natural death. Ian’s was a murder framed as a suicide.”

“Or an opportunist’s suicide,” Nina said.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe Ian really did commit suicide, since no one’s arguing it. Maybe someone saw a convenient way to pin blame on him for Sam’s murder, planting a note with his body before they called the cops.” Nina seemed to like her theory. “You said the note was typed. Anyone could’ve written it.”

“Detective Davenport said that Helena found him.”

“But you saw Elizabeth at his practice the night before. Maybe she found him first, planted the note, and left him there. She couldn’t have called the cops. How would she have explained being in his lab with him after hours? ‘Oh, I’m a United States senator, and we were just getting ready to have more extramarital sex because we’re in love, and he’s my son’s sperm-donor-bio-dad…’”

An idea scratched at the back of Jessie’s mind. She held her palm out and waved it at Nina. “Give me a second.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “If my father is the one who orchestrated the cover-up of Sam’s murder, and he’s involved with Helena, maybe she called him first, and they came up with the idea of the note together.”

“Are you saying that Ian killed himself or that someone murdered him?”

Jessie remembered the times she’d been around Ian. At Sam’s memorial, at his office—when she’d heard and seen him with Elizabeth. “He wasn’t the type to commit suicide.”

“Then that leaves you with another murder.”

“Committed by the same person who killed Sam. He or she left the suicide note as a cover.” Jessie drank some tea. “I’ve come full circle to Senator Talmont.”

“How do you figure?”

“I did some research on him after Philippe told me about Sam’s scheme and showed me those pictures of them. What I found out about Talmont didn’t seem to matter until now.”

“This oughta be good.”

“Talmont is ex-military. Special ops. He’s got the strategic and tactical experience to devise a plan like this. Clandestine operations—get in, get out, don’t get caught.” Jessie tried to reconcile this image of Talmont with the man she’d held at gunpoint the night he came to Sam’s place. “I’ll bet if he wasn’t drunk and leering, he could be stealthy. And dangerous.”

Nina shook her head. “If he’s got all that training and experience, then how do you explain him falling for Sam’s extortion scheme?”

That question had occurred to Jessie, too. And she’d had personal experience that gave her the answer. “He’s been out for a while, living the platinum-spoon life of a senator. He wasn’t sharp. Sam took advantage of his weaknesses.”

“Which are?”

“His ego and his libido. And I can use those to my advantage.”

Nina got that oh-no-you-don’t look on her face. “Think about the things you just said. If Talmont was careless enough to kill Sam, and ruthless enough to kill Ian to cover it up, then he wouldn’t hesitate to come after you.”

“He might have already.”

Nina cocked her head, a line forming between her drawn brows. “Come again?”

“I got hit by an SUV the night before last. Someone tried to run me over.”

Nina’s eyes flickered with panic. The frantic look kept Jessie talking, fast. “The side mirror clipped my shoulder and knocked me down, but I’m okay.”

“And you were going to tell me this when?” Nina pressed her hands to the sides of her head, flattening her curls. “You have got to stop. I respect that you want to find Sam’s murderer, but it’s not worth dying for. What will you have accomplished then?”

Jessie’s defenses flared, but before she could speak, Nina continued. “Sam’s murder and the cover-up was slick enough,” she said, “but this thing with Ian has upped the stakes to a whole new level. That man was here yesterday, gone last night. Neither you nor I think it was suicide, but everyone else does. The note cleverly made Ian the fall guy. Don’t you get it, Jess? Nobody wants justice. They want you to leave it alone.”

Jessie jutted out her chin. She hadn’t come this far only to give up. “Well, I’ve never much cared what everyone else wants, and it looks like Sam didn’t, either. It’s down to Talmont now. And I’m going to prove it was him.”