Maxine was silent on the way home. She stared morosely into the twilight, and I regretted asking her to come along. It was going to take time to get over losing a son, even one she didn’t know very well.
But the closer we got back to town, the more unease I felt. “You never mentioned that you invested in Craig’s new comic series.” I stared down at the list of Craig’s investors—all women. Coincidence? One other was from the region, but a few more had addresses around the country.
“No, I suppose I didn’t,” she said.
“Do you know who these other women are?”
“I can’t say. I’ve never met any of them.”
We’d driven another block before I realized that Maxine hadn’t really answered my question.
“But you know how Craig knew them.” It was a guess.
She sniffled but didn’t answer, keeping her eyes on the road.
“Maxine?”
“Look, Liz, from what I know, Craig found most of his . . . investors . . . online. Now let me drive so we don’t end up in another pie stand.”
It was meant to end the conversation, but it just made my brain start spinning. The slight pause before “investors.” If these women weren’t investors, why did they give Craig money?
Also niggling in the back of my brain was the fact that someone had stolen Craig’s computer and wiped the shop’s laptop. Or tried to anyway. Was it to hide the record of these . . . online investors?
“Maxine, did you wipe the laptop?”
“What?” she mumbled.
Another nonanswer.
If Maxine had wiped the laptop, had she also taken the computer to suppress some kind of information on it? And if she’d taken that, might she have also broken into his home too?
“Maxine, who are those other women?”
She drew a breath through clenched teeth. “For someone who considered himself so smart, Craig could be an idiot.” She kept on driving, pausing to flip on the headlights. “They’re all . . . we’re all . . . women he bilked. At least I got that much from the laptop before . . .”
“Before you wiped it. I get that. You’re his mother. It’s not hard to understand that you’d want to protect him.”
Maxine snorted.
Okay, not to protect him. “To protect them?” I glanced up at Maxine. The occasional oncoming headlights reflected across streams of tears running down her face. She reached to wipe some of it away.
“Pull over,” I suggested. “You shouldn’t drive when you’re this upset.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“What?”
“I’m not stopping this car until I figure out what to do.”
If I’d suspected before, now I knew. Maxine’s involvement went far beyond wiping the laptop.
“I can help you do that,” I said. “I can help you figure this out. Why don’t you talk to me?”
While she was considering that, I put a finger around the handle of my purse that I’d set on the floor by my feet and started inching it up. If I could get to my cell phone inside . . .
But as soon as I’d maneuvered the purse into my lap, Maxine grabbed it. I tugged back, and we struggled over the bag, the car swerving into oncoming traffic that warned her with loud horns. She managed to regain her lane while tossing my purse into the back seat.
I lunged for it.
“If you do that again, I will crash this car. Sit down!”
I eased down into my seat. Except for the context, the words could’ve been said by any harried mother in the country. Only hers were not a warning but a threat.
I struggled to keep my voice calm. “Maxine, I don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“You know enough to be a problem.”
“Just that you wiped the laptop. And you probably also took the computer.”
She sniffed again. “It was all right there in front of me the whole time. The multiple accounts. The fake names. He kept all the e-mails.”
“The evidence that proved he defrauded his investors?”
If she’d snorted before, she cackled at this.
“Defrauded. That’s a kind word. Want to know what he did?”
“Yes. Please tell me.” I’d decided my best bet was to try to calm her down and keep her talking. I think that’s what Dad said to do when negotiating a hostage situation, which my alarmed brain just realized this was becoming. I hoped the same tactics still worked when you were the hostage.
“I found Craig on a message board designed to reunite adopted kids with their birth parents. Well, it turns out, he’d registered for it under seven different e-mail addresses.”
“Why would he . . . ?”
“Because he’d surf the stories of mothers looking for sons his age.”
“And pretend to be those sons?”
“Basically, yes. He was a little smart about it, in that he wouldn’t answer their posts. He’d just copy those details and make his own post in the section for sons looking for their mothers. Then he’d wait for them to come to him, like a spider luring flies into his web.”
“So you might not even be his mother.” Although I somehow doubted it. The resemblance was still striking.
She shrugged. “No idea. He didn’t use a fake name to set up the account I found. That’s how I traced him here.”
“Aren’t names and contact information on those sites private?”
“You young people. Just because I have a little age on me, doesn’t mean I can’t still hack a computer. You could say I have over thirty years of experience. Not only did I find those e-mails, but spreadsheets he used to keep all the details about these aliases. And others he used to track his . . . income. Some women just wanted to help him. Others didn’t want it known that they’d had a son, so he blackmailed them for even more. It’s where he got the money to open the shop.”
“So you discovered all this on the laptop and then wiped it.” I struggled to come up with a reason. “Because if police found it, it would give you a motive?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “But I know you didn’t stage the break-in at the comic shop,” I continued. “Those two mob guys already confessed to that. Besides, you wouldn’t have had to break in. You had a key.”
“And if I’d used my key, everybody would have known I took the computer. I wasn’t sure what to do. I figured investigators would check it out eventually. But then the security service called me about the alarm.”
“It didn’t go to the police?”
She shook her head. “Craig had disconnected the part that called the police directly. We’d had too many false alarms, and the company threatened to start charging us. They normally called Craig, and he went to check things out. Since Craig obviously wasn’t answering, I guess I was next on the list. When I went over there, the door was jimmied and the place was a mess. I figured if I took the computer, the police would just blame whoever broke in.” She blew out a breath. “I shoved it in this little shed off the alley. We never used it for anything but rock salt and our snow shovels. Nobody ever thought to check there.”
“But you also broke into Craig’s house?”
“If he was stupid enough to leave evidence all over his computer . . .”
“What did you find?”
“Dirty laundry. A messy bathroom. Dishes in the sink. Typical guy place. Oh, why? Why did he have to be so secretive?”
“Maxine. All those things. The computer. The break-in. They’re minor. The big thing is the murder. And I know you didn’t kill Craig. You were with me.”
Tears continued to stream down her face as she forged ahead, her driving growing increasingly erratic.
How could she have killed Craig? We’d arrived at his room at the same time. Unless . . .
“You didn’t want to ride together because you wanted to get there before me. Did you even go home to feed your cat?”
“This was before I hacked his laptop. When I still thought we might have . . . some kind of relationship. The fall threw me, you know? Like it was a reminder that I might not have forever to get around to telling him I was his mother.
“So I went a little early. I called the hospital and got his room number. Just in case you were already waiting in the lobby, I went in the back way by the cafeteria. He was chatty and talkative when I got there, just propped up in the bed.”
“So you told him you were his mother?”
“I started to. But you know how I beat around the bush. I had just gotten to the topic of mothers, and he began yammering. He told me all about how he’d bilked all these stupid women. He was bragging. You don’t want to know the words he used or the names he called them. It’s like he had no filter at all.”
“That was the drug,” I said. “It acts like a truth serum.”
“So he really meant what he said.” A hitch in her voice had softened the last part. “I had to know for sure. ‘What about your real mother?’ I asked him.
“He laughed. ‘Why would I want a mother?’ he said. ‘What’s she going to do, bake me cookies?’ Then he just swore and said he wished I was dead. Or wished his mother was dead. I never got to tell him.”
“But he was alive when you left.”
“I didn’t leave. I just sat in the chair, dumbfounded.” She bit her lower lip and negotiated the car through a last-minute turn, screeching the tires. “I don’t know if it was what the hospital gave him, or if that drug was still in his system, but in five minutes, he was sleeping.
“He looked so peaceful. So much like he did when he was a baby. I knew then it was time to finish what I should have done in the first place.”
“Should have done? Maxine, you tried to kill him before?”
“A few weeks after he was born. He was a mistake, you know. His father wasn’t in the picture, and my parents pretty much showed me the door. He was doomed from the very beginning. What kind of life did I have to offer him? He wouldn’t stop crying and I had no sleep. I’d held a pillow over him then too, until he was still. When I lifted the pillow, he looked so peaceful. Only then I chickened out.” She shook her head. “They took him away from me. Oh, I got counseling. They blamed it on chemicals in my brain, you see. Postpartum depression. But it turns out I was right. Not only Craig, but a lot of people would have been better off if I finished the job.”
We were coming up on a police car parked on the side of the road. We had to be going over the speed limit, and I waved frantically as we passed. The same young officer who had been following me the day I crashed into the pie vendor at the flea market was sitting behind the wheel. He’d recognized the car. And he . . . waved back.
“He knows what side his bread is buttered on.” Maxine snorted. “He’s not going to pull over his boss’s girlfriend.”
Not unless I could get his attention. I lunged for the steering wheel just as she was making a turn.
We struggled for control, the car jerking to the left and then to the right, even as Maxine pushed down on the accelerator and the car gained speed.
As we hit the curb, my head struck the roof, and every bone in my body jolted. The car went airborne and started to spin. Next thing I knew, glass and splinters flew everywhere. The car came to a sudden stop, and the air bags pushed me back even as momentum threw me forward against my seat belt. Water poured in. Before I could figure out where the water was coming from, I knew we were stopped. I reached for the door handle, but it didn’t budge.
I could hear screaming, but I just wanted to—had to—get out of that car. I found the seat belt and unbuckled myself and started to climb out of the window.
Arms reached in to help me. Someone told me to stay where I was, but I ignored the voice. “Call the police,” I croaked. Once outside, I looked back at the car. Maxine was drenched and slumped against the steering wheel and deflated air bag. The windshield was gone. And several large lobsters flopped around sluggishly on the hood of the car.
We’d crashed into the new seafood restaurant—and directly into that spiffy three-hundred-gallon lobster tank.