Chapter Thirteen
Sergeant Flynn was on the phone when I arrived at police headquarters, but he waved me to a seat across the folding table from him. I waited, impatiently, while he wrapped up the call. “Ms. Snowden, what brings you here?”
“I want to know if that man in my house is Wayne or Wade Cadwallader, and I want to know it now.”
“Whoa. What’s the hurry?” The corners of his mouth turned upward, one of the few times in our association I’d seen him smile. I wondered if he was laughing at me.
“I need to know if I’m responsible for a stone-cold psychopath staying at my mother’s house. If Imogen was dating both of them, then she can’t tell the difference. None of the rest of us has ever met either of them before. Wayne’s prints must be on file. You need to test them against the corpse.”
Flynn held up a hand. “Already done. As it happens, we have both Wade’s and Wayne’s fingerprints available, from a couple of times Wayne tricked the NYPD into arresting his brother. It always got straightened out, but Wade was booked a few times.”
“Fantastic. I assume if that guy at Mom’s house wasn’t Wade, you already would have been over to arrest him.”
“It’s not so simple. The differences between twins’ fingerprints are usually very subtle. It’s not something I could notice, or anyone in the ME’s office. I’ve had to send them off to the FBI. They have more sophisticated equipment and a trained specialist who can read the results.”
“A specialist in differentiating twins’ fingerprints?”
“His most famous case involved murderous identical triplets.”
My head spun with the possibilities. The situation we were in was tricky enough. “When will we know?”
“The results will take time.”
“How much time?”
“Not clear. A couple of weeks.”
“What?”
“The FBI guy is an expert, Julia. He’s in high demand. And, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s the holidays.”
“I can’t have a psychopath living in my mom’s house for a couple of weeks. You must put some credence to my theory that Wayne sometimes impersonated Wade or you wouldn’t be checking the corpse’s identity.”
He spread his fingers out on the desk. “Out of an abundance of caution. To make sure the identity of the body is correct. Nothing more. We’ll know in two weeks.”
“I hear you,” I said. “Just do me, and yourself, two favors. One, find out whether Wayne Cadwallader was left-handed or right-handed. Would that be in his criminal record?”
Flynn blinked. “I don’t think so. I’ll check. Why?”
“A hunch. If you can’t get the information from law enforcement, is there a way to look at the twins’ school records, or something else that would tell us?”
He made a note. “Maybe. Why?”
“I noticed last night that whoever it is at my mom’s house eats left-handed, but his grip is awkward, like he’s pretending to be a lefty. I asked Imogen about it. She confirmed her boyfriend is left-handed.”
Flynn sighed. “Julia, remember the twins were bounced from foster home to foster home from a very young age. Maybe no one ever showed them how to hold a fork. Besides, if one is left-handed, wouldn’t the other be, too?”
“I did some reading about twins on the web this morning. I think Wade and Wayne were mirror-image twins.”
“Which are?”
“Identical twins who are opposite-sided, like a person looking in a mirror. They’ll part their hair on opposite sides, one is right-handed, the other left-handed, and so on. I think that’s what the Cadwalladers are. Their hair is cut too short to tell about the parts, but I believe whoever is at my house is eating with his left hand, even though it isn’t natural.”
“Mirror image twins, eh?” Flynn put down his pen and closed his notebook. “Sounds rare.”
“It is, but it does happen.”
Flynn held up a hand. “Okay. Okay. I’ll find out. But, Julia, I’ve been doing this detective thing for a while now, and I’ve learned the simpler explanations are usually the right ones. The guy at your mom’s house is most probably Wade, law-abiding actuary, just as he claims.”
“Do you have a ‘simpler explanation’ that fits this case?”
“I told you Wayne was a moneyman for the Russian mob. The Organized Crime Task Force in New York has picked up some chatter. It seems there may or may not be some missing money. Whatever the case, bad men are looking for Wayne Cadwallader. Very bad men.”
“When will you know something?”
“Soon.”
“Let’s hope,” I said. What a relief that would be. If Wayne was really Wayne, and out-of-town mobsters had killed him, the rest of us could go on to live happily ever after. Well, maybe not Imogen. I still didn’t like that guy at my mom’s house, even if he was Wade. But prying Imogen away from the real Wade was a simpler problem that could be dealt with later, and was really none of my business, anyway.
“One more thing,” I said. “You should also check on emergency room admissions at NYU Hospital on Friday night, December fourteenth. A whole group of people from Imogen’s office came in, allegedly with food poisoning. She thinks it was salmonella, but I’d like to know the real diagnosis. The symptoms seem a little off to me. It’s true, salmonella can make you really sick, but from the way Imogen described it, this was too fast-acting and uniform across the group. Her colleagues assumed it was salmonella because everyone who got sick had drunk the eggnog and everyone is wary of raw eggs nowadays, but I’d like to know what the doctors there actually diagnosed. If my theory is right, that Wayne was her date that night, pretending to be Wade, and your theory is right, that bad people were after Wayne, I wonder if he knew it and thought the poisoning was an attempt on his life. That would explain why he slunk off before the EMTs arrived.”
“The bad guys would have to be pretty motivated to poison a whole group of people for one target.”
“They’d have to be pretty motivated to follow a truck four hundred miles to Busman’s Harbor, Maine, too.”
* * *
As soon as I left Flynn, I went in search of Imogen and Cadwallader, whichever one he was. I found them shopping at Gordon’s Jewelry on the corner of Main and Main.
“Look, Julia!” Imogen held out her left hand with a diamond the size of a dime on the ring finger. “Look what Wade just bought me! We’re engaged!”
“My gosh. That’s gorgeous. Let me see it in the light.” I hustled her over to the other side of the store. “What are you doing?” I whispered. “You broke up with him less than a week ago.”
“I know,” she sighed. “But I told you, since he’s been back, he’s been wonderful.” Her eyes took on a dreamy, faraway look. “We’ll get married in the same church my parents were married in and I’ll wear my mama’s dress. The church will be filled with magnolias and all my family will be there. My parents will see I was right about Wade. He wasn’t a fling. I was right about everything.”
I wanted to shake her. “You’ve been back together less than twenty-four hours. How do you know ‘moody guy’ isn’t coming back?”
She dug the heel of her new L.L.Bean boot into the wooden floor. “Julia, don’t tell me what to do. You’re just like my parents.”
Across the room, Cadwallader studied the earrings beneath the glass countertop. There was no way around it. This latest turn of events meant I had to tell her what I believed. I kept my voice to a low hiss. “Imogen, I think you’ve been dating both Wade and Wayne. That’s why your boyfriend’s personality seemed so changeable. Because he is . . . was two different people.”
I expected a stunned look of dawning comprehension. Instead, the defiant chin jutted out. “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would you believe that? Do you really think I don’t know my own boyfriend?”
It was now or never. I stared down at her. “Not only do I think you dated both of them, I think you don’t know who you’re with right now. You don’t know which one you’ve agreed to marry.”
“Well, I never.” She turned around and called across the room to Cadwallader. “We’re leaving.” Turning back to me, she spat, “Julia, I’ll thank you to stay out of my business.” She and Cadwallader made for the door. “Why does everyone in the world try to tell me what to do?” she whined to him. Then, staring back at me, she said, “You’re just like my parents. We’re getting out of here.” She gave the door a good slam behind her.
“Sorry, Mr. Gordon,” I said to the owner after they left.
“Don’t apologize for them,” he answered. “That was an expensive ring I just sold. Funny that they put it on her credit card instead of his, but I guess it takes all kinds to make the world nowadays. She said her daddy would pay for it.”