Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (9 page)

“Then the DNA you collected from me was useless.”

“Of course, you’re aware that bleach destroys DNA.” David spoke around another bite of his donut. “If that was your skin under her fingernails, we can’t prove it.”

“You also can’t clear me,” Mac said. “If I was going to kill Christine and Maguire, the last place I would’ve done it would be my private suite. Every cable news station around has been at the Inn asking when I’m going to be arrested. They’ve been hounding Willingham for a statement, which he won’t give. Do you think I like being under a microscope? Do you think I enjoy getting calls from my daughter, crying because one of her friends asked her if her daddy flipped out and killed her mother? If you can’t use DNA to clear my name, then I’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”

Even as the words came out of his mouth, Mac regretted allowing his temper to slip. He thought of how many suspects who had spouted similar declarations of innocence that he had ignored.

“My dad didn’t raise no dummy.” With a chuckle, David referred to his notes. “My officers have questioned everyone at and around the Spencer Inn. No one saw you. Of course, since you’re the boss, your employees could be lying.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Hector voluntarily handed over the security tapes immediately. The originals. Of course, he made copies for the Inn’s own investigation. Forensics confirmed that they haven’t been edited. You aren’t on them anywhere after checking Christine in. Nor did your access card get used.”

“Then I’m cleared.”

“Were you that quick to clear a suspect when you were a detective?” David asked.

Mac didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t.

“You have enough money that you could’ve paid to have it done.” Even though David’s tone was casual, Mac picked up a serious note to it.

“What would be my motive?” he asked. “Christine did make a bid for part of my inheritance, but the judge laughed her out of court. We were through. I’ve moved on.”

“Calm down,” David told him. “We took a look at your financials, with a warrant, of course. There’re no suspicious withdrawals or transfers that look like they went to pay for a hit.”

The police chief concluded, “I know you didn’t do this, but you aren’t the only one that’s had people breathing down your neck. The town council ordered me to haul you in here in the back of a cruiser for the media to see to prove that we aren’t crooked and you don’t own Spencer’s law enforcement. I wouldn’t do it. But I still had to do all I could and look at this from every angle before I could scratch your name off my list.”

With a stroke of his pen across the notepad, David put a line through Mac’s name.

“I appreciate that,” Mac replied. “As long as I’m sitting in your hot seat, can you make it worth my while? Tell me what you do have on Christine’s murder.”

“T.O.D is ten-thirty,” David recounted from his notes in his case file. “You need a key card to go anywhere in the hotel except the general public areas. Security doesn’t register when a guest opens the door from inside the room to let someone else in. It only registers when the key card is used. Based on the evidence we’ve collected and what we know, Christine had stayed in the suite after you left and never went anywhere, or even used the phone in her room. Her cell records indicate that she had called her sister Roxanne Burton shortly after you checked her in, at around five-thirty, to tell her about her spending the night at your penthouse.”

“Did you get a statement from Roxanne?”

David leafed through some reports before stopping to tap his pen on the statement Mac was asking about. “Roxanne told us that Christine had been depressed ever since Maguire left her a few weeks ago. Roxanne suggested that she come out here to a lake house they have to clear her head. She came out on Thursday, which happens to be the same day Stephen Maguire checked into the Spencer Inn. Roxanne swears that it was only a coincidence.”

Mac was startled. “I never knew Christine was here. I thought she’d come out the same day that she showed up at my house.”

“She was in Spencer,” David said. “At six-thirty-seven, according to hotel records, Christine ordered two filet mignon dinners and a bottle of red wine from room service, which was delivered at around seven. The server said Christine was alone when he delivered the dinners. Shortly after eight o’clock, her cell records show a series of calls to Stephen Maguire’s cell. He was having dinner with a woman, who we have yet to identify, in the restaurant. Their dinner ended between eight-thirty and nine o’clock. Security records indicate that he used his key card to go up to his floor and enter his room around that time. Meanwhile, from eight o’clock on, Christine kept calling his cell every ten to fifteen minutes—for over two hours until Maguire finally called her back at around ten-fifteen. They spoke for four minutes. He used his key card to take the elevator up to the penthouse floor at around ten-thirty, at which time he was killed.”

After setting down his pen, David folded his hands on top of the folder. “Did Christine speak Spanish?”

Mac replied, “Hector told me that you suspect she was stalking Stephen Maguire.”

“Then you know about the black wig and Spencer Inn cleaning service smock we found in Christine’s room.” David popped the last bite of his donut in his mouth and washed it down with coffee. “The Inn’s security videos have footage of a woman in a black wig who seems to be following Maguire while he was there. Employees who encountered her said she knew very little English.”

“I can’t believe Christine would kill anyone,” Mac argued.

David said, “If she had summered here at the lake throughout the years, she would know what she needed to do in order to mix in with Inn employees so that she could follow him. Maguire did ruin her life. According to her sister, a couple of weeks ago she filed a petition to have Christine declared mentally incompetent.”

“I don’t want my children to think their mother was a lunatic,” Mac insisted. “She was an alcoholic and she had made some very bad decisions but—”

“Someone went to a lot of trouble to make this happen.” David sat forward in his seat. “Maybe Christine was stalking Maguire, but someone else was in that room. We found a black wig in her things. It had her hair and epidermal cells in it. She wore it. We also found black hairs from a wig in Stephen Maguire’s blood and caught in a class ring he was wearing. Whoever attacked him—stabbed him twenty-seven times—was wearing a black wig. But it wasn’t the wig Christine had in her suitcase. The way the blood was splattered in that attack, the wig would’ve gotten some in it. There was no blood in the wig we found and it hadn’t been washed.”

Mac said, “That proves Christine didn’t kill Maguire.”

“She got into a fight with someone besides Maguire,” David said. “He had defensive wounds, but no scratches. Also, Christine died of a cervical fracture but she didn’t get it in the shower tub.”

“She didn’t fall and hit her head on the towel rack?”

“Her blood alcohol level was point-two-six, plus she had enough Valium in her to kill an elephant. It’s unbelievable that she was even conscious.” David marveled. “Her head wound didn’t match with the towel rack or anything else in the shower tub, but it does match with the corner of the sink. We believe that she got into a fight with whoever was cleaning up the bathroom after Stephen Maguire’s murder—”

“The killer had to be covered in blood after stabbing him twenty-seven times,” Mac agreed.

“With all the alcohol and drugs in her system, Christine had to be unconscious. The killer puts on her clothes and kills Maguire in order to get his blood on Christine’s clothes to make it look like she’d done it. Christine comes to while the killer is getting rid of the evidence and attacks the killer, getting skin under her fingernails. Christine falls and hits her head. The medical examiner said she died instantly.” He added in a soft voice, “So she didn’t suffer.”

“That’s good to know.”

“The killer put Christine’s body in the tub to make it look like she’d killed Maguire and then had an accident while cleaning up.” David folded his hands on top of his notepad. “Tell me about Stephen Maguire.”

“If you’re any type of detective, you’ve already found out all about Stephen Maguire,” Mac countered.

“I want to know what you know about him.”

“He was a bastard,” Mac said. “He broke up my family.”

“Didn’t you two work together?”

“Yes.” Mac swallowed in hopes of keeping down the anger that he still felt rising inside his chest when he talked about Stephen Maguire. “He was an assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia. I worked with him on some murder cases. In my personal opinion, the only reason he got as far as he did was because he was a Maguire.”

“I’m not up on the social register,” confessed David.

“Neither was I until I had the displeasure of working with Stephen Maguire,” Mac said. “In the twenty-odd years that I was a homicide detective, I got to know a lot of U.S. attorneys. Some were okay. Others were great. Maguire wasn’t either. But because his great-grandfather was Everett Maguire—”

“And that’s important because?”

Mac chuckled. “You really aren’t into high society goings-on.”

“All bastards look the same to me no matter who their daddy is.”

“Everett Maguire was a Supreme Court Justice a hundred years ago,” Mac explained. “He was a blue-blood from off the Mayflower, or something like that. He had eight children. Half of them went on to become self-made millionaires. The other half married into millions. They all went into high society and became movers and shakers about town. Broderick Maguire went into real estate and by the 1940s owned half of D.C. Now, he’s a billionaire. He had seven kids. I think he has like fifty grandkids and a dozen great-grandchildren.” He held up his hands as if he was going to count up the Maguire family on his fingers. “And that isn’t counting Broderick’s brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews. The Maguires own high society in the United States Capitol.”

“And Stephen Maguire is—was—one of them?” David asked while referring to a report from his case file.

“What Maguire lacked in legal know-how, he made up for in arrogance and political pull,” Mac said. “He never let anyone forget about his family connections. The judge who presided over my divorce had a son who wanted to get into the same fraternity at George Washington University that Maguire and his family had belonged to. She buried me. The kid got in.” 

David’s expression was one of genuine confusion while he sipped his coffee.

Mac finished off his root beer. Seeing his reflection in the mirror, he remembered that they were being watched and was surprised that he had forgotten. He guessed that David had appointed his deputy Bogie to do the honors.

“Has the crime scene been cleared yet?” Mac asked.

Ignoring his question about the crime scene, David said, “I was hoping that you could clear some things up, but instead I’m more confused.”

Mac cringed again. He thought of how many times he had started interrogations with a pleasant request that the suspect clear up some confusion. He reminded himself that David had said he was cleared as a suspect.

David removed two reports from his folder. “I’m sure you know that it’s SOP to run background and credit checks on murder victims.” He turned the report around for Mac to review. “Christine was in hock up to her eyebrows. Did you know that?”

“Ed told that to me yesterday. Apparently, my ex-wife was living large.”

“Did Ed tell you about the state of Stephen Maguire’s finances?”

“He had no reason to check on Maguire’s finances,” Mac said.

Turning the second report around, David asked, “How long were Maguire and Christine together?”

“A couple of years.”

David held the paper down with his hand over the top. “This is where I get confused. The way Jeff is acting you’d think Maguire was Prince William, complete with the silver spoon still in his mouth. But that’s not what I see here.” He slid the report across the table to Mac.

The personal and financial report read quite differently from what Mac had expected.

As Mac had expected, the report showed that Stephen Douglas Maguire was a lawyer with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia. He was also a graduate of George Washington University Law School.

Mac was surprised to find that, before law school, Stephen Maguire had in fact received his bachelor’s in political science from The Ohio State University. He swore that someone had told him that Maguire had received his bachelor’s from Oxford University.

Mac was still scratching his head over that when David gave him the run-down. “Maguire was nowhere near in debt. On the contrary. He’d made some good investments and had substantial money in various accounts. He’s made large deposits. He’s got a condo in Hilton Head and a boat. He’s got a Hummer and BMW, all registered in his name. According to Christine’s credit report, the lease for the Beemer is in her name.”

“He’s got the car; she’s got the payment book. Sweet,” Mac noted with sarcasm.

“His most recent investment was some commercial property right here on Deep Creek Lake.”

Mac felt his blood pressure jump up a notch. “Here?”

“Sully’s over on the other side of the lake,” David explained. “The perfect establishment for lakeside dining.”

Mac knew the property. Sully’s had been a lakeside restaurant and lounge. The outdoor patio was adjacent to boat docks that allowed customers to dock their boats and jet skis in order to relax for dinner or a cocktail before going back out onto the water. Mac and Archie had eaten there once be-fore it was foreclosed on and the property put up for sale.

It was located directly across the lake from Spencer Point.

“How would you feel about Stephen Maguire, the man your wife traded you up for, opening a restaurant and watering hole directly across the lake from you?” David asked. “You’d see his place first thing in the morning when you got up and his joint would be the last thing you’d see before going to bed at night.”

“I had no idea Maguire was moving out here,” Mac argued. “Why would he? He was on the fast track with the prosecutor’s office when I left Georgetown.”