Big Sick Heart: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (18 page)

“No, Chief, I don’t have anything to say.”

“Since I can’t suspend you, here’s what you’re
going to do on the Hagerty case,” the chief said. “It could be a while before
the Hawaii cops can get that kid to either back off on his story how Dolores
Weston had her husband killed—or give them something they can go on. I don’t
believe in coincidences. My money’s on her being the link. If she was into
something dirty, maybe her husband found out about it and she had him taken
out. Then she had to take out Hagerty for the same reason. I want to be ready to
grab her up if it turns out that’s what happened.”

“Okay, so what do you want us to do?”

“You and Miner get the phones and financials on
Hagerty and Dolores Weston. Figure out what kind of shit they were into. With
any luck, I can connect the dots and get her for both murders before the Hawaii
guys flip the kid.”

“That would get your picture in the paper,
wouldn’t it?”

“Seagate, get the hell out of my office and do
your job, while you still have one.”

I turned and left. I wasn’t seeing the connection
between the two murders. The Maui detectives must’ve sweated the kid hard on
the conspiracy. If there was any evidence, they would have been all over
Weston’s place here in town when they were here. But they went home the next
day. Even if Weston’s employees in town said the doper kid was an asshole,
since when was that a crime? No, I didn’t see any reason to pursue the James
Weston murder—until something else turned up. In the meantime, Ryan and I would
work the Hagerty murder.

“All right,” Ryan said when I got back to our
desks. “How’d it go?”

“He authorized us to get the phones and financials
on Arlen Hagerty and Dolores Weston. Wants us to nail Weston for killing her
husband and Hagerty.”

“We’re a ways from making that connection.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But since he’s letting us get the
information we want, let’s just do it.”

“Okay,” Ryan said. “I’ll start rounding up the
records. Oh, and one other thing. I called Soul Savers in Milwaukee. There’s an
office there, but there’s no record of Timothy Sanders stopping by.”

“You work on Hagerty’s records. I’ll do Dolores
Weston.” I looked at my young partner as he began to fill out the forms on his
computer. Either this kid is one hell of an actor, I thought, or he doesn’t
know what happened in that car crash.

*  *  *

Getting the phones and
financials on Hagerty and Dolores Weston took the rest of the morning. We had
to officially route the requests through the chief’s office. He forwarded them
to the prosecutor, who signed off on it. The phones were simple because there
were only a handful of carriers who could have had accounts for Hagerty and
Weston. The financials were more complex. Naturally, Soul Savers had so many
layers of bureaucracy I had to spend a lot of time on the phone getting
shuttled between various administrative and accounting offices in Colorado
Springs.

The search for private accounts for Hagerty took a
call to the Colorado Association for Bank Security, which puts law-enforcement
in touch with the right bank during a criminal investigation. For Weston, it
was more complicated because she had residences in four other states, which we
had to run down.

Ryan ate his bag lunch from the other day. I
bought some calories from a machine in the break room. By 1:00 we had what we
needed to start talking with each other.

“Okay, Ryan,” I said, tossing my empty chips bag
into the garbage can, “tell me about Hagerty.”

“He didn’t have a cell, or at least he didn’t have
a registered one. All he had was a home phone. When he was on the road he used
hotel phones. I got his itinerary from Soul Savers going back three months and
contacted the various hotels. There are calls from the hotels at each of the
places he’d been during that period, so he didn’t appear to be using a calling
card.”

“Okay, who’d he talk to?”

“The most calls were back and forth to Soul Savers
headquarters, a few to the Archbishop. He called a lot of restaurants. The only
thing that jumps out is he was talking a lot to Dolores Weston.”

“When was that?”

“The whole time. Going back to late August, at
least once a week. The last month, more than that. Couple times a week. And
there were two calls—one to her, one from her—the day he was killed, in the
afternoon.”

“So when he’s here in Rawlings, he’s using the
hotel phone. What phone is she using? A number in the legislature or home?”

“Day he was killed,” Ryan said, looking down at
the records, “he called her at her office in the legislature a little before
3:00. The call was fifteen seconds, so I’m guessing he left her a message. She
called him back, from her home, around 4:00. That call lasted nineteen
minutes.”

“Those other calls to Dolores, going back the
three months, are they during the day or the evening?”

“Both. And they range from less than a minute to
more than forty minutes.”

“That’s a little more chatting than I’d expect
between these two,” I said.

“Seems like it to me. I guess Dolores would want
some sort of endorsement from Arlen running up to the election. Let me look at
the pattern.” He ran his finger down the record. “But the frequency doesn’t change
after the election. In fact, some of the longest calls were in the last couple
of weeks.”

“They could be talking about the Henley
Pharmaceuticals thing,” I said. “What did you get from the financials? That
might tell us something.”

“Okay,” Ryan said. “He had an operations budget
and a travel budget from Soul Savers. He had control of them, although I
couldn’t get straight whether Connie de Marco had any authority to draw on
them. But there’s nothing particularly interesting about them, anyway.”

“Anything interesting separate from Soul Savers?”
I said.

“Maybe. He’s got three different accounts: two
joint accounts in his name and Margaret’s, one in his name only. He’s got no
trusts or anything fancy. The bank account in his name, he makes a
five-thousand dollar deposit around the fifteenth of every month.”

“Those deposits coming from Soul Savers?”

“No, not according to Soul Savers,” Ryan said.

“They have any fingerprints on them?”

“No, they’re not checks, they’re cash.”

“That’s weird,” I said. “Where’s he getting five K
a month in currency?”

“Maybe that’s something we want to talk with
Dolores Weston about,” Ryan said. “What’d you get on her?”

“Okay, start with the phones,” I said, scanning
the records. “I’m seeing the same calls you saw between her and Hagerty.”

Ryan said, “Anything between her and the doper
kid? What’s his name?”

“He’s Robert Cowan. A couple, but nothing right
before the husband died.”

“Which doesn’t tell us much either way, right?”

“Right,” I said. “If he’s working for her here and
in Maui, she could say she was calling him to see how he’s doing in Maui.”

“Anything interesting in her financials?” Ryan
said.

“Yeah, a bull’s-eye on that one,” I said. “She was
withdrawing five thousand a month, cash, from a private account.”

“Which is exactly what Hagerty was depositing,
right?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“What’s she paying him for? And why in cash?” Ryan
said.

I said, “We’ll, those are good questions, Ryan.
Want to see how the rich and famous live?”

“I’ll set it up,” Ryan said. He tried Dolores
Weston’s office. “She’s probably not there since the legislature doesn’t
convene till January.” He let it ring, then left a message asking to speak with
her. Next he tried her home. She wasn’t there, but he left a message with the
housekeeper, asking her to call when she got in.

Twenty minutes later, Dolores Weston phoned to
tell us how on the advice of her attorney she would have no comment on the
ludicrous allegation that she was involved in the death of her husband. Ryan
assured her we understood that but that we were interested in talking with her
about her relationship with Arlen Hagerty. We arranged to meet her at her home
in fifteen minutes.

“Do you know where this place is?” I said as we
got into a cruiser.

“She told me to stay on Harrison, as far as you
can go.”

We drove north on Harrison out of town toward the
foothills, past the fancy developments with names like Ravensmere and Bryn
Arden. The houses gave way to meadows. “You sure you got that right: all the
way out on Harrison?”

“That’s what she told me,” Ryan said. We were on a
one-lane dirt and gravel road, nothing around us but prairie and rolling
hillside. “There it is,” he said, pointing to the red-sided barn, big enough
for at least a dozen stalls. Next to the barn was the paddock, enclosed by a
gleaming three-rail white fence. The paddock was covered in grass. Irrigation
heads, surrounded by tires, dotted the expanse. Seven horses were eating grass
and hay. A mare was walking lazily around the paddock, her colt trotting beside
her. A young man and a young woman were sitting on the fence, talking. “Look at
that, will you? It must be a couple of acres.”

“What kind of horses are they, do you know?”

“The expensive kind. Three of them are Arabian,
four are quarter horses. They’re beauties, every one of them.”

“Give me a number.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Can’t tell without seeing their
papers, but I’d guess the quarter horses go for ten or twenty thousand each.
The Arabians, they could be a hundred thousand each. Sky’s the limit with them,
really.”

“Good, I just wanted to know how much to dislike
Dolores Weston.”

“Well, if it’s a question of money, you should
hate her,” he said, pointing to her house.

With the big red barn and the bright fence, I
hadn’t even noticed the estate tucked into the hillside. It was a flat-roofed
modern building made up of rectangles dominated by horizontal expanses of warm
Montana stone, ash, and huge floor-to-ceiling windows that mirrored the sky and
the sun. Cantilevered decks surrounded the three sides I could see.

We drove up the driveway covered in pavers set in
a herringbone pattern. We got out of the car and crossed the sandstone steps to
the main entryway. I pressed the buzzer next to the ten-foot tall double doors.
A moment later a uniformed Hispanic woman opened one of the doors.

“Detectives Seagate and Miner to see Dolores
Weston.”

“I’ll see if Senator Weston is available. Please
come in.” She turned and retreated into the house.

Ryan and I walked into the foyer. I said, “You
said she’d see us, right?”

“Yeah, she told me so herself on the phone.”

“So what’s with the ‘see if she’s available’
crap?”

“That’s how important people talk, Karen. Haven’t
you heard it in movies? Fifteen minutes ago, she thought she’d be available.
Now she might not be available. If she can’t see us, that’s our problem, not
hers.”

“Like something so important happened in the last
fifteen minutes she’s gonna tell two cops to take a hike?”

“Karen, you know Senator Weston is rich. If you
can’t understand how that makes her more important than a couple of cops,
you’re never going to get anywhere in life.”

“Yeah, well, I think that ship’s already sailed,”
I said. A moment later, Dolores Weston emerged from inside. We knew she was
close to sixty, but she looked barely forty. Her dark hair was sleek, cut
stylishly short. Her wide set eyes framed a long, graceful nose. Her
berry-shaded lipstick picked up the cranberry of her cashmere sweater and
complemented the charcoal wool slacks.

“Detectives,” she said, extending her hand and
smiling broadly, giving us an opportunity to appreciate the wonderful mixture
of two of God’s most important blessings: physical beauty and old money.
“Dolores Weston. You must be Detective Seagate and Detective Miner. Please come
in,” she said, leading us in.

Why, this is going to be simply a delight.
“Senator Weston,” I said, “let me say how sorry we are about the loss of your
husband.”

“Thank you very much, Detective,” she said. “You
know, James and I worked on this house together—it’s the only one of our places
… When I look around this beautiful house, I see him everywhere. I still can’t
believe he’s gone.” She paused, but only for a second. I didn’t know what to
say, so I didn’t say anything.

“This is the great room,” she said, her eyes
sparkling again. It was like she was done thinking about her dead husband. Now
it was time to show us the house. “I just adore this view,” she said, gesturing
through the wall of glass to the prairie stretching out to the foothills that
touched the sky.

Ryan picked up on her shifting gears. He said,
“This is a beautiful home, Senator. I can’t help but notice how the interior
colors mirror the earth tones.”

“I’m so glad you saw that, Detective. My late
husband and I wanted to merge the inside and the outside so seamlessly you
momentarily forgot whether you were inside or outside. That’s why we settled on
the natural palette: the leather, the stone columns in the corners, the
fireplace, the reclaimed beams, the tiles—everything.”

“Well, you’ve certainly achieved that,” he said.
“It’s simply magnificent.”

“Let me show one other thing, Detective,” she
said, bestowing a broad smile on Ryan, who seemed to be the one worthy of her
attention. “Step over here for a moment,” she said, gently guiding his elbow.
“Look that way,” she said. He smiled, turning obediently in anticipation of
another enchanting surprise. “We just didn’t want the kitchen to look like a
kitchen when you’re standing in the great room. Do you know what I mean?”

“Oh, absolutely,” he said as he walked up to the
entryway. “Are those zinc counters?”

“Yes, they are,” she said, clearly impressed. “And
the cabinets are
wenge
-wood.”