Jack arrived promptly at a quarter to ten the next morning.
“
I heard about what happened to Melissa,” he said as he held the door for her to enter the back of the luxury car. “Are you okay?”
“
I’m fine.”
He waited until they were heading down the driveway before asking,
“Do the police have any leads on who did it?”
She snorted.
“They think a burglar did it. They’re not even considering any other options.”
“
A burglar?”
“
Used to just steal things, but apparently he’s turned violent,” Helen said. “They wouldn’t even consider me as a suspect.”
“
You?”
“
Why not me?” Helen said.
Jack glanced at her in his rear-view mirror.
“You probably have an alibi. When was she killed?”
“
I have no idea.” She hadn’t thought to ask, and she didn’t know enough about head wounds to make any sort of educated guess. “I doubt the police will tell me. I didn’t exactly bond with the detective.”
“
Melissa wasn’t here when we came back from the courthouse around 6:00,” Jack said. “If she died before that, then you’ve got me and Tate and even the judge to confirm your alibi. Plus there’s the log I file with the company. It would confirm when I left here.”
“
She could have been here, and we just didn’t see her.” She shivered. The body could have been lying out there all night, a few feet away from where Helen was sleeping. “It was dark when we got home, and her body was in the side yard, away from where you parked.”
“
We’d have noticed if her car was still here,” Jack said. “I don’t remember seeing it.”
“
You’re right. It was gone then,” Helen said. “She had to have been alive then to drive it away, but then how’d she get back here later? The car wasn’t here when I found her body.”
“
The killer must have taken it, so you wouldn’t notice anything was wrong,” Jack said. “Give himself more time to get out of town. You’d have been suspicious if Melissa’s car was here last night, and she wasn’t, and you’d have gone looking for her and found the body.”
Melissa really could have been dead since the previous afternoon, Helen thought. She hadn
‘t heard a car coming or going at any time during the morning before she’d found the body, and it was hard to miss the sound of tires on her gravel driveway. The only time she might not have noticed a car arriving this morning was while she was taking a shower. But it seemed unlikely that Melissa could have arrived, been killed, and then had her car stolen by her killer, all in the ten minutes or so that Helen had been unable to hear anything outside.
“
It doesn’t make any sense,” Helen said. “If the killer drove Melissa’s car away, how did he get to my house in the first place? She’s never brought anyone with her before, and it’s not exactly walking distance from anywhere. I doubt anyone hires a taxi or limo to go to kill someone.”
“
True.”
“
And there were still a couple cans of her Diet Pepsi in the refrigerator this morning. She usually finishes all of them before she leaves,” Helen said. “Something had to have happened to make her leave without finishing them all on Monday.”
“
Like realizing you’d flown the coop?”
“
That’s about the only thing that would tear her away from her soda and radio,” Helen said. “I wonder if she told her boss. He didn’t say anything about my having escaped from Melissa’s care.”
“
She probably tried to find you first, and then got killed before she spoke to the boss.”
“
If Melissa did leave on Monday afternoon to look for me, and was gone when we got home, then it narrows down the time of death to somewhere between 6:00 that night, and 10:00 Tuesday morning.” That was the exact time when Helen had no alibi for yesterday. She really deserved to be a suspect. “But why did Melissa stay outside in the yard, instead of letting herself into the cottage to bug me, like she normally does? She couldn’t have known that I barricaded the doors against her, and I would have heard her if she’d tried to come in.”
“
Lost her key?”
“
Maybe.” Helen tried to recall if there had been keys in Melissa’s hands. She didn’t think so. Melissa never carried a purse, presumably because it interfered with lugging her Diet Pepsi supply into the house. The brightly-printed smocks she wore had large pockets in them, and she might have tucked the keys in there. “I wish we could see what personal effects the police found on her.”
“
If anyone can get that information for you,” Jack said, “Tate can.”
“
That’s what I’m counting on.” That, and the fact that Tate might be tempted out of retirement by the novelty of a client trying to prove she
did
commit murder, instead of trying to prove she was innocent.
* * *
Jack parked outside Tate & Bancroft, and settled in with his video games while Helen limped into the building. The reception area was vacant, like the first time she’d been there. She heard a man’s voice talking, though, so she headed down the hallway in that direction. She wasn’t sure if it was Tate or his nephew. Their voices were as similar as their looks. The same height and lean build, the same dark hair, except for the gray strands that Tate had earned. The only real difference in their appearance was that Adam seemed a great deal more tense than his laid-back uncle, with tension lines already forming in his forehead.
Adam was seated behind a clutter-free desk, talking on the phone. He gestured that he
‘d only be a moment, and that she should come in and take a seat.
As Helen stepped forward, the ache in her hip warned that she was not ready to sit just yet, so she pretended to be fascinated by the law books lining his walls. From the sticky notes poking out from some of the books and the gaps where the occasional volume was missing, it appeared that Adam actually used his set, unlike her ex-husband who kept them for show. Her ex had always had minions with their own libraries to do the actual research for him.
Adam hung up the phone and stood to greet her. “My uncle isn’t here right now.”
“
I didn’t expect to see him. I understand that he’s retired, so I came to see you. I hope you don’t mind that I stopped by without an appointment, but it was something of an emergency.”
“
What can I do to help?”
Adam politely remained standing until Helen reluctantly folded herself into one of the client chairs. It would take too long to explain why she
‘d rather stand. “You know the nurse I tried to get a restraining order against?”
He nodded.
“She’s dead. I found her bloody body this morning.”
“
That does sound serious, but not the type of legal work I do.” Adam rose from his seat. “Let me see if Uncle Tate can talk to you. He’s out back, in his workshop.”
A few minutes later, Adam returned and sent her out back to the garage where Tate maintained a small woodworking shop.
“Just follow the sound of the lathe. I can’t promise he’ll turn it off to talk to you, but he didn’t threaten to report me to the Board of Bar Overseers if I told you where he was, so I think he’s willing to listen.”
The garage doors were the old-fashioned kind that swung out, rather than lifting into the ceiling. They were both propped open, but even so, the interior was poorly lit. The walls were lined with stacks of banker
‘s boxes containing old legal files, leaving what would have been just about enough space to park one subcompact car, if it weren’t filled with Tate’s woodworking machinery and a rickety table cluttered with wood scraps and several elaborately detailed wood lamp stems, awaiting wiring and a shade.
Tate was standing at the lathe, patiently turning a three-foot length of wood into what appeared to be another lamp stem to match the ones on his work table. He was good at his hobby, she thought. And it was good for him. He looked peaceful. Happy, even, although he wasn
‘t the sort to laugh out loud.
She needed a hobby like that. Something she could be good at, unlike scrapbooking and photography, and that would be so engrossing she wouldn
‘t notice when other people were invading her space, like Melissa had done at the cottage, or, Helen thought with some guilt, like she was doing herself by entering Tate’s workshop uninvited. The least she could do was wait quietly until he turned off the machinery to take a break.
Finally, Tate seemed to notice her presence and turned off the lathe.
“Adam told you where I was, didn’t he? Why won’t anyone believe that I’m retired?”
“
Probably for the same reason no one will believe me when I say I want to be left alone.”
“
It’s too easy for clients to find me here.” Tate glanced pointedly at his wrist, except there was nothing there. He jerked open a drawer in his workbench and rummaged through it. “I know I have a watch here somewhere. Don’t think I won’t charge you for this conversation, just because it’s happening outside my office. In fact, I ought to charge double for the inconvenience.”
“
Go ahead. There should be something left from yesterday’s retainer.” Helen looked for a place to sit, but apparently Tate always worked standing up, and there wasn’t room for any spare furniture. “You won’t have to appeal the restraining order, at least. Melissa is dead.”
He snapped around, surprise evident in his eyes. He quickly schooled his expression into its usual inscrutability, and leaned against his workbench to study her face for several seconds.
“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to kill her.”
“
I didn’t, and you know it,” Helen snapped. Even Tate wasn’t taking her seriously. He wouldn’t have joked about her guilt if he’d thought it might have been true. “I could have killed her, but I didn’t.”
Tate absently picked up a scrap of sandpaper and began applying it to a section of the lamp stem he
‘d been turning. “Then who did?”
“
I don’t know,” Helen said. “The police think it was a burglary gone bad.”
“
If they change their mind and arrest you, I’m going to need a bigger retainer.”
“
I won’t be arrested. No one believes I’m capable of murder.”
He looked up from his work.
“Then why are you bothering me?”
“
A couple things.” Helen retrieved Pierce’s business card from her purse. “I need you to terminate the contract with the nursing agency. I am not going to have another visiting nurse’s death on my conscience.”
Tate took the card.
“I thought you didn’t kill the first one.”
“
I might kill the next nurse if I can’t stop the agency from sending them out,” Helen said.
“
Adam can handle the contract cancellation for you,” he said. “Why are you really here?”
“
He doesn’t do criminal cases,” Helen said. “I need to know everything you can tell me about burglary.”
“
You running out of cash?” he said. “Considering a new career in crime so you can pay my bill?”
“
I’m just wondering about Melissa’s killer.”
“
You don’t strike me as the type who indulges in pointless intellectual exercises. You’ve got a plan.” He stared at the card in his hand for a few moments before nodding to himself. “You want to find the burglar before the police do, so you can thank him for getting rid of Melissa?”
“
Not to thank him. Just to prove that he didn’t do it, so the police will have a reason to keep looking and find whoever really did do it.”
“
You’ll get arrested for interfering with a police investigation.” Tate pocketed Pierce’s business card. “Adam can take care of cancelling the nursing agency’s contract. I’ve got better things to do than represent you when you haven’t even been charged with a crime.”
“
You said you’d consider taking on an interesting homicide case,” Helen said. “A patient killing her nurse isn’t the routine murder.”
“
You didn’t kill her.”
“
I could have.”
“
You aren’t going to drop this, are you?” He leaned against the table where his lathe was set up. “Give me the basics. How was she killed?”
“
Okay, that part was pretty standard,” Helen said. “She was bashed over the head.”
“
Her significant other did it, then,” Tate said. “Forget about the burglary angle.”
“
I don’t think she had a significant other,” Helen said. “Her boss said she didn’t have any family.”
“
Bosses don’t know everything about an employee’s private life.”
“
I think he was right, though,” Helen said. “Melissa was trying to impress me with her dedication, and told me she’d always worked such long and irregular shifts, it didn’t leave any time for a personal life.”