The Red Queen Dies (32 page)

The boys took off, zipping into the street and down the hill.

McCabe stepped out into the street and held up her badge.

The patrol car pulled up beside her. She was relieved to see two cops she recognized.

“Sorry, guys, it was a false alarm,” she told them, reaching for her ORB.

“Nice flowers,” one of the cops said with a smirk.

After she had canceled her call for backup, McCabe explained the daisies. The cop who had been smirking shook his head, a bemused expression on his face.

“Kids” was all he said.

“Yeah,” McCabe said. “Kids. Thanks, guys.”

The bouquet of daisies tucked close to her body to protect it, McCabe started back through the crowd to deliver the flowers to Mrs. Givens's family.

Some days something went right. Flowers instead of a gun.

And some days, good people who made a difference, like an old woman who passed out homemade cookies to little boys, died when they shouldn't have.

 

30

 

Not much was happening when she got back to the station. A couple of other day-shift detectives were still at their desks, filing reports or preparing for court the next day.

“He left about half an hour ago,” Yin said when she asked if he had seen Baxter. “He left in a hurry. He must have had a big date.”

“Yeah,” McCabe said. “I guess so.”

She checked her ORB to see if Baxter had left her a tag. Nothing.

Yin said, “I'm out of here, too. Thanks again for ordering the wine for our anniversary dinner. Casey was really impressed. Classy gesture, she said.”

“I'd like to take the credit,” McCabe said. “But it was Baxter's idea.”

“The two of you are working good together, huh?”

McCabe nodded. “Like peas in a pod. Have a good evening, Walter.”

“You, too.”

Yin left and McCabe pulled up the master file on the case. Research was still looking for information on Melanie Jacobs and had contacted the company she used to work for when both she and the company were in Albany. Nothing useful there yet. There had been a significant turnover of staff and management when the company relocated south. The company's personnel department was searching for Jacobs's file and would forward any information that could be legally shared if it was found. The personnel manager was puzzled that the staff was having trouble finding it.

“Hmm,” McCabe said to herself. “And I wonder where that file could have gotten to.”

Research also had added another notation in the last ten minutes. Baxter wouldn't have seen this one before he left.

The notation was a link to a now-defunct communal posting node. And there was a photograph captioned “Clarence at the county fair with friend. Photo by Melanie.”

Under a sign saying
REPTILE EXHIBIT
, a young man with shaggy blond hair and blue eyes smiled into the camera. He was holding a black snake with red markings. The snake had wrapped itself around his upper arm.

The young man in the photo looked a lot like Clarence Redfield might have nine years ago.

McCabe sat there staring at the photo. If Clarence Redfield had been Melanie Jacobs's boyfriend and Melanie's little sister had attended a summer science camp and been bullied by a girl named Bethany and then nine years later, Bethany and Sharon Clark, who had been caught up in the drama, were murdered …

Clarence Redfield was here in Albany, threading about the murders and, to all appearances, unaware that he had once had at least indirect contact with the victims.

Both Johnnie Mae and her mother were dead, and Melanie was nowhere to be found. So where was Melanie? Had she assumed another identity, become someone else? Did Clarence Redfield know where to find her?

If FIU or the State Police lab could confirm it was Redfield in the photo, they would have a wedge. An entry point for another interview, to which Redfield would undoubtedly bring his lawyer.

All right, what about the Ted Thornton connection? They knew that Redfield had worked for a company that had subcontracted for Thornton. Redfield probably had been working late the night before his wife fell from the ladder. Had Ted Thornton been in Albany that week?

Easy enough to find out. Bruce Ashby should know. McCabe decided to call him rather than send him a tag. Almost 6:30, but he might still be on the job.

“Bruce Ashby.”

She left her ORB on
VOICE ONLY.

“Mr. Ashby, Hannah McCabe here. I wonder if you could help me with something. I'd rather not get into the details right now, but we're looking into the background of someone who might have tried to contact Mr. Thornton a couple of years ago.”

“A couple of years ago?” Ashby said. “Who was this person?'

“Uh … I'm not sure what name he might have used. But I'm wondering if Mr. Thornton was in Albany during July 2017. Particularly from July tenth to twelfth.”

“Hold a moment,” Ashby said. Then: “Ted was here the week before and until the afternoon of July eleventh. He was waiting for a bid from a subcontractor, but he left to go down to the Tony Awards.”

McCabe felt her heart jump. “The Tony Awards?”

“Vivian was nominated for her second Tony.”

McCabe flashed back to the photograph in Vivian Jessup's condo. The photo of Jessup and Thornton at an event after the Tony Awards.

“The subcontractor who was making the bid … did they know that Mr. Thornton was waiting?”

“Of course they knew. The bid was due the next day, but I had asked them to try to get it in by the afternoon of July eleventh, because Ted wanted to see it before he left Albany.”

“Did they make it?”

“No. They had all kinds of excuses, but it didn't come in until the next morning.”

“I suppose their staff must have been putting in overtime.”

“Not our problem. They knew three months before that the bid was due.”

“Could I ask … did they get the contract?”

“They got it. Ted said they had made the deadline. And there was no one else who could do the job as well.”

“But they might have thought that they were going to be penalized for not getting the bid in before Mr. Thornton left for the Tony Awards.”

“They might have thought that,” Ashby said. “I realize Ted promised to provide full cooperation, Detective McCabe, but I don't see what our business dealings with a subcontractor—”

“I hope I can explain soon, Mr. Ashby. Thank you for being so forthcoming.”

McCabe said good-bye before he could ask any more questions.

Sometimes, if you just kept asking questions, you could get people to provide information before they thought about whether you should have it. She had caught Bruce Ashby when he'd sounded as if he were distracted by something else.

And that reminded her that they needed to ask Research for follow-up on the initial background checks on Bruce Ashby and Lisa Nichols.

McCabe sent her request to Research. Then she began to search the Web for the photo that she had seen in Vivian Jessup's apartment of Jessup and Thornton. Photos archived on the official node. Photos of the award winners and nominees on other nodes, as well. Best-dressed. Worst-dressed. Who was escorting whom.

Not only was the photo of Jessup and Thornton on several nodes but there was a brief interview with Jessup about her win, with a smiling Ted Thornton, her “dear friend,” at her side.

Easy enough for Clarence Redfield to have seen.

He'd worked late, while Ted Thornton went down to the City for a gala event, to be there to cheer on his friend Vivian Jessup.

But if Clarence Redfield was the killer, why now? Had Vivian Jessup's arrival in Albany been too much for him? Brought back all of his anger and maybe guilt about the deaths of his wife and baby?

And what about Bethany Clark and Sharon Giovanni? Even if Clarence Redfield had felt some anger toward them because of what had happened with his girlfriend's sister, would he kill them nine years later? Kill them for something that had happened when the two girls were little more than children?

If he'd held a grudge, wanted revenge on behalf of his girlfriend, Melanie, and her sister, why had he waited?

He had been back in Albany since … Of course, when he first returned, his mother had been ill, and then she had died. And then for a brief period, he must have been happy. He had been married; his wife was pregnant.

And then wife and unborn child were dead. In that scenario, Vivian Jessup made some kind of sense. A target for his rage. But why go back nine years to the incident with Bethany and Sharon?

“You too, huh?”

McCabe looked up, to see Pettigrew holding out a cup of coffee. “Thanks,” she said. “Me, too, what?”

“Stuck.”

“Yeah, I am,” McCabe said. “I can almost see it, but something's missing. You still working on the ex–baseball player case?”

“Among others. The lou says it goes into the file unless we catch a break.” Pettigrew sat down in the chair beside her desk, his own coffee cup in hand. “All we know is an unidentified young woman came to visit Swede Jorgensen a couple of days before thugs jumped him and beat him senseless. He's dead. We can't find the girl or the thugs.”

“But you think the girl's visit had something to do with what happened to Jorgensen.”

“Probably,” Pettigrew said. “Since he didn't seem to have much of a life otherwise. Okay, trivia time. Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was a baseball fan? And Abner Doubleday, who is often mistakenly credited with creating baseball, was a Union general and friend of Lincoln.”

McCabe smiled. “And with that, it looks like we've found the six degrees of separation between our cases.”

“So we have. Your turn. Anything interesting but not particularly useful come to mind about my case?”

McCabe took a sip of her coffee. “You know baseball isn't my game. But when I heard your player's nickname, it did remind me of something.”

“What?”

“Ever see an old movie from the forties? Burt Lancaster plays a washed-up prizefighter called ‘the Swede.'”

“The Swede?” Pettigrew said, sitting up straight.

“When the movie opens, he's killed by two professional hit men who come looking for him.”

Pettigrew set his coffee cup down on her desk. “What's the title of this movie?”

“
The Killers.
I watched it with my dad years ago.”

“In the movie, why did they come after him?”

McCabe shook her head. “I don't remember the details. Something about a holdup he had been involved in. And I think he was involved with Ava Gardner, the wife of the gangster who sent the hit men. And the insurance investigator was playing your character.”

“My character?”

“The guy who was trying to figure out why Burt Lancaster—the Swede—hadn't tried to run when the killers came looking for him. Why he just let himself be killed.”

“But my Swede wasn't killed. He just wasn't talking about why two thugs beat him up. Then he got an aneurysm and died.”

“And if he'd been involved in a holdup, that would have turned up by now.”

Pettigrew shifted in his chair, then stood up. “Still, I think, just for the heck of it, I'll go find that movie. Might give me some ideas.”

“Or not,” McCabe said.

“Or not. I got another one for you. Did you know there's a baseball player who was known as ‘the Wizard of Oz'?”

“There is?”

“Ozzie Smith. Used to do somersaults on the field. My dad and I went to Cooperstown when Smith was inducted into the Hall of Fame. But unlikely he has anything to do with your case.”

“Probably no more than Burt Lancaster has to do with yours,” McCabe said. “But it's an interesting tidbit.”

Pettigrew nodded. “Life is full of interesting tidbits.”

He waved a hand as he headed back toward his own desk.

“You forgot your coffee, Sean.”

“Toss if for me. I've had enough caffeine for one day.”

McCabe tilted sideways in her chair and tossed the cup into her disposal bin. “Hey, Pettigrew, did you know that some writer had a theory that Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper?”

Pettigrew looked up from his ORB and gave her a bemused look. “Really? Never heard that one. You think Carroll ought to be on your suspect list?”

“Problem with that is, he'd have to be capable of time travel. That particular Ripper theory's kind of far-fetched anyway. Find your movie?”

“The synopsis and a clip.”

“Feel like going for a beer when you're done?” McCabe said.

“Sure. Sometimes the answers are floating right there in the suds.”

“Are they? Why didn't anyone ever tell me about that?”

 

31

 

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

McCabe woke up with a half-formed thought. It was gone before she could catch it. She searched for it as she was standing in the shower. Vivian Jessup's purse. Something about what the old woman had said about finding Jessup's flower purse. Or maybe about who had thrown it away.

She sat down across from her father at the kitchen table. He was wearing the biomonitor that sent his readings to his doctor once a week. He was eating oatmeal with a look of displeasure on his face. “I hate this stuff,” he said.

“What do you think of when someone says ‘a he/she'?” McCabe said.

“What do you mean, what do I think?” Angus said. “It's a crude way of referring to someone who is transgender.”

“What if someone said she could tell someone was a he/she by the walk?”

“How was the person walking? Swishing like a girl? Stomping along like a lumberjack?”

“Our witness didn't say,” McCabe said. “She drifted off into aliens from outer space. Thanks, Pop.”

“You're welcome. Now, tell me what we were talking about.”