Poisoned Blue (Jamie Stanley Crime Scene Investigation Series Book 1) (7 page)

Chapter Eleven

“Have you done that background
check yet?” Jamie fanned herself with a sheet of scrap paper. Although all the
windows and the door were open, the station was stuffy.

“Yeah,
nothing. Not so much as a speeding fine.”

Jamie groaned.
They were getting nowhere.

“So, I took a
look at her accounts. There was a large amount of money taken out a couple of
weeks ago. I’ve traced the money and it ends at a solicitors in Argentina.”

“Argentina,” Jamie repeated.

“I’ve got some
details of the solicitor.”

“Good work,”
Jamie said.

“That’s not
all. When I checked Neil’s accounts, he had a withdrawal of the exact same
amount.”

“Going to the same
solicitors?”

“Exactly.”

“So what does
that mean?” Jamie poured herself a mug of coffee.

“I’m not
exactly sure.”

“Ring them and
find out,” Danny said, coming back in from the kitchen with a pot of noodles.

“Will do,”
Carl said.

“Bit early for
lunch, isn’t it?” Jamie asked.

“This is my
breakfast.”

Jamie’s
stomach rumbled reminding her that she’d missed breakfast too. Her hangover was,
surprisingly, a lot better.

“Is there any
other food in the fridge?”

“Some out of
date milk,” Danny said.

She looked at
her coffee and cringed.

“There might
be one of Carl’s cereal bars in one of the cupboards.”

“Help yourself,”
Carl said, pressing another button. “I hate these robotic phone people. They
never give you the option you want.”

“Strawberry
and yogurt,” Jamie said, pulling one of the bars out of the cardboard packaging
and unwrapping it. She took a bite. “Sounds odd but tastes alright.”

“Are you
talking to yourself again?” Danny asked.

Jamie poked
her head out of the kitchen. “Do I talk to myself a lot?”

“All the
time.”

Carl nodded in
agreement.

“What do you
think Greg was doing in the car with Mrs Longacre’s parents when they crashed?”
Jamie asked.

“No idea,”
Danny said. “I’ll call him and arrange a meeting as soon as Carl’s off the
phone.”

Carl held up
his hand to ask for silence.

Jamie and
Danny went back to their own work.

“Sorry,
thought I was getting through to an actual human being, but it appears not.”
Carl tapped his fingers on his desk. “I know it’s a long shot, but do you think
Sara was meant to be in the car with them? Maybe the parents weren’t the
intended target.”

Danny
shrugged.

“I don’t
know,” Jamie said, “but I’m pretty sure that somewhere along the line we’ve
been led down a dead end.”

“If you reach
a dead end, start again.”

Jamie nodded.
“Good idea. Let’s say that it’s nothing to do with Greg, the cleaner or the
work colleague. Let’s focus only on the husband and this Tanya woman.”

“Okay,” Danny
agreed although he didn’t know where she was going with this train of thought.

“Can someone
take a picture of this board?”

Carl propped
the phone under his ear and took a picture of the board with his mobile. “Got
it.”

Jamie unstuck
all of the pictures and made a pile of them on the side of her desk.

“What are you
doing?” Danny asked as she used the board rubber to remove all the writing.

“Starting
again.”

“It now says
she’s gone out for lunch,” Carl complained, hanging up.

Carl and Danny
watched as Jamie stuck the pictures of the husband and his lover back up on the
board.

“The husband,”
she tapped the wrong end of her pen against the picture of the husband, “has
been lying to us ever since we first spoke to him. He said he was happily
married to the deceased, but he’s been having an affair for the past six months.”

“And he said
they don’t get on with the neighbours and then says he’s asked them to watch
over the house while we’ve banned him from staying there,” Danny added.

“Also, how
come he was in the area on Tuesday when he said he didn’t have time to come
back into the area to meet us?” Carl asked.

“And why are
they giving money to a solicitor?” Jamie rested the end of the pen against her
lips. “Lots of questions, not a lot of answers.”

“Neil said
that Tanya had never met Sara before, so why was she in their house? It was
clearly marked off as a crime scene.” Danny stood up, walked round the opposite
side of his desk and perched on the edge of it.

“And how did
she get in? If she had the means to get in then, she had the means to get in on
Saturday and murder her.” Jamie yawned – she shouldn’t have stayed up so late
the night before.

“Is that another
lie Neil’s told us? Does she have a key to the house?” Danny stood up and drew
a picture on the board.

“What’s that?”

“A key.”

Jamie
scrunched up her forehead. “You sure?”

“You draw a
key then.” He rubbed the picture out and sat back down on the edge of his desk.

“I have to say
mate, that does look a lot more like a key than yours.”

“We know what
killed her, but we don’t know how. We have several suspects none of whom seem
to possess a good enough reason to murder and for all we know, every one of
these people had the opportunity because no one is telling us the truth.” Jamie
put the lid on her pen. “We are getting no where.”

“Who has the
best motive?” Carl said, trying to inject some enthusiasm into the team.

“Neil. He’ll
inherit the fortune that Sara inherited from her parents.”

Carl tapped
some buttons on his laptop. “Except he won’t.”

“What?”

“According to
this, Sara’s giving all of her money to charity.”

They both
frowned at Carl.

“Why didn’t
you say that before?” Danny asked.

“I didn’t
think to look. When a wife dies, you just assume the money will go to the
husband or kids.”

“Is any of it
left to Greg and Zoe?” Jamie asked.

“Not a penny.”

“Did the
solicitors answer phone say when she’d be back from lunch?” Jamie asked,
“‘cause I think we’ve come to a complete stop.”

Carl shook his
head. “I’ll take a look at the laptop we got from the colleague yesterday.”

“This is interesting,” Carl
looked up from Sara’s laptop.

Jamie and
Danny, who’d been doing very little all afternoon, looked up.

“It looked as
though there was nothing on it other than a load of work stuff, but then I
found this.”

“What is it?”
Danny peered over his shoulder.

“It’s full of
information on her parents’ car crash. Newspaper clippings, interviews and what
looks like information obtained by the police who dealt with the case.”

Jamie looked
over his other shoulder.

“It seems as
though she was trying to solve the case by herself. Neil was wrong. She hadn’t
put the case to rest. She hadn’t refused to speak about so that she could
forget about it.” Carl looked first at Danny then at Jamie.

“I still don’t
know what this means exactly,” Jamie admitted.

“Maybe she got
too close to the truth so the culprit decided they had to kill her too. Unless,
of course, she was the intended victim all along.”

“But that
brings us back round in a circle. Why kill her? What reason is there? From what
we can see, she was an ordinary woman who worked hard and had been married
about a year. Okay, she had a lot of secrets but … ” Jamie’s sentence trailed
off.

“Maybe that’s
it,” Danny said.

“What’s it?”
Carl asked.

“Maybe the
motive wasn’t to get something but rather to get rid of something. Look at our
suspects again, who would benefit from her not being around?”

“Greg would
get custody of the kid,” Carl said.

“Polly would
get the promotion if she was allowed back to work,” Jamie suggested.

“Neil and
Tanya would be able to be together without the complications of a divorce,”
Danny added.

“Ironic.” Carl
leaned back in his chair.

“What is?”

“That someone
would murder a person to escape the complications of divorce.”

“I guess it is
a bit,” Jamie said.

“As for
Marion, the cleaner, all she’d succeed in doing is losing her job. I still
don’t think she’s involved in any of this.” Danny cracked open a can of Cola.

“It’s got to
be Greg,” Jamie said. “He has the best motive, and he was in the car with the
parents so he could have caused that also.”

“Agreed,”
Danny said.

Carl nodded.
“I’ll bring him in.”

“You’re accusing me of what?”
Greg said. Today he was wearing a black
Guns and Roses
t-shirt with torn
jeans.

“We know that
you’ve been trying to gain custody of Zoe since Sara told you she wanted a
divorce. Everything you’ve tried has been unsuccessful. When Sara’s parents
died you tried to get her to pay you more money to help look after Zoe, but she
refused–”

“Can I just
stop you a minute?” Greg interrupted. “First of all if I wanted to get custody
of Zoe in an unfair manner, I’d threaten to tell Neil, and Sara would
immediately give in and sign any form I told her to. Secondly, Zoe’s not that
far off sixteen, she’ll be free to do whatever she wants then. So you tell me,
what would be the point of risking spending the rest of my life in prison?”

“How come you
were in the car when Sara’s parents were involved in the crash?” Carl tried to
get to him from a different angle.

“Sara’s
parents were very close to Zoe even after the divorce. Zoe was in a performance
with her theatre group and the four of us were supposed to be driving down to
watch it but then Sara couldn’t get away.” They could see that Greg was
replaying the events in his head. “I love Sara, I wouldn’t do anything to hurt
her. She chose Neil, and I didn’t approve of that, but if he makes her happy
then that’s all that really matters.”

“Did you think
the accident was suspicious?” Jamie asked.

“Yes, I did,
and I told the police as much at the time. One second we were driving along,
chatting and looking forward to the performance and the next the car was veering
off towards the edge of the road and went over.” Greg shuddered. “Things like
that don’t just happen, do they?”

“The reports
say that the driver must have fallen asleep,” Carl held the single page report
in his hands.

“Rubbish.
Unless he was sleep talking.” Greg stared down at the floor. “The police pinned
fake accusations because they didn’t know what else to do. There was virtually
nothing left of the car.”

“I can’t
really say anything,” Carl said, “because I wasn’t the one looking into it, but
I very much doubt they’d say things without any evidence to suggest such
things.”

“You police
are all the same.” Greg shook his head. “Can I go now? I need to pick Zoe up
from school in a while.”

“Just one more
question.” Carl put the sheet down. “Did you know that Sara was trying to solve
the case herself?”

“I’d thought
she might have been, but I wasn’t sure. We didn’t really speak.”

“Just one more
question.”

Greg sighed.

“You think the
crash was deliberate, who do you think caused it?”

Greg looked
down at his hands. “If I knew that, this’d all be over by now, wouldn’t it?”

There was a
knock on the door. They’d shut it after bringing Greg into the station and
they’d be glad to see him leave just so that they could open it again. It was
amazing how quickly the small office got hot.

“It’s Alex,”
Danny said, seeing Alex’s head peaking through one of the windows.

“Okay Greg, I
think we’re done here, unless you can give us any more information,” Jamie
said.

“If I had any
more information I would give it to you, but I don’t.” He stood up and let
himself out.

Alex walked
in.

“What are you
doing here?” Jamie asked. Although Alex regularly hung out with them, he’d
never been to see her at the station.

“I went back
to the waterfall–”

“I told you
not to go there,” she cut him off. “It’s dangerous.

Carl laughed.
“What are you? His mother?”

“Jamie, it’s
not dangerous. I just wanted to enjoy the pretty view and the nature.”

Carl
snickered. “Bit girly, don’t you think?”

Jamie smiled.

“Shut up. This
is important.” Alex refrained from stamping his foot on the ground.

“What is it?”
Jamie said more nicely.

“I was sitting
behind the waterfall, eating my lunch, and I nudged something under the bench
with my foot. It’s dark in there so it took a while for me to find whatever it
was I’d kicked. Look,” he held out a small rectangle of card encased in a
plastic wallet.

“What is it?”
Danny asked. He’d been out the back making himself a coffee.

“It’s a name
tag.”

Jamie took the
tag from him. “It’s that Tanya woman, the one Mr Longacre’s having an affair
with.”

“It must have
fallen off when they were messing about the other night,” Alex said. He looked
pleased with himself.

“But in the
notes Neil wrote out for us, it says she’s a lawyer, not a nurse.” Carl pulled
the piece of paper out of the file on his desk. “Look, right here.”

“What would
someone gain most from her death? Danny, I think you were right. You’re going
along the right lines.” Jamie flipped the name tag over in her hands. “It’s not
what would be gained from her death but what would be gained if she ceased to
exist. Alex you’re a genius.”

“Can you tell
us what’s going on?” Carl said.

“Not exactly.
Uh … Carl, get everyone to the Longacres’ in two hours. That should give me
enough time.”

“Enough time
to do what?”