Seed No Evil (11 page)

•   •   •

At ten minutes before five o'clock, Marco and I walked into the animal shelter's reception area and were greeted by the Friendly Sisters in the same lackadaisical manner as before. Marco showed them the enlarged photo of Justin, but neither of them had ever seen him.

“You know who's his spittin' image?” one of them asked the other. “Stacy's son.”

“Who are you looking at?” asked a voice behind us.

I turned just as Stacy came up to the reception counter for a look, cradling the same golden brown puppy in her arms. She took one peek at the photo and her features stiffened. “What are you doing with that picture?”

“We wanted to know if your staff had ever seen him here,” Marco said.

She snatched the photo and threw it onto the counter in front of the women. “Have you?” she snapped. Both women shook their heads, looking alarmed. Stacy gave them a satisfied nod and turned back to Marco. “That's because he wouldn't dare show his face around here.”

“Could we step into your office to finish this conversation?” Marco asked, retrieving the photo.

“This conversation
is
finished,” she said. “I've told you everything I know.”

“Not everything,” Marco said, “but your ex-husband filled us in on what you left out. I think you know what I'm talking about. We can talk about that here, if you prefer.”

Stacy's eyes narrowed as she did some fast thinking; then she handed the puppy to one of the women, did an about-face, and marched up the hallway.

I glanced at Marco. “Are we supposed to follow her?”

“After you,” he said.

“W
hat did Justin tell you?” Stacy demanded, settling behind her desk. She was trying to look relaxed, but I could feel the tension radiating from her body as she clutched the armrests on her chair.

“He told us you have a son,” Marco said.

“How is that important?” she snapped.

“I understand his name is Kyle,” Marco said. At her nod, he asked, “Is there any way your ex-husband could have gotten a copy of your key from Kyle?”

“Kyle would have told me if his dad had asked for the key.”

“Are you sure?” Marco asked.

“Are you implying that Justin may have murdered my sister?” she replied.

She sure was quick to jump to that conclusion. Judging by her expression, it almost seemed as though she was hoping we'd say yes.

“We're checking every possibility,” Marco said evenly. “Is there any other way Justin might have accessed the shelter?”

“I wouldn't know that.” Stacy tapped her fingers on her desk. “Is that all?”

“Justin also told us he tried to shield your son from your sister,” Marco said.

“What a liar,” Stacy said venomously. “
I
tried to shield Kyle from my sister, not Justin.
I'm
the one who raised him, who protected him. Don't be fooled by Justin's pretense of being a good father. There isn't a paternal bone in Justin Shaw's body.”

“Why did you feel the need to protect Kyle from your sister?” Marco asked.

Stacy started to answer, then closed her mouth. She clearly hadn't been expecting that question.

“Yesterday you told us you loved your sister,” Marco said, “that you were best friends. Now we find out that both you and Justin felt a need to protect your son from her. Do you see my confusion? So why the disparity?”

“I don't have to answer your questions,” she retorted. “You're not the police.”

“No, but we work closely with them,” Marco said, pulling out his cell phone. “If you'd like verification, I'll give you the name and number of Sergeant Sean Reilly and let you talk to him. Abby, would you write down his number and give it to her, please?”

I jotted it down and handed it across the desk. Stacy looked at it for a moment, then placed it in front of her. “What are you saying? That you're going to report this back to them?”

“We're trying to find a murderer,” Marco said. “
They're
trying to find a murderer. Naturally, we collaborate. We have the same goal. So if you want to clear this up, I'm sure the detectives investigating the case will be grateful. If you don't feel the need to clear it up, we'll report that back to them.”

It was a gamble, but Marco knew how to play it cool. He waited a few seconds, then touched my arm. “Let's go.”

“Wait,” Stacy said, rubbing her forehead. “Can you give me a minute to think?”

“There's no reason you have to think about your answer if you're telling us the truth,” Marco said.

“Okay, look,” she said. “It's true that Bev and I didn't always get along, especially in the years following the affair. But in the past year or so, with Kyle being older, more on his own, there was less need to—” She looked around, grasping for a word, and used a shrug instead. “When Bev put me in charge here, we grew close again.”

I wasn't buying it, not because of what she'd said, but because of what she'd omitted—having less need
to protect her son
. How could she go from not trusting her sister around Kyle to being close to her simply because the boy was a teenager? Where had her mistrust gone? Had it suddenly dissolved in a bubble of goodwill? That didn't match up with what we'd heard from others.

“Let's go back to when Kyle was young,” Marco said. “What were you protecting him from? Was Bev abusive?”

“She could be verbally abusive at times, yes,” Stacy said. “I didn't want Kyle subjected to that.”

“Was she verbally abusive to you or to Kyle or to both of you?” Marco asked.

Stacy said slowly, “Me . . . at times.”

Reading off my notes, I said, “So she had an affair with your husband
and
she was verbally abusive to you, and yet at the end you were close?”

Stacy said nothing, obviously realizing how inane that sounded, so I continued. “I'm surprised she had the nerve to visit you after you found out about her affair.”

“That was Bev,” Stacy said with a tinge of bitterness. “Our parents died years ago and we had no other siblings. Bev didn't want to lose the connection.”

“How did you feel about it?” I asked.

“After she and Justin betrayed me, I never wanted to see either of them again. Unfortunately, divorce doesn't work that way, and neither did Bev.”

“She forced herself back into your life?” I asked.

“Bev didn't take no from anyone,” Stacy said. I wondered if she realized how weak that made her sound.

“How does Kyle feel about his aunt?” I asked.

“He doesn't . . . didn't really know her. Oh, he knew her to say hello, but I always made sure he had something else to do when she was coming over. Now he has the chess club at school and friends to hang out with. I hardly see him myself.”

“Didn't he have questions about this aunt whom he wasn't allowed to be around?” Marco asked.

“I told him we'd gotten into a huge argument and weren't on good terms. He accepted that.”

“Would it be all right if we talked to Kyle?” Marco asked.

Stacy's expression hardened. “No. I'm keeping him out of this.”

“The detectives will want to interview him,” Marco said.

“I won't allow it. I'll hire a lawyer if I have to.”

“Lawyer or not,” Marco said, “you can't stop the detectives from interviewing your son if they believe he's a material witness. And just so you know, they'll want to take him down to the station and put him in an interrogation room, where they may keep him for several hours. Are you willing to put him through that, or do you want to let us save him that agony by talking to him at home—or here in your office, if you prefer?”

“If the detectives were going to talk to him,” she countered, “they would have done so already. I've been questioned and no one—got that?—
no
one
has asked to interview Kyle.”

“That doesn't mean they won't,” I said.

“I'll take my chances,” Stacy said, folding her arms. “There's absolutely no reason why he has to be interviewed. He's a thirteen-year-old kid, for God's sake. He doesn't know anything about the operations here at the shelter because he suffers from severe allergies and isn't allowed near animals. Anyway, he didn't know his aunt's habits, so there's nothing he could tell you. So my answer is an absolute no.”

“Okay, then let me ask this again,” Marco said. “Is there any possibility that Kyle took your key to the shelter to make a copy for his dad?”

“Same answer as before,” she said. “Besides, my keys are always with me.”

“Even at night?” I asked.

“I don't sleep with them, if that's what you mean,” Stacy snapped.

“Are they in your purse?” I asked.

“That's right.”

“And you keep your purse where?”

“In a closet,” she said.

“In your bedroom?” Marco asked.

“No.” Realizing that Kyle had access to her keys, she looked away uneasily.

“Would you do me a favor?” Marco asked her. “Would you ask Kyle if Justin approached him about getting the key?”

“As I said before,” Stacy said, “Kyle would have told me if his father had asked for the key.”

“So Kyle doesn't keep secrets from you?” Marco asked. “He shares everything?”

Stacy hesitated long enough for me to sense that her honest answer was no, yet she stubbornly answered, “He tells me everything.” Stacy rose. “I'm through here. You'll have to go now.”

Marco touched my arm, so I closed up the pen and prepared to leave. “If you change your mind, give me a call,” he said. “You have my number.”

“Won't happen,” she muttered as we left her office.

•   •   •

“Well, Sunshine, what do you think of Stacy now?” Marco asked as we rode back to Down the Hatch.

“She's overly protective of Kyle, and that makes me wonder why.”

“Wouldn't your mom be that way under similar circumstances?”

“I think she'd let me answer questions but maybe with a lawyer present. Why not?”

“That's what I keep asking myself,” Marco said. “Why won't Stacy let Kyle be interviewed? What is she afraid of? And the answer I come up with is that Kyle has some knowledge about the events of Monday evening that Stacy doesn't want to get out.”

“So why doesn't she just instruct him not to say anything to us about it?”

Marco pulled up to a railroad crossing, where a train was moving at a snail's pace. “Stacy can instruct him as much as she likes, but if we were to ask him a question she hadn't thought of, she has no way of predicting how he'd answer.”

“I wonder if she realizes that protecting him makes her look guilty.”

“Sunshine, this mom is worried enough to take her chances. She would rather have us think she had something to do with her sister's death than have her son open his mouth and prove it. And she believes she's safe because the detectives haven't asked to speak to Kyle.”

“So all we have to do is put a bug in Reilly's ear so he can pass that along to the detectives and let them contact Kyle. That'll scare Stacy into letting Kyle talk to us.”

“I'd rather not. We'd run the risk of Corbison actually interviewing the boy.”

I couldn't help but shudder. Al Corbison was the detective who'd gone after me for the murder of a law professor, and I was still sore about how poorly he'd handled my interview. “So what do we do? Put more pressure on Stacy?”

“I'm thinking about working from the other end. Justin still sees his son every other weekend. Maybe we can impress upon him how important it is we talk to Kyle.”

“If he did get a key from Kyle, he won't want us talking to the boy either.”

The crossing gates went up, so Marco put the Prius in gear and started across the tracks. “What did you think about the rest of Stacy's interview?”

“I can't decide if she was purposely trying to confuse us or not. She told us she had to protect her son from her sister because Bev
could
be verbally abusive, not that she
was
. So was she or wasn't she abusive to Kyle? Then Kyle hit the teenage years and suddenly Stacy didn't need to protect him any longer, like he'd grown armor.

“And at that point, she claimed she and her sister grew close again. Yet from what Emma claims to have overheard, the sisters fought over the affair up until Bev's death. So how could Stacy feel close to her sister with all that pain still being dredged up?”

“Stacy is a puzzle,” Marco agreed. “We'll have to get back to her eventually, but in the meantime, let's see if Justin is willing to arrange a meeting with Kyle.”

“Is it legal to go behind the mother's back?”

“We're working for ourselves this time, Abby, so we can fly under the radar. I say we go see Justin tomorrow and find out when he'll have contact with Kyle next. After dinner tonight, I'm going to call Emma's coworkers and see what they can tell me.”

“Does that mean we get to eat now?”

“Are you sure you feel like eating with that swollen throat and itchy rash? You're scratching all the time.”

“I need to soak in an oatmeal bath, but I need food even more. I've got my wedding gown fitting after dinner.”

“With a rash?”

“I'll manage somehow. I can't afford to delay.”

•   •   •

After a miserably itchy dinner with Marco, I took advantage of the warm, breezy evening to walk four blocks to the beautifully restored Victorian home that was Betty's Bridal Shop. I sat on a red tufted settee in the front parlor scratching my arms and legs until Betty came out front to get me.

Betty Dale was a slender woman in her late forties whose soft-spoken voice and small frame belied a hard-driven saleswoman. I'd met Betty before, when I was one of Jillian's bridesmaids, and I'd admired her strong business sense then. Now she came forward with her hand extended, then took a good look at me and pulled her hand back, her eyes widening in surprise. “What's wrong with your neck? And your arms?”

“It looks worse than it feels,” I told her. “It's just swollen lymph glands and a rash.”

Betty took a discreet step backward. “Are you contagious?”

“I don't think so, but I'm going to see my doctor in the morning just to be sure.”

“Why don't you call me after you see the doctor and we'll go from there?”