12th of Never

Chapter 62

THE COOLER WAS packed, what with everyone in there. Conklin, Claire, her two investigators, and I were grouped around a stainless steel table between stacks of drawers full of dead people. No coffee allowed. I needed coffee.

The investigators were used to the walls of dead people, and to having no caffeine. They were eager to prove themselves.

Jessica Kain was young and trim, and wore black tights, a baby-doll dress under a thin cotton jacket, and sunglasses pushed up in her streaked blond hair. Jay Dedrick was dark-haired, wiry, and had a tattoo of his wife’s name on his wrist—Jackie.

The two were friends, but definitely competitive.

Dedrick took the lead.

“We went through every inch of Kennedy’s house. Faye Farmer lived there, too, but it was his house and most of the stuff was his. We went through his closets, his garage, the crawl spaces.

“He left his computer on and we went through that. He said he didn’t care what we looked at; he had nothing to do with Faye’s death and didn’t know who did. We selected some of his DVDs at random. All of them were football games.

“Bottom line on the search of Kennedy’s house: we found nothing indicating that he was planning to kill his girlfriend.”

Kain pushed up the sleeves of her jacket, even though it was about forty-six degrees Fahrenheit in the cold storage. She said, “We dumped their phones. There was a call from Kennedy to Farmer at two forty-five on the morning of the shooting. She answered the call. Took fourteen seconds.”

I said, “Long enough for him to say, ‘Don’t be a bitch’ and for her to say, ‘Screw you.’”

Kain said, “That was the last call either one of them made or received that night. Kennedy got a call at seven sixteen a.m. from his sister in Seattle. Then he got calls from everyone in the world. Same for Faye, but she wasn’t taking calls by then. She was here.”

Dedrick looked at notes on his tablet and read out names of the male partygoers they had interviewed, some of whom I knew from watching them play ball. Dedrick said he spent a few hours with Niners’ quarterback Calvin Sandler. Whenever Kennedy was spotted in a club or a restaurant, he was either with his fiancée or Cal Sandler or both.

Dedrick told us, “Sandler said, and I quote, ‘This whole effing thing is effed up. Jeff was at his effing party the whole effing day and night and he never effing left.’

“Sandler corroborates Kennedy’s story and says that he was with Kennedy when Faye Farmer stomped off,” Dedrick said.

Kain listed the women guests, including Linda Banks, the “extra woman” whose flirting had detonated the Faye Farmer explosion. Banks, too, corroborated that Farmer had left in a huff.

“Did Faye have any enemies?” I asked. “Did anyone want to kill her?”

“Both Farmer and Kennedy had haters,” said Kain. “They each had thousands of followers on Facebook and Twitter. Also, there was a rumor that Faye might have been seeing some guy in the movie business. He’s a mystery man, if he even exists. I couldn’t find out his name.”

I said, “So maybe Faye had an unknown admirer and she and Kennedy had at least a billion virtual fans. This just keeps getting better.”

Claire spoke up. “What about Tracey Pendleton? Find out anything on my former security guard?”

Dedrick said, “Pendleton has vanished. She has not used her credit card. She has not taken out any of the hundred and forty-five dollars she has in her checking account, and she has not used her phone. There’s no sign of her car, either.”

Claire said, “Is she afraid to call in because she let the body snatcher into the morgue? Or is she drinking off a big paycheck for letting someone steal Faye Farmer’s body?”

I was pretty sure that Tracey Pendleton knew who killed Faye Farmer because she opened the door and let someone in. That someone was either the killer, or a fixer who’d come to clean up for the killer.

I was saying, “Tracey was likely collateral damage,” when the door behind me opened and FBI honcho Ron Parker poked his head in.

“‘Scuse me, Lindsay. May I have a word?”

Ah, nuts. What did he want now?