Lipstick On A Pig

Chapter 13

We agreed to meet Charlotte in Portland after her classes ended the next day, and catch Jonathan Cork as he was leaving work. After all, Sophie reasoned, after a long hard day of work he might be mentally taxed and ready to tell us anything. I wasn’t so sure a highly-paid lawyer was going to break so easily, but I supposed there was no way to know until we tried, right?

That was how we found ourselves parked in the law firm’s parking lot, sitting in the back of Sophie’s car, watching the front door to Forrester, Forrester and Cork like a handful of hawks. All of a sudden, we saw the form of Jonathan Cork coming out, and heading toward us. This was our chance.

“How do we know he’s not going to call out for help?” Sophie asked suddenly, looking at us worriedly.

“If he’s a serial killer he’s probably not going to be scared of us, he’ll just follow us and come slit our throats while we’re sleeping,” I replied.

“Great, that’s a really helpful visual, thanks Angie,” Sophie replied, and I shrugged.

“You asked the question.”

“Shut up guys, he’s coming this way. Let’s go,” Charlotte said, but I noticed that while the three of us got out of the car straight away, she stayed in it for a minute longer. I paused and looked at her questioningly, and she raised her index finger in reply. I knew what that meant; Charlotte wanted to try a spell. Unfortunately in order to use our magical abilities, Jason being around meant we had to be a little bit more subtle about it than usual. Well, that and the fact that we were in downtown Portland, with tons of people around.

I got out of the car and followed Sophie and Jason, who waited until Jonathan Cork was at his car before greeting him.

“Mr. Cork,” Jason called out, and the man looked up in surprise.

“Do I know you?” he asked in reply, a little bit cautious.

“No, you don’t. I’m Jason Black, a journalist with the Willow Bay Whistler.”

“Oh?” Jonathan Cork replied. He seemed like he half just wanted to get into his car and walk off, and half wanted to know what Jason was going to ask him about.

“I understand that Jessica Oliver worked for you,” Jason continued. I had to admit, I was impressed. By starting off with such a simple and innocent question, he had taken Jonathan Cork off his guard completely. The man relaxed visibly; I wondered what else he was hiding that made him tense up at a journalist’s name.

“Oh, yes, of course. Jessica. What an absolute tragedy. I truly hope and trust that the police will find the monster who killed such a promising young woman.”

“What I’d like to know is how you can explain a third woman that you were seeing having either disappeared or turned up dead?” Jason apparently decided to go straight for the jugular after making Cork relax slightly. Jonathan Cork suddenly resembled a fish, his mouth opening and closing over and over without saying anything.

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” Cork finally managed to stammer out.

“Don’t play dumb with me. I’m not here to write an article or some exposé. I know that you were sleeping with all three women. Jessica Oliver, Ella Port and Laura Kasic. Kasic and now Oliver are dead, and Port disappeared a few years ago. I think we can pretty safely assume she’s dead too.”

“I’m not admitting to anything. I was Oliver and Kasic’s employer. Both were killed in unfortunate circumstances. While I can confirm that Ella Port was a client of the firm, I had no direct contact with her; her lawyer was another associate here.”

Great. He was going all lawyer talk on us.

“You were a suspect in the disappearance of Laura Kasic,” Sophie chimed in. “What do you have to say about that?”

“I have to say that the police cleared me of any wrongdoing, I am not a suspect in her murder nor was I ever arrested for it, and now I’m leaving.”

“Fine, but if you leave now, I promise you Jason will be writing an article detailing how three women you slept with have either been murdered or gone missing,” Charlotte said, and I looked over at her, shocked that she was willing to lie so blatantly.

Cork looked torn as he looked from Charlotte to Jason. His look was hard; he wasn’t about to correct her. Finally, Cork sighed.

“Fine,” he said. “I’m not admitting to any affairs. After all, I’ve been happily married for twenty years. However, it is true that two of my former employees and one former client have either been murdered, or disappeared. However, I had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

“What was your alibi for Laura Kasic’s murder?” I asked. It was the earliest murder, and the one the police cleared him for.

“I was in London.”

“Like, London, England?” Sophie asked, and Cork nodded.

“Yes. I’d flown out the day before. I showed the police my passport; immigration had stamped it right around the time Laura was murdered. There was absolutely no way I could have killed her, I was thousands of miles away by then.”

Damn. There went my theory of an alibi that could maybe be disproven. Being on another continent was a pretty solid alibi for not killing someone.

“How do we know you didn’t hire it out?” Jason asked him. Oh, yeah, I hadn’t even thought of that. Cork threw up his hands.

“The police in Chicago thought that too. Ask them. They looked over every single financial record I had. There were no strange payments, other than, well, certain gifts that I gave to Laura. For her excellent work at the firm, of course.”

“Of course,” Jason replied cooly.

“And what about the others?” I asked. “Where were you when they were killed?”

“A few days ago, when Jessica Oliver was killed, I don’t know the time of her death, but I spent that whole evening at home with my wife. When Ella disappeared, I was with my wife. She was giving birth to our third child, and had a horrendously long sixteen-hour labor. They were just about to give her a C-section when little Gemma finally popped out. From eight until noon the next day, I was at the hospital, waiting for my daughter to be born.”

I shared a glance with Sophie. This wasn’t good. It seemed like maybe Jonathan Cork wasn’t our serial killer after all.

“Fine,” I said. “Say we believe you. What reason do you think anyone could have had to kill the three women?”

Jonathan Cork thought for a moment. “For Laura, I have absolutely no idea. She was a wonderful woman in every way. She had no enemies, no one who would want her dead. Ella, well, she had the lawsuit with her old boss. He got a little bit too hands-on, and when she went to HR, he fired her. She had a case, and a good one, too. Annie, her lawyer, had come to me a few times for advice, so while I didn’t work with Ella directly, I knew some of the details of her case.”

I noticed that he was careful not to say that he didn’t know Ella at all, just that he didn’t work with her case.

“I was sure the case was as close to a slam dunk as you can get in unlawful dismissal cases, which are notoriously hard to prove. Luckily Ella had done everything right. She had recorded dates and times when the harassment occurred, recorded conversations with her boss in secret, had kept all of her excellent performance reviews. The last one had been from a week before she was fired. Then the icing on the cake is she was fired the afternoon after complaining to HR. The morons didn’t even wait a few weeks to make it look like a coincidence. That’s the only thing I know about Ella that could have gotten her killed.”

“And Jessica?”

Smith shrugged. “She sometimes rubbed people the wrong way. She took a lot of care about her appearance, and she could get a bit disruptive if she didn’t get her way.”

Gee, you don’t say, I thought to myself as Cork continued. “But it wasn’t anything that someone would want to kill her over. She might have rubbed some people the wrong way, but that was it.”

“Thanks,” I said to Jonathan Cork.

“You’re not going to write all that in the paper, are you? Please, my wife…” Smith trailed off.

“Maybe if you really care about your wife you won’t stick it into the first skinny blonde thing you see next time,” Jason replied. “But no, I won’t be running an article about you. You don’t need to worry about that.”

Visibly shaken, Cork nodded curtly and got into his car, starting it in record time and racing out of the lot.

As the three of us went to the car, I noticed Charlotte hanging back. Whatever spell she’d set, she was obviously going to reverse it as soon as Jason was out of earshot.

When we were back on the road to Willow Bay—Charlotte driving her own car back—Jason, Sophie and I discussed what we’d found out.

“So do you guys think he’s the murder, or not?” Sophie asked as she drove down the Interstate so fast that I was more focused on our impending deaths in a fiery wreck than the conversation.

“I don’t think he did it,” Jason replied first. “He seems like the kind of guy who just doesn’t have it in him. He’s the perfect weasel-like personal injury attorney. The kind who looks good, says the right thing, and fights all his battles in a court of law. Not the kind of guy to go out and murder women he’s been with in cold blood. That said, I could see him being the type to hire a hit. I just don’t see him getting his hands dirty, and his alibis did seem pretty solid, without checking them.”

“I think you’re right,” I replied slowly, my eyes watching the speedometer. “I don’t think he’s the kind of person that would kidnap someone, murder them and hide the body in the woods.”

“So we’re back to square one, basically,” Sophie said.

“No, I don’t think we’re quite there,” I replied. “I think that there is definitely a link between the three women, and I think there’s a serial killer out there. It’s just probably not Jonathan Cork. Unless he hired a hitman.”

“Which we have no way of figuring out if he did or not,” Sophie answered.

“If solving murders was easy, everyone would be doing it,” Jason offered in reply.

“And the murder rate would probably go down,” I muttered. If only.