Private: #1 Suspect

CHAPTER 99

I drank down a Red Bull in the break room while I waited for coffee to brew. I thought of a few comebacks for Justine-mostly why she should forgive my completely unpremeditated good-bye tryst with Colleen.

I’m human. I’m sorry. I couldn’t possibly be more sorry.

Why couldn’t she forgive me?

I went to my office, booted up my laptop, opened files in the “Colleen” folder, and revisited facts that Colleen had never told me.

Item: Right out of high school, Colleen had married a man named Kevin Molloy. The marriage was annulled six months later, but Colleen had kept her married name. In the year that Colleen and I had dated, she’d never mentioned an ex-husband, not once.

Had Molloy followed her to LA?

Did he still love her?

Item: A businessman named Sean McGough had paid Colleen’s way to the USA in 2009. McGough was still in Dublin, had not left Ireland in three years. Who was McGough to Colleen? And why had she also failed to mention him?

Item: Mike Donahue. Colleen had said he was like an uncle to her. As with Molloy and McGough, I had put Donahue’s life through an electronic sieve. Donahue had gotten his American citizenship in 2002. He’d gotten two DUIs in LA and another in Seattle, where he was supporting a boy of seven. He hadn’t married the child’s mother.

If Donahue had wanted to kill Colleen, it would have been easy. She’d trusted him. Still, I had never gotten any sense that he’d had a romance with her, that he’d been jealous of her feelings for me, that he was anything other than an avuncular man with an Irish pub that Colleen had frequented when she’d lived in Los Feliz. A dead end.

Another folder.

I had collected all of the personal e-mails between Colleen and me going back to the day I first kissed her. I went time-traveling for a while, got lost reading her words and mine, remembering the growing romance at the office, all the love we had made in her rose-covered cottage.

And I remembered Donahue calling me. “Come to the hospital, quickly.” Seeing Colleen with bloody gauze around her wrists. Knowing what she’d done to herself after I’d told her it was over.

I got up, paced the hallway, made more coffee, stared out onto Figueroa. The rain had moved on. I went back to my desk and clicked on the video folder.

I’d seen all of the videos stored there, except for the one Mo-bot had shot while Tandy and Ziegler were perp-walking me out to the car at the curb.

Now I forced myself to play the video and look at myself from Mo-bot’s second-story point of view.

There I was, just ripped from the Private Worldwide meeting, stumbling between Tandy and Ziegler in the blinding sunshine. The media had been shouting questions and I’d kept my eyes down.

I watched every frame-and I saw something I hadn’t seen that day. Correction. I saw some one. Clay Harris.

Clay Harris was a Morgan family hand-me-down, not exactly harmless, almost a Morgan family curse.

It couldn’t be happenstance.

Harris lived in Santa Clarita, twenty miles out of town, yet there he was, standing behind the media surge with a very good view of me.

Why was Harris lurking in front of Private the moment I was taken in for Colleen’s murder? He was smiling, and I thought I knew why.