Private: #1 Suspect

CHAPTER 121

Ziegler twisted in his seat. He’d delivered the news as if it had caused him physical pain.

“We’re all interested, Caine,” he said. “We actually want the one who killed her.”

I exhaled. It didn’t matter that Ziegler and Tandy saw my relief. They had evidence that Colleen had bitten Clay Harris. Their evidence was now our evidence.

Apparently Tandy felt the same way. He said, “We’re going to concede that Colleen bit Harris. But, Morgan, before you and your attorney start throwing confetti around, let me say that this bite mark isn’t conclusive. It doesn’t mean that because Colleen Molloy bit Harris, he killed her. You understand that, right?”

The bitterness was in his tone if not his words. Tandy had been wrong about me and that had to be killing him. I wished I could tell him that in the past couple weeks he’d funneled me through a meat grinder with a very sharp blade, that he was a bad cop, that someday he was going to pay.

I stifled myself.

“Colleen fought for her life,” I said. “I’m glad about that.”

Caine tapped the table, half a signal to me to shut up, half a signal to the detectives to keep talking.

“So you’ll be happy to hear that we also have this,” Ziegler said. He opened the envelope again and dumped out a chunk of metal. It was a hard drive. It looked like the one that was taken from my security system the night Colleen was killed.

I stopped breathing.

“What’s this?” Caine asked.

“It’s Jack’s hard drive, with video evidence that Clay Harris carried Colleen Molloy into Jack’s house. It’s time-stamped with the date and hour that approximate Molloy’s time of death. We found it in Clay Harris’s shack of junk. And that indicates that he took it from Morgan’s house and brought it home. This, along with the bite mark…”

Clay Harris had killed Colleen, but he didn’t have the ingenuity to have done it on his own. And he didn’t have a motive either.

Tommy had a motive-to put me in a hole for the rest of my life. But he didn’t have to do the killing himself. Harris had been willing to do it for a year’s salary, which he’d spent on a car.

It just made sense that Tommy had directed the action from the beach outside my bedroom window and that Harris had called him as soon as Colleen was dead.

Caine said, “My client is cleared of the murder charge.”

“We’ve spoken to ADA Eddie Savino,” Tandy said. “He’s meeting with the DA tonight. I think Morgan is going to be free of Molloy’s murder, but here’s the thing, Mr. Caine…”

I saw something I didn’t like in Tandy’s eyes, a flash, a warning.

“We’ve got another dead body,” he continued. “Clay Harris was shot dead, and Jack, if he killed your girlfriend, that’s classic motive to kill him.”

“I didn’t do it,” I said.

“Are you charging Jack with Clay Harris’s murder?” Caine snapped.

“Not yet,” said Tandy. “We’re watching you, Morgan. You and your brother.”