The Zero Night

37

“I called Abel Teitscher in New Mexico,” Stride announced to Serena, Maggie, and Guppo in the police conference room. “Gavin’s name never came up during the investigation of Jonah Fallon’s hit-and-run. With Susan having a different last name, Abel never made the connection. Not that he would have or should have under the circumstances. It wouldn’t have seemed relevant.”

Maggie stood up and went to the window, where she leaned against the ledge. After staring at the forest for a while, she turned back and blurted out what they were all thinking.

“Does anyone believe this is just a coincidence?” she asked. “Because if not, what exactly do we think happened here?”

Stride stood in front of the whiteboard and studied the four names that he’d written there:

Somehow, the lives of those four people had intersected violently. And for Gavin, lucratively. Three of them were dead, and Gavin was rich.

“Six years ago, Gavin’s law firm partner was arrested for embezzling client funds,” Stride began, laying out the timeline for them. “The firm dissolved, and Gavin lost everything. He went bankrupt. He lost his house, his reputation, and most of his savings. He had to start over doing defense work for low-income clients, usually on public defender rates.”

He used a black marker to circle Susan’s name on the board.

“Then three years ago, Gavin’s sister, Susan, married Jonah Fallon. Jonah was a senior health-care executive with money in the bank and a high six-figure income. Susan and Jonah honeymooned in a luxury resort in Aruba. They bought a mansion in Bayview Heights. Suddenly, Gavin’s sister had everything in her life that Gavin had lost in his. It’s not hard to think there was some sibling jealousy over that. But there wasn’t anything Gavin could do about it.” Stride paused. “Until.”

“Until Susan was diagnosed with an aggressive form of uterine cancer just a few months after she got married,” Serena finished his thought.

“Exactly.”

Guppo shook his head. “Holy crap. Holy effing crap.”

Stride sat down again and took a minute to contemplate the horror of what they were describing. “Yeah. That’s what we’re thinking, right? Gavin is bankrupt and down on his luck, and over here is his sister, with a lot of money thanks to her new husband. But then he finds out that his sister is going to die. It’s just a matter of time. If she dies with Jonah alive, nothing changes for Gavin. On the other hand, if Jonah dies before Susan, then Susan inherits her husband’s money. Plus a sizable life insurance policy, I imagine.”

“So when Susan ultimately dies of cancer — with no kids, no other family — all of that money goes to Gavin,” Serena concluded.

Stride nodded. “I think we’re looking at an unbelievably insidious murder conspiracy that’s been playing out for the last two years. With three million dollars as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

“Fucking lawyers,” Maggie snorted from the window ledge.

Guppo crunched on his Fritos. “Do you think Chelsey Webster knows about any of this?”

“She was pretty quick to have doubts about her husband,” Maggie pointed out.

“Right, and if Chelsey suspects, it gives us the one thing we’ve been missing,” Stride went on. “A motive. If it was just about money, Gavin could have divorced her and walked away with the inheritance. On the other hand, if Chelsey had even a whiff of foul play in Jonah’s death, that’s totally different. That’s a reason to get rid of her permanently. Gavin keeps the money, and his wife never raises any awkward questions about his dead brother-in-law.”

Serena went to the whiteboard, too. “It makes perfect sense, and we all think that’s what probably happened. Except we have a big problem.”

“We have no proof,” Stride said.

“Exactly.”

Serena drew an asterisk beside the name of the woman in the middle of everything. Nikki Candis.

“According to what we know right now, Gavin didn’t kill Jonah Fallon,” she went on. “Nikki Candis did. It was her vehicle. The red Highlander was parked in her garage. And Nikki had a history of drunk driving. Everything points to her.”

“So there must be a connection between Nikki and Gavin,” Maggie said.

“I agree,” Serena replied, “but right now, the only connection we have is thin. According to Delaney, Nikki catered Jonah and Susan’s wedding. She would have been at the reception, and presumably, so would Gavin. So we can put them in the same room at the same time. But that was one event three years ago. As a lawyer, Gavin would say that doesn’t prove a damn thing, and he’d be right. We don’t have any evidence that Nikki and Gavin even met, let alone that they teamed up on a grotesque conspiracy to kill Jonah Fallon.”

“Did Gavin ever represent Nikki?” Stride asked. “Maybe on one of her DUIs?”

Guppo shook his head and replied with his mouth full of chips, “I went back and checked the court records. There’s no indication that she was ever one of Gavin’s clients.”

“What about an affair?” Maggie asked.

“It sounds like Nikki did her share of sleeping around,” Serena replied. “Particularly when she was drinking. So it’s possible. I’ll talk to Delaney and see if she recognizes Gavin’s picture. I’ll also take another look at Nikki’s credit card and phone records in case anything jumps out that would tie her to Gavin.”

Stride eased back in the chair.

He realized how normal and comfortable it felt to be here. He’d done this in this same room with these same people hundreds of times over the years. When he glanced at the window, he saw Maggie watching him with a strange little smirk on her face. He was sure she was thinking the same thing. But there was more to it than that. He’d also fallen into the role of command without even thinking about it. He was running the meeting, but technically, he wasn’t the one in charge. Maggie was.

If he was really back, if he was really going to stay, then they were going to have to decide which one of them was the leader. But for the time being, the look on her face told him to keep going.

“Let’s focus on Jonah Fallon,” Stride went on. “He’s the newest piece in the puzzle. Jonah’s death proved to be extraordinarily fortuitous for Gavin. But as Serena points out, it was Nikki’s SUV that killed him. The question is, was this really something more than a drunken hit-and-run?”

Serena frowned. “Delaney says her mother didn’t remember the accident. She blacked out all of Saturday night. So that doesn’t help us.”

“Could she have been lying about it?” Stride asked.

“Maybe, but her behavior afterward doesn’t mesh with that. Delaney says her mother was horrified by the damage to the Highlander. Plus, she’d had multiple blackout episodes like that in the past. It’s part of a pattern.”

“Well, that means we only know two things for sure,” Stride said. “Nikki drank a lot, enough to get blackout drunk. And sometime after ten o’clock, her Highlander was out on Getchell Road near Jonah’s house. Do we know how she got there or where she was drinking? Was there any activity on her credit cards that Saturday night?”

Serena shook her head. “No. And there were no phone calls on her cell phone, either. Delaney was with the Larsens on their camping trip. She and her mother didn’t talk while she was gone.”

“So we don’t know where Nikki was or what she was doing until we get to the time of the accident,” Stride said.

“We don’t even know that,” Maggie interrupted.

Stride’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“We don’t actually know that Nikki was behind the wheel,” Maggie said. “We know it was her SUV, but we can’t be certain that she was the one driving.”

“That’s true,” Serena agreed. “For all we know, it could have been Gavin. Nikki had no reason to be out on Getchell Road, but Gavin sure did.”

Stride drummed his fingers on the desk. “The only way that works is if Gavin had a significant relationship with Nikki Candis. That’s what we need to establish. He needed access to her and to her vehicle. He had to know she was subject to blackouts. We have to prove he knew her, knew who she was, what she drove, where she lived. If we can’t find an intersection in their lives, we’ll never make a case.” He looked at Serena. “This is your discovery. What do you want to do?”

“I’ll talk to Delaney.”

Serena grabbed her coat from the back of the chair. She headed for the doorway, but then she stopped. Her face darkened with a look that Stride knew well. It was the look she got when she was getting closer to the truth.

“You know, we’re not just talking about the murder of Jonah Fallon. We could be talking about Nikki’s death, too.”

Stride nodded. “Gavin may have killed her to make sure we never linked him to the accident.”

“Or maybe it’s more than that,” Serena said. “Maybe Nikki started to remember what really happened.”

The mapping app told Chelsey Webster when she was closing in on the location of the GPS coordinates. She pulled onto the shoulder of Skyline Drive, which was terraced into the steep hillside, and stopped. With a shiver, she got out into the cool evening. Most of the trees had given up their leaves, and through the empty birches, she could see the islands dotting the Saint Louis River.

It was almost dark. She had to move quickly.

She opened the trunk of her Volvo and removed a dirty shovel. When she checked her phone, she saw that she was fifty yards or so away from the GPS position she’d found in the email. The route led her uphill. She climbed across a bed of wet leaves and maneuvered around the young trees that grew closely together.

Halfway up the hillside, she stopped. The map told her she’d reached the spot, like finding an X scrawled by a pirate. The numbers matched.

Around her was a web of gnarled branches. The ground was thick with yellow-and-gold leaves. Gavin had always told her that this was the challenge of geocaching. The coordinates would get you only so far, and once you were there, you had to figure out exactly where the treasure was hidden.

Chelsey looked for a clue because she knew there would be one. She glanced around at the trees, her gaze moving methodically from one to the next. At first she saw nothing, but then in the dim shadows, she spotted a flash of color. A thin strand of pink ribbon was tied around the end of a long branch. It fluttered in the breeze.

She made her way to the spot. When she kicked away the leaves at her feet, she could see that the ground had been recently disturbed. The dirt had been shoveled away and then roughly replaced. The area made a small square, around two feet on each side.

Chelsey glanced down the hillside toward Skyline Drive. No one was there. No one was watching. The road was empty. She felt sweat on the back of her neck, and a wave of tiredness and fear broke across her mind. But she didn’t listen to it. She knew what she had to do.

With her foot on the top of the blade, she thrust the shovel into the soft earth and began to dig.