True Blue

CHAPTER 25

BETH READ THROUGH the report on her computer screen three times. This was something her father had taught her. Read through once for general conceptualization and then a second time for the nitty-gritty details. And then read it a final time, at least an hour after the first reading, but do so out of order, which forced your mind and your eyes from their comfort zones.

Beth refocused. They had scrubbed Diane Tolliver’s computer at work and at her home without revealing any surprises. The work computer had yielded a mass of legal documents and research items and correspondence on dozens of complicated deals. The woman’s town house in Old Town Alexandria had yielded no clues or leads. They would work outward now, from her job and personal life. Murders were almost never random occurrences. Family, friends, acquaintances, rivals, spurned lovers-those were the categories from which the takers of human life were most often spawned.

She looked down at the one interesting item on Diane Tolliver’s work computer. The e-mail she’d sent to Roy Kingman Friday night. The missive was cryptic and she was hoping that Kingman could explain it, but when interviewed by her detectives over the phone he claimed to have no idea what it meant or why it had been sent to him.

They also knew from the electronic records from the garage that Tolliver had left the office Friday night at two minutes before seven and returned at a little before ten, leaving again around ten-forty. The cleaning crew had come in at seven-thirty and left around nine-thirty. They had seen nothing unusual.

What did people do for a few hours on a Friday evening? They had dinner. The fact that she had driven showed it was too far to walk. They were accessing the woman’s credit card records to see what restaurant she’d gone to. That would only work if she had paid the bill, of course, but it was a viable lead.

Need to focus in on A-

That was the message she’d sent to Kingman that he claimed not to understand. Was that the whole message or had it been cut off? She might have been interrupted. If so, by whom at that late hour? But she’d been alive on Monday morning. Beth frowned as she thought about her sister hanging around Kingman. Could he crack a brain stem? Yeah, he probably could.

There were other messages Diane had sent over the course of the weekend, all from home. Just routine ones to various friends, and she’d ordered some items for her home from two vendors. Her BMW 735 was in the parking garage in her normal space, and the gate record showed she’d accessed the garage at six a.m. on the dot. Her car had been searched without revealing anything of use.

Tolliver’s purse had not been found, so robbery couldn’t be ruled out. Yet she’d been raped; that might have been the primary motivation. And then killed to prevent her from fingering who’d done it. No one at Shilling & Murdoch had come into the office over the weekend, including Diane Tolliver.

From what Beth had learned, Tolliver usually got in around nine. So why had she come to the office so early on Monday? They were interviewing everyone who worked at the law firm to verify where they were on Monday morning. However, Beth was really counting on getting a database hit on the sperm.

They could find no one who’d talked to Diane over the weekend. One neighbor reported that he saw her drive off in a hurry on Sunday around nine in the morning but did not speak to her. She lived in an end-unit town house with a garage. She could come and go without interacting with anyone, as she apparently had the weekend before she’d been killed.

There were dirty dishes in the dishwasher and trash that indicated she had eaten in over the weekend. She had a cleaning service that came three times a week, but not over the weekend. Her home phone records showed no calls going out, and the only messages on her voice mail had been from solicitors. She, like many people, apparently used her cell phone to communicate most of the time.

They couldn’t find her iPhone because it had presumably been in her purse. But they had requested the phone records from her carrier. She’d made many calls on her cell phone over the weekend. None of them had been to friends or coworkers, though. These were all normal things that one did during a weekend. Tolliver had not known, of course, that it would be the last weekend of her life.

The previous Friday, her last full day at the office, had been spent in meetings with various clients. Three of them were local and had been interviewed, but had told them nothing of interest. Tolliver had seemed perfectly normal to them. Two of her client meetings had been with men from overseas. Both men had flown out Friday night and were now in the Middle East. Neither was obviously her killer.

Her cell phone chirped.

“Hello?”

“You working late?” said Mace’s voice.

“Had a community outreach event but it got canceled. What are you offering?”

“Dinner, on me. Pick a nice place. I mean really nice, where you actually have to wear shoes and everything.”

“Did Altman give you an advance on your salary?”

“No, I just cleaned out my bank account.”

“Mace, what about your creditors?”

“I’ll start paying them off with my first paycheck. Let’s just have a nice meal.”

“Mom was that bad?”

“She’s still alive and so am I, so how bad could it be?”

“Okay. How about eight-thirty? I’ll call you with the place.”

Mace clicked off and Beth went back to her notes.

Her office phone rang.

She picked it up and listened for two minutes.

There’d been another murder.

And this one had cut close to home. A U.S. attorney was dead. Mona Danforth wasn’t the one killed. Beth managed to avoid tacking “unfortunately” onto the end of this thought. But they had just discovered Jamie Meldon’s body in a Dumpster in northwest Washington.