“Merow,” he said.
She smiled. “Owen, it’s so good of you to finish Mary’s shift for her.”
He tipped his head to one side and gave her his best cute cat look.
“You’re such a hambone,” I said. I took him up to my office, gave him a drink and a couple of crackers and went back down to help Abigail. I tried Marcus but the call went to voice mail. “Call me,” I said. “It’s important.”
My phone rang about an hour later just as I was starting the walk through the building. I’d been expecting it to be Mary or Marcus, but it was Celia Hunter.
“Hello, Kathleen,” she said. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“No,” I said. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“I’m hoping there’s something I can do for you,” she said.
“All right.”
“You mentioned that Leo got a key in the mail.”
“Yes,” I said, tucking a book back in place on its shelf.
“I think it’s possible Meredith did send it.”
“Do you know why?”
She exhaled softly. “Leo’s father had a large metal strongbox in his house. He was a child of the Great Depression and he didn’t really trust banks. The family didn’t know for certain what was in it until he died. Meredith told me that Leo had suspected his father’s lawyer may have taken things out of the box before it was opened with Leo, Victor and the lawyer present. There was only one key and the lawyer had taken charge of it as the executor when Leo’s father died.”
Celia paused and cleared her throat. “I keep thinking what if it was Victor, not the lawyer? What if he somehow made a copy of that key? What if Meredith found it? What if she figured out what it was for? Maybe Victor found out and . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.
I thanked her for calling and hung up. I remembered what Sandra had said about when Leo had received the letter with the key. One day before he was killed. Victor Janes was looking more and more guilty. I tried Marcus again, and again all I got was voice mail.
Abigail was ready to go. “I can wait for you,” she said.
I shook my head. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll let you out now. I have to go upstairs and corral the furball.”
I unlocked the door, watched Abigail walk to her car then relocked it again. Then I went upstairs to get Owen.
He trailed me as I shut off the remaining lights and double-checked windows. I wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to what I was doing. I was putting together the case I was going to make to Marcus.
“Victor Janes doesn’t have cancer,” I said to Owen. “He’s not sick and if he was faking that, maybe he also faked his alibi somehow. I think when Leo got the key in the mail he recognized it and he figured out that Victor stole something—money, probably, and maybe a lot of it—from their father, and I think he guessed that Victor had something to do with Meredith’s death.” I remembered the book on theatrical makeup Leo had requested. “In fact,” I mused, “I think Leo was already getting suspicious that his brother’s illness was just another scam.”
I pulled out my phone again. I thought for a moment about trying Simon but he and Mia were still in Minneapolis. I put the phone back in my pocket and turned around.
Victor Janes was standing there.
chapter 17
“I’m sorry, Victor, the library is closed,” I said. I looked down for Owen but he had disappeared.
Literally.
“Yes, I know,” Victor said.
I wrapped my fingers around my keys and began to move toward the door, making a wide path around him. “It’s not a problem. I can let you out.”
It took about three steps for him to plant himself in front of me. “Don’t waste your time and mine, Kathleen,” he said. “I saw you. You went through the garbage cans.”
I didn’t see any point in keeping up the pretense. “You killed Leo,” I said. “You use your right hand but you’re ambidextrous like he was. You used your left hand when you hit him even though most of the time you do things right-handed.”
Victor laughed. It was a harsh sound in the empty library. He looked exactly like his brother but there was no way anyone who had met Leo could confuse the two.
“So we’re going to play a game of Clue?” he said. “The killer was Uncle Victor in the foyer with a sculpture?”
“Yes, it was,” I said. The only thing I could think was to stall, to keep him talking. “How did you fake your alibi? You weren’t actually in that chat room.”
He gave me a smile that made the hairs come up on the back of my neck. “The wonders of modern technology. I have this slick little app that lets me connect with my computer even when I’m somewhere else, like now, for instance. Makes it look like I’m there when I’m not.”
“You had a second phone, a prepaid one that you got rid of.” I studied his face, looking for even a hint of remorse. I didn’t see any. “It wasn’t a coincidence that the battery on what was supposed to be your only phone overheated that exact day, was it?” I remembered what Avis had said about her old tablet: Heat isn’t good for rechargeable batteries.
Victor shrugged but didn’t say anything. It was as close to an admission as I was going to get.
“I don’t understand why you killed your own brother, though.”
“You can call it sibling rivalry.”
“You wanted his wife.” I moved my left leg a little to the side. Was Owen still next to me? No.
Victor smiled. It just made his face more ugly. “I had his wife.”
I shook my head. “No, you didn’t. Meredith was afraid of you, afraid enough that she was waiting for you to go out of town so she could get away from you. The night she died she was on her way home to her husband and her son. She didn’t want you.”
“Is this where I’m supposed to get angry and then you take advantage of my emotions to escape?”
“She was going to tell Leo what you’d done, how you’d stolen money from your own father. That’s why you killed her,” I said. I saw a flash of anger in his eyes.
“I didn’t kill Meredith,” he said emphatically. “I just wanted to talk to her. That’s all. I wanted her to pull over so I could talk to her. It’s not my fault that she wouldn’t slow down.”
“She found the key to your father’s strongbox,” I said. “She knew then what you’d done, what kind of person you really were. I’m guessing you almost caught her, so she dropped the key in an envelope and mailed it to Leo. She didn’t want you to find it on her. And she knew she could explain everything when she finally saw him. Except she never did.”
Victor took a deep breath and seemed to get his emotions under control again. “What I did was take what was mine. What I did was secure a future for the two of us. Which I could have made her understand if she’d just pulled the damn car over!”
“You must have wondered what happened to that key,” I said. “She didn’t have it on her. Then as the weeks went by you must have figured you were safe.” I gave him a smile I didn’t feel. “Then after all this time you saw the story about the mail found in the wall at the post office.”
There had been a small story about it on the evening news, which had been picked up by the Today show. “You realized Meredith could have mailed the key to Leo and, if he got it, he’d know what you did—everything you did. That’s why you came here. Not to reconcile with your brother. You came to see what he knew.”
“He changed,” Victor said, and for the briefest moment I thought I saw something—maybe a flash of regret—but it was gone and his face hardened again. He pulled a hand over the back of his neck. “He never used to be able to keep a secret. But he didn’t let on that he’d hired someone to look into Meredith’s accident. I thought . . . I thought we were actually going to be brothers.” It was hard to miss the bitterness in his voice.