“I didn’t pay any attention.”
“Never saw his car?”
“Sometimes heard it, usually very late at night. I stayed out of his business. Frankly, didn’t care. Assumed he was out all the time, partying with his druggie friends.”
“Maybe a druggie friend named Roger Baptista. By the looks of it, Toby was never planning on coming back to your office or your apartment after his vacation in the Vineyard.”
She is thinking, her face tight, angry. Scared.
“Why would Toby remove that file from your office?” Win presses her.
“Forgetful, brain rotted by drugs, no memory left…”
“Monique?”
“Because someone asked him to, what do you think! To make me look incompetent, corrupt. You don’t have what you need to work the case. Without the file, it’s rather impossible, isn’t it? If that file was found there, it’s terrible for me.”
Win just listens.
“Someone told Toby to take it and the brain-rotted fool did.” She is silent for a minute, then, “Stupid, incompetent. Dead or alive. Either way, Crawley gets reelected.”
“You think he had something to do with this?”
“How convenient Toby was out of town that night. When you showed up, when it happened, Toby wasn’t there. Had just left for the Vineyard. No witnesses. The purpose of that ridiculous letter left at the Diesel Café was probably to make sure you didn’t decide to show up at my house and prevent the very thing you did.”
“So you know about that, too,” Win says. “Let me guess. Huber and his silk cravats. A scarlet one that night.”
“I found out after the fact. Now maybe I see a different reason why he did it. A taunting letter to keep you occupied. In case you might have decided to drop by, come see me…”
“Why would he think that?”
“Pathological jealousy. He thinks everybody wants me. He thinks everybody wants you. Toby probably hand-picked him, you’re probably right.” She’s back to something else, back to Baptista. “Probably one of his drug sources. Probably met him hanging around the courthouse. Do you think he paid him?”
“Who’s he?”
She looks at him, looks at him a long time, then, “You know damn well.”
“Huber,” Win says, and it’s not going to be easy interrogating him when that time comes.
“Jessie’s probably the one who broke into my apartment….”
“Why? To find the file?”
“Yes.” Then, “I don’t know. I don’t know. All I know is he wanted me to look bad. Destroy my reputation. After death. Or now. In life…”
Her voice is shaking, her eyes filled with enraged tears. Win watches her, waits.
“So tell me.” She can barely talk. “He pay him to rape me, too?” She raises her voice, tears falling.
Win doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what to say.
“Or paid him just to kill me and burn up the house and the worthless nothing piece of shit threw in the rape free. Oh yes. The proverbial crime of opportunity.”
“Why?” Win quietly asks. “Why the—”
“Why the overkill?” Lamont interrupts with a harsh laugh. “Why? Come on, Win. You see it every day. Hate. Envy. Being scorned, dissed, threatened. Pay-back. Kill somebody as many times and in as many different horrific ways as you can, right? Degrade them, cause them as much pain and suffering as possible.”
Images of that night, of her. Win tries to push them back.
“Well, he tried,” she says. Then, “How much?”
He knows what she’s asking. He doesn’t answer her.
“How much!”
He hesitates, says, “A thousand dollars.”
“So that’s all I’m worth.”
“It has nothing to do with that and you know—”
“Don’t bother,” she says.
14
Rex’s Guns & Ammo is on Upward Road in East Flat Rock, a good spot for a private meeting because the shop is closed on Sundays. Nice to know that the folks in North Carolina who believe in firearms and camouflage observe the Sabbath.
Sykes and Win sit in folding chairs somewhere between racks of rifles and fishing tackle, a seven-pound bass mounted on the wall giving Sykes the fisheye. Leaning against a glass showcase of pistols is the Henderson County Sheriff, Rutherford, a friend of Rex’s, which is how he came upon the key to let Win and Sykes in so they could have a little discussion about the Finlay case. Rutherford sort of looks like his name, an odd thing about that, a phenomenon Sykes has been aware of all her life.
He’s big and rumbling like a freight train, intimidating and hell-bent in one direction — his. He has reminded them more than once in one way or another that Flat Rock is his jurisdiction, made it clear that if anybody picks up George and Kimberly, “Kim,” Finlay, it will be him, says he needs to understand why they should be picked up in the first place. So Sykes and Win are doing their best to patiently explain the facts of the case, details that became apparent when they stayed up all last night driving here from Knoxville, then holing up in a Best Western Motel, picking apart and piecing together information from a case file that they should have had access to from the start, pages and pages of reports, witness statements, and about a dozen gruesome photographs that make many things disturbingly obvious.
It was Kim who discovered Mrs. Finlay’s brutalized body and called 911 at 2:14 p.m., August 8. She claims she was driving George’s white Mercedes sedan, was out running errands and decided to drop by for a visit. Yet several hours earlier, between ten thirty and eleven a.m., a retired man who lived only a few blocks from Mrs. Finlay’s Sequoyah Hills home saw Kim in the area driving her red Mercedes convertible. When Detective Barber questioned her about it she offered the simple explanation that while she was out and about she stopped in the Sequoyah Hills neighborhood to walk her Maltese, Zsa Zsa, on Cherokee Boulevard, or the Boulevard, as she called it. Nothing particularly suspicious about that, since Cherokee Boulevard was and is a popular place for people, including nonresidents, to walk their dogs. Kim, who didn’t live in Sequoyah Hills, was known to walk Zsa Zsa there daily, depending on the weather, and August 8 happened to be a beautiful day.
In her statement to Barber, she continued to spin her reasonably credible story, claiming she took Zsa Zsa home around noon, checked on George, who was sick in bed with a cold, then went back out in his Mercedes because her Mercedes convertible needed gas and was making a funny noise. On her way to the dry cleaner’s, she decided to drop in on Mrs. Finlay, and when she didn’t answer the door Kim let herself in and had the most awful shock of her life. She went on to tell Barber, very tearfully, that she had been very worried about Mrs. Finlay’s safety. She has all this money and is ostentatious and lives alone, and is naïve, much too trusting, she said, adding that earlier in the week when George and I came by to have dinner with her, we both saw a suspicious-looking black man near her house, staring at it. When we turned into the driveway, he walked away very quickly.
George, of course, verified his wife’s story. George, of course, had a few good stories of his own, including that he was fairly sure his aunt had noticed this same black man several days earlier, just walking up and down the street near her house—loitering, in her words. George was also fairly sure he probably left a hammer on a windowsill in his aunt’s master bedroom, having used it to help her hang a painting, he wasn’t exactly sure when, but not long before it happened. A plausible theory evolved: Mrs. Finlay returned home from tennis or shopping or something and interrupted her assailant, who had gotten only so far as stealing a box of silver coins that supposedly was in plain view on a dresser in the master bedroom.