After a bowl of instant oatmeal and a quick cup of coffee, I dressed in my old jeans and a t-shirt that said, "If this shirt is clean, my horse is still dirty," slid my feet back into the pink bunnies, and plugged in my hairdryer. As I looked in the mirror, comb to my short brown hair, I stopped. The notion that barely surfaced at the grocery store wouldn't be held back any longer.
Damn. I didn't want it to be Donna. She was a good person who cared about people, gave back to the community, and had been virtually robbed of her retirement.
No, definitely not Donna.
In five minutes my hair was dry, styled, and no longer smelled of apples. I went to the kitchen for another cup of coffee to go with my anxiety over my client and friend.
It was obvious I needed information if I was going to put my worry to rest. I needed to tap into the gossip mill. There were other factors, other people I hadn't considered. I knew of one reliable source who would talk to me, too. Someone who wouldn't assume Donna had a motive.
I turned on the computer and began downloading files from my clients. Time to multitask. I phoned Peggy, Donna's partner, hoping to catch her at home, confident I could learn something from her since she worked for the Everett Times. While the phone rang I peaked out the front window. Joey was back. Terrific. But before I had much opportunity to fret, Peggy answered. Being tactful required all my attention.
"Can't say I ever thought of you as interested in gossip," Peggy said, when I asked what she knew about Valerie.
"I'm not, normally." My face grew warmer, and I was glad she couldn't see. "This involves me, personally. Can this be 'off the record'? I mean, can what we say stay between us?"
"Thea," Peggy said, laughing. "I'm not a reporter. I'm a copy editor. I wouldn't give a reporter a lead on a story to save my grandmother. I doubt they'd listen to me anyway. They do their best not to on a daily basis. I'll tell you what I can, but I'm not sure I can be much help. What do you want to know?"
"I'm trying to find out who had reason to kill Valerie." I ran a damp palm down my blue-jeaned thigh.
"Huh. Doesn't exactly sound like a job for 'super-accountant.' Call me crazy, but I think this is where the cops come in." She sounded cautious.
"The police think I have a motive." My words rushed out like a confession.
"You? So you turned to the dark side, huh? Do you think they'll let you do our taxes from your jail cell? It's so hard to find a good accountant these days."
"Peggy, I'm serious!"
"Sorry, girlfriend, but I can't imagine why the police think you killed her."
"Me neither, but I'm afraid I look convenient to them. Donna told me about the Ruckers, but is there anyone else whose problems would have been solved with Valerie's death?" Had I worded that carefully enough to make it clear I wasn't asking about Donna?
"Let me see. Besides Melanie, who might have taken more of a giant leap out of her long-suffering wife role than a weeping meltdown at the horseshow, and gone totally LEO – oh, that's Low Earth Orbit -"
"Huh?"
"Ballistic, insane, quantum anger. Keep up, girl. Anyway, the thing is, I don't know. Valerie always played on the edge. But besides thinking she was all that plus a family sized bag of chips, she was careful, or calculating enough not to cross any line that would mess with her ambitions of Olympic gold."
"Meaning?" Dirt, Peggy, give me dirt.
"She wasn't into drugs, to the best of my knowledge, or things that could get her arrested. Her father hushed up all the nasty stuff about her, too."
"What nasty stuff?"
"Gossip, affairs with married men, and at least a couple of miraculously dismissed civil law suits. You ever wonder how she happened to get that primo piece of real estate over on Carpenter Road? If that was totally above board, then I'm Tina Turner."
I jumped out of my chair and walked to the window with the cell phone pressed hard against my ear. Now we were getting somewhere. "How did he manage to silence all that?"
"He owns the paper. When he tells us to jump, we all say, 'yessir, how high?'"
'Oh, I didn't realize you worked for him. I thought he was in some kind of real estate development."
"Yeah, that too. He owns several business interests, and a few well-placed individuals."
"Do you know who? Do you think Valerie was caught up in any of his shadier deals and someone got carried away trying to get even?"
"Hard to say. Verifiable information like that is difficult to come by. I would think he'd keep his daughter out of those things, but we know she could get a little ambitious on her own."
"Hmm." I fisted my hand in my hair as I paced. I needed more.
"I got something to say to you, Thea. Donna didn't kill Valerie." Her words stopped my feet. My jaw sagged. "I don't want to find out you're trying to get out of something by pushing it off on her. You'll lose our business and anyone else's I can talk to. And you're going to have to deal with me."
"No, Peggy. That's not what I meant to imply -"
"I'm just saying." Her tone made me flinch.
Crap. I'd alienated a client and friend. "I'm really sor -"
"And something else you should know. Your sister was the one who tipped off Melanie about Randy and Valerie. She must have some serious grudge if she'd stoop that low."
That little piece of news all but knocked the air out of my lungs. "I didn't have any idea," I choked out.
"Thought you'd want to cover all your bases." Her voice held a hard edge.
I groveled, to excess. By the time I'd hung up, I'd mollified my client but wasn't sure about the friend. I slumped in my chair, feeling battered, spent, and humiliated. And clueless. However, I knew as insensitive and thoughtless as Juliet could be at times, there was no way she could have killed anyone or deliberately goaded someone else into it. How had Peggy gotten hold of that information about my sister? It had to be rumor. On the chance there was some truth to it, I'd make a point to chat with Juliet later about her lack of quality decision-making skills.
In the interest of "covering all my bases," I dragged my thoughts back to Frederick Parsons's less than legal inclinations. Unfortunately, it occurred to me if Valerie's death was connected in some way to her father's business dealings he would have figured that out by now, and in all likelihood acted decisively. The fact that he continued to have Joey watch me offered proof enough he was no closer than me to discovering who killed his daughter.
I sighed and turned back to my computer. There was work to do, and if I wanted to get away for dinner this evening with Andrea I needed to get to it or spend the weekend catching up.
But my own work was disappointing me as well. The second client I worked on showed the same lack of return on an investment. The situation was becoming too familiar. I was tired of seeing intelligent people make unintelligent mistakes.
This one included excess paperwork, as he always did, so I sifted through it to find out what had gone wrong. Sure enough, the prospectus was there. High yield investment described to make it sound like a slam-dunk. It was Greg's company, but it was Sarah Fuller's business card stapled to the inside of the cover.
Sarah's clients were losing money.
At least some of them were. It wasn't a crime for your clients to lose money or make bad investments unless you intentionally steered them in that direction. Could that be happening here? I was willing to bet that the client whose taxes I had done on Tuesday, and who also showed evidence of a loss, invested in the same fund. Why didn't people do their homework before handing over large amounts of money to a stranger? Sure, Snohomish is a small town, and people tended to be trusting – a fact that could tempt nefarious individuals – but people also tended to talk. Bad enough for any business to make mistakes, but to deliberately pursue what was not in one's client's best interest was idiotic. I needed to schedule some official chit-chat with the feds very soon. Jeez. More problems. Just what I needed.