“No!” Rich Easton shouted, suddenly on his feet. The lawyer tried to quiet him, but he brushed him away. “Stone killed her, not me! I was out in the garage last night, working on my boat, when he got into the house. They must have struggled over my gun and he killed her just like he killed Earl Frank in my office last year. I heard the shot and found him standing over the body. I hit him with the propane torch I was carrying and then picked up the gun and shot him. He wasn’t getting away with another murder. That’s when I got the idea about switching identities.”
His lawyer struggled to be heard. “Rich, you really shouldn’t—”
“I don’t want them thinking I killed Monica. I loved her.”
“I suppose the propane torch you were using to remove the boat’s paint gave you part of the idea,” Leopold continued. “You changed clothes with Stone, taking the suit his lawyer had provided, and placed both bodies on the bed. You noticed that Casper Stone was missing most of his teeth. Prison records show he’d had recent dental work. That gave you the rest of the idea. You pulled out his remaining teeth. Then you burned the face and hands with the torch, making visual and fingerprint identification next to impossible. You removed your complete set of false teeth, with your dentist’s mark on both plates, and put them into the dead man’s mouth. They didn’t fit perfectly, of course, so you broke his jaw to cover the poor fit, and jammed them in. That was your big mistake, and when it finally dawned on me at the bus station tonight I knew the truth.”
“What mistake?” Easton asked.
“The jaw was broken, the face was burned beyond recognition, yet this upper and lower plate were in perfect condition. They couldn’t have been in the dead man’s mouth when his jaw was broken and he suffered the worst of the burns. If the teeth, the only means of identification, were added by the killer later, there was a good chance the identification was false. And if the body wasn’t yours it was most likely the missing Casper Stone.”
“But why did he risk showing up at the bus station tonight?” Connie wanted to know.
Leopold looked at Rich Easton. “For the same reason he faxed that message to Stone’s lawyer rather than phone him. He must have known Griswald would respect lawyer-client privileges and not immediately report the call to the police. But he couldn’t phone Griswald because he couldn’t fake Casper Stone’s voice well enough to fool the lawyer. The whole business with the message and the bus station was simply to strengthen the idea that Casper Stone was alive and on the run. I assume he went to the bus station with the blue suit over the pants and shirt he’s wearing now. He’d added gray to his hair, and without the teeth he looked like a different person. Leaving the suit in the men’s room where it was sure to be found and identified, he figured we’d go after the bus and the trail would come to a dead end. Meanwhile he’d slip out of town some other way and link up with that missing money. It might have worked, but when I noticed that toothless man I remembered the perfect set of false teeth. I remembered the man who sent that fax while hardly opening his mouth. And then the whole thing came to me.”
Easton’s attorney moistened his lips. “We’ll plead self-defense. You’ve got no case.”
“That’s for a jury to decide.”
Later, back in the squad room, Connie said, “It’s after one. You’d better go home, Captain. Molly will be wondering what happened.”
“What happened was that a couple of tries at a new life didn’t work out. Casper Stone is dead and Rich Easton is in a cell.”
He went out to the car, thinking that his own new life was about the same as the old one had been.