“So there was some tension,” I said. “Did you overhear any arguments between Colin and his mother?”
“Yes, several months ago. Mrs. Terrell said Colin should settle on something, either teaching or law school. Colin got defensive, they argued, and Mr. Terrell got involved. Colin stormed out of the house. Later Mrs. Terrell told me she probably shouldn’t keep helping Colin, but he was her son. I understood. I’d do the same for my kids. She said Mr. Terrell got upset because she gave Colin money, but it was her own money. Besides, he wrote lots of checks to his own son.”
“Same situation?” I asked. “Eric has trouble deciding what he wants to be when he grows up?”
“Not quite the same. Eric knows what he wants to be — the boss. He started his own business, but it failed.”
“His father bankrolled him?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Mejia said. “Mrs. Terrell told me Mr. Terrell lost a lot of money when Eric’s business went under, about a year ago. Eric wanted to start another business.”
“How do you know that?”
“I overheard another argument, a couple of weeks before the Terrells died. Mr. Terrell and Eric had a big fight, words mostly. I was upstairs cleaning. They were in the backyard and the windows were open. I looked out and saw them shouting at each other. Eric said his father was being selfish, he had plenty of money. Mr. Terrell said that wasn’t the point. He wasn’t going to give Eric any more, because Eric didn’t have a head for business, and he wasn’t going to throw good money after bad.”
“You said their fight was mostly words. Did it get physical?”
Mrs. Mejia frowned. “Yes. Their voices got louder, then Eric grabbed his father’s arm. That was when Mrs. Terrell came out of the house, telling them to stop.”
It sounded as though there were some longstanding issues about money in the Terrell family, between father and son, and between mother and son as well. Mrs. Mejia’s version of Colin’s work history was different from his sister’s. Pamela had said he was between jobs, but she’d left out the fact that he’d moved from job to job, and had attended law school.
What if Colin’s stint as a law student had brought him into contact with the details of Probate Code Section 250? What if his financial problems led him to stage the Terrells’ supposed murder-suicide? The legal connection got muddier when the background check I’d initiated on the beneficiaries revealed that both Erin Terrell and her sister-in-law Lisa worked in law offices. Lisa was an administrative assistant in a general-practice firm in Oakland, where she and Eric lived. She had access to the California codes. So did Erin, who was a paralegal in one of the big San Francisco firms, one that practiced several types of law, including wills and trusts.
I dug into the details of Eric Terrell’s failed business. He had attempted to carve out his own niche in the high-tech boom, right about the time the bottom fell out of the so-called new economy. The venture lost a lot of money. He was now working at a software firm in Oakland, doomed to a day job until his inheritance freed him to start another business.
Time to start looking at alibis, I thought.
Sergeant Lipensky, Alameda Police Department, looked sceptical when I spoke with him that afternoon. “Erin was in a meeting at that law firm where she works,” he said. “Pamela was in front of a fourth-grade class in Hayward. Eric dropped his car off at a dealership in Oakland for service that morning. He didn’t even have transportation. Took BART and the bus to work.”
“What about Lisa, Eric’s wife? And Ralph Allen, Pamela’s husband? He’s out of work.”
“Lisa was working that day. She had lunch with friends at about the same time the Terrells died. Ralph had a job interview in Pleasanton.”
“Colin Baker? He does temp work, doesn’t have a fixed place of employment.”
“I know that. He was working at a law firm that day. All that week, in fact.”
Another law firm, I thought. No surprise, really. The Bay Area was lousy with lawyers. “You talked with someone at the firm?”
“I talked with someone at the temp agency, who checked his timecard, which has to be signed by someone at the firm. What makes you think this is anything but murder-suicide?”
“No note. The position of the gun. My gut.” Lipensky didn’t say anything. “What about your gut?”
“Well... my gut doesn’t like it, either,” he admitted. “No note, the gun. No apparent reason. Looks like they were happily married, no problems.”
“When I encountered Erin and Eric the other day at the house, Erin informed me that Claude was planning to divorce Martha, so of course Martha killed him, then killed herself.”
“First I’ve heard of any divorce,” Lipensky said, on the alert.
“That’s what I figured. Turns out Erin got that story from her brother, who says his father confided in him. No way to verify that.”
“What do Martha’s kids say about a divorce?”
“Pamela denies it. I haven’t talked with Colin yet. Say, what was the name of that law firm where he was working the day of the deaths?”
Lipensky told me. “You’ll let me know if you find out anything.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course. I always cooperate with the authorities.”
I met Henry Van, the gardener who’d called the police, in front of the house where he was working. He brushed dirt from his hands as we introduced ourselves, then took a bottle of water from the cooler in the back of his pickup truck, opened it, and drank. “Don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t already know.”
“Describe what you saw.”
“The Krimmlakers weren’t home. They’re the people I garden for on that street. I’m there every other week. The time varies. I’ve got three other clients in that part of Alameda. I arrived around eleven o’clock. I must have been there when the Terrells got killed, but I didn’t see or hear anything.”
“You may have, without realizing it.”
He looked dubious. “I was trimming hedges in the back. Power tool, makes a lot of noise.”
“See any cars or people in the area? Anyone near the Terrells’ house, or the Victorian across the street, where the Brandons live?”
He shook his head. “Nope. That time of day, most people are at work. It was a school day. None of the kids were around.”
“Did you break for lunch?”
“Sure. After twelve and my stomach was growling. I went round to the front of the house and—” He stopped. “Wait a minute. I did see someone. A couple of teenagers. I was sitting in my truck eating lunch. I saw them in my rearview mirror as they walked past me. They headed up the driveway of that house across the street and went in the front door. I didn’t think anything about it till now. I figured they were coming home from school for lunch.”
“Can you describe them?”
“She was pretty,” he said. “Long brown hair. Maybe fifteen or sixteen. The guy was older. Lanky build, red hair, tattoos on his arms, pierced ears.”
I’d caught a glimpse of the two Brandon daughters when I’d interviewed their parents. One was old enough to drive a lime-green Beetle. She had dark, knowing eyes and wore her dark brown hair short with bangs. The other looked younger, and she had light brown hair falling past her shoulders.
“What happened after they went inside? Did you see them come out?”
He shook his head. “Nope. I heard rock music. Really loud. Ate my sandwich, finished trimming hedges, cleaned up the cuttings. I was working on the shrubs in the front when the housekeeper went into the house next-door. It wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before she ran out the front door screaming that there were dead bodies in the house. I whipped out my cell phone and called nine-one-one.”