I was wondering what thing they wanted sorted when Cassandra spoke, clearing up any confusion. “I didn’t kill Roger.”
“And I believe her,” Eva said. “The police are basing the case against Cassandra on the most circumstantial of evidence,” she continued. “The suicide note, which appears to have been written in her style, and her fingerprints on the bottle.”
“It’s circumstantial evidence like that that can do you in,” I commented, remembering my own sorry plight when the hammer that had been used to bash in Jennifer Goodall’s skull had turned up with my ridges and whorls all over the handle. “Was the Jim Beam bottle yours?”
“Oh, yes. I kept it in my desk drawer. For medicinal purposes.” She blushed again. “I know it sounds lame, but every once in a while I’d have one of those days, and it’d come in handy. It wasn’t the kids so much,” she explained, “but their parents can certainly drive you to drink.”
“Everyone knew where she kept the bottle,” Eva added.
“And the Prozac?” I wondered.
Cassandra shrugged. “There must be half a dozen people to-ing and fro-ing in our office every day, exhibiting every sort of phobia and anxiety you can imagine. Any one of them could have had access to Prozac.”
Thinking about the contents of my own daughter’s medicine cabinet, I had to agree. “If the police think you murdered Roger,” I continued with unrelenting logic, “they must believe that you faked his suicide note, too.”
“I haven’t seen it yet,” Cassandra complained. “It was on Roger’s computer.”
Eva smiled at Cassandra sympathetically. “They took his CPU, didn’t they? Looking for evidence? They’ve still got the PC Roger used at home.”
Cassandra nodded.
Eva frowned. “Then that’s it, then.”
I raised a cautionary finger. “But wait! Cassandra, all your files are backed up every night to the mainframe computer, right?”
Cassandra nodded, comprehension dawning. “We should be able to find a copy of Roger’s note if we restore it from backup!”
I shoved my coffee mug aside. “Brilliant! Well, what are we waiting for?”
Eva drove the three of us to the Eastport Yacht Sales offices near the intersection of Second and Severn in Eastport. We parked next to the sailmaker’s shop.
It was still early, so the office was locked, but Cassandra let us in with her key.
The reception area of EYS looked like a photo layout for Yachting magazine. Comfortably upholstered chairs were arranged in a neat square around a glass-topped table, where back issues of Yachting, Sail, and Cruising World were arranged in neat cascades.
Roger’s office, too, seemed ready for the photographers. Except for the dust bunnies marking the empty spot under his desk where Roger’s CPU had so recently sat, the room was immaculate. The police had done a careful job, it seemed. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed-the papers in his outbox, his telephone, his monitor, his keyboard, mouse, and mouse pad. A customized mouse pad, I noticed with a twinge, with a picture of Roger and Eva smiling out from it, standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon.
Because Roger’s access to the mainframe had disappeared along with his hard drive, Cassandra escorted us to her office, stopping along the way to turn the printer on in the photocopying room and to remove a laptop from a locked cabinet.
The state of Cassandra’s office would have sent Mr. Monk, the obsessive-compulsive TV detective, into cardiac arrest. The rampant disorder made even me catch my breath. Catalogs, brochures, and business papers of all kinds littered every available surface. Sailing posters hung crookedly on the walls. The cord on the venetian blinds was a tangled mess, three slats in it were broken, and a sticky puddle marked the spot where coffee had recently spilled on Cassandra’s desk. Either the Annapolis police had different searching standards from the FBI, or Cassandra was, quite simply, a slob.
“Sorry for the mess,” she apologized, confirming my slob theory.
With a broad sweep of her arm she reclaimed the work space, sending a stack of papers cascading onto the floor. She set the laptop down and plugged in the ISDN cable that snaked out of the wall. “They took my CPU for evidence, too,” she explained. “But they didn’t think about the company laptop. We use it mostly for boat shows.”
I watched as Cassandra powered up the laptop and prepared to access the centralized office files. She tapped away with confidence, while Eva and I looked over her shoulder, bristling with nervous tension.
“Files, backup, restore,” Cassandra was saying. The light on the front of the laptop blinked, and the hard drive whirred. “Word, file, open…” Tap tap tap. “Print!” she exclaimed at last, stabbing at the Enter key with a flourish.
“Wait here while I get the file,” she said.
Cassandra returned a few minutes later with three copies of Roger Haberman’s so-called suicide note.
It has come to my attention that people are conspiring against me. They will never rest until I am dead. I didn’t mean to harm anyone. For the trouble I’ve caused, I’m desparately sorry. I’m a mess. I’m out of control. I see no other way than to quickly end it.
“It is rather generic,” I observed, looking up from my copy of Roger’s note. “And it doesn’t mention you specifically, Eva, which I find pretty curious.”
“It certainly doesn’t sound like Roger.” Eva tapped the note with her index finger. “‘It has come to my attention that’ is just a bit stuffy, even for Roger.”
“The police analyst has determined I wrote it,” Cassandra said. “They’ve got all my word processing files, so I suppose they can prove it in a court of law. Apparently I use phrases like ‘it has come to my attention’ with a statistical probability of twenty-seven percent over samples of writing chosen at random from among the general population, or some such nonsense. But their analyst is dead wrong.”
“This troubles me, though,” Eva interjected. “Roger never learned how to spell ‘desperately,’ and he’s misspelled it here, too. But this, I think, is the clincher.”
“What?”
“‘To quickly end it,’” she quoted. “Roger was a stickler for grammar. The poor man couldn’t split an infinitive if his life depended on it.”
Eva grimaced, as if realizing that the tired old cliché had sudden meaning. She looked from Cassandra to me, tears glistening in her eyes. “Roger wrote this note himself, didn’t he? For whatever reason, Roger wrote the note.”
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
“But why?” Tears rolled down her cheeks and splashed, unheeded, on her blouse.
“You gave me the answer yourself a couple of days ago, Eva.”
“I did?” she sniffled.
From the chaos on her office shelves, Cassandra managed to unearth a box of tissues and hand them to her.
“Yes. You told me that Roger had recently taken out a life insurance policy, and that if he committed suicide, it would be worthless.”
Dabbing at her nose with the tissue, she nodded.
“So try this on for size. Suppose that Roger, in his distress over being outed on national television, in fear of being branded as a kidnapper, thereby heaping more disgrace on you, even threatening your job and your calling to the priesthood…” I paused to take a breath. “Suppose Roger decided to kill two birds with one stone.”
From her desk chair Cassandra muttered, “I don’t get it.”
“Okay. Roger has two problems.” I held up a finger. “First, he wants to make sure the wife he loves and who he has so grievously wronged gets the money that’s coming to her.” I held up two fingers. “And second, he wants to punish the boss he believes wronged him, by firing him without provocation.”