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CHAPTER forty-five

  There was a light knock on the bathroom door and I ignored it. I closed my eyes again and slid further down in the tub and felt the hot water and bubbles gathering around my neck.

  "Kate," Jay’s muffled voice said through the unlocked door.

  "Yeah. Come in."

  I felt his presence standing over me and without opening my eyes I asked him if Leech was gone.

  "Yes."

  Hiding in the warm bathtub had made me feel better, but just for a few minutes. Visions of the police dragging Jay down the stairs in handcuffs had danced before my closed eyes. Newspaper headlines blared about his arrest.

  "What’d he ask you about?" I probed.

  "My job. Why I was fired. Where I’ve been the last couple of days."

  "Was he happy with the answers?"

  "Somewhat. He’s preparing a written statement and I have to go down to his precinct and sign it."

  I hadn’t been asked to sign any statements. My stomach sank and I opened my eyes. Jay was sitting on the edge of the bathtub with his back to me.

  "You know Kate, the way he questioned me, it was strange. He didn’t come out and say it, but I don’t think they’re convinced that Rick’s death was a suicide. He asked me if I owned a gun. He asked me where I was yesterday in the late afternoon. He asked me when was the last time I’d seen Rick. And he went back to the night Ev died and asked me to give him the details of what had happened." Jay sounded despondent as he rattled this off. His shoulders were hunched and he was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

  I stood up in the tub and reached around him for the towel hanging on the rack. With the towel held primly in front of me I asked him to get up so I could get out of the bathtub.

  "Sorry," he mumbled and left the bathroom without looking at me.

  I was more perturbed now than I had been when I overheard Leech demanding an alibi. I dressed quickly and found him sitting on the balcony on a kitchen chair that he had moved out there.

  "How did you answer Leech when he asked for an explanation of your whereabouts in the last seventy-two hours?" I had decided a flank attack might be better than firing from the hip. No more demands like last night, from me.

  Jay shaded his eyes from the sunlight with his hand and peered up at me. My arms were crossed against my chest and I quickly dropped them and consciously eased the muscles in my face. I tried my best not to look like a schoolmarm.

  "I told him the truth. I hadn’t left Dodge City."

  "And when he didn’t even crack a smile, you realized he was serious."

  "Yeah. Dead serious. I told him what I’d been doing. He recalled seeing me at the funeral. I told him that after the funeral I spent the afternoon downtown at the Public Library. Dinner at Bigliardi’s with you and Vanessa. Slept in my own bed, alone, so I didn’t have any witnesses. Thursday I had lunch with that friend I was telling you about, the analyst. Dave Smithson. That afternoon I was back at the library, doing more research. Slept alone, again," he sighed. "I tried wrenching his heart strings with that one but he wasn’t budging."

  I smiled but didn’t interrupt.

  "Friday I went to Ottawa. I had to go and see my mom."

  "How is she?"

  "She’s great."

  "And how did she take the news?"

  I knew that had to have been a difficult trip for Jay to make. His mother was incredibly proud of her offspring’s accomplishments, and rightly so. As poor as his family had been, his mother had insisted that they all attend university. Jay and his sisters all had graduate degrees and they were supporting their mother now. Jay was the last to graduate, and when he secured his job, he and his sisters had finally insisted that their mom quit her job and move out of the old neighbourhood in Centertown Ottawa. They had bought her a nice condominium overlooking the Canal and provided her with more money than she knew what to do with. She was the queen of Tuesday night bingo at the Glebe Community Centre now and Jay had told me that she placed pictures of her kids around her at the bingo table for good luck. The fact that Jay had been fired under questionable circumstances would not have gone over well with Mrs. Harmon.

  "She was rightfully indignant, at first. And then when she listened to what had actually happened, how Rick had accused me and then fired me, I could tell she was going to box my ears," he laughed. "I think she’s worried about me not getting a paycheque and she wouldn’t believe me when I told her I wasn’t destitute. I had to show her my passbook from the bank to prove that I had money in savings. She was ready to give me money because she told me she never spends half of what we give her."

  He leaned the chair back on two legs and put his feet up on the railing of the balcony and stared at his bare feet.

  "You know," he continued quietly, "mom wanted me to move back home. I told her this wasn’t a complete disaster, yet, and that I’d get another job. Besides, who wants to work in a town where the only jobs are with the federal government and all they do is whine about the Senators not winning the Stanley Cup?"

  Jay dropped his feet and the front legs of the chair hit the floor. "Traffic was heavy on the 401 and it was late when I got back. I checked my messages as soon as I got home, around ten-thirty and came over here right away."

  My breath came out slowly when I realized I had been holding it all along. These were all reasonable explanations of his whereabouts. We’d discuss why he didn’t call me, some other time.

  "Did Leech ask if you slept alone last night?" I said with a laugh.

  "No." He grabbed my hand and pulled me down on his lap where I curled up and put my head against his chest.

  "Why were you doing all that research? Checking out companies in your job search?"

  "No. As corny as it sounds, I was looking for the truth."

  "Ah, the eternal search for truth. Tell me old wise one, what’d you find?"

  He thought it would be better if he showed me.

  The file Jay retrieved from his car was about an inch thick and he sorted the various sheets of paper in piles on the kitchen table. He held up a few sheets stapled in the corner and passed them to me. The top sheet read University of Western Ontario, Richard Ivey School of Business, MBA Graduates, Class of 1998. Listed below, in alphabetical order were the names of the graduates. Jay’s name was highlighted in yellow on the second page.

  I smiled and passed it back to him. "Adding this to your resume?"

  He didn’t answer and handed me a single sheet of paper that had a section in the middle highlighted. I read in small type in the top, right-hand corner Who’s Who 2002. The highlighted section read Oakes, Christopher Earl, B.Comm., MBA: Chairman, CEO and member of the board of directors, TechniGroup Consulting Inc., B.Comm, University of Illinois, 1973, MBA, Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, 1975.

  The section went on to describe Chris’ past jobs, the charitable foundations he graced with his presence, and his marital status, or lack thereof.

  All of this was old news to me so I handed it back to Jay. He exchanged the Who’s Who photocopy with another single sheet which I immediately recognized. It was our company’s standard biography sheet which had a picture of Oakes and a couple of paragraphs describing his background. The few words describing his academic past were highlighted. I didn’t bother reading any of this and I looked expectantly at Jay who silently offered me another piece of paper.

  This one looked vaguely familiar. It was a photocopy of a trade magazine feature article about Chris Oakes that had been written about three months after Chris joined our company. The blurred photocopy didn’t do justice to the original photo that had appeared in the magazine. The photo had pictured Oakes sitting at a desk with an active computer screen behind him. The article had described Oakes as a real computer wizard and it talked about how he used the computer at all hours of the night, sending e-mails and messages to his employees and executives. The article was a joke be
cause Oakes didn’t even have a desk, let alone a computer in his office. Chris could no more operate a computer than I could fly a jetfighter. He was just like Rick Cox - a technophobe and ashamed to admit it. I remember when I read the article I thought they should have been referring to voice mail, not e-mail.

  Jay had highlighted several paragraphs that described Oakes’ academic achievements.

  I handed this back to him and said, "So?"

  "The coup de grace," he replied and handed me more papers. This set looked similar to the first one Jay had handed me. University of Western Ontario, Richard Ivey School of Business, Class of 1975.

  "Do you see Chris’ name anywhere on that list?" Jay asked me. I flipped the pages to find the O’s and carefully read the names.

  "You won’t find it on there," he told me as I read. "I checked the years before and after 1975, and his name doesn’t appear. I called the registrar’s office and they told me he was registered and dropped out in his first year."

  "So, the man’s a liar. Why hasn’t anyone discovered this before now?"

  "I don’t know. Maybe when someone reaches his level, they forget to check references," Jay said.

  "Well, Sherlock. What other goodies have you come up with?"

  "When I discovered that he’d dropped out of Western, I knew something was fishy in Denmark. I realized then that there was a missing link because his resume of his past jobs only starts after his alleged graduation from MBA school."

  "He was probably slinging hamburgers," I offered. "Not exactly something you want on your resume."

  "Well, Kate. I’ve discovered he wasn’t slinging hamburgers," he announced.