“Melanie, Carson Graham was murdered last night.”
She swallowed hard and nodded. “I know. I saw it on the news.” Her face twisted. “We were…friends. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Melanie, we know about your affair.”
She just stared at them for a long moment, dread pulling at her expression. “My husband…he doesn’t know. Is there any way to keep this quiet? He’s out of town for a few more days. I really can’t let him find out.” Her lower lip began to quiver, and she started to cry. She covered her mouth, and her brow pleated as she stared at them.
“Do you think he knows already?”
She looked at them then, her eyes rounding. “You think…No, it wasn’t my husband! He’s not a killer. He’s been in Canada on business for the last three weeks. He has no idea. It’s not him, Cade.”
“Do you have any idea who might have wanted Carson dead?”
She got up, grabbed a tissue. “I told him. I told him to be careful, that he was playing with fire.”
Cade glanced up at McCormick. His muscles were rigid with attention. He looked back at the woman. “Melanie, what did he tell you about Lisa Jackson’s murder?”
She was sobbing now, clearly losing control. “He was a witness. He spent the night with me that night. My husband wasn’t home, and Carson’s wife was working a double shift at the hospital. He walked over so no one would see his van here. He was leaving my house around ten that morning, walking home, when he saw someone pushing Lisa’s car into the river.” She looked at Cade through her tears. “That person has to be the one who killed Carson!”
Cade wanted to be careful now. He didn’t want to frighten her away from giving him a name. “I think he could have been, Melanie. That’s why your account is so important.”
“I knew it.” She got up again and walked across the room. “I told him! When Carson tried to get money out of him, I told him he was dealing with a killer. That he was putting his life in danger! He thought he had it all under control.”
Cade’s heart stopped. “So he was blackmailing the killer?”
“Yes! Only he wouldn’t tell me who it was. I really don’t know, Cade. You’ve got to believe me.” She went to the front window as she spoke and peered out, as if she feared someone was watching her.
Cade shot McCormick a look. She knew who it was. She knew and wasn’t telling, but her own fear spoke volumes.
“Melanie, I’m afraid we need to take you in to the station and take a statement from you.”
She swung around. “You’re arresting me?”
“Not yet. Not unless we think you’re lying…or withholding important information about a homicide case.”
She grunted and looked at him as if she couldn’t believe he distrusted her. “I’m telling you, Cade, I don’t know a thing.”
“Then why are you looking out that window like you know someone’s going to come for you?”
“Because he might know about me. He might think Carson told me.”
“Then you’ll be safer at the police station anyway,” McCormick said.
Her face changed as she saw the wisdom in his words. “All right. Let me get dressed, and I’ll come with you.”
CHAPTER 74
By the time they got Melanie back to the police station, there was a message waiting for Cade. “Chief, this woman named Kylie Hyatt said she needs to talk to you,” Alex Johnson said. “She says she knows who killed Lisa Jackson.”
Cade grabbed the message and stared down at it. “Who is she?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say.”
Cade called the number, and a man answered in a gruff, phlegmy voice. “Yeah?”
“This is Chief Cade of the Cape Refuge Police Department. I’m calling for Kylie Hyatt.”
“She wants to talk to you in person,” the man said. He gave him an address in Savannah.
Cade frowned. “All right, but first tell me who she is and what she has to do with this case.”
There was a long pause, then, “She’s Dr. Alan Sims’ maid—and that’s all I’m going to say until you get here.”
The phone went dead in his hand, and he stared down at it. Sims’ maid?
He rolled the tapes back through his mind, of his visit to Sims’ house right after the murder. “Excuse the mess. My maid is AWOL, and my wife has been in Europe for the past week. It doesn’t usually look like this.” On his last visit, Sims had mentioned that his maid “up and quit.”
Maybe there was a reason she was AWOL.
Maybe she’d witnessed a murder.
Cade hurried out of his office to the interview room where McCormick sat with Melanie. He motioned him out and closed the door.
“I just got a call from Sims’ maid. She wants to talk to me. I think this might be our smoking gun. Let’s leave Melanie here to stew in her juices while we go interview this woman.”
CHAPTER 75
Kylie Hyatt lived in a neighborhood of HUD houses and low-income rental units in Savannah. It was early in the evening, but even now, several men loitered out on the street, and women who looked as if they had long ago traded in their dignity for a drug fix stood on the corners. They all scattered at the sight of Cade’s police vehicle, as if he’d come to make a sweep.
Cade had notified Savannah police that they’d be questioning Hyatt, and invited them to escort him and McCormick since it was their turf. They opted out, since it was Cade’s case. McCormick followed him to the ramshackle door, and he knocked. Heavy footsteps shook the house, and then the door came open.
An obese man with a dingy white tank top and a cigarette in his mouth looked out at them. “You’re here.”
Cade showed him his badge. “I’m Chief Cade, and this is Detective McCormick.”
“Come in.” The door opened, and a small, plump woman peered past the man. “I’m Kylie,” she said as they came into the dimly lit house.
The place reeked of tobacco and mold, and had decades of dirt ground into the vinyl tiles. The paint on the walls was peeling. But there was no clutter. Everything seemed in its place.
The woman had a nervous tick that kept twitching in her cheek. “I should have called you sooner, but I was scared. After I heard about that woman’s murder, I didn’t know what to do. Now that there’s a second murder…well, I just couldn’t stay quiet any longer.”
She sat down, and Cade sat next to her on the dirty couch.
“Excuse the way the place looks. This is my brother’s house.” She looked up at the obese man. “Roy isn’t as neat as I’d like for him to be. I’ve been trying to clean up since I’ve been here.”
“Don’t go apologizing for my place, Sis. It ain’t none of their business how I keep house.”
Cade didn’t want to get sidetracked. “Miss Hyatt, you said you had something to tell us.”
Kylie went to the window and peered out as if she expected the killer to come walking up her porch steps. The nervous gesture was so similar to what Melanie had done this morning. “I was supposed to be off that day—”
“What day?” Cade asked.
“The day that lady was murdered.”
“May 16,” Cade said, and Kylie nodded.
“I hadn’t left yet, though. Mrs. Sims went to Europe a couple of days before, and they’d given me a long weekend. Dr. Sims thought I was already gone, but Roy hadn’t come to get me yet, and when that woman came banging on the door, I listened.”
“What woman? Lisa Jackson?”
“Yes. He let her in, and she was hysterical. She called him a fraud and accused him of tricking her and deceiving her for money. Said he had robbed her of her childbearing years, that she was going to expose him. I felt like I was eavesdropping—and I didn’t want Dr. Sims to get mad and fire me—so I went on outside and waited for Roy on the street.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“No, that’s all. Just an argument. She was very angry.”
“Was she still there when Roy came?”
r /> “Yes. I was so glad to get out of there.” Kylie burst into tears and covered her mouth with a trembling hand. “And then when I heard about her disappearance, and when she was found…I knew he killed her.”
Cade’s heart fell. “But you didn’t see him do it.”
She shook her head. “No, but she was so angry, and the things she was accusing him of were terrible. He must have snapped…”
He looked at McCormick. This was not the smoking gun they’d hoped for. Too bad she hadn’t stuck around to see what else had happened, but the fact that Sims had lied about Lisa coming to see him didn’t look good. If only they’d known all this earlier. “Miss Hyatt, why didn’t you call the police before now?”
“I was scared. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go back there, but I was afraid to come forward.” She started to fall apart then, and her brother came over and put his arms around her.
“It’s okay, Sis. You’ve done the right thing now.” He looked up at them over her head. “You get him, officers. You lock him up so he can’t hurt my sister.”
Cade intended to do just that.
CHAPTER 76
The waiting room in the fertility clinic was full of patients, both men and women, waiting for Sims to play God with their reproductive systems and give them hope—or take it away. They all looked up as Cade came in with two uniformed officers.
Armed with an arrest warrant, which the DA had finally granted him, he bypassed the receptionist’s desk and pushed through the door into the back. A nurse was coming toward them, and she stepped back, startled.
“I need to see Dr. Sims,” Cade said in a low voice. “Where is he?”
“He’s with a patient right now.”
“Which room?”
She pointed to the room, but stepped in front of him. “You can’t go in there!”
“Knock on the door. Tell him to step out here.”
She did as she was told, and after a moment, Sims stepped through the door. His face drained of color as he saw his visitors. “Chief Cade, what are you doing—?”
“Alan Sims, you are under arrest for the murder of Lisa Jackson. You have the right to remain silent…”
“You’re out of your mind!”
One of the officers snapped a cuff over one of Sims’ wrists, but he twisted away before he could click the other one into place. Cade’s men descended on him, wrestling him to the ground.
“I didn’t do it, you idiots! I didn’t kill anybody!”
He fought to get away, but within seconds the other cuff snapped around his wrist, and Sims was jerked to his feet. His face was red and he breathed hard. “Elaine, call my lawyer! Tell him they’re trying to frame me for Lisa Jackson’s murder!” He swung back to Cade. “You’re going to regret this, Cade! We’re going to sue the socks off of you for this.”
Cade grabbed his arm and led him back through the nurses. The doorway to Sims’ waiting room came open, and the patients who’d put their faith in him watched, stunned, as their doctor was dragged away.
CHAPTER 77
Okay, she came to see me, but I didn’t kill her.”
Sims sat in the interview room at the police station, rubbing his sweating face with both hands. He’d finally confessed that he saw Lisa the morning of her death, but in the last hour of grilling, he hadn’t confessed to anything else.
“Why did you lie to us when we asked you when you’d last seen her?” Cade demanded.
“Because I was scared. If you knew she came to see me that morning, you would have thought I did it. I’m not stupid. When I first heard she’d disappeared, I thought she’d gone off somewhere and killed herself.”
“Why would she kill herself when Dr. Anderson had finally given her hope?”
“I didn’t know. She was crazed with anger and rage, not thinking rationally. Then when she was found murdered…” He rubbed his face again. “I was shocked. It was too much of a coincidence that it would happen on the same day.”
“Coincidence, all right,” McCormick said. “But I don’t really believe in coincidences. You, Cade?”
“No, I don’t. Not in murder cases.”
“Come on,” Sims said. “I know it looks terrible. It couldn’t look worse, but I did not kill her.”
“So she confronted you about lying to her.”
“I made a mistake with her diagnosis.”
Cade thought of the tape he’d heard of him trying to convince Morgan to mortgage her life to pay for IVF, the lies he’d probably told her about her fertility, and that same rage boiled up inside him. Slowly, he stood up and leaned over the table. “You didn’t make a mistake with Lisa, Sims. You lied flat out. Falsified her test results. Exploited her fears to get money out of her. And you kept her from getting the help she needed so she could have a family.”
Sims looked at the ceiling, shaking his head. “I’ll fight this. I’ll get the best lawyers money can buy.”
“They won’t help you, Sims. We have too much on you.”
He considered that a moment, then his hand closed into a fist, and he gritted his teeth. “Even if everything you said was true, I did not kill her. She came to me rabidly angry, shouting threats and accusing me of…all those things. I never touched her. Then she left my house. I followed her out, trying to convince her it was a mistake, begging her not to go public with her accusations, but she got into her car and sped off. I never saw her again.”
“Pretty convenient that she died before she could have you arrested.”
“I didn’t do it! But Ben probably did. She probably went home and had it out with him. I’m telling you, she was in a rage. Maybe he was defending himself, then didn’t know what to do.”
Cade believed she might have been killed in self-defense, but he was certain that Sims had been the one to do it. Nothing else made any sense.
A knock sounded on the door, and Cade looked up.
“Chief, can I see you for a minute?”
Cade got up and went out into the squad room. Caldwell nodded toward the television on in the corner. “Vince Barr is on again.”
Cade moaned and limped over to the set. “Man, he doesn’t waste any time.”
“The drama continues to unfold,” Vince said to Shepherd Smith. “But if Dr. Sims is the man, then he very well could have killed both Lisa and Carson Graham. Kylie Hyatt, the woman who worked as Alan Sims’ maid, told me just a few minutes ago that she reported to police that Lisa Jackson paid Sims a visit the morning of her disappearance. She had just gotten the results of a second opinion she’d obtained from another doctor, and learned that Sims had been lying to her about her fertility problem for the last thirteen years…”
Cade almost turned the set off. He turned back to the others in the squad room and saw that they all anticipated an explosion. “If one of you has been talking to this man, so help me…”
“Though Miss Hyatt left before it came to blows, she feels certain that her employer is the one who strangled Lisa Jackson with a telephone cord, and then disposed of her body, in order to keep her from exposing him as a fraud.”
Cade swung back around and stared at the set. How had Barr known about the telephone cord? They found it on the floor of the car, bagged it as evidence, and kept it quiet. Only McCormick and two of the detectives from the State Police knew about it. Cade hadn’t even told his men.
It was something only the killer could know.
His heart started to pound, and sweat broke out on his face. He turned back to the interview room and looked at that door. Was it possible…could Sims and Jackson and Melanie Adams all be telling the truth? Could the killer be someone else entirely?
He turned back to the screen. Could it be someone who’d gotten famous from the story, who’d carefully orchestrated events so that it would garner national attention? Could it be the man who was reporting the story almost as fast as Cade was uncovering the facts?
“McCormick!” He limped to his office.
McCormick came out of the i
nterview room. “What is it, Cade?”
“We’ve got more work to do. There’s been a new development.”
CHAPTER 78
Vince Barr’s background only added to Cade’s suspicion. The man had a history of blowing mediocre stories into spectacular headlines, but he’d failed at getting much attention out of any of them. Cade did a search for Barr’s name on the Internet, and amid the hundreds of articles Barr had written, Cade found a few about the writer, himself.
“Take a look at this.” Cade turned his monitor so McCormick could see it. “Here’s an AP report that came out an hour or so ago about the Lisa Jackson case and the media coverage of it. They’re talking about how a local case turned into a national drama, and they quote Barr. He says, ‘The timing was perfect for this case to break. No war news, no terrorist attacks, no hurricanes, no interesting politics filling the news. So when this attractive woman is killed and her husband is the immediate suspect, it can’t help pique national interest. And as awful as this sounds, even the murder of Carson Graham couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. For those of us writing about it, it’s like a dream come true.”
McCormick rubbed his hand over his shaven head. “Okay, so let me get this straight. Didn’t Sam Sullivan tell us that he went to Vince Barr with the rumor of Ben’s affair?”
“Yes he did. Said Vince wasn’t interested in local politics.”
“But maybe that was the springboard Vince needed to set up the perfect story. One that he could help unfold, so he could give the national news shows a play-by-play.”
Cade couldn’t believe they’d been chasing down the wrong trails. “So you think he mulled this alleged affair over in his mind, then decided that it really would be a story if the candidate’s wife turned up dead?”
“So he makes it happen—and he’s on top of the story from Day One.”
“What about Carson Graham?”