J. Jance - Name Witheld

"When I first told you about Lizbeth, Mr. Moore, you asked me if her husband had killed her. Was there any particular reason you said that? Do you know anything about him that would make him a possible suspect in your mind?"

Harry thought for a moment before he answered. "I think Don wanted to be rid of her," he said. "I don't think he had any idea that she wouldn't give him up without a fight. I think he just expected her to lie down, play dead, and take his word as gospel about their not being married. But she wouldn't do that. The last thing she ever said to me was that some things were worth fighting for, and marriage was one of them. I couldn't believe it. Sometimes I just don't understand women at all, do you Detective Beaumont?"

"No," I said. "Not at all. But let me ask you one more thing, Mr. Moore. This is about Don Wolf now. How close is the biotech community down there?"

"Did you say community?" he returned. "That's not quite the right term, Detective Beaumont. I'd say it's closer to a snake pit. Why?"

"But do you pretty much know what the other guys in your field are doing?"

"Of course. Nobody in his right mind turns his back on another snake. Why?"

"I was told Don Wolf had a considerable reputation as a financial wizard in biotech. His previous places of employment were listed as Downlink of San Diego, California; Bio-Dart Technologies, Pasadena, California; Holman-Smith Industries, City of Industry, California. Ever heard of them?"

"Never," Harry Moore replied. "I can do some checking around, if you like, and see what I come up with."

"You do that, Mr. Moore. And let me know what you find out."

I put down the phone in Gabe Rios's messy office and sat there staring at it. Latty Gibson and Lizbeth Dorn Wolf weren't the only people Don Wolf had lied to. He had also pulled the wool over Bill Whitten's eyes. Of the three, Whitten seemed like the only one who had seen through to the real back-stabbing Don Wolf. And maybe he, more than the others, had been prepared to defend himself.

All of which meant that Bill Whitten was right. He needed to stay on my list of prime suspects, and although it was a very short list, I reminded myself to keep him close to the top. Right under Latty Gibson.

I had no more than put down the phone after talking to Harry Moore when a proud Gabe Rios appeared in the door to his office. Grinning from ear to ear, he gave me the old thumbs up.

"Congratulations, Detective Beaumont. You've got yourself a Seecamp thirty-two auto murder weapon," he said.

"Gee, thanks," I returned glumly.

Gabe frowned. "What's the matter, Beau? For somebody who just found a critical piece of evidence, you don't sound very happy."

"I'm not," I said. "I may have a murder weapon, but that doesn't mean I have a murderer."

Gabe shrugged and booted me out of his chair. "You have to start somewhere," he said. "For right now, I just eyeballed things. I'll get the official ballistics report put together and sent up to you through regular channels. You should have it by the first of next week."

"That's the soonest I can have it?"

"You know it is."

"What about prints?"

"Wiped clean."

"That figures," I said.

Grace Highsmith obviously watched too many police dramas on television. How could I possibly have expected anything else?

"Okay," Gabe said. "Out of my chair so I can get back to work."

As I vacated the chair, he was already reaching for the magazine he had been reading when I had first entered his office. "Reading magazines?" I asked with more than a trace of sarcasm. "Is that really part of your job description?"

He grinned. "What do you think?" he asked. "How else am I going to stay up-to-date?"

On the way back to Seattle, I puzzled over what I had learned so far. The gun-Grace Highsmith's gun-really was the weapon that had been used to murder Don Wolf. That lent a good deal of credence to the theory that Latty Gibson was the killer, and that Aunt Grace had attempted to confess to the crime in an effort to save her niece from a long prison term.

But if Grace had gone to the trouble of confessing to one murder, why not to both? If a capable defense attorney-and Suzanne Crenshaw seemed plenty cagey-could somehow manage a plea of temporary insanity. If evidence of the rape were somehow admitted into courtroom proceedings, that could possibly prove mitigating circumstance.

But with all the focus on Latty, I couldn't afford to ignore the other possibilities. The other detectives and I had somehow fallen into the trap of thinking that Don Wolf had been the first to die. But that might not be the case. The question raised by Harry Moore about whether or not Don Wolf had murdered Lizbeth was one that merited some serious consideration.

And then, there in the distance, stood Bill Whitten. Another station heard from, as they say, and one I couldn't afford to ignore.

I must have driven another five miles or so before I realized what I had done. Even lacking proper identification, I had given the second victim a name. In my mind, Audrey Cummings notwithstanding, the dead woman found in Don Wolf's apartment was Lizbeth Wolf and nobody else. Harry Moore had told me that Don Wolf had been determined to be rid of his relatively new wife. One way or another, now he was.

The trip back to Seattle from Tacoma took far less time than the drive down. Part of that was due to the fact that I was dreading the inevitable ass-chewing from Captain Powell. But by the time I finally made it back to the fifth floor at ten past seven that evening, I knew I was home free. Powell's a day-shift kind of guy. He might stay late to work a case, but never just to issue a reprimand.

Ducking into my cubicle, I paused long enough to take three messages off my voice mail. One was from someone I didn't know-a lady named Hilda Chisholm. She left two numbers-both for work and home-without giving me even a glimmer of information as to why she was calling. That wasn't particularly disturbing or unusual. In my line of work, I often receive phone calls from witnesses who are reluctant to leave important information of any kind on a recording device. They have to be handled on a person-to-person basis. Consequently, I started my next day's TO DO list by writing Hilda Chisholm's name on the topmost line. Then I retrieved my next message.

That one was from Lucille Enders down in La Jolla. "Detective Beaumont," she said, "I just left Anna Dorn's house. I've talked to her, told her that Don Wolf is dead and that her daughter may be as well. That way, in case something shows up on the news, at least she's been warned. She's taking the whole thing pretty hard. She requested that you not call back until tomorrow morning. I did ask her if she knew any other next of kin on her son-in-law, and she said she couldn't help us there. She told me that if he had any family, he never mentioned them to her."

Bless you, Lucille, I said to myself as I erased her message and wrote Captain Powell's name directly beneath Hilda Chisholm's. Being able to tell him that the next-of-kin notification was a fait accompli might help bail me out of the Larry Powell doghouse, as far as Grace Highsmith's public nonconfession was concerned.

Lucille Enders' message buoyed me up. The third one left me reeling.

"Hello, Beau," the voice said. "This is Dave-Dave Livingston, calling from Rancho Cucamonga."

My heart fell. I would have recognized Dave Livingston's voice even without the tagline introduction. Dave is my first wife's-Karen's-second husband. I could tell from the minute quaver in his voice-the slight hesitation between words-that this wouldn't be good news. Karen had been battling cancer for more than two years-most of that time without my knowing anything about it. I gripped the phone tightly and braced myself for whatever was coming.