David Baldacci - True Blue

Roy had told her what the Captain had said about the chain. Roy had dismissed it as the construction guys protecting their food. Mace had initially thought that too. But not now. Now the chain made sense for a far different reason. They couldn’t have the Captain stumble on the body over the weekend while he was looking for some chow. So they’d locked him out and Diane Tolliver’s body in.

She hadn’t been murdered on Monday morning. She’d been killed on Friday night, probably right after she sent Roy that e-mail when she returned from her dinner with Meldon. And the fridge wasn’t the only reason Mace thought this. Now the autopsy results started to make sense. She gazed at the microwave next to the fridge. The microwave. She remembered Roy telling her…

She slipped back down to the lobby and from there into the little room behind the security console. She saw the microwave perched on one shelf. She tried to turn it on. Nothing happened. It was broken. She hurried back up to the fourth floor, pulled out her phone, and called Roy.

“Hey,” he said. “That Tyler is something else. We’ve been playing ball all this time and the kid is still running circles around me.” He paused. “Wait a minute, I thought you went to bed? Where are you calling from?”

“Diane wasn’t killed on Monday morning. She was killed on Friday night.”

All she got after that was silence.

“Roy, did you hear me?”

“Mace, where are you!”

“On the fourth floor of your office building.”

“What! Are you crazy?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, I did, and I feel like somebody just hit me with a two-by-four. Why do you think she was killed on Friday night?”

“Think about what was in her stomach.”

“The autopsy report said steak, veggies, potatoes, stuff like that.”

“Exactly.”

“But you found all that food in her town house garbage can.”

“It’s also the exact food she had on Friday night at Simpsons when she had dinner with Meldon. And Lowell Cassell’s report said that there was a strong smell of garlic in the gastric contents. I knew something was bugging me about that. I searched her kitchen and found not a trace of garlic anywhere, not even in the trash. But I recalled from looking at the menu at Simpsons that they serve garlic mashed potatoes. I think whoever killed her knew what she’d eaten at the restaurant and planted all that stuff at her house to make it look like her last meal had been there , on Sunday night instead of on Friday night at Simpsons. Only they either didn’t know about the garlic or screwed up. And according to the autopsy report her stomach lining was really green from the spinach. I don’t think it got that way from it sitting in her gut overnight. More like over two days.”

“Then the body?”

“They killed her in your office on Friday night. Then she was put in the fridge on the fourth floor, probably while the Captain was asleep in another part of the construction space. You told me that he said he went to sleep when he got there and didn’t know if the chain was on there when he arrived. I’m sure it wasn’t because Diane didn’t get back to the office until after ten and the Captain was already on the fourth floor by then. So they threw her in and chained the fridge shut. The nail and hammer crew doesn’t work weekends. And the Captain left on Sunday like he said, because he probably ate what was lying around the fourth floor on Saturday, found he couldn’t open the fridge, and decided to bag it. They moved her body to the fridge in your office early on Monday morning. Then you found her.”

“Why not just leave her in our fridge for the weekend?”

“They couldn’t be sure some lawyer might not come in to work and pop open the fridge. And they couldn’t wrap a chain around your refrigerator. And most importantly, I think they did all this to set up the Captain for the fall.”

“I guess they could have found out he was sneaking in the building.”

“I’ve got a theory about that too. And I discovered that the sperm bank had an alarm system failure on Wednesday of last week.”

“You think that’s when they got the sample from the Captain?”

“The place is closed on Wednesdays and Sundays. Sperm only lasts so long. Cassell told me that the sperm in Tolliver clearly had been there longer than a day but not longer than three days. They probably put it in a freezer after they got it from the Captain on Wednesday to preserve it temporarily. Then after they killed Tolliver, they injected it into her vagina on Friday night. Cassell told me that a guy with the probable health problems of the Captain couldn’t have had an erection in just an hour or so on Monday morning. And he couldn’t have ejaculated to the degree required to place the sperm that high up in her cervix. But I bet a syringe would’ve done the trick.”

“This is incredible, Mace.”

“But it fits. The temp in the fridge keeps the body from decomposing. Two hours or two days in an icebox, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference, particularly when she was lying on the floor for all that time while the police were investigating. And then the body was taken to the morgue and stuck in a chiller bed. All the normal forensic indicators got messed up big-time.”

“But I thought she sent e-mails and made phone calls over the weekend from her house.”

“E-mails prove nothing. Anyone could have sent those. And it seems all the calls she made over the weekend were to people she didn’t know. So they couldn’t recognize her voice. I learned there was one neighbor who saw her but only really observed her drive off. He couldn’t make a positive ID. And the lady apparently didn’t have many social friends; she used an escort, after all. The imposter probably stayed at her house all weekend playing the role of Diane. She drives her car to the office early Monday morning so no one else would be around to see, goes up in the elevator, and enters the office suite, which leaves an electronic trail of her movements. Then she turns around and walks back out.”

“But Ned swears he heard her come in on Monday morning.”

“Yeah, Ned. Remember he was in the back microwaving his breakfast?”

“Yeah, that’s why he said he heard her but didn’t see her.”

“But you told me the day porter was on the fourth floor heating up his soup in a microwave. Why not use the one in the room behind the security console? The one Ned said he was using that morning?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll tell you. Because the microwave in the lobby is broken. I bet if we ask the day porter he’ll tell us the same thing. That it’s been broken for a while.”

“So are you saying fat, stupid Ned planned all this and killed Diane?”

“He’s fat, but I’m not sure how stupid he is. And I don’t think he did any of this alone. I think he looked the other way when the Captain sneaked in the building, because he was told to.”

“Mace, we need to go to your sister and tell her all of this. I’ll meet you there.”

“And tell her what? A bunch of speculation? Because that’s all it is. We don’t have solid proof of anything.”

“So what do we do?”

“You prepare for your hearing tomorrow. I’m going to Newark. We say nothing. But we keep an eye on old Ned and he might just lead us to where we need to go.”

“I don’t want you getting your neck crushed by that guy.”

“I’d hear him coming from a mile away just by the fat sloshing.”

“Okay, but will you get back here please? At least then I’ll know you’re safe.”

“Oh, Roy, you really do care,” she said sarcastically.

“If anything happens to you, your sister will blame me. And I’d rather be dead.”