murders.”
Henry draped an arm around the girl, protectively. “Why is she here?”
“For one thing, I’ve seen the women you’ve been dating lately,” Shawn said.
Henry pulled his arm away from the girl, embarrassed. But she grabbed his hand and wrapped it around her, then snuggled close to him.
“As I said, we are here to solve a series of baffling crimes,” Shawn continued. “Who killed John Marichal? Who killed Dallas Steele? Who killed Betty Walinski?”
“Tara Larison,” Coules said. “Can we go home now?”
“Impossible,” Shawn said. “Tara couldn’t have killed all those people.”
“Why not?” Lassiter said.
“Because she’s the most obvious suspect,” Shawn said.
“Right, because she’s killed a bunch of people before,” O’Hara said.
“But the most obvious suspect is never the killer,” Shawn said. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Gus stared at him. “This is all you’ve got?”
Shawn shrugged. “It sounded good when I came up with it.”
Gus stared down at the ice cubes in his glass. Maybe if he studied them hard enough, he’d find a subliminal picture of the real killer. Because that looked like the only thing that was going to keep the police from taking Shawn’s confession in a couple of hours.
“Actually, Mr. Spencer, the likeliest suspect is almost always guilty,” Chief Vick said. “That’s what makes them obvious-evidence they’ve created in their commission of the crimes.”
Coules and the detectives muttered their agreement. Shawn held up a hand to silence them.
“Then let me give you another reason why I know Tara didn’t kill John Marichal and Betty Walinski,” Shawn said. “Because she did kill Fred Larison and Aunt Enid. Because this very morning she tried to kill Gus.”
“Well, I’m convinced,” Lassiter muttered. “Can we go home now?”
“Every one of those killings was staged to look like an accident,” Shawn said. “A fall down the stairs, a trip over a skateboard. At first I assumed, like you, that this was the work of a canny criminal covering up her crimes. But then she tried to kill Gus, and even though we caught her in the act, she insisted that it was an accident.”
“That’s right,” Gus said. Maybe there was hope outside of the dream of an ice-cube portrait. “She claimed I fell down a flight of stairs in a one-story building.”
“So she’s nuts,” Coules said. “Big deal.”
“It is a big deal. She needs to believe she’s not a killer, just the victim of a series of tragic accidents. That’s why she fooled me for so long. Because even though she had killed several people, she was completely convinced in her own mind that she didn’t.”
“So when you read her aura, it proclaimed her innocence,” Veronica said.
Shawn shot her a grateful smile. “Exactly. But for her to keep up the illusion, when she killed, she arranged the scene to look like an accident. Whoever killed John Marichal and Betty Walinski didn’t bother to make them look like anything other than victims of cold-blooded murder.”
Shawn turned to Gus to see how he was doing. Gus gave him a quick thumbs-up.
“What about Dallas Steele?” Arno rattled his handcuffs for emphasis. “I saw her kill him. And I’m willing to testify-as long as they reduce these ridiculous charges against me.”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” Shawn said. “And so is Fluffy, by the way.”
Arno made a move toward Shawn, but Lassiter pulled him back.
“You didn’t see Tara kill Steele. You saw her standing over him with a knife.”
“The knife forensics proved was the murder weapon,” Coules said.
“She made no attempt to hide or to claim Steele’s death was an accident,” Shawn said. “So we can all agree that Tara is innocent.”
Chief Vick held up her watch. “The one thing we can all agree on is that you have twenty-eight minutes left.”
“If Tara didn’t kill these people, who did?” Shawn said. “Before we can answer that question, we have to understand what an ex-con, a tackle shop widow, and a billionaire venture capitalist who didn’t know how to tie his shoes in kindergarten had in common.”
“Nothing,” Lassiter said.
“Do you think so?” Shawn said. “Let’s go back to the beginning and figure out where it all began. At first I thought it was the towing of Gus’ car. That’s what took us to the impound lot.”
“He was parked illegally,” Lassiter snapped.
“But that’s not what kept us at the impound lot.” Shawn ignored Lassiter as he plowed on. “Six thousand dollars of parking tickets did that. So we have to go back a little further to discover where this story really begins. To find our killer, we need to understand who is responsible for those tickets.”
“Umm, you?” Gus said. There was one ice cube that seemed to be growing a face as it melted.
“Only in a technical sense,” Shawn said. “I accuse… her.” He pointed a finger at the coffee girl, who gazed back at him, perplexed.
“Me?”
Henry pulled her to his side. “Shawn, this is ridiculous.”
“Is it really?” Shawn said.
“Yes,” Gus said. The face on the cube was looking more like an elephant and less like a suspect. Gus rattled the ice, hoping to find another image. Instead, he saw something on the bottom of the glass. It looked like a shard of gray plastic.
“Think about it,” Shawn said. “She’s a seemingly insignificant player in the drama. We never even saw her once over the course of the investigation, but somehow her name kept on coming up.”
“We don’t even know her name,” Gus said.
“It’s Mindy,” the coffee girl said. She looked up at Henry adoringly. “Mindy Stackman. I’m in the book.”
“Why do you think there were all those constant, subtle, seemingly meaningless references to a character we never see? To establish her as a plausible suspect. And then she appears here for reasons no one understands.”
“She’s here because I brought her here,” Lassiter said. “And I brought her here because she was on your list.”
“And now she’s finally unmasked as the real killer,” Shawn concluded. “Can you imagine an ending more satisfying than that? More technically perfect? Even Joe Eszterhas would approve, and he wrote both Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct. ”
“He also wrote F.I.S.T., which is what you’re going to get in your face if you don’t stop saying things about me.” Mindy looked around at the accusing faces. “What? You’ve never seen a film major working at a coffeehouse before?”
“Fourteen minutes, Mr. Spencer,” Chief Vick said.
“Is there one reason why we shouldn’t think Mindy is the killer?”
“There’s no evidence,” O’Hara said.
“There’s no motive,” Lassiter said.
“There’s no connection,” Coules said. “Except some arbitrary pattern you imposed on a series of events because it’s convenient for you.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” Shawn said.
“Obviously,” Coules said.
“So why wasn’t it just as bad when you assumed that Dallas Steele’s murder was connected to the killings of John Marichal and Betty Walinski?”
Gus stopped trying to fish the thing out of the glass. Shawn actually seemed to be on the verge of a point. “The only reason to accuse Tara is a pattern. And the police created that pattern.”
“She was holding the knife!” Coules said.
“And because of that, you created this pattern that said she must have committed those other two murders,” Shawn said. “Because she’s the one person who could have had any reason, no matter how vague, for killing all three victims. But if you stop assuming there’s only one killer, there’s no reason for her to have done any of it.”
