“She may not have told him about you,” Epstein said.
“If she had,” I said, “someone would have come after me.”
“True,” Epstein said. “And no one has.”
“Once he got mad,” I said, “she probably didn’t want him to know that it was even worse than he thought.”
“Dennis was FBI,” Epstein said. “He’d know how. Alderson probably thought Dennis did the bugging.”
“Yes.”
“And the next morning after she told him this she was killed, and that same day, probably, her husband was killed.”
“Sounds like Alderson,” I said. “Doesn’t it?”
Epstein was nodding as he walked.
“And when they searched his house and found the tape they thought they’d got it all?”
“She probably minimized the damage when she told him about the tape,” I said.
“Seems a lot of trouble,” Epstein said, “kill two people just to avoid being mentioned in a divorce proceeding.”
“I guess he valued his privacy.”
“You have a tail on the woman the day she was killed?”
Epstein said.
“Yes.”
“And it was your guy plugged the shooter.”
“Yes.”
Epstein walked past my desk into the little bay behind me, and looked down at the street and sipped his coffee. Neither of us spoke.
Then Epstein said, “Lotta nice-looking women walk by here.”
“They do?” I said.
Epstein turned from the window and smiled.
“So,” he said. “You got a theory of the case?”
“I do,” I said.
“How ’bout that,” Epstein said.
“I think that Alderson believed that he could insulate himself from any investigation by killing the only two people who knew anything. Jordan, because they were lovers. Doherty, because he’d heard the tape.”
“Uh-huh,” Epstein said. “Except the tape Doherty heard didn’t have anything actually incriminating, unless we still prosecute for adultery.”
“But Alderson didn’t know that,” I said. “Until he listened, by which time both Jordan Richmond and Dennis Doherty were dead.”
Epstein nodded slowly, paused to drink some coffee, and nodded some more.
“So he tries to make it look like Doherty killed her when he learned of the affair,” Epstein said. “And then, crazed with grief, he killed himself.”
“But would the cops know of the affair?”
“We learned that she and Alderson were an item when we began investigating her death,” Epstein said. “Lotta people knew.”
“And,” I said, “when you got to him he could say,
“But your guy tailing Jordan ruins it by putting one into the shooter’s head. Nice shot, or a lucky one, hit him under the right eye.”
“It wasn’t luck,” I said. “Too bad, though. If he hadn’t been so good, the guy might not be dead and we might have an ID.”
Epstein fi nished his coffee.
“Too bad,” Epstein said.
“You knew who Alderson was before I ever came to see you,”
I said.
“He was a person of interest,” Epstein said. “But pretty low priority.”
“And his organization,” I said.
Epstein shrugged.
“Like you told us everything,” he said.
“You started it,” I said.
