“Superior. A good description,” Sam agreed.
“Did he date, or have a girlfriend?” She knew Sam would understand why she asked this.
“I always had the impression he was somewhat of a ladies’ man,” Sam replied.
Tessa leaned down and adjusted her slacks. The ankle monitor caught on the material. “This is a pain, but in a good way.”
“Tessa, what do you want to know? I’ll be as honest and up-front with you as I can be, but if you don’t ask, I can’t help.”
So she was transparent, she thought as she turned to face Sam. “This is disgusting, but I’ll ask anyway. Did he ever strike you as a pedophile? Would you have suspected him of . . . doing what he did to my girls.”
“No.”
“How can you say that and sound so sure if you didn’t really know him? I don’t understand.”
“He did not strike me as a creepy pervert. Maybe a male whore, but I never had weird vibes in the sense that you’re asking. I wish I could be more concrete in my assessment of the guy, but you asked.”
She nodded. She had never picked up on any oddities in Liam, either. She didn’t like him. Why? He’d been arrogant. A show-off. Cocky. Too handsome in her opinion. But like Sam, she had not picked up on anything twisted about him. At least where . . . children were concerned. And when she actually thought about him in relation to Piper and Poppy, he genuinely seemed to care about them. In the true sense an uncle would. She had never seen the girls’ behavior change when he was around. If anything, they were more playful and outgoing when Liam came to the house. It made no sense. Tessa always reasoned that’s how these sick-ass people worked. No one would suspect them—Liam—of being a child molester.
A loud banging from downstairs sent her to her feet.
“That would be Harry. A bull in a china shop,” Sam observed, as they headed downstairs with the watch.
“Wait!” Tessa said, and ran back up the stairs. She grabbed the other bag with the checkbook and ran back downstairs in under a minute. “He might want to see this as well,” she said, a bit winded. “It’s a checkbook. I didn’t know Joel had a personal account.”
Sam took the bag from her.
Another loud bang from the front door.
“Stay here,” Sam said. “I’m sure the media hounds are out there just waiting to get a glimpse of you.”
Tessa nodded.
She did not want her face made public yet.
Chapter 10
Harry Mazza was the spitting image of what one would describe as a science nerd. Black horn-rimmed glasses, brown hair a bit too long and in need of combing, untucked pale blue dress shirt, and wrinkled slacks. Tessa recognized a kindred spirit at once, as she, too, had been a true science nerd in school.
Sam quickly introduced them.
“Yeah, good to meet you, lady. Now where’s that watch?” he asked Sam. “I’ll need to send it to the lab tonight.”
If circumstances had not been so dire, Tessa would have laughed at Harry Mazza. He had no manners whatsoever. But circumstances were dire and no laughing matter.
Sam handed Harry the Ziploc bag with the watch in it, along with the bag containing the checkbook. Harry, in turn, took a blue glove from his pocket, snapped it on his right hand, then removed the watch from the bag. He inspected it for several minutes, then took a small magnifying glass from another pocket. Taking his time, he inspected the watch at some length. “I’m going to make an educated guess here, but unless I am mistaken, this watch received a hard blow that made it stop. I can’t be one hundred percent sure until we examine it at the lab, but that’s my gut impression.”
Tessa looked at Sam, then at Harry. “With all due respect, Mr. Mazza, that can’t be right. Sam took that watch from Joel’s desk after . . . after his death.”
“Could be, but until we examine it in the lab, I’m sticking to what my gut says. That watch stopped when it was hit or dropped.”
“Sam?” Tessa looked to him for an explanation.
“I’m not an expert in forensics. As Harry says, let’s wait until it’s properly examined.”
Tessa walked into the kitchen, not caring that it was rude. What Harry Mazza implied could not be possible. Sam found that watch at the office in Joel’s desk. After his death. And the watch had stopped on Saturday, when she was already in San Maribel, and according to the evidence introduced at the trial, the murder had occurred on Friday, before she had gone to San Maribel. Sam had to be mistaken. He’d said there were five or six boxes from Joel’s office. She needed to find them and search for the watch that Sam had actually found in Joel’s desk. A stopped watch with the date of her family’s murder was impossible; it literally could not have been in Joel’s desk.
Sure that Sam was mistaken, she returned to the living room, where the two men were deep in conversation. She doubted they’d even registered that she had left the room.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Sam, where are the other boxes you took from Joel’s office? Nothing has been marked.”
“I brought all the boxes here. Right after the trial, a month or so, if memory serves me correctly. I’m sure I labeled them.”
“No, you couldn’t have. None of the boxes I searched had any type of writing on them. To be frank, I found it odd they weren’t labeled.”
Sam looked perplexed.
Harry
