“I know it was stupid, but I just panicked. Before I really thought about what I was doing, I grabbed the knife from his chest, wiped it clean, and threw it into an urn in the hallway.”
Thad had not been at a meeting in Richmond, as she had told me earlier. The truth was that she hadn’t seen him since the night before. He’d come over to her place Sunday night and they’d fought.
“Arthur could be hard on his boys.” Tabitha’s hand shook as she wiped a tear from the corner of her eye; the massive diamond on her left ring finger caught the light as she moved. “He loved them, but often held them to an impossible standard, particularly Thad, being the firstborn and all.”
Tabitha said the two had gotten into it yet again about Thad’s being in pharmaceutical sales. Dr. Davenport felt like Thad had chosen the path of least resistance instead of rising to his potential and going to medical school like his brother.
Thad told Tabitha that Arthur was halfway into a bottle of Macallan when Thad got home Sunday night. “He started in about how it was so embarrassing when Thad walked in ‘hawking his crap’ in front of his colleagues. He said how much smarter and more motivated David is, and why can’t he be more like him . . . he just went on and on.
“Thad has the patience of a saint. Obviously.” She threw me a guilty look from under her lashes. “So he was pretty good about letting that kind of stuff roll off, but I guess it got to him that night because he started yelling back. Thad said it got bad—years of resentment started coming out, both of them yelling and screaming at each other.
“He came to my place around 7:45 as upset as I’ve ever seen him. He said he was going to show his father that he couldn’t control him. He said he was going to tell his father that he didn’t need him or his money anymore.” Tabitha’s face twisted in anguish. “I know it was wrong of me—and selfish—but all I could think about was the wedding and where we would get married. I mean, we have less than two weeks to go and the invitations have already gone out and—” Fresh tears sprang to her eyes and she wiped them away quickly. “Anyway. Then we fought. It was awful, we almost never fight. Thad got so angry, he left my place at just after nine and said he was going to stay with his brother.”
I was rapt listening to this story and wondered how much of it Carl Haight knew. This certainly did not look good for Thad.
“So why did you go over to the house the next day?”
She took a deep breath. “Arthur and I had always gotten along really well, and I just thought if I could talk to him and get him to calm down, maybe he’d apologize to Thad and we could go on like none of it ever happened. But then I saw him lying there . . . with Thad’s knife . . . I mean, of course I knew Thad would never—could never—but I just reacted out of protective instinct and now . . .” This was the most genuine emotion I’d ever seen from Tabitha in all the years I’d known her.
“I called you for help, but by the time you got there I was so freaked out by what I’d done, I couldn’t even admit it to you, so I made up that stuff about the obituary.”
“I had a feeling there was more to the story than just you wanting me to write the obit,” I said.
She nodded. “I called you because you were able to get to the truth of what happened to Jordan, even after the sheriff closed the case. I need you to do the same thing here, Riley. You’re not one of those people who just accepts things at face value.” She said this like it was both a compliment and an insult. “And despite the face value here, there is no way Thad killed his father. He doesn’t have a violent bone in his body. You have to help us!”
“Does Thad know what you did?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I didn’t have time to tell him. I hoped to tell him on the drive over to the station, but they separated us.” She dropped her face into her hands and took another deep, steadying breath. With her eyes still focused on the carpet below, she said, “I know I have to tell Carl, but once I do he probably won’t even look for other suspects. He’ll focus all his energy on Thad—and me.”
She had a point there. Dr. Davenport was a wealthy man and Thad (and by extension, Tabitha) stood to inherit a lot of money after his death. When you added in the rocky personal relationship, the murder weapon or weapons being in Thad’s possession, and the argument the night before he died, it didn’t take much to see Thad and Tabitha as lead suspects.
Tabitha stared at me and I could feel the weight of her desperation. It was painful. Whatever the truth was, Tabitha believed to her core that her fiancé was innocent.
“I need your help, Riley.”
“I’m not sure what I can do . . .”
“You’re smart. You’ll figure it out. You knew there was something off with Jordan’s death and you were right. You have to know there’s something off here, too. You’re already writing the obituary, right?”
I nodded.
“So just use those interviews to look into who could have wanted Arthur dead. Did he have any enemies? Any bad business dealings? Anyone else who would profit from his being out of the way? Or maybe it was one of his girlfriends—he always had plenty of those . . .”
“Listen,” I
