“His wife would have been furious that he let me see inside,” I said. “She’s the queen of appearances. Wears fake eyelashes and diamonds to grab coffee on Sunday morning, because you never know who you’ll run into. Even if they couldn’t afford a major remodel—I’m pretty sure you’ll find she sank their savings, including their remodel fund, into the Byrd’s Nest project—she would never put their house on the market until it was professionally staged. But how can they be hurting? She’s got tons of listings. Condos sell like cupcakes in this city.”
“Like you said,” Navarro replied. “Appearances. Many of those are colistings with other agents, or proposals for projects that aren’t anywhere near shovel-ready. Some will never materialize. She kept her license while he was raking it in, but didn’t work much. Now that the burden of earning an income is on her, she’s had to rebuild relationships with developers, create new ones, yada yada. It takes years.”
“Don’t tell me,” Tracy said drily. “You were a real estate agent before you became a special agent.”
Navarro rolled his eyes. I decided I liked him.
“So, in a nutshell,” Armstrong said, “Ellingson believes his wife killed Halloran, because he heard Halloran cry for help and spotted him out back. He called 911”—he paused to check the report—“at five after six, several minutes after he first started hearing something, and roughly half an hour after he saw her leave the Halloran house. And he knew she had motive.”
“That’s consistent with the physical evidence indicating he was shot in the mudroom, near the back of the house,” Greer said.
“But didn’t you tell Laurel—Mrs. Halloran—that there was very little evidence of an intruder in the house itself?” I asked Tracy. “If Deanna shot Pat in the mudroom, and then left by the front door, wouldn’t she have left some kind of trail?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Laurel cleaned the house Thursday, knowing she was leaving town for the weekend the next morning. Your crew found Maddie’s lipstick on the bathroom floor after the murder. What if,” I said, “it was Maddie that Bruce Ellingson saw, not Deanna? They’re about the same height, and they both have short dark hair. He only caught a glimpse, through the hedge. It would have been easy to mistake them. She could have driven straight to the ferry and made it.”
“You’re not saying your friend shot Halloran,” Tracy said. “Or that she’s in cahoots with the killer.”
“No. No, I don’t have any idea who shot Pat,” I said. “Ellingson didn’t hear the shot, and he didn’t see anyone lurking around. But say Maddie went out the front door. Sometime in the next twenty to thirty minutes, the killer shows up at the back door. Heck, maybe he was watching, waiting for Maddie to leave. That would explain why Pat was shot in the mudroom and crawled out the back.”
“Why would Ms. Petrosian have been there?” Greer asked. “Even if they were they having an affair, that wouldn’t explain why she became a target three years later. Mrs. Halloran’s alibis are solid, for both crimes.”
“I think Maddie went to Pat for help.” I explained my theory of the plan to buy up the properties, one by one. “Then, when she owned the rest of the block, or most of it, she’d approach Barut with a proposal to buy the corner lot, using a business name similar to the one Jake Byrd and Deanna Ellingson were using. The corner property was her target all along.”
“Why was she so hot on that corner lot?” Navarro asked. “If she wanted to run a convenience store, there must be tons of properties available.”
“And why the ruse with the business name?” Armstrong said. He leaned toward me, resting his elbows on his knees. He wasn’t wearing socks with his boat shoes, and his jeans rode up a few inches, giving me a glimpse of the orca tattooed on his ankle. “From what you’ve said about her, doesn’t sound like her style.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “And any old convenience store wouldn’t do. What Maddie wants is to recreate what her family lost. The first business they built in this country, on that very spot. The business and property they lost because of Jake Byrd’s grandfather’s recklessness.”
I dug the album out of my tote and showed them what I’d found: the pictures, the cards, the notes. On the whiteboard on the wall behind us, Armstrong drew a large-scale version of the Gregorian family tree, filling in the names Maddie hadn’t added to hers: Elizabeth “Lizzie” married Byrd? followed by a descendant line to Jacob “Jake.” Then he drew dotted cousin lines between Lizzie and David, Jake and Maddie.
The detectives and special agents sat around the table, littered with coffee cups and notepads, studying the wall. Tracy reached for the album and flipped back to the photo of the grocery and truck. “Gregorian and Son,” he muttered.
“I don’t know how Haig Gregorian lost the family grocery,” I said. “According to Tim, it was vaguely criminal. Miriam, Maddie’s mom, may know more.”
“If all that’s true, I get why she wanted the building back,” Greer said. “But it was Byrd’s legacy, too. Didn’t he have just as much right to buy it? She sabotaged his dreams to pursue her own.”
I had to admit, that bothered me. Was it only in my imagination that Maddie was both successful and perfectly ethical, a woman who took over a business built by men in a field dominated by men, reclaiming rundown buildings and revitalizing neighborhoods without smearing her lipstick? Had I put her on a pedestal unfairly, exposing her to criticism—and worse—for falling off it?
“Why didn’t any of this come out three years ago?” Tracy asked. But I knew the answer: Only Maddie could have told them.
