Although the solid oak door was wide enough to easily fit two grown men in the doorway, it swung open effortlessly. The detective who had been assigned Ben’s case stood on the front porch. By now I was used to his check-ins.
‘Good morning, Detective Meltzer. Come in.’ I stepped aside for him, a man who almost fit the girth of the doorway all on his own.
Detective Levi Meltzer had missed his calling as a wrestler. At easily six foot two, this was the kind of guy you wanted on the streets fighting crime, because I was pretty sure his muscles were bulletproof. The man looked impenetrable. I imagined his ring name being Macho Mustache, or as Lane called him, Pornstache, a tribute to his Orange Is the New Black obsession. Lane had often quoted television shows as if he’d come up with the witticisms himself. And I always laughed as if I’d never heard them before.
‘How are you today, Harper?’
Although I still called him Detective out of respect, for me he was on a first-name basis. That was how often I saw him. Right after Ben’s death it had been daily, sometimes multiple times a day, that he’d drop by or ask me to come down to the station for questioning. But now, being weeks into the investigation, his visits were becoming less frequent. Which was probably a good thing. Because that meant I was becoming less and less of a suspect.
‘I’m hanging in there,’ I replied.
‘I couldn’t help but notice the moving truck. You going somewhere?’ He cocked an eyebrow.
So he was following me, watching me. Perhaps I wasn’t as out of the hot seat as I thought.
‘I’m moving in with my brother for the time being. I’ve decided to rent this place out until the investigation is closed. I don’t have a job, and I can’t afford to keep paying the mortgage on this place in the meantime.’
‘I see. You know not to leave town until we find Ben’s killer, right?’
Of course I knew. I had only been reminded by Detective Meltzer and my attorney a dozen times. ‘Yes, sir. I’m just moving across town. Not even ten minutes away. I’ll jot down the address for you so you know where to find me.’
‘That’d be great, thanks. Here you go.’
He pulled out a pen and pad from his pocket and handed them to me.
I scribbled a circle, but the ink had gone dry. ‘I’m sure I have a spare in my kitchen.’ I headed into the kitchen to find a pen, and Detective Meltzer followed me. ‘I haven’t heard from you in a while. Have they finished the autopsy yet?’
‘No, ma’am. We’re understaffed, and the coroner is backed up for weeks so, unfortunately, I can’t tell you how much longer until we have the autopsy results. It can take up to twelve weeks, in some cases.’
‘So you’re no closer to finding out who did this to my husband.’ I added a touch of annoyance to make it clear I was frustrated. The frustration was genuine – I needed the autopsy results to determine cause of death, and I needed cause of death to get my insurance payout. Who wouldn’t be frustrated by this lengthy process with closure out of reach?
Detective Meltzer shook his head. ‘I’m afraid we found no DNA at the scene, have no witnesses, nothing to point us to the killer. I wish I had better news for you, Harper, especially given the unique nature of the crime.’ He paused, and I caught him watching me root through the junk drawer looking for a pen. When I found one, I wrote down Lane’s address and handed him his notepad back.
‘What do you mean by “unique nature of the crime”?’
‘Your broken back window was taped shut with only cellophane and right next to the door, which would have been an easy access point for the thief to break in. And yet the thief instead chose to break through a dining room window. It makes you wonder: what type of thief would choose a loud, conspicuous option over a quiet, easy, in-and-out?’
A surge of panic swelled up my chest, suffocating me. I was caught. ‘Maybe he didn’t see the broken window,’ I said, wondering if my practiced breaths were giving me away.
‘You don’t do a job like this without first casing the home, Harper. So it implies one of two things. Either you have an oblivious thief with an unusual thirst to kill, or the whole thing was staged. Considering you have an alibi, and we have no primary suspects with a motive to kill your husband, it leaves us with a lot more questions than answers. However, we have found a new angle.’
‘What kind of new angle?’ Dear God, let it not point to me or the suicide.
‘We’ve gotten access to Ben’s work files on his personal computer, and we found some interesting … numbers in his accounting. I’m not at liberty to tell you all the details, but it looks like Ben might have been investing clients’ money in a promissory note scam. If he lost a client a lot of money, well, that could make someone angry enough to want him dead.’
The detective may as well have been speaking Chinese. ‘Promissory note scam? What’s that?’
‘Ben’s company was in some financial trouble, so the employees were asking friends and family to buy their debt. It’s called affinity fraud, in which an investor exploits people who trust him. In exchange, each lender was promised a high interest rate yield on their loan. But it turns out all the money lent by these investors disappeared … along with Ben’s CEO, Randolph Whitman.’ Detective Meltzer sighed. ‘Some of these people lost their life savings.’
‘Randy is gone?’ I had wondered why he hadn’t attended Ben’s memorial, but it never occurred to me that he’d taken off. I had assumed it was too hard for him to face. The two had been close friends since college and trusted each other
