her eye-popping partnership income of $434,000. I blinked but the number didn’t change. I clicked through the rest of the pages to find her partnership tax return, my index finger twitching when I found the K-1. My daughter owned 12.5 percent of PEMA Partners. I started to shake and couldn’t stop.
Chapter Sixty-two
Since Kevin died, I had relied on hard facts to tell me whether people were good or bad, guilty or innocent. I stopped trusting my hunches and gut feelings because that’s what got Kevin killed. Besides, instinct never convicted anyone. Only the facts did.
Staring at Wendy’s K-1 for PEMA Partners, I realized that I’d applied the same standard to my family, demanding tangible proof of their love and loyalty, testing our relationships against only what I could prove beyond a reasonable doubt, afraid of anything that required me to get under their skin and into their hearts. I accused them of their?aws and convicted them of their weaknesses. It made no difference that I applied the same standard to myself. That was only fair.
Joy understood. She showed me her pain because she blamed me for it and concealed everything else. That Wendy may have hidden as much or more was a staggering indictment.
Her ownership interest in PEMA Partners was unmistakable proof of a connection between her and Jill Rice and, by extension, Thomas Rice. I hoped but didn’t believe that she had hit a home run in the commodities market and innocently invested her windfall in PEMA. Wendy would have told her mother and me if she had. Instead, she’d kept secret the fact that her net worth now exceeded mine.
Colby was the common denominator between Wendy and the Rices, which meant that unless someone had held a gun to her head, she could be part of everything that had happened. We are all responsible for the choices we make, but life had conspired against her since the moment Kevin was taken, her relationship with Colby spawning the perfect storm that had swept her into the hands of people willing to trade her life for theirs.
When I stopped shaking, I opened my eyes and found my server hovering over me.
“You want me to call 911?” she asked.
I slid out of the booth and dropped a ten on the table, breaking my promise not to leave her a tip, and made my way toward the door. “Forget it.”
She looked at my untouched plate. “Something wrong with the food?” When I didn’t answer, she got in the last word. “With some people, it doesn’t pay to be nice.”
Thomas Rice was dead. Colby was on the run and Wendy was probably being held hostage to lure him back. That left Jill Rice as the only person who could shed any light on PEMA Partners. I didn’t have to wait for her to come home this time, though she didn’t answer the door until I’d rung the bell half a dozen times.
“It’s you again,” she said when she opened the door.
Her lacquered good looks had crumbled, replaced by a washed-out shell. Her eyes were empty, dull sockets surrounded by dark circles. Without makeup, she had the pale, lifeless look of someone who’d been ill for a long time, her survival still in doubt. She was wearing black pajama pants with a matching shapeless top, though she looked like she hadn’t slept since I’d told her that her ex-husband was dead.
Rice clung to the doorframe for a moment, then turned and walked back into the house, the open door an invitation to follow. I expected to find a collection of empty wine bottles scattered through the house but there were none. She was stone sober but tottering on the edge nonetheless.
She sat on a sofa in the den, lost among large, decorative pillows covered in bright?oral prints that made her look smaller than she was. The room was large, one wall all glass, two layers of drapes drawn against the sun, the lights turned off, the room and her skin the same shadowy gray.
A decorator’s fingerprints were evident in the way each knick fit with each knack, furniture and fabrics blending and contrasting in muted harmony with the wall coverings and artwork. A plasma TV hung above the fireplace, the screen black and silent. It was a perfect, soulless show house.
There were different ways to conduct an interrogation. The choice depended on an assessment of the subject’s vulnerability. A good rapport made some people open up. They wanted to talk, to confess to someone they liked or whose approval they craved. A friendly smile, an understanding nod, and a humble acknowledgment that we’ve all stepped in the bucket at one time or another often opened the?oodgates.
The hard way was another way, but it was obvious that I wouldn’t have to go there with Jill Rice. She’d already gone there by herself, taken a self-administered beating, and was ready to talk. All I had to do was listen. I sat in a sleek, high-backed, black leather chair angled across from the sofa and waited.
“They won’t release Tommy’s body until next week,” she began.
It was the first time I’d heard her refer to him with any sign of endearment. “That’s a long time to wait to see him,” I said.
She turned her head toward the covered windows. “I’ve waited a long time. I can wait a little longer.”
“Have you made the arrangements?”
She nodded, studying the drapes. “It will be private. There’s really no one else but me. I’m having him cremated.”
“Then what?”
She looked at me, a gallows grin creasing her lips. “Then I’ll come home and pack.”
“Where are you going?”
Rice shrugged. “I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
“You should talk with someone, maybe a psychologist, someone to help you get through this.”
She didn’t say anything, this time examining her nails. “Is that what the FBI recommends under these kinds of circumstances?”
“You were divorced, but it’s obvious you still cared about him. That’s a lot to work through.”
She grabbed a pillow and wrapped her arms around it. “I’ll tell you what’s a lot to work through. Killing him. That’s what I did, you know. I killed him.”
We both knew that she hadn’t, but there was no doubt that she believed she had. “He died in prison, not at home.”
“I sent him there.”
“He broke the law. It was a risk he took.”
“But,” Rice said, her eyes red and wet, “I turned him in.”
“He was a drug dealer. He deserved to go to jail.”
She looked at me like I was a simpleton, rolling her eyes. “I didn’t turn him in because he was a drug dealer. You see the way we live. Do you have any idea what this costs? I turned him in because he cheated on me. I caught him screwing our neighbor’s twenty-year-old daughter. She was home from college. He was working at home. I walked in on them. She thought it was funny.”
“What did he think?”
“That I would put up with it because of the money. That’s what he told me. I told him that I wouldn’t be his whore. It was all very dramatic.”
“How long had you known that he was dealing drugs?”
“From the start. Tommy was very good about business. He put together a pro forma and showed me how it would work. He said it was all about managing the risk.”
“That’s why he put the assets in your name.”
“Not everything. Just enough to take care of me if he ever got caught. He said he loved me and would do whatever he had to do to keep me out of trouble. When I caught him cheating, I was so mad I didn’t care what happened to him. After he was arrested, he said he forgave me. He said he’d gotten what he deserved for being unfaithful. Now he’s dead and it’s my fault.”
Jill Rice didn’t mind being married to a drug dealer as long as he didn’t cheat on her. Thomas Rice made sure he provided for his wife even as he betrayed her. He forgave her for turning him in, but she couldn’t forgive herself. Politicians argue about family values. I gave up trying to make sense of them a long time ago.
“Tell me about PEMA Partners. I ran across it when I looked at your tax records.”
