before she knew enough about him. These days, with all the drug dealing and such, when somebody has plenty of money and no visible means of support, no regular job, you can't be too cautious. So anyway, when I tried to talk her into slowing down and taking some time to get to know him before jumping into anything, we had a huge fight. I was afraid she was going to up and quit on me. In the end, she just told me to mind my own business. Two weeks after that-less than a month after they met-they ran off to Vegas and got married. And two months later, he tells her, ‘By the way, I've got this new job up in Seattle. See you around.' Lizbeth tried to pretend that his taking off like that didn't matter, but it did. It had to hurt like hell.'
'My understanding was that she was down here waiting for the house to sell,' I said.
'In order to sell a house, you have to list it,' Harry Moore said. 'That business about staying here to sell it is what she told everybody, just to save face. And who can blame her? There she was, a blushing first-time bride almost forty years old. And what happens? The groom takes off and leaves her high and dry.'
'So what happened last week?'
'Lizbeth called me from home. She had been off on sick leave for several days the week before Christmas, and Alpha-Cyte shuts down completely between Christmas and New Year's. She called me, crying. She asked me to come over because she needed to talk to someone, and she didn't know where else to turn. When I got to the house, she was in pretty bad shape. She had been in bed for two days with a terrible cold. Not only that, she'd just received a letter from Don saying there had been some kind of mistake. That there had been a glitch in the proceedings somewhere along the line. The upshot was that Wolf's divorce from his first wife hadn't been final at the time he and Lizbeth eloped to Vegas. According to him, it turned out they weren't married after all. That sleezeball was a bigamist.'
Among other things, I thought. 'What then?' I asked.
'First I said, ‘I told you so,' which, as my wife pointed out later, was exactly the wrong thing to say. Then I offered to put Lizbeth in touch with my personal attorney so she could get some advice on her legal standing-like, did she need an annulment or could she take the bastard to court and sue his socks off? I don't know why I bothered. It was just like pissing into the wind.'
'Why do you say that?'
'Because as soon as I finished, she asked if she could have another week off once the Christmas holidays were over. She said she was going to drive up to Seattle and try to straighten things out with Don. And I said, ‘What's to straighten out? Stay the hell away from the slimy bastard.' I probably said some other things, too. I don't remember it all. I'm sure I hurt Lizbeth's feelings. I guess I'm not what you call a sensitive guy when it comes to women. I just wanted to protect her is all. I didn't want her to be hurt.'
Harry Moore's voice broke. I could believe that the connection between him and Lizbeth Wolf went beyond the ordinary employer/employee connections, although I couldn't sort out exactly what their relationship might have been.
'When was this conversation, Mr. Moore?'
He cleared his throat. 'The twenty-ninth. Maybe even the thirtieth.'
'She would have driven?' I asked.
'Yes,' he said. 'Lizbeth loved to drive. She had herself a little four-wheel-drive Subaru wagon. Even with snow, she wouldn't have had any trouble getting over the mountains.'
'When I first told you about Lizbeth, Mr. Moore, you asked me if her husband had killed her. Was there any particular reason you said that? Do you know anything about him that would make him a possible suspect in your mind?'
Harry thought for a moment before he answered. 'I think Don wanted to be rid of her,' he said. 'I don't think he had any idea that she wouldn't give him up without a fight. I think he just expected her to lie down, play dead, and take his word as gospel about their not being married. But she wouldn't do that. The last thing she ever said to me was that some things were worth fighting for, and marriage was one of them. I couldn't believe it. Sometimes I just don't understand women at all, do you Detective Beaumont?'
'No,' I said. 'Not at all. But let me ask you one more thing, Mr. Moore. This is about Don Wolf now. How close is the biotech community down there?'
'Did you say community?' he returned. 'That's not quite the right term, Detective Beaumont. I'd say it's closer to a snake pit. Why?'
'But do you pretty much know what the other guys in your field are doing?'
'Of course. Nobody in his right mind turns his back on another snake. Why?'
'I was told Don Wolf had a considerable reputation as a financial wizard in biotech. His previous places of employment were listed as Downlink of San Diego, California; Bio-Dart Technologies, Pasadena, California; Holman-Smith Industries, City of Industry, California. Ever heard of them?'
'Never,' Harry Moore replied. 'I can do some checking around, if you like, and see what I come up with.'
'You do that, Mr. Moore. And let me know what you find out.'
I put down the phone in Gabe Rios's messy office and sat there staring at it. Latty Gibson and Lizbeth Dorn Wolf weren't the only people Don Wolf had lied to. He had also pulled the wool over Bill Whitten's eyes. Of the three, Whitten seemed like the only one who had seen through to the real back-stabbing Don Wolf. And maybe he, more than the others, had been prepared to defend himself.
All of which meant that Bill Whitten was right. He needed to stay on my list of prime suspects, and although it was a very short list, I reminded myself to keep him close to the top. Right under Latty Gibson.
Fourteen
I had no more than put down the phone after talking to Harry Moore when a proud Gabe Rios appeared in the door to his office. Grinning from ear to ear, he gave me the old thumbs up.
'Congratulations, Detective Beaumont. You've got yourself a Seecamp thirty-two auto murder weapon,' he said.
'Gee, thanks,' I returned glumly.
Gabe frowned. 'What's the matter, Beau? For somebody who just found a critical piece of evidence, you don't sound very happy.'
'I'm not,' I said. 'I may have a murder weapon, but that doesn't mean I have a murderer.'
Gabe shrugged and booted me out of his chair. 'You have to start somewhere,' he said. 'For right now, I just eyeballed things. I'll get the official ballistics report put together and sent up to you through regular channels. You should have it by the first of next week.'
'That's the soonest I can have it?'
'You know it is.'
'What about prints?'
'Wiped clean.'
'That figures,' I said.
Grace Highsmith obviously watched too many police dramas on television. How could I possibly have expected anything else?
'Okay,' Gabe said. 'Out of my chair so I can get back to work.'
As I vacated the chair, he was already reaching for the magazine he had been reading when I had first entered his office. 'Reading magazines?' I asked with more than a trace of sarcasm. 'Is that really part of your job description?'
He grinned. 'What do you think?' he asked. 'How else am I going to stay up-to-date?'
On the way back to Seattle, I puzzled over what I had learned so far. The gun-Grace Highsmith's gun-really was the weapon that had been used to murder Don Wolf. That lent a good deal of credence to the theory that Latty Gibson was the killer, and that Aunt Grace had attempted to confess to the crime in an effort to save her niece from a long prison term.
But if Grace had gone to the trouble of confessing to one murder, why not to both? If a capable defense attorney-and Suzanne Crenshaw seemed plenty cagey-could somehow manage a plea of temporary insanity. If evidence of the rape were somehow admitted into courtroom proceedings, that could possibly prove mitigating
