Grain of Truth Page 17

  Elke wasn’t sure what to make of that. She sat down with Iain and she said, “Well, we have a few questions for you.”

  “Okay,” said Squires. “But maybe I can save you some time. You’re here to ask about the Mukherjee case, right?”

  “That’s right,” said Elke.

  “Well, I want to confess,” said Squires. “I did it. But Alan wasn’t there. It was just me. Alan had nothing to do with this. He never liked it that I killed people. Alan, he’s a gentle soul. He’s really not a murderer. I’m the one who does that.”

  “Confess?” said Elke. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” said Squires. “I don’t know if that means I got to go to another trial or something?”

  Elke was thrown for a loop. She glanced at Iain, to see if he was similarly out of sorts, but he seemed cool and collected as usual. She half-hoped that Iain would take over, start asking questions, but he was quiet.

  “I guess it doesn’t really matter,” said Squires. “I ain’t ever getting out of here anyway.”

  “Well, why don’t we talk about the crime?” said Elke. “How did you do it?”

  “I shot them on their couch,” said Squires. “I didn’t even much care about robbing them, to be honest. I just like killing a little too much. I don’t know. There’s something not right about me, I guess.”

  “Uh, you can’t walk me through what happened?” said Elke. “What door did you come in?”

  “I can’t remember,” said Squires. “That doesn’t seem to have made an impression on me. But I do know that I brought my own gun, and then he tried to go for his. He had a safe with a gun in it. And I got that one from him, and I shot him with it. And his wife. But, you know, I don’t know if I want to talk too much in detail about it right now. Truth be told, I ain’t proud of what I done.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Well?” said Elke to Iain as they drove back to the office. “Aren’t you pleased? You thought it was him all along.”

  Iain, who wasn’t driving this time, but sitting in the passenger’s seat of Elke’s car, seemed very interested in his fingers. “You don’t seem pleased.”

  “I guess I am,” said Elke. “I mean, he’s confessed. That makes it easy. And a criminal like him who’s already behind bars is good for publicity. It seems like a win for us all. Next case, we can pick something less controversial.”

  “So, you’ll just take his word for it, then?”

  She glanced at him and then back at the road. “You don’t believe him?”

  “Do you?”

  “Why won’t you answer any of my questions?”

  “Sorry.”

  Silence.

  She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “He knew about the safe.”

  “I’m fairly sure that information was released to the papers,” said Iain. “They said that Saanvi and Kevin got the gun out of the safe and then killed her parents.”

  “So… what are you saying?”

  “Well, he didn’t seem to know anything else about the crime,” said Iain. “And his type, he’s the kind who kills for the thrill of it, that’s evident by the fact that he always wanted to do it, and Kelley never did. That killing was unnecessary, but Squires did it anyway. If he’s a thrill killer, that business about not being proud of it is bull. He’s proud, and he remembers. I’ve seen videos of his confessions to the other murders he committed. He kept his mouth shut for a long time on that, but once he knew that they had him and that he was going away, he really opened up. He went through all of it in detail. Every minute of the robbery, how much the victims begged for their lives, all of that. If he did this, he would remember.”

  “So, you’re saying he didn’t do it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Iain. “It seemed so much like the profile of these two. I think we have to wait for the DNA test to come back.”

  “Okay,” said Elke. “Okay. But if we really do have a confession here, and we’re sitting on the fact we’ve solved the case, then that’s not great.”

  “With the way everyone’s set against Saanvi and Kevin, we’d be better with DNA evidence, wouldn’t we?”

  She nodded. “That’s true. We would.”

  * * *

  Elke spent the entire weekend packing up the house she’d shared with Felix. She threw nearly half of it away, and designated the rest to be given away to Goodwill. She wouldn’t have nearly the space at her new place as she did here. But she didn’t mind that. She liked her new place. She liked how it was all hers. She hadn’t lived on her own since she was just out of college, and there was something about it that made her feel young, almost reborn.

  The old house was depressing, and not only because she had to pack and clean the place, but because it reminded her of Felix and everything she’d lost.

  When she was away, she didn’t think of that as much.

  She was beginning to realize that was what moving on was, in reality. It wasn’t that the pain of something horrible went away, it was only that she thought about that something less and less.

  But when she did think about it, it still hurt.

  Losing Felix was always going to devastate her. But she didn’t have to think about it anymore. She could focus on work and decorating her new apartment.

  While packing, she thought about the case, and she hoped that it turned out that Jeremy Squires really was responsible for the murders. She was already exhausted when it came to this case, and she was ready for it to be over. When it came down to it, Squires made the most sense. He was a thrill killer. He had killed before. He had confessed. It had to be him.

  Because neither Rory Gutierrez or Wheeler and Chapman made as much sense.

  Rory’s motive was thin, she thought. Of course, the girl didn’t have an alibi and wouldn’t give them a DNA sample. So that didn’t look good for her.

  Wheeler and Chapman could have done it, but they almost seemed too obvious. They were assholes, but they were intelligent assholes. So, it seemed like they would have realized that they had come out in public and called for Dr. Mukherjee’s death. And they wouldn’t have done it because they simply weren’t that stupid. But she couldn’t be sure. They had been younger then. Maybe they had been stupider.

  She supposed that it could also be Dr. Oliver. Maybe he’d had a closer relationship with Tempest than he’d let on. Maybe he’d actually been jealous and that jealousy had twisted into some kind of rage. But he did have that alibi, and it seemed pretty airtight.

  She didn’t even want to think of the other option, that the killer was someone they had never even thought of. If the DNA came back negative for Squires, they were going to have to look into other similar crimes in the area and see if they couldn’t tie it to someone else.

  Of course, there was a final option, and that was that Saanvi and Kevin actually were guilty. If that was the case, then they’d done all of this for nothing.

  She didn’t have any control over any of it while she was moving out, though, so she did her best not to think too hard on it. Instead, she focused on packing up everything she could and getting herself moved out of that house.

  At the end of the final day, she called her real estate agent. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I don’t want to rent out my house after all.”

  Renting it out meant she’d still own it. It meant she’d have to come back and look at this place over and over. And every time that she did, she’d be reminded of Felix, and it would hurt again. She didn’t want to hurt anymore. She wanted to be free.

  “You’ll lose money if you sell,” said Lulu.

  “I know that,” said Elke. “That’s okay. I want rid of this place. Price it so it sells fast, okay?”

  * * *

  Elke felt lighter when she went back to work, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. So, when she called everyone together in the conference room, she was almost bouncy as she asked where they were and what was going on.

  “I guess we’re nowhere,” said Fr
ankie. “I mean, we think it’s Squires, but we’re not sure. So we don’t have anything definite right now.”

  “Well, I was thinking about all of it over the weekend,” said Elke, “and I really think it’s got to be Squires. None of the other options make nearly as much sense. What about you, Hudson? You feel any differently about it than you did?”

  Iain shrugged. “Not really, to be honest.”

  “So, you still don’t think it’s him.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” said Iain. “My opinion has no bearing on the actual truth of the case.”

  Elke sighed.

  “Uh, guys?” said a voice from the doorway.

  They all looked up.

  It was Amos with an envelope. “Just got this,” he said. “It’s from the lab.”

  “DNA results?” said Elke. “Finally?”

  “Looks like,” said Amos, handing the envelope over.

  Elke ripped it open and spread it out on the conference table. Everyone gathered around and peered down at the paper.

  For several minutes, it was quiet.

  “No fucking way,” Elke finally said softly.

  “Not him,” said Frankie. “Not either of them. There are two markers, and neither of them match either Squires or Kelley.”

  “And they ran it against the database,” said Iain, pointing at the bottom of the paper. “And it doesn’t match anyone whose DNA we already have on file.”

  “Well, at least it’s not Saanvi’s or Kevin’s then,” said Elke, wandering over to the board and staring up at the suspects listed. “Thank goodness for small favors.”

  It was quiet for a minute.

  “So, this DNA definitely belongs to the murderers?” said Frankie. “Could it belong to someone else?”

  “Well, there was the theory that it might have belonged to movers,” Iain said.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Elke. She had forgotten about that. “So this DNA maybe doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s still Squires.”

  “If it is,” said Iain, “we need a lot more than his wimpy confession to pin it on him. He needs to give us the exact details of the murder.”

  “Well, how do we get him to do that?” said Elke.

  Frankie raised a finger. “I’ve got an idea about that.”

  “Okay,” said Elke. “Hit me.”

  * * *

  Frankie slapped a copy of the DNA results down in front of Squires. “You’re not a match.”

  “What the hell is this?” Squires peered down at the paper. Then he looked up at Frankie. “And who are you?”

  “She’s my associate, Frankie Hart,” said Elke from the corner of the room. She hadn’t bothered to sit down at the table, letting Frankie be the one who engaged with Squires.

  “You didn’t do it,” said Frankie, sitting down across from him. “We know that. So, why’d you say you did?”

  “What do you mean, you know I didn’t do it?” Squires gave them a confused look. “I don’t see what you’re saying.”

  “This is DNA taken from the crime scene at the Mukherjee house,” said Frankie. “It doesn’t match you. You didn’t do it. Why’d you say you did?”

  Squires sat back in his chair. “Hell.”

  “Did you commit this crime or not?” said Elke. “You told us you did.”

  “I just didn’t want anyone to find out about Lila,” he said.

  “Lila?” said Frankie. “Who the hell is Lila?”

  “Lila is Alan’s wife,” said Squires. “He’s devoted to her. They have a daughter together. She’s grown up and on her own now, but she’s still Alan’s world. I couldn’t take all that away from him, not after being associated with me is what got him into jail in the first place. So, I lied and said I did that crime.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Elke.

  “See, I remember that murder. I remember hearing about it on the news the day after it happened. So, I remember where I was that night,” said Squires.

  “You weren’t murdering the Mukherjees?”

  “No,” said Squires. “I was with Lila. We were kind of having a thing on the sly. Alan didn’t know about it.”

  “I see,” said Elke.

  “When Lila got pregnant, she wanted to keep the baby.”

  “So, hold on, you’re saying that Lila’s baby was yours?” said Elke.

  “Yeah, I knew it was probably my kid, because she and Alan weren’t really doing it at the time.”

  “If Alan and his wife weren’t… intimate, then wouldn’t he have been suspicious?” said Frankie.

  “Well, Alan’s kind of dumb about that stuff,” said Squires. “I love the guy, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not the brightest bulb in the box. She convinced him that the baby was his, and then she didn’t want anything to do with me anymore.” He shrugged. “Which was fine, because I don’t kink that way for pregnant chicks.”

  Elke worked hard not to make a disgusted face.

  Squires studied his knuckles. “It all worked out, you know. Then you come sniffing in here for an alibi, and I know if I give it to you, it would just kill Alan. I can’t do that to the guy. You’re not gonna tell him, are you?”

  Elke sighed. She shook her head at Frankie. “Let’s get out of here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  On the drive back to the office, Frankie got a call from her son’s after-school program, and she dropped off Elke in a rush, no explanation.

  Elke went back up to the office, feeling dejected.

  “Not Squires,” she told Iain, who was in his office scrutinizing the DNA sheet.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” said Iain. “DNA doesn’t lie.”

  “But maybe this DNA isn’t connected to the killer,” she said. “Right?”

  “Maybe,” said Iain. “If it is, though, it rules out Gutierrez. It’s male. White male.”

  She snatched the sheet from him and looked at that. “Okay, you’re right. So, what? That leaves us with Chapman and Wallace, then? It’s them?”

  “Well, we don’t have their DNA,” said Iain. “They’ve never been arrested, and they’ve never given a sample. So, we can’t be sure.”

  She handed the paper back to him. “I would so love it if it were them. Really would love it. They are such jackasses, and I want them to be guilty.”

  “So, we get a DNA sample, then,” he said. “We see if they are.”

  “Right,” she said. “That simple.” She sighed. “It’s only that it’s not them, is it? I mean, does the crime scene indicate that it could be them?”

  Iain raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s just talk it through. We know that the Mukherjees were moved, don’t we?” she said.

  “Yeah…” Iain got out his file and went through it until he could find the crime scene photos. He spread them out on the desk. “We know they were moved.”

  “What we don’t know is how all that went down,” she said. “Were they moved to the couch to get them out of the way?”

  “Not if the killers weren’t trying to rob them,” said Iain. “I thought that because I thought that it was Kelley and Squires.”

  “Why move them to the couch, then?”

  “To talk to them, maybe,” said Iain.

  “If it was Gutierrez, she’d want to talk to them.”

  “She’d want to talk to Dr. Mukherjee, anyway. Tell him off for keeping her from graduating. But it’s not her. It’s male DNA.”

  “If the DNA is even related,” said Elke. “Oh, no, wait! That missing page of the transcript interviewing Gutierrez?”

  “Yeah? What about it?”

  “She mentioned a boyfriend in it. Maybe the boyfriend helped. Maybe it’s his DNA.”

  “And the other set of male DNA?”

  “Maybe that’s a mover,” said Elke.

  Iain blew out a long, slow breath. “I don’t know.” He shook his head and got up from the desk. He paced. “At first, I was thinking that the thieves came into the house and did
a sweep. When they found the victims in the house, they moved them to the living room to keep them occupied. But maybe moving them to the living room was the point all along.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But why?”

  “I…” He stopped pacing and turned to her. “Maybe to shoot them. Maybe it’s that simple. Maybe they didn’t want to talk or anything like that. I mean, if it’s Chapman and Wheeler, this would essentially be a hate crime, wouldn’t it? What are hate crimes usually like?”

  “Violent?” said Elke.

  “Presentational,” said Iain. “They said it themselves. They said he should be strung up. Lynched. Hung and put on display. Well, sitting two people on a couch and putting bullets into their skulls? That’s putting them on display.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Frankie ushered Thad back the hallway to her office.

  Elke was coming out of Iain’s office down the hall.

  “I’m sorry,” Frankie called. “I had to pick him up. He was fighting, and they said he couldn’t stay. He’ll keep himself busy, though, I swear. He won’t be in the way.”

  Elke looked uncomfortable.

  “Do you want me to take him home?” said Frankie. “I mean, if there’s nothing else for us to do today—”

  “I actually was kind of hoping you could look into Gutierrez a little more. I had a chance to look at the missing page of the transcript, and she’s saying there that she wants to speed the interview up so she can get home to her boyfriend. I was hoping you could track down the boyfriend, whoever that might be.”

  “Okay, I can do that,” said Frankie.

  “With your son here?”

  “I can use the computer to do research or call people on the phone. He’s not going to stop me from doing that.”

  Elke hesitated. “He can’t be here every day.”

  “No, I know that.” Frankie lifted her chin.

  “Fine,” said Elke. “But keep an eye on him.”

  Frankie ushered Thad into her office. She sat down behind her desk, feeling bone tired. Elke didn’t have any kids. Elke didn’t understand. And even parents who did have kids didn’t understand, because their kids weren’t on the spectrum like Thad. He was a challenge. She loved him, but she didn’t always understand him, and she didn’t always cope well with him.