“So you thought Francine poisoning this neighbor was a good solution to her problems?” Trent asked skeptically.
Hubbard threw his hands up again. “No, I didn’t, but I just wanted—needed—her to leave me alone.” Tears filled the man’s eyes again. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please—”
Jocelyn slapped the desk hard. “Don’t,” she snapped. “Just answer the questions.”
Instantly cowing, Hubbard looked back and forth between them. Trent went on. “Okay, so you gave her the listeria. Then what happened?”
“She left me alone for a long time. Years. I thought it was really over. But every so often, she’d find me. I tried to avoid her, not to give into temptation but she—she did things.”
Hubbard said the words “did things” in a tone that was half revulsion, half awe. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I couldn’t say no. God help me, I couldn’t say no.”
“She asked you for it last week, didn’t she?” Jocelyn asked.
He nodded as a sob worked its way up his windpipe. “I’m so sorry.”
“She ever ask you for anything else?” Trent asked.
Hubbard hiccupped, looking at Trent in earnest. “Like what?”
Trent folded his arms across his chest. “You know what, Mr. Hubbard. Now, come on.”
The man’s shoulder blades drew together, his body tensing. “Wh-what? No, no. I don’t.”
Trent sighed. He pulled the Ruger P90 out of his coat pocket and put it on the desk. It was wrapped in clear plastic, and Hubbard recognized it immediately. He leaned forward. “A P90. I used to have—oh my God, is that mine? Where did you get that?” He stood, pushing his chair out of the way and backing up against the dry-erase board behind the desk. He pointed at the gun, his voice so high it sounded like a creaking door. “Where did you get that?”
“From Francine Rigo,” Jocelyn said quietly.
A vein in Hubbard’s neck throbbed. “I did not give that to her. I would never—that was stolen from my truck. I filed a police report.”
“Are you a firearms enthusiast?” Trent asked.
“I have some handguns that I use for home defense, and I have a concealed carry permit. It’s all legal.”
“What kinds of guns?” Jocelyn asked.
Hubbard’s eyes darted toward her. “What?”
“You said ‘some guns.’ What kinds?”
“A Smith and Wesson Model 48, a Beretta 92FS and a Glock 23 that I bought after my P90 was stolen.”
“So you never discussed firearms with Mrs. Rigo?” Trent asked.
Hubbard shook his head. “She hated guns. She would never let her husband buy one. It was not a topic she ever wanted to discuss.”
“Then how did your P90 get into her hands?” Jocelyn asked.
Hubbard’s eyes watered. The fear rolling off him was palpable. “I don’t know. I swear to you I don’t know. It must be some kind of mistake.”
“Oh, no mistake, Mr. Hubbard.” Trent pointed at the gun. “We got that from inside Francine’s home. From her dead body. It’s registered to you.”
“I swear to you, I didn’t give her that gun. It was stolen from my truck fourteen years ago. I’m telling the truth. I swear.”
Trent waited a long moment. Hubbard said nothing. He simply stared at them with a desperate, pleading look in his eyes.
“Tell me about Sydney Adams,” Trent said.
What appeared to be genuine confusion wrinkled the man’s brow. “Who?”
“Sydney Adams,” Trent repeated.
He looked back and forth between them, waiting for one of them to give him an explanation. Then he said, “Oh my God, is that the neighbor? Is Sydney Adams the neighbor Francine poisoned?”
“Sydney was a girl,” Jocelyn said. “A senior here in 2000.”
Again, the man waited, looking at them expectantly. There wasn’t even the briefest flicker of recognition in his face. He really had no idea who Sydney was, or at least he didn’t remember her. Although he had clearly heard about Francine’s death from his colleagues, he obviously had not heard about Cash’s arrest.
“She was shot in Fairmount Park,” Trent supplied.
Hubbard shook his head, his face scrunched with the effort of searching his memory banks. Then his face lit up as he hit on something. “She ran track, didn’t she? Her murder was just in the news recently, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Jocelyn said.
He stared at them with no desire to fill the awkward silence, Jocelyn noted. Either he had no involvement whatsoever in Sydney’s murder, or he was just as skilled a liar as Francine had been.
Trent sighed. “We’re finished here. Thank you for your time, Mr. Hubbard.”
The man looked surprised but smiled at them, obviously relieved that they’d be leaving soon. “Oh, sure, okay.”
Jocelyn waited until they were outside of the school before asking Trent, “What about the Smith and Wesson Model 48?”
As they got to the car, Trent opened the passenger’s side door for her. “I sent two officers to his house with a warrant for it before we came here. Someone in the crime scene unit owes me a favor. He’ll fire it and check the ballistics against the rounds pulled from Sydney’s body.”
Jocelyn stood by the open door but made no move to get in. “What happened to not telling his wife?”
Trent said, “What happened to not cheating on your wife?”
“Good point.”
“Maybe he didn’t shoot Sydney Adams—we’ll know by tomorrow. But he gave that psychopath the poison. He knew what she was using it for. He’s every bit as guilty as she is.”
“Right,” Jocelyn said, thinking of Zachary Whitman. Like Whitman, Hubbard was a bystander who saw what was going on but made no move to stop it.
Bystanders made her skin crawl.
She sat in the car. Trent closed her door and went around to the driver’s side. After he started the car, he took one last look at Franklin West.
“Fuck him,” he added.
Chapter 45
November 20, 2014
Jocelyn sat in the hall outside of Zachary Whitman’s office at the Community College of Philadelphia. She could hear him through the partially closed door discussing an assignment with a student. She looked at the time on her phone. She was ten minutes early. She leaned back against the gray cinderblock wall and closed her eyes. The hall was dimly lit, making it hard for her not to curl up on the bench and take a nap. She’d managed to get a full eight hours of sleep the night before, but she still felt exhausted. She hadn’t felt right since the poisoning, no matter how much sleep she got. Her eyes burned, her limbs felt heavy, and her legs ached. She’d had two cokes that morning. She still couldn’t drink coffee. The caffeine had helped clear her mental fog, but her body still felt like it needed to sleep for a week.
The squeak of sneakers on the tile floor down the hall startled Jocelyn. She opened her eyes to see a group of students passing by, completely oblivious to her. She blinked several times and pulled her phone back out, re-reading the texts that Trent had sent her earlier that morning. The ballistics tests on Hubbard’s Model 48 came back negative. The bullets that killed Sydney were not fired from his gun. Moreover, Jocelyn had checked the news footage of Lonnie from the night Sydney was killed and spotted Hubbard in the background, standing on Franklin West’s steps, which gave him an alibi, even though neither Jocelyn nor Trent believed that Hubbard had done it.