Mel said nothing.
“I suggest we tackle this case the same way we would any other. First, let’s go upstairs and put Barbara’s cigarettes where they belong. Then let’s go back home and work the case. I’ll interview you the same way I would any other victim.”
“Or suspect,” Mel interjected.
“Victim,” I repeated firmly. “We’ll make a list of everybody who was on that trip with you and find out as much as we can about each of them. And we’ll also check to see exactly what the cops down in Cancun have going for them on this case.”
“What if the killer used my weapon?” Mel asked.
“You had it with you?”
“My back-up Glock,” she said. “We were flying on Anita’s private jet. There wasn’t an issue with security.”
That gave me pause. If forensics ended up linking Mel’s 9-millimeter to Richard Matthews’s death, it was going to be a hell of a lot harder to make all this go away.
“Did you have the Glock with you all the time?”
“Not when I was swimming-or jogging,” she added. “It’s hard to carry a concealed weapon when you’re wearing a bikini.”
“Amen to that!” I said.
She smiled at me then. “Let’s go inside,” she said. “I’m freezing.”
We went back upstairs only long enough to return the cigarettes and lighter to Barbara Galvin’s top desk drawer.
As we headed back to Seattle, Mel sat on the far side of the car, holding the file folder tightly against her chest. “I tried to do some checking on the Matthews case,” she said. “What little I could find was in the El Paso papers.”
“I saw that, too,” I told her.
“So how are you going to find out what the Cancun cops have without leading them straight to me?”
“You don’t know about my secret weapon,” I said. “Whatever Ralph Ames can’t find out isn’t worth knowng.”
“But Ralph’s your attorney,” Mel objected. “Whatever he found out wouldn’t be protected…”
I handed her my phone. “Look under ‘incoming calls,’” I told her. “His number should be one of the last ones that came in. Call him and tell him you’re hiring him and that he should come by the house later this evening and pick up his retainer.”
“But I can’t afford someone like him.”
“This is too serious, Mel,” I said. “You can’t not afford someone like him. We can’t afford it.”
Mel stared at the phone. “What do I tell him about what’s going on?” she wanted to know.
Mel’s state of mind was still too fragile to tell her that I had already run up the flag to Ralph. By now he probably knew more about the case than Mel and me put together.
“Say we have a situation here and that we’re sure you’ll be needing his services.”
“Isn’t that a little vague?” Mel asked.
“Believe me,” I told her, “Ralph can handle vague better than anyone I know.”
So she made the call. Concerned Ralph might inadvertently blow my cover, I was relieved when he didn’t answer and she left him a voice-mail message.
“Who all was at the retreat in Cancun?” I asked.
She rattled off a list of names. “Anita Bowdin, Professor Clark, Destry Hennessey, Rita Davenport, Abigail Rosemont, Justine Maldonado, and me. Seven of us altogether. Then there was Sarah James, Anita’s cook, and the two pilots. The cook stayed at Anita’s place. The pilots went to a hotel. Anita had her own room. The rest of us shared.”
I remembered meeting the first four women Mel mentioned. The others were names only.
“And was there any kind of disagreement among you?” I asked. “Hard feelings of any kind?”
“No. Not at all. We spent a lot of time brainstorming about the upcoming fund-raiser. That was the whole point of the retreat. We were determined to raise more money than last year, and we did-raise more money, that is. But we had fun, too. We walked on the beach. Went into town for shopping. Did the whole tourist thing. And the food was wonderful. Sarah is a marvelous cook.”
“And did any of the women know your story-about what had happened between Sarah Matthews and her father?”
“All of them did,” Mel answered. “Anyone who was on the board, and we all were, would have known about it.”
I tried to quell the sudden flare-up of anger I felt, but it didn’t go away.
“How can that be?” I demanded. “I didn’t find out about any of it until yesterday, when you finally told me. But in the meantime, you’re saying the rest of the world already knew?”
“It’s part of the board of directors’ selection process,” Mel explained. “Prospective members are encouraged to write individual essays explaining how and why they came to be involved in sexual assault prevention programs. Once the essays are written they’re circulated among existing board members.”
Maybe that was part of what had made me so uncomfortable at the SASAC banquet. Maybe the group’s ultimate aim was to help people affected by sexual assaults, but there had been that exclusionary sense about the organization-an in-crowd, private-club chumminess about the women, “those women,” an us-and-them mind-set, that had left me cold while at the same time leaving me out.
“So you have essays for all the other women on the retreat?” I asked.
“I’ve read them,” she said, “but I didn’t keep them. They’re painful stories, Beau, all of them. When I was finished reading, I ran them through the shredder.”
“Would anyone else still have them?” I asked.
“Maybe. Why?”
“Because we need to check. If the guy who attacked Destry Hennessey’s grandmother is dead and if Richard Matthews is dead, maybe some of the other responsible parties have met the same fate.”
For a moment Mel didn’t answer. Then, with no further explanation to me, she dredged her own phone out of her pocket, scrolled through some numbers, and pushed “send.”
“Hey,” she said breezily when someone answered. “Mel here.”
There was a pause. “Oh, no. The food was fine. Great. Not to worry. No complaints on that score whatsoever.”
Which told me Mel was calling Rita Davenport, her fellow SASAC board member and the lady who ran the catering company.
“So I was calling with a favor,” Mel continued. “You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of all the board member essays, would you? I’m one of those people who unload that kind of stuff as soon as I read it, but now I need to see one of them…You do? Hey, that’s great. If you could just shoot them to me in an e-mail…sure…that’s terrific. Appreciate it. Wrong? Oh, no. No, nothing’s wrong, and it’s no big deal. I just wanted to compare notes on a couple of things. Fine. Thanks.”
Mel closed her phone and heaved a sigh. “I suppose I’ll go to hell for lying,” she said, “because it is a big deal.”
Indeed it was.
Once back at Belltown Terrace, we did just what I’d said we would. Mel started a new pot of coffee. Then, armed with computers and notebooks, we began to go over what we knew and what we didn’t know.
We had barely figured out where to start when Ralph called. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Hold on,” I told him. “This is Mel’s story. You’d better hear it from her.”
I punched the phone onto speaker and handed it over to Mel. My trust in Ralph is well founded. He listened to the whole story without ever hinting that very little of what she had to say was news to him.
“What do you need from me?” he asked when she finished.
Mel sighed. “I guess I’d like you to find out whatever you can about the ongoing investigation down in Cancun.”
“And if they haven’t tumbled to your possible involvement, you’d just as soon I didn’t mention it,” Ralph concluded.
“Yes,” Mel said.
“Give me a while,” Ralph said. “But if you don’t mind, I probably should swing by in a little while so you can give me that retainer. With a situation this serious, I don’t want there to be any question at all about my being your attorney of record.”