Hand of Fate (21 page)

Allison imagined what it had been like. Jim must have envied his classmates their living mothers and sober fathers, their siblings, their certainty of their place in the world.

Rod continued, "Fate went to college on scholarship. He worked at three other radio stations, including one in college, before joining KNWS. He's been there for about twelve years. He had an excellent credit rating, no outstanding bills, and a nice-sized 401(k). He owned a BMW and a condo in Willamette Villas. There's been no unusual outgo of money in the last year, so it doesn't look like he was paying blackmail. His medical history was unremarkable--some trouble sleeping, and his cholesterol was a little high."

"How about his personal life?" Leif asked.

"Well, as you might have guessed from what we heard from his neighbor, it was, hmm ... robust might be one word you could use to describe it. He dated a number of women. And he took photos, of some of them, at least, with a digital camera we found in his condo."

"What were they wearing?" asked Officer Flannery.

"Or what weren't they wearing?" Heath Robinson chimed in with a leer.

Allison shot Nicole a resigned look. She didn't know how Nic could stand to work with Heath. Nicole's face was impassive. Even though her expression hadn't changed, Allison saw that her friend's face had gone strangely flat, as if she had withdrawn deep into herself. Talking about photos must have dredged up memories of her work with Innocent Images. Online predators often used pornography to convince young girls that having sex with them would only be natural.

"The shots were actually kind of tasteful," Rod said. "Nothing hard-core. Negligees or strategically placed sheets." He looked over at Nicole.

"Oh, and Nic--that receipt you found for Oh Baby in Fate's desk? Turns out that's an upscale lingerie shop, not a baby store. He bought someone a, a--" He stumbled over the word. "A battier." He pronounced it buhst-ee-air. No one corrected him.

"Speaking of kids, were the women in these photos all adults?" Allison asked. "Did anyone look underage?"

Rod shook his head. "All what I would call age-appropriate eye candy. Late twenties to early forties."

"How many in total?"

"There's some question as to whether a couple of shots are of the same woman or not. My best guess would be nine."

"Any familiar faces?" Allison braced herself to hear Cassidy's name.

"Negative. And we isolated just their heads and showed them to the neighbor who saw a woman leaving his apartment the morning Fate died, and she didn't recognize any of them either. None of the photos were of Victoria Hanawa or any of Fate's female coworkers."

"Could you tell if the women knew they were being photographed?" Nicole's voice had a raspy edge.

"It was all pretty much 'smile for the camera."

"I can't believe anyone was that stupid. Let alone nine of them." Special Agent Karl Zehner shook his head. "In five minutes, he could have sent those photos all over the Internet."

Rod shrugged. "They must have trusted him."

"How about that hotel card from the Hilton?" Allison asked.

"They say the cards are automatically reprogrammed for each visitor, and they can't say when or who used it last," Karl said. "I'm guessing it was just a memento."

Nicole turned to Riley Lowell, who worked at the computer forensics laboratory. "What'd you find on Fate's computer?"

"No big surprises. But what was really useful was the memor
y s
tick you found in his desk. He had saved copies of a lot of threats that he had gotten by e-mail. Some of them weren't threats per se, just people who were angry at him." He patted a stack of paper. "I've made printouts for you so you can prioritize which ones you want us to try to get IP addresses on."

"And then there are the people Jim knew in real life," Leif said. "Nic and Allison, you guys handled the bulk of the interviews this morning. What do you think?"

Allison looked at Nicole, but when she didn't say anything, Allison went first. "I can see a number of angles. One is that if you read between the lines, ratings for his show have not been as strong as they wanted. They added Victoria Hanawa in the hopes that she would bring them more young female listeners, but it didn't work."

"So the solution was to rig up some kind of poisonous gas and kill Fate at work?" Karl's face wrinkled in disbelief. "Shoot, wouldn't it be a lot easier just to fire him, or both of them, and bring in someone new?"

"You would think so, but I just got off the phone with the station's insurer," Allison said. "They carried keyman insurance on Fate. Now that he's dead, they'll be getting five million dollars."

Karl whistled, but Leif said, "This still feels personal to me, not corporate. In every interview I conducted today, it seemed like Fate had managed to tick off that person at least Once."

There were nods around the table.

Nicole said, "Victoria disagreed with him about the direction of the show. And she said that Chris was bullied by Jim on an ongoing basis."

Rod nodded. "A couple of people I interviewed mentioned Fate picking on Chris."

"I think we need to look closely at Victoria," Nic said. "To me, she seems a much more likely suspect than Chris. Victoria certainly ha
d t
he motive. Fate didn't listen to her ideas. He mocked her and cut off her mike. He didn't appreciate her suggestions for changing the show. And there could have been some kind of relationship that soured?'

"There weren't any photos of her on his camera," Karl said.

"All that means is that she's smart enough not to get talked into posing. And as for opportunity--we already have a witness saying that Victoria is the one who handed the package to Jim. She claims she found it in her box."

"What about the person who normally sorts the mail?" Rod asked. "Do they remember seeing the package?"

Leif said, "The mail room guy doesn't remember putting that package in Victoria's box. The thing is, he handles at least a hundred packages a day. He says he doesn't remember any of them, unless maybe they're so big they don't fit in the box at all."

"Just because the guy had access to the package doesn't mean he'd have the motive to kill Fate," Rod said. "Do we know yet what kind of opiate was used? Would Victoria Hanawa be able to get any? Would she have the know-how to modify a smoke bomb?"

"Tests have been negative so far for heroin, morphine, and Percocet," Nicole said. "Now the lab is testing some of the less common ones. But we won't have the test results back for several days--maybe longer if they don't get a match."

Rod looked dubious. "I still keep coming back to the idea that it would have been incredibly risky to hand him the package and then hang around. Would Victoria have the guts to stay?"

Nicole shrugged. "What better way to provide herself an alibi than to stay with him until the end and then-cry crocodile tears while she takes over his program?"

"I'm not sure I would agree," Allison said. "If you want to look at people who had a beef with Jim Fate, the line would be down th
e b
lock. So Victoria Hanawa and Jim Fate didn't always see eye to eye. But is that enough reason to kill someone?" She knew that it actually was, that almost anything could be reason enough in the right person's twisted mind. "Victoria didn't evacuate the building. She stayed even though she knew that something in that room was killing Fate. She stayed even though he ordered her to leave. She says it was so he wouldn't be alone."

The idea nearly brought tears to Allison's eyes. She remembered what it was like, thinking she might be dying, anonymous, surrounded by strangers in the street. To have someone there, comforting her, steadying her, would have been so welcome.

Nicole would not be swayed. "Yeah, but what happened after everyone else had evacuated? What if Hanawa stayed so she could take evidence? With no witnesses. Or only one witness. And she knew he wouldn't be able to say anything."

Leif asked, "How about people who were listeners, or who had been on the show?"

Smoothly shifting gears, Nicole said,"I think the family of Brooke Gardner has got to be at the top of the list. After all, their daughter killed herself after having been on the show and basically having him accuse her--falsely--of killing her own child. And Fate did receive a threat directly linked to her death."

Allison added, "And there's Congressman Quentin Glover. We've all seen that commercial. And the transcripts show that Fate was hammering him day after day, calling on him to resign. Chris told us he has gotten several angry phone calls from Glover, and that he and Fate were once personal friends."

"There's no greater enemy," Rod said, "than an old friend."

Chapter
29 Southeast Portland

Leif drove easily, one hand on the wheel, the other resting lightly on the emergency brake, only a few inches from Nic's left thigh. After calling earlier in the day, they were driving out to interview Brooke Gardner's parents, who lived in outer southeast Portland.

For the past few weeks, Nic had begun carrying Leif around in her head. Every morning, when she put on a blouse or selected a pair of earrings, she wondered what he would think when he saw them. If she read an interesting article in the paper or watched an intriguing segment on the news, Nic imagined sharing it with him. Pushing her grocery cart through WinCo, she wondered if he liked sharp cheddar or had a favorite brand of Ben & Jerry's.

A few weeks earlier, they had met for Saturday breakfast. Makayla had spent the night with Nic's parents. Before she agreed to meet him, Nic made it clear to Leif that it wasn't a date. That they were just friends. And he had kept it light, not touching her, or looking at her in a certain way, or even saying anything that a coworker wouldn't say.

But now, sitting beside him, aware of his every breath, she wondered if she was making a mistake, the way Allison and Cassidy kept saying. Something had shifted inside her in that crowded stairwell
,
when she had been convinced that she was only a few minutes from death.

Leif's voice interrupted her musing. "What are you thinking?"

Nic wrenched her mind back to the case. "I think we're missing something. But I can't think what." She looked out the window. Twenty years ago, this had all been fields. Now it was strip malls, strip joints, and used car lots.

"Let's hope it comes to you. Because right now, the way I see it, the problem isn't that we don't have enough suspects. It's that we have way too many."

The Gardners lived in an aging apartment complex that covered a couple of blocks. Leif kept to the posted five miles per hour as they wound through the narrow streets curving around dozens of identical gray two-story buildings.

They found the unit they were looking for toward the back of the complex. As soon as Leif knocked, the door swung open. A man and a woman--Stan and Linda Gardner, Nic presumed--stood in the doorway. They were both blond, both a little overweight, and neither of them looked that much older than Nic.

But there was a third person with them, one she hadn't expected. A toddler straddled Linda's hip. After Leif and Nic introduced themselves, Linda said, "And this is Brandon." He gave them a shy grin that showed his small, white teeth like freshwater pearls, then turned and pressed his face against his grandmother's bosom.

The Gardners invited them in, and then settled into a worn, beige plaid couch. Leif took the tan recliner while Nic sat on the matching ottoman, which was the only other piece of furniture in the room.

"Do you know why we're here?" Nic asked.

"I would guess this has something to do with what happened to Jim Fate," Stan said. He regarded them steadily.

Leif opened up the file he had brought and held up a plastic evidence bag. Inside was the newspaper clipping about Brooke Gardner's death--and the threat scrawled on top of it--that Nic had found in Jim's office. The Gardners looked at it without any sign of curiosity or alarm.

Leif said, "We were able to use new technology to get fingerprints off this. And guess what? They match someone in this room. And it's not me, and it's not Special Agent Hedges. Or Brandon, for that matter."

There were no prints on the clipping, so it was a lie, but it was a legal lie, one that often encouraged the guilty to immediately admit the truth. They had successfully used the same technique before. Two months earlier, Leif had told a robbery suspect that he had sent the mask the robber wore into the lab, which had been able to get a "facial print" off the mask. The robber had at once admitted his guilt.

Stan shook his head. "I didn't write that."

Linda said, "I did."

They all, even Stan, turned to look at her.

"It was right after they figured out"--she looked down at her hand stroking her grandson's fine blond hair--"that Brandon was alive. My only child was gone, and it was all Jim Fate's fault, and Brandon's father was threatening not to let as ever see our grandson again." She made a sound of bitter amusement. "Grandparents basically don't have any rights in Oregon. With just a few careless words, Jim Fate destroyed my entire family. He hounded my only child to death solely for the sake of getting more listeners. And he never even apologized. There were times I did want him dead. But I never acted oil what I was feeling, other than to send him that note." She took a shaky breath. "And we've all come to terms with it since then."