Sink Trap (24 page)

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Authors: Christy Evans

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Large Type Books, #Mystery Fiction, #Murder, #Crime, #Investigation, #Murder - Investigation, #Oregon, #Plumbers

BOOK: Sink Trap
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Sheriff Mitchell was on the phone when I arrived, and the deputy at the counter showed me to a small, sparsely furnished office to wait for him.
I sat in the chair he indicated, an ancient metal frame with a cracked, dark green, vinyl seat and back. The padding had packed down somewhere in the Reagan Administration,
and though it still seemed sturdy, it offered little in the way of comfort.
Then again, I don’t think comfort was a high priority.
The only other furniture in the room was a bare wooden desk of about the same vintage as my chair and a spindly looking secretary’s chair in one corner.
I was wondering if the sheriff intended to sit on the secretary’s chair—there wasn’t much else to do in the bare room—when the door opened. Fred Mitchell wheeled in a high-backed executive chair, the kind I’d used to have in my San Francisco office. I remembered that when you have a really good chair, you take the time to drag it with you to meetings.
I supposed this qualified as a meeting of some sort. What it really was, of course, was an interrogation. I just didn’t want to think about that part of it.
The sheriff moved a file folder off the seat of the chair, sat down, and placed the file in the exact center of the desk. He took a small tape recorder out of his shirt pocket and laid it on the desk, next to the file.
“Do you mind?” he said, pointing at the recorder. “I’m pretty good at notes, but this makes sure I have an absolutely accurate record of what was said.”
Alarm bells went off in the back of my head. “Is this an official interview? Should I have a lawyer?”
Sheriff Mitchell leaned over the desk. His dark eyes were wide and his voice soft and sincere as he replied. “This is unofficial, and the recording is just for my use in the investigation. You don’t need a lawyer, and I’ll tell you if we reach a point where you might.
“For now I just need to find out what you know—anything that might help us discover what really happened to Martha Tepper.”
There it was.
What really happened
. That didn’t sound like he believed she’d moved to Arizona after all.
“You mean . . . ?”
The sheriff avoided my question. “The bag you found
in the Tepper house contained some objects that have aroused our interest. We are doing a preliminary inquiry.
“Mr. Hickey gave us his version of what happened, and I’d like to hear yours.”
I tried to remember all the advice I had ever heard about talking to the police. Answer politely, tell the truth, don’t volunteer information.
I chose my words carefully, giving him the bare facts of our discovery that morning. I didn’t go into detail about how a tool had gone through the wall—it was just an accident.
The sheriff asked if I had seen or heard anything unusual during the last couple weeks while I was working at the house.
I stopped to think, and the miniature recorder stilled. The sheriff saw me look at it, and the corners of his mouth lifted slightly. “Voice activated. Saves on batteries.”
I didn’t tell him I knew a lot about the technology. Samurai Security had used voice activation recording when necessary, and we’d perfected a couple nifty tricks. Tricks that Blake and his buddies were now using, I was sure.
The sheriff cleared his throat, drawing my thoughts back to the present. “Miss Neverall? Anything unusual?”
I decided the arguments between Sandra, Gregory, and the Gladstones didn’t qualify as unusual. In fact, they had sounded pretty much business as usual, if you ask me.
But Janis Breckweth, that was definitely unusual.
“There was this woman,” I said. How could I describe Janis Breckweth without making her sound like a nut case? Then again, maybe she really was a nut case.
I figured it was the sheriff’s job to figure that out.
“She came to the house one day while Barry—Mr. Hickey—and I were working. She said she lived there, and she’d come to get her things.”
“What can you tell me about her?”
“She looked kind of, I don’t know, disheveled, I guess.
Her hair was a mess and it looked like she’d slept in her clothes. She said her name was Janis, and she was Martha Tepper’s housekeeper.”
The sheriff wrote down each detail as I told him, occasionally going back to underline or circle some particular piece of information.
Watching him take notes was nerve-wracking. My stomach clenched and I fought back the taste of egg salad rising in my throat.
I really hate egg salad.
“This Janis, you say her last name was Breckweth, right? She lived in that house?”
I nodded. “She said she’d lived there six years. A friend of mine, who knows Miss Tepper better than I do, told me Miss Breckweth had been living there for several years, so I guess it’s true.”
“And she said she came to get her belongings? She didn’t take them with her when she left?”
I shrugged. “All I know is what Janis told me. She said a woman came and told her they were selling the house, and she had to leave. Said they wouldn’t even let her wait until morning, or pack her clothes, or anything.
“That’s all I know about her.”
The recorder clicked off and the sheriff waited, as though he expected me to remember something else.
I could hear the clicking of computer keys from the other room, and the occasional muffled squawk of the police radio. Neither sound was loud enough to activate the recorder.
We sat for what felt like several hours in silence. The sheriff reviewed his notes, stopping to scribble things in the margins of the page as though he had all the time in the world.
Or as if he was waiting for something.
As the silence stretched, I found my palms sweating, and my heart beating faster. I had nothing to hide—well, almost nothing, and I’d had a key, so it really wasn’t a
break-in—but I was still reacting to the tension. I tried to imagine how nervous I would be if I had something serious I didn’t want to share with him.
It reinforced what I had realized several days earlier: I was not cut out for a life of crime. Even vicarious crime. I wanted to confess to something, anything, just to break the silence.
Of course, I didn’t have much to confess to, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to. I wondered how real criminals handled this kind of treatment. On the other hand, real criminals probably didn’t care.
The thought didn’t help.
I considered telling him about the sabotage at the Tepper house. Was that significant? Would he care, or would I just sound paranoid? Probably the latter.
I kept quiet. No sense destroying what little credibility I had.
I did think of something, though. The sheriff probably wouldn’t take it any more seriously than Barry or Wade had, but at least there was something I could say.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said, even though I didn’t believe it. “But there was something else. I only just remembered it because it was at the warehouse, not Miss Tepper’s house. She left all her furniture in the house, along with a lot of clothes and things, but this was at the warehouse.”
The sheriff looked up from his notes. “You never know what might be important. Please, I want to hear anything you know.”
“Well, there was this brooch.” The recorder whirred, and I told him about finding the brooch in the trap of the utility sink at the warehouse.
“She wore that brooch every single day,” I said. “That was why I was worried about her in the first place. She never went anywhere without it.”
I hesitated. There was that whole thing about not volunteering information, but maybe that was just with lawyers, not police. Besides, I’d been worried about Martha Tepper for too long to stop now.
I told him the story of the brooch, the one Paula had told Sue and me, complete with the missing brother, the dead fiancé, and the dream to visit the Wall.
By the time I’d finished, I have to admit, I was a little choked up. I don’t care what Wade said, it was a sad story.
“So,” Sheriff Mitchell said when I ran down, “you don’t think she would have left without that piece of jewelry?”
I shook my head. “Not a chance. I don’t know her as well as some of the people around here, but I can’t imagine any woman leaving a piece like that behind, any more than a married woman would leave her wedding ring.”
“You’d be surprised,” he said, in a tone that implied a lot, but he didn’t say anything more.
I tried to remember if I had heard anything about the sheriff’s current marital state, but my brain refused to cooperate. It was busy with more important things, like controlling the impulse to scream, “Let me out of here!”
“You don’t agree.” It was a statement, not a question. There was no point in asking when his answer was clear.
It was apparently my day to be wrong about everything.
“On the contrary, Georgiana—May I call you Georgiana?—I agree with you entirely. A piece that carries that much emotional and sentimental value does not get left behind except in a life-threatening emergency. And sometimes not even then.
“I have seen people run back into burning buildings or crawl into a smashed-up car, to retrieve a baby’s toy or a favorite sweater. It’s a stupid thing to do, but it happens.”
He leaned back in his chair. “So I agree with you, Georgiana.”
He lapsed back into silence and I tried not to fidget. We went on for several more minutes like that: long silences, with the recorder springing to life when Mitchell asked an occasional question.
At last the sheriff leaned forward. He steepled his fingers on the desk and stared down at his notes. “Is there
anything else you can think of? Anything we ought to know?”
I shook my head. “I really think I told you everything I could remember.”
“All right.” He stood up.
A deputy, a different one than had been at the desk, came into the room at once, as though he had been waiting for some signal from the sheriff. He handed his boss a few sheets of paper and stepped back, waiting by the door.
I felt silly being the only one sitting down, so I stood up, too. I made no move to leave since no one had actually said I could go yet, and leaving without permission struck me as a bad idea.
The sheriff read the papers, flipping one over to read the back. I watched, not sure what to expect. Did he have some information about what we’d found?
“A couple things before you go, Georgiana. I’d like you to bring that brooch in here, please. It’s lost property at the very least, and it may be evidence if we decide a crime has been committed.”
“Sure,” I said. “Right away.”
The sheriff nodded once. “There are a couple reporters out front, claiming they want to get ‘your side’ of the story. You are welcome to speak to them, of course. But if you’d like to avoid them, Deputy Carruthers can show you the employee exit around back.”
I’d dealt with the hyenas of the business press during the trouble at Samurai Security. A couple local reporters shouldn’t be a problem. But I’d elect to avoid them if I could.
“Thanks. I’d appreciate that.”
He handed over a picture and asked me if I knew the woman in the photo. It was Janis Breckweth. I identified her as the woman who came to the house and claimed to live there.
“I’ll have her picked up,” he said. “According to this report”—he tapped the piece of paper in his hand—“she’s the new cook at Second Chances.”
“That’s a weird coincidence,” I said. “I think that’s where the crew came from that packed up Miss Tepper’s house and took everything to storage.”
Sheriff Mitchell shot me a hard look. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. I’d seen the Second Chances logo on the shirts the movers wore, and I remembered the Gladstones talking about them.
Mitchell glared and scrawled a note on the edge of the paper. “I don’t believe in coincidence,” he growled.
“Sorry.”
“Not your fault.” He waved away my apology and skimmed over one more piece of paper before sticking the entire stack into the file folder with his notes from our interview.
“Carruthers will show you the back exit, Georgiana. I’ll see you back here later today?” His voice rose in a polite question, but I knew it was more than a request. “With that brooch.”
He hesitated. “We did get some preliminary results from the lab,” he said. “I suppose you deserve to know.
“Those were blood stains on the towel. DNA testing will take a while, but the type matches Martha Tepper’s.”
6
never skimp on preparation
When it comes to tools, buy the best you can afford, not what looks nice. Good tools are worth every penny. Poor-quality tools make any job more difficult and prone to disaster.
 
—A Plumber’s Tip from Georgiana Neverall
chapter 20

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