Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(60)

“The timing’s pretty interesting,” I said. “That’s only a week or so after Chris disappeared.”

“Exactly,” Todd agreed. “So I checked with the major hotels in Vegas. Turns out Shelley Loveday was staying in a suite at Caesars Palace, the kind of accommodations casinos usually reserve for and routinely comp to their high rollers.”

Suddenly I was making the same connection that Todd had. Shelley had told me straight out that Roger had paid Chris off in order to encourage him to disappear. She’d also mentioned that the payment would have been made from the “just in case” funds that Roger stowed in the safe at home. But what if Roger hadn’t made the payment in person? What if he’d used a courier to make the payoff and had delegated his mistress to deliver the goods?

After all, what about that unidentified woman Bill Farmdale had told me about, the one claiming car trouble who’d shown up at the back door of Zig’s Place the night Chris disappeared? What if Roger had dispatched his mistress to deliver the payoff money to Chris but she’d pulled a fast one? What if while Chris was working on her car, she’d attacked him from behind? With him on the ground and her standing over him, she would have been at the proper angle to deliver that fatal blow, the results of which were still visible in Harriet Raines’s patched-together skull. As for Chris? In that position he would have been totally oblivious to the danger and completely unable to defend himself.

And just like that, with that one blow, Shelley Loveday would have accomplished two very different things. Roger Adams had wanted Chris Danielson gone, and killing him handled that thorny issue once and for all. As a very important side benefit, however, Shelley now found herself in the possession of a sum of cold, hard cash to spend on whatever she wanted, including an expensive junket to Vegas.

According to Twink, as long as Shelley had been married to Jack Loveday, the guy had kept her on a very short leash as far as spending was concerned. Would someone like that hand over money for his wife to squander on a weekend of gambling in Vegas? Not on a bet, I told myself. I suspected that Jack Loveday had known nothing at all about that weekend junket, and there was a good chance Roger Adams, Shelley’s longtime lover, hadn’t heard a word about it either.

Prior to that moment, I had considered Roger Adams, Danitza’s aggrieved father, to be the only person of interest in the likely death of Chris Danielson. While I was still on the job, I would have regarded that kind of investigation with disdain, saying the detectives involved were suffering from tunnel vision. Hadn’t I been doing the same thing?

Most homicides revolve around one of three things—drugs, sex, or money. Here was number three staring me straight in the face—money, ten thousand dollars’ worth! Compared to that a father’s simmering anger might have to take a backseat, because now I had two things I hadn’t had before—motivation and an actual suspect.

I was still holding the phone with those ideas flashing through my mind when I heard Todd’s impatient voice in the background. “Beau, are you still there?”

“Sorry, yes, I’m here. Great work, Todd,” I told him. “Keep digging. I think you’ve just handed me the name of my possible killer.”

“Shelley Loveday Adams?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Okay,” Todd said. “I’m on it.”

He hung up then. Instead of ordering dessert, I waved for the waitress to bring my check. After paying the bill, I headed back across the street to the Driftwood. There might have been snow on the ground. It could have been frigid weather, but I didn’t notice and didn’t care, because now I had a real sense of purpose.

I was on the job again, and the old killer-chasing bloodhound had just caught a scent.





Chapter 21




Back in my room at the Driftwood Inn, I hied myself to the desk chair and began going through the documents Todd had sent me. I worked from the bottom up, starting with the ones sent earlier in the day and gradually arriving at the later ones, all the while searching for any telling details that might provide a smoking gun that would point suspicion at Shelley Adams.

In my years as a homicide investigator, I often went to a prosecutor with what I thought to be a solid case only to be told it wasn’t enough—that I needed more in order to prove the suspect guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This time I was several rungs on the investigative ladder below that. All I had at the moment were suspicions—plenty of those—but nothing concrete and nothing solid enough to rise to the level of probable cause. This was a cold case for sure, one with no forensics or DNA or eyewitnesses. It would have to be solved the old-fashioned way, by tracking down friends and relations of both victim and suspect in order to establish exactly how the fatal encounter might have occurred.

A lot of crooks get caught because they’re just plain stupid. Shelley was anything but that. Homer, Alaska, is definitely a small town. With the notable exception of Penny Olmstead’s accidental sighting in Anchorage, Shelley and Roger Adams had managed to carry on an extramarital affair for years without anyone being the wiser. No, Shelley was smart, all right, and excellent at keeping secrets. Fortunately, I’m an expert at unearthing same.

There was no scene of the crime as such. Even had there been video surveillance cameras rolling nearby at the time when Chris went to help that supposedly stranded motorist, those tapes—that’s what they generally were back then—would have long since been overwritten and disappeared. What I had to do was re-create the crime scene in my mind, and in the quiet of my room at the Driftwood Inn that’s what I did.