The Accomplice(72)

* * *



—

“What are you working on?” Burns asked her partner.

“I’m tracking Irene’s cash withdrawals in the last three years.” Noah spun around his laptop, showing Margot his Excel spreadsheet of cash withdrawals.

“That spreadsheet is a little bit like porn for you, isn’t it?” Margot asked.

The answer was yes, but Goldman ignored the question.

“In 2016 through ’17, she makes an average of five ATM withdrawals each year. Then, at the end of last year, she started withdrawing larger sums. One thousand, five thousand. It adds up to close to thirty thousand in the last year. All in cash. I contacted her financial adviser, Cliff Easter. He’d asked Irene about it, because he didn’t like how it looked, and she told him she was buying art,” Noah said.

“Can we verify that?” Margot asked.

“I reached out to the attorney. I’m going to get a look at her storage facility in a few hours. Get this: According to her attorney, there were no amendments to her will.”

“So if she was buying art…” Burns said.

“Right,” Goldman said, nodding. “Anything not designated in her will goes to the husband.”

Margot threw on her coat and searched her desk for car keys. “Let me know as soon as you find anything. We’ll need an appraiser.”

“Where are you going?” Goldman asked.

“Albany,” Margot said. “I want to talk to Detective Oslo. He investigated the Scarlet Hayes death.”

“You think there’s anything there?”

“I have no idea,” Margot said.



* * *



—

Miles Oslo had retired from the New York State Police three years earlier. Now he worked very part-time as a private detective, running his casual business out of a sparsely furnished office in a decaying strip mall in Troy, New York. Oslo agreed to meet Detective Margot Burns to discuss the Scarlet Hayes case.

Margot found it both disappointing and suspicious that he didn’t even have signage on his door. She rang the buzzer for unit four. A tall, extremely lean man with fading strawberry-blond hair answered the door.

After introductions were made and coffee offered, Margot sat down in an old leather chair in the shabby ten-by-ten-foot room.

“I know. This place is a shithole,” said Oslo.

“I appreciate your time,” Burns said.

Oslo moved a small file to the center of his desk. “I reviewed my notes this morning,” Oslo said. “I’m afraid I don’t have much more to tell you. Nothing stuck out. Back when I interviewed Owen Mann, he had an on-again off-again relationship with Scarlet Hayes. By all accounts, he was not the pursuer. While the death was unfortunate, all the crime-scene evidence suggested that it was an accident.”

“Was there anything about the case that didn’t sit right with you?” Burns asked.

“Sure,” Oslo said. “A few things. When we were still getting heat from Scarlet’s mother, I asked Owen if he’d take a lie-detector test. He declined right away, didn’t even think about it.”

“Any good lawyer would tell him to refuse,” Burns said.

In the same situation, she wouldn’t let her own son take a lie detector.

“I agree,” Oslo said, nodding. “But I always got the feeling there was something he wasn’t saying, like maybe he was protecting someone.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. It was just a feeling.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Oslo said. “We got an anonymous call the morning after Scarlet disappeared, telling us where we could find the body.”

“Where was the call made?” Burns asked.

“A pay phone in town. It could have been a hiker who came upon the deceased and didn’t want to get involved. We’ll never know.”

“The trail was on public grounds?”

“Technically part of Markham, but anyone could hike there,” Oslo said.

“Did you investigate the call?” Burns asked.

“There were no cameras near the pay phone.”

“Fingerprints?”

Oslo pretended to consult his notes. “I’d have to get back to you on that.”

“Didn’t you think that the caller might have been the killer?”

“If I thought there was a killer, I would have considered that a possibility,” Oslo said.

“What didn’t sit right with you?”

“It didn’t make sense that Scarlet made that hike alone. I thought maybe she was lured up there. And the call bugged me. But a lot of people are wary of cops. At the end of the day, we didn’t find any evidence to dispute an unfortunate accident,” Oslo said.

“Why did you close the case when you still had doubts?”

“The evidence pointed to an accident. And I didn’t want Owen living with a cloud over him.”

“Did you interview Luna Grey back then?” Margot asked.

“Luna Grey? What does she have to do with anything?”

Oslo hadn’t thought about the girl until he’d pulled the file to refresh his memory.

“Luna was the one who discovered the body of Owen’s wife. In fact, she notified Owen before the police,” Margot said.