The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(60)

And what about the deaths of Richard Whalen and Pam O’Neil? If Richard Seddon had been involved then how would that have worked? Would he have been waiting for them in the house? If so, where was his car?

My afternoon, like most of my afternoons, was free. I drove back out to the northwest suburbs, a drive I was getting very used to. By the time I reached the deck house in Bingham that was still for sale, the dark clouds I’d first noticed in Cambridge were smothering the sky, and light rain had begun to fall. I pulled directly into the driveway, not worrying about anyone seeing me, then got out of the car and looked at the house. It was exactly as I remembered it, a brown deck house that blended into the woods around it. The last time I was here I’d heard the three gunshots coming from inside and forced myself to go in and look. I could remember every detail of what I’d found.

Instead of trying the front door I went around the side of the house, walking across the narrow strip of lawn that led to the back of the property, with a screened-in back porch and another narrow strip of lawn bordering the thick woods. The rain was picking up, coming in gusts, and I turned up the collar of my Harris Tweed jacket. I walked over and looked at the door that led to the porch, tried it but it was locked. The lock was a spring latch, and I considered digging out a credit card to find out how easy it was to open but decided against it. Instead, I skirted the edge of the property, spotting what looked like a seldom-used path heading into the woods. About fifty yards along the path it met up with a definite trail, the ground hard-packed soil, and the trees cut back. I turned right and walked slowly. It was dark in the woods, but the rain had either temporarily stopped or was not penetrating the thickly clustered pine trees. I passed a tree that had a blaze of yellow paint on it, so I knew I was on some sort of official trail. I walked through a clearing, disturbing a trio of crows that scattered from the ground to lower branches, cawing at one another, and probably me. Then I reached a road. A small sign nailed into a tree told me I’d been walking in the Bingham Town Forest. There was no parking lot at the trailhead but the road widened a little and there were tire ruts along the side of the road. I crouched and looked at one of them, pretending for a moment that I was the type of detective that could look at treads and know what kind of tire had made them.

I reversed course back through the woods, managing to find the path that led to the deck house. Sitting in my car, the heater running, I now knew that it was entirely possible that someone else had been in the house on the day that Richard and Pam had been shot. The killer could have parked along a parallel road and gone through the woods. I would never have seen them from the front of the house. There was no definitive proof that this had happened, but I’d learned it was a possibility.

I sat there for a while, making assumptions as I’d been doing all day.

Joan’s husband was having an affair and she decided she wanted to kill him, plus the woman he was cheating with. She knew she couldn’t do it herself, but she had an accomplice. He was an outcast named Richard Seddon and they’d killed together before, or at least instigated murders. So she contacted him, told him the place that her husband conducted his afternoon trysts, and Richard lay in wait, having parked on a nearby street. But even that plan wasn’t good enough, so she decided to add a witness, a detective who would find the bodies, and confirm that it looked like murder followed by a suicide.

I decided that the time had come to talk with Richard Seddon. If all of what I was thinking was true—if he was the third person—then questioning him might provoke him into contacting Joan. What I really wanted to do was to talk with Lily again, or maybe it was time to talk with Roberta James. Tell her what I knew, and leave it to her. Instead, I formed a plan. Tomorrow morning I would park my car down the street from where Richard Seddon lived in Fairview, and sit and wait for him to go by. I needed to find out where he worked, and if I should approach him there or at his house. I already knew the questions I would ask him, that I would try the same ruse I’d used when talking with Elizabeth Grieve, telling him I was hired to investigate the drowning accident of Duane Wozniak. It would be just plausible enough, and also just suspicious enough that he would contact Joan. And if that happened, then I’d know for sure, and then I could hand the whole thing over to Roberta James and the Bingham Police Department. Easy peasy.





Chapter 27





Richard


Richard looked up, and there was the man with the jeans and the tweedy jacket that he’d seen outside his house the day before. “Are you Richard Seddon?” the man asked. Richard stood up too fast and immediately felt the blood rushing from his face, and for a brief moment thought he might pass out.

The man said, “Whoa, you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Richard said.

“I know you’re working right now, but is there any chance we can have a quick conversation? I have a couple of questions for you. Won’t take long.”

“Okay, sure,” Richard said, regretting the words as soon as they came out of his mouth. He was working, after all, and he could have told the guy he’d talk with him later.

But they wound up stepping outside, and walking to the picnic table on the strip of grass across the parking lot, Richard telling Mr. Koestler he was taking his break.

Once they were seated, the man slid a card over to Richard and introduced himself. Richard looked at the card even though he’d already realized that the man was Henry Kimball, the old teacher that Joan had hired to follow her husband. Richard’s mind was anticipating questions, desperately trying to decide how he would answer. He was obviously going to be asked something about the murder of Richie Whalen and that woman he was with, or maybe even be asked about Joan Grieve. Should he at least say he’d heard about it? Should he acknowledge that he went to school with both Joan and Richie?