The Last Lie Told (Finley O’Sullivan, #1)(10)

Which begged a question: Why did having lunch with Sophia Legard push Jack so close to falling off the edge?





4


9:20 p.m.


Legard Residence

Lealand Lane

Nashville

Finley sat in the darkness of her car. She’d begged off Matt’s dinner invitation. Worse, she’d done it via text and then turned off her phone. He would forgive her. Work was his obsession too. He was just a little better at appearing to balance work and his personal life. She’d never quite refined that skill.

Derrick hadn’t minded. He’d respected her dedication.

So, like most evenings, tonight she had spent hours going through the Legard case file. She’d read every single report. The interviews. The autopsy. And she’d done some research into what the daughters and the mother had been up to for the past five years.

Sophia Legard, the mother, had taken the reins of her husband’s company. As it turned out, he’d been involved in far more than the music label. He had dabbled in property development and the stock market. The Legards’ current worth was several times more now than before the murder. Part of that, of course, could be ascribed to the recent real estate boom. The majority, however, was related to far wiser investing in the market. The wife had a knack, it seemed, for choosing well.

Did that include her friends? At fifty-nine she was two years younger than Jack. It was conceivable they knew each other. Nashville wasn’t that large. Both were high-profile people. It was certainly even possible they were friends. She thought of how her boss had felt the need for his first drink in years after a single meeting with Sophia Legard and how he’d averted his eyes when they’d talked about her. Finley made a mental note to look into the possibility the two had a personal history.

The daughter Cecelia was suspected of being agoraphobic. According to social media and various style and social bloggers, she had left the house less and less over time. She had no assets of her own that Finley could locate. No driver’s license. She looked basically the same—at least in the most recent photo available on the World Wide Web. Her hair was short now, in one of those neck-hugging shaggy styles considered to be cute and sexy. Dark-brown eyes, like Finley’s. If anything, Cecelia was thinner than before.

Olivia, on the other hand, had gone blonde and wore her hair around shoulder length—the way the twins had five years ago. According to her essentially inactive social media page, she had graduated from USC and worked at a small advertising firm. Her apartment was in a more modest area of San Diego. No record, not even a parking ticket. According to what Jack had learned from the mother, Olivia was headed to Nashville but wouldn’t arrive until late tonight. She’d wanted to do her interviews via Skype, but Jack nixed the idea. Not only did he want to interview the twins in person; he was well aware Judge Ruth O’Sullivan would never allow a remote deposition in a murder case unless there was simply no way around it.

Finley considered the Legard home. Elegant. European style situated on a large treed estate lot in one of the city’s grandest communities. The twins had attended a premier private school. A deeper search of social media prior to the father’s murder showed glamorous trips abroad and huge parties. In the many photos still available on the net, the two had been photographed more often with their doting father than with their mother.

Finley had studied the way the father looked at his daughters. Where his hands rested whenever he touched one or the other. Nothing overtly sexual. Cecelia and Olivia appeared as fond of him as he was of them. There were slightly more pics of Olivia with her father than of Cecelia. But not enough of a difference to represent any significant relevance.

The media snapshots taken during the trial had showed three women, mother and daughters, all seemingly equally devastated. Once the trial was over, the surviving Legards seemed to fade into the sunset. Olivia moved away, and Cecelia withdrew into the massive mansion. Sophia worked primarily behind the scenes, leaving the day-to-day operations of the family businesses to trusted staff. She was rarely mentioned in news released about the company. Her charity involvements landed her an occasional appearance in the Inside Nashville section of the Tennessean or a mention in the Nashville Lifestyles magazine.

Lance Legard had no history of noteworthy issues, personally or professionally, that had attracted unwanted attention. No lawsuits. No nasty rumors. He had either been very discreet or incredibly careful.

Finley started her car and eased away from the curb. Going from this neighborhood to her fixer-upper on Shelby Avenue was like moving from Neiman Marcus to Walmart. Not that she cared. She’d grown up in a house not unlike the Legard residence. More a museum than a home. When she and Derrick met, he’d been working on a fixer-upper on the East Side, and she’d felt more at home there than she’d ever felt in her condo on Woodmont Boulevard or her childhood home in Belle Meade.

A mere two weeks after they met, she had been spending more time at his place than her own. Barely a month later she’d leased her condo and moved in with Derrick. After what happened—in that very house—most who knew her didn’t understand why she kept staying in the fixer-upper that remained unfixed. Her husband had died there. She didn’t know a single one of her neighbors. People had come by after her release from the hospital to offer their support and/or sympathy. She didn’t recall their names. In all probability most were more curious about the murder in their neighborhood than in her well-being.