On blink four, he leaned forward slightly. “I want to ask a hypothetical question of you first.”
Not what I expected, but if it would get me the truth at last, I’d play along. “Okay. I’ll answer if I’m able.”
“If a person didn’t learn about a crime until after the fact, could they still be considered an accessory?”
That opened up more questions for me than I’d had before. Was he worried about protecting himself or his wife? His wife was his soft spot. If he’d told her after our last visit that he’d killed Gordon and the drug accusation was a lie to hide it, then he might be worried the police would charge her with something as well.
“It depends on the situation. To be an accessory, a person”—I was careful not to say you in order to keep it general—“had to have helped with covering up the crime or had to help the perpetrator avoid capture. And spouses can’t ever be forced to testify against their husband or wife.”
“What about failure to report? As a therapist, I have a duty to report child abuse. Is there any law in place where an average citizen needs to report a crime that isn’t child abuse if they learned about it months later and didn’t participate in covering it up? All that person did was stay quiet once they learned of it.”
He asked the questions so calmly that it raised the hairs on the back of my neck. If I hadn’t known it was his training hiding his emotions, I would have pegged him for a sociopath. As it was, that knuckle crack made me think he was likely just really good at his job.
The second question also made it sound like it wasn’t his wife he was worried about. Had Gordon committed some sort of crime and Leonard learned about it? If so, the victim of Gordon’s crime could have come back later to exact revenge. Or someone else could have known about it and they were blackmailing Gordon. In that case, he would have taken the money to pay off his blackmailer.
I brought my hands down to my knees, a friendlier position. “You understand I can’t give you legal counsel?”
He nodded, but the movement was abnormally small.
In many states, there wasn’t even a legal duty to render aid to someone in distress. I’d had trouble sleeping for weeks after I heard about the Florida teens who videoed a man drowning on their phones and laughed rather than calling 911. Police were hoping to charge them with failure to report a death at least.
I doubted that’s the kind of thing Leonard was talking about, though.
“As far as I know,” I said, “there’s no legal duty to report a crime in Michigan.”
Leonard leaned forward slightly and put his hands on his knees as well, a mimic of my posture. “Gordon withdrew that money to purchase something for our mother that would help her peacefully end her own life.”
15
That was not at all what I’d expected to hear.
I let myself slump back in the chair. Physician-assisted death was legal in only a handful of states, and only so long as they provided the means of death but didn’t administer it.
Gordon wasn’t a doctor, and Michigan wasn’t one of the states where providing medical aid in dying was legal at all. If Gordon administered the lethal aid, then it would definitely have been considered a murder, even if he had been a doctor.
“Did your wife know?”
“She did. That’s why she seemed shocked when I said Gordon had a drug addiction. I explained to her afterwards why I lied.” Leonard’s gaze shifted to the side and then back to me as if he was deciding how much to share with me. “Gordon refused to tell me at first where the money went. That’s why I brought the suit against him. He only admitted it after that, and that’s the real reason I dropped the lawsuit. Our mother was in so much pain those final weeks. If she asked Gordon to help end her suffering…it was a better use of her money than whatever I would have spent it on.”
There was a fierceness to his voice that I hadn’t heard before—a defense of his mother and brother’s decision.
I’d never been there. I’d never had to watch someone I loved suffering. A part of me could understand their decision and a part of me couldn’t. Life was a precious gift, and so many people who wanted more days didn’t get to have them.
Despite that, it wasn’t my place to criticize Leonard or Gordon right now. Right now, all that mattered was whether this somehow resulted in Gordon’s death.
Whoever he bought the means of suicide from got their money. They wouldn’t have had a reason to come after him or to frame Clement. It couldn’t have been blackmail. That was the only unusual withdrawal from Maryanne Albright’s account, and Gordon’s financials hadn’t shown anything unusual, according to Chief McTavish.
It was still possible that Leonard had killed Gordon because he was angry Gordon helped their mother end her life.
But I didn’t see it. He sounded sincere when he’d defended Gordon’s actions. He was good at hiding his emotions, but I hadn’t seen any evidence that he was equally as good at faking emotions. Most people either had one of those skills or the other, but to have both was rarer.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this when I first asked?”
“I thought my wife and I could be prosecuted after the fact for knowing about it, and I figured if I told you Gordon had a drug problem, you’d leave it at that or you’d pursue the drug angle and wouldn’t find out the truth.”
I almost had. If it hadn’t been for Clement insisting Gordon didn’t do drugs, I might have wasted a lot of time looking for a drug dealer who didn’t exist.
With what was at stake, I had to make sure Leonard wasn’t deceiving me again. If he hadn’t planned to tell me that Gordon assisted their mother in killing herself, he might not have come up with a reason why I shouldn’t think he’d want to punish Gordon for it. “Withholding information that way makes it seem like you might have been angry with Gordon for what he did and killed him over it.”
“You could try that argument.” Leonard crossed his legs. “But I was part of the committee that petitioned to have Michigan’s laws concerning physician-assisted suicide changed. I’d be a hypocrite if I killed my brother because he wanted to provide the same peace to our mother that I wanted to provide to others.”
His story was convincing except for one thing. “Then why weren’t you two speaking again once you found out the truth?”
“I agreed with what he did, but he should have asked me rather than doing it on his own. I should have had my chance to say goodbye, too.” Leonard’s hands shifted toward each other like he wanted to crack his knuckles again. Instead his ran his fingers over his knuckles twice. “It seems stupid now that Gordon’s gone, and my last words to him were angry ones. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him, either.” His hands separated, and he straightened his back. “Do you have any more questions, or are we done? The hour’s almost up.”
I didn’t have any more questions. Not after that one sentence—It seems stupid now. Those were the words of someone who genuinely regretted not making up with a person they cared about before it was too late. He hadn’t killed his brother.
Which meant I now had a much bigger problem.
It was back to looking like Clement was the only one who could have murdered Gordon Albright.
“It’s possible Clement did kill Gordon,” Anderson said once we were back in my car.
It didn’t help hearing my fear repeated back to me. Clement and I had a plan for what we’d do if we felt he was guilty. I just didn’t want to execute it. I liked Clement, and I didn’t want him to be guilty. I certainly didn’t want him to have to spend his final days in prison, knowing his wife was afraid of him.
My phone vibrated in my pocket, and the Bluetooth display flashed the number for the prison where Clement was.
