“What about the—” My mom and I both started the question and stopped at the same time.
My mom nodded at me to continue.
The tingle of confidence spread and warmed my entire body. My mom and I had never worked together like this before. I’d always been assigned a task that was carefully monitored by someone who could speak to a jury without sounding like Oliver Twist begging for more food. It might actually be fun to work side-by-side with my mom as equals and to show her that I might be a crappy lawyer, but that didn’t mean I was a failure. I was good at other things. Important things.
I rubbed my palms along the skirt my mom had insisted I change in to when she believed we were meeting a client. “What about the woman who didn’t check in?”
Erik flipped through his notes. “Alice Benjamin. Mandy didn’t have anything other than an email address and a name. I have someone seeing if they can track down a phone number.”
My mom set the pen down on the table and folded her hands. Her expression turned almost bored, like the glamor had suddenly worn off the case. “In most situations, the person who looks guilty is.”
In other words, my mom thought Alice likely killed Vilsack and then fled, and given how Vilsack’s roommate described him, the motive was probably romantic. Alice found out he was cheating on her with another woman, or she was married and Vilsack threatened to expose their affair.
That would be an interesting case in my mom’s world, where she’d have to build a defense for Alice, but on the other side, where things seemed simple, there wasn’t a challenge for her.
No challenge for her meant she wouldn’t see this as a valuable use of our time. Even if Alice’s husband had followed her here and killed them both, it wouldn’t interest my mom, and we’d be back to how I was wasting my life here.
I wasn’t about to let that happen, which meant I wasn’t about to let our role in this investigation fizzle out on our first day. “Alice Benjamin also might have had nothing to do with it at all. We have a lot of blanks to fill in first. Did Mark think there’s a chance Vilsack is still alive?”
Erik shook his head. “Possible but not probable were Mark’s words. There was a lot of blood pooled behind the toilet and under the sink, and it looked like someone started to clean up, probably using the items Mandy found in the wash, and wasn’t able to finish.”
I restrained myself from looking directly at my mom. Her expression wouldn’t give much away anyway. But from the corner of my vision, I caught the tiniest change in her posture. She brought her upper body forward. The unfinished cleanup had her interested again.
“Any leads on the body?” my mom asked. “Without one, a decent defense attorney can call into question almost every piece of evidence you bring against their client.”
“We’re waiting on the state cadaver dogs.”
Erik scrubbed a hand around the back of his neck. An expression flickered across his face like he couldn’t remember for a second what he’d been about to say.
Not a good sign. The next natural step would be to talk to Mandy’s other employees and clear the remaining guests. But if Erik was too sick to stay focused, a traditional interview/interrogation style could harm the investigation by tipping off the perpetrator without giving us enough benefit to justify it.
Plus, in a case like this, where we had more question marks than potential answers, it felt like we might want to be a little more informal until more of the lab results came in.
I opened my mouth to suggest to Erik that my mom and I could talk to Sunburnt Arms employees while he managed things here, but I snapped my lips shut. One of the “tricks” my parents warned their clients about was police personnel pretending their questions were innocent when they weren’t. Would my mom see me as a traitor for doing the same?
I waited for the sharp pain in my chest, but it didn’t come. Instead I felt almost…calm. I couldn’t let what my mom might think or not think stand in the way of doing what I knew was best. That’s what had landed me in a job I hated in the first place.
I picked up the photocopy of Erik’s notes and the list of evidence they’d collected so far, and then stood. “Why don’t we start talking to Mandy’s other employees while you coordinate things here? They don’t know we’re working with you, and they might be more open.”
Erik sneezed loudly enough that his chair squeaked. He slumped slightly—the first time I’d ever seen him with anything less than perfect posture. “Maybe that’d be for the best.”
As we were climbing back into my car, my cell phone rang. The screen said Mandy. I waited for it to sync to Bluetooth and answered over the speakers.
“You have us both,” I said.
“There’s dust everywhere, the kitchen’s a mess, and things are missing.” Mandy sounded like she needed to be offered a paper bag to breathe into.
Better I didn’t ask how she’d gotten to The Sunburnt Arms so fast after the police released the scene. My suspicion was she’d gone back to keep an eye on things from a distance despite my strong recommendation that she stay away.
“I’ll never get it back in order before the next guests are supposed to arrive,” Mandy continued, her voice rising in pitch. “I’ll have to cancel more bookings.”
My mom raised her hand and caught my attention. She pointed from herself to me and then at the speakers.
I nodded. Whether my mom’s motives were altruistic or practical, since it’d give us a chance to question Mandy’s staff in a casual environment, I agreed with her. “There’s not much you’ll be able to do alone there tonight. Why don’t you call in all your staff for tomorrow after church? My mom and I will come, too. We can make a list of what you might need to buy as we set things right.”
“It feels like I’ve been robbed.”
The situation couldn’t be quite that bad. The police tried to cause as little mayhem as possible. But they would have fingerprinted, photographed, and collected evidence, both trace and otherwise. That meant that all the stained linens and laundry would be gone as evidence, and so would any other items the police might think could be connected to the case.
“It can feel like you’ve been violated. I promise we’ll put it right, so you won’t lose any more guests. Head back to my place for now, okay? We’ll bring home dinner.”
I disconnected the call.
The twist in my stomach had nothing to do with hunger pains, even though it was well past when I’d normally have eaten.
I’d lied to another friend. I’d made it sound like we were coming for her when really we were coming to find out if we’d need to bring even more trouble on her by investigating one of her other employees as a potential murderer.
I swallowed hard, but it didn’t clear away the gritty feeling in my mouth. The thought that I would have offered to help her anyway barely took the edge off.
My mom watched me. “Even the good guys have to bend the truth sometimes,” she said softly. “You know the police do it.”
I knew. And I knew that in a world with as much evil as ours, the good guys sometimes had to deceive the bad ones in order to protect society. It was the collateral damage like Mandy that bothered me.
My fingernails dug into the steering wheel. Maybe it was time I told my mom that. “That’s one of the reasons I can’t come back. It’s one thing to bend the truth in pursuit of making sure a criminal can’t hurt anyone else. It’s something else entirely to try to do it in pursuit of the exact opposite. I can’t do that anymore.”
I peeked at my mom. Her expression was smooth, like I’d said I don’t like chocolate anymore rather than like I’d basically said I found what she and my dad did morally untenable anymore.
“So it’s not that you’d rather make maple syrup than be a lawyer?” she asked.
