The Detective's Dilemma

“And there was no feud between the two of you?”

“Not as far as I was concerned,” Beth insisted. Leaning forward, she placed a hand flat on the ugly gray table near the corner where Detective Redstone sat. “I know I told my friend Katie Carrington that it was Brandon who ended our engagement and I pretended to be upset,” she said, “but that was a lie. Brandon asked me to say that he was the one who wanted out, and I didn’t see then what harm it could do.” She sat back, waving a hand dismissively. “I just wanted it over with. Even before I found out Brandon was fooling around with Brianne, I knew the engagement was a mistake. Brianne was just the excuse I needed to end it. I didn’t kill her. I had no reason to. Heck, I was glad she wound up with Brandon. Better her than me.”

“Your story just doesn’t check out, Miss Maitland,” Redstone’s partner, Paul Jester, said bluntly. Sprawled casually in a stiff chair at the end of the rectangular table, he seemed the more easygoing of the two, with his pale blond flattop, pink apple cheeks, blunt nose and plump lips. He looked comfortably rumpled in khakis, sport shirt with open collar and tweed jacket with baggy elbows, a true contrast to Redstone’s dark good looks and tailored clothing.

Jester shifted forward, both elbows propped on the tabletop, and went on, repeating facts already established. “Mrs. Dumont checked into the Maitland Maternity Clinic at five forty-five, noting in the guard’s reception book that she had an appointment with you. At precisely six-fifteen, you check out, just at the moment the security guard on the desk is changing, so no notice is taken of the fact that Mrs. Dumont is still inside. At six-twenty the cleaning lady finds the body in your office and sounds the alarm.” He sat back, spreading his hands. “Now what are we supposed to believe?”

Beth shook her head. “Make what you must of it, Detective. I’m telling you that I had nothing to do with the murder. I always check out precisely at six-fifteen. The registry will verify that.”

Redstone leaned down, getting right in her face. She noticed that one of his small white teeth was chipped, the one left of center on the bottom, and shivered with sensual awareness—of a man who suspected her of murder, yet!

“Mr. Dumont swears that you set up the appointment with his wife via the telephone that very afternoon,” he said.

She shook her head. “I didn’t.”

“He says, in fact, that you’ve been harassing his wife since the day of their marriage.”

She looked Redstone straight in the eye. “I don’t know why he’s saying these things, but they aren’t true.”

“And,” the detective went on relentlessly, “you yourself told Ms. Carrington that he, not you, ended the relationship.”

“My client has explained that repeatedly,” Blake said. “This protracted interview is beginning to border on harassment, gentlemen.”

“Look, Ms. Maitland,” Paul Jester said soothingly, ignoring the attorney. “It happens. We know how it is. Your fiancé dumped you for another woman. You called her into your office after hours to tell her exactly what you thought of her. She got smart, hit a nerve. Before you realized what you were doing, you picked up something and wrapped it around her throat….”

Beth was shaking her head, her eyes blazing angrily. “No, no, no. It wasn’t like that. I never touched her. I never even laid eyes on her. I certainly didn’t kill her.”

“That’s enough,” the attorney asserted. “You have my client’s statement. Nothing has changed in the last two hours or more.”

Jester sighed and shot a look at his partner, who got up off the corner of the desk and paced toward the door. Halting, his back to Beth, Redstone brought his hands to his waist and bowed his head. After a moment, he looked over his shoulder, studying her unapologetically, one hand covering the lower part of his face.

“I didn’t kill her,” Beth said to him, sensing that he was the one she had to convince. “As God is my witness, I never even saw her. I wasn’t jealous. I don’t know why Brandon is lying. All I know is, I didn’t kill her.”

The door opened, and Megan Maitland, Beth’s mother, stuck her head inside the room. “How long is this going on?” she demanded. Her white hair had been swept into a neat French twist high on the back of her head, adding to the air of authority that always surrounded her. “Haven’t you badgered my daughter enough?”

Attorney Blake, a good friend of her mother’s, stood. “I think we’re finished here,” he announced firmly.

“I should hope so,” Megan said. “We have a press conference scheduled in less than an hour, and I want my daughter there with me.”

Beth frowned at the notion of the press conference awaiting them at Maitland Maternity. The press had been rabid wherever the Maitlands were concerned. First, a baby had been abandoned on the clinic’s doorstep with a note that claimed he was a Maitland. Then Connor O’Hara, a Maitland cousin no one had ever seen before, showed up, followed by his girlfriend, Janelle, who claimed to be the baby’s mother. And all while Maitland Maternity Clinic was planning its twenty-fifth-anniversary gala. Now a murder had been committed in Beth’s office at the clinic day care—and Beth was the prime suspect. She’d rather thumb her nose at the press pack than give them anything, but even a press conference was preferable to being booked for murder. She stared at Ty Redstone, trying to decide if he was going to arrest her. Finally, he nodded.

“You can go for now, Ms. Maitland, but don’t leave town, and be prepared to make yourself available to us on short notice.”

Blake clamped a hand around Beth’s upper arm, helping her to her feet. He held out her jacket for her. “Good day, gentlemen,” she said, looking at Ty Redstone. “Wish I could say it had been a pleasure.” With that she walked out the interrogation room door and straight into her mother’s waiting arms. The appalling events of the past several hours had drained her, so she allowed her mother to rock her gently from side to side while Hugh Blake quietly praised her for her aplomb and assured Megan that he would pressure the police to find the murderer quickly. Megan thanked him for his help. Beth lifted her head, and together the three of them walked out of the downtown Austin police station.

TY CLOSED THE DOOR on the sight of Beth Maitland standing huddled within her mother’s embrace. After years of this work, he was relatively unaffected by such displays, but something about these Maitland women got to a man. Every one he’d met so far was a real beauty, including the mother, who had to be sixty if she was a day. But then these rich types could afford whatever mysterious beauty treatments kept them looking so young and lovely. Not, he had to admit to himself, that beauty treatments of any sort could make a woman’s legs as long and slender as Beth Maitland’s, or nip her waist in so narrowly that he could span it with his two hands. He dismissed such thoughts, turning to his partner and the matter at hand.

“So what do you think?”

Paul leaned back, balancing his chair on two legs, locking his hands together behind his head and propping his crossed ankles on the table. “I don’t know. Seems like a pretty airtight case on the surface.”

“No kidding.” Ty ticked off the incriminating evidence. “She has the motive and the means. The timing is perfect. The body was found in her office. And the dead woman just happens to be the new wife of her recent and former fiancé. Add to that the statement of said former fiancé—now the widower—that she set up the appointment via telephone, and what you have—”

Ty looked at Paul, and Paul looked at Ty. Together they said, “Too easy.”

Bowing his head, Ty clapped a hand to the back of his neck. “I’m always spooked when they’re too easy.”

“The old hound is smelling a fix,” Paul said blithely. It was a break-room joke that Ty Redstone could smell a frame a mile away despite a steady wind—and for good reason.

“Suppose you break it down for me,” he said, ignoring Paul’s attempt at humor.

Paul rocked forward and pulled his legs down from the table. He extracted a small notebook from his coat pocket, unclipped a pen from it and flipped it open, preparing to demolish their airtight case. “Okay. First of all, strangling is a man’s MO. Even with a garrote, it takes strength over time to get the job done, and an unbound victim of the same approximate size can put up a pretty fierce struggle.”

Ty nodded. “Women usually conk their victims over the head, shoot ’em full of holes or slowly poison them to death. They don’t strangle them with a thin, flexible weapon. What do you think it was, by the way?”

Paul shrugged. “Some sort of cord would be my guess. Too thin for a belt or rope.”

“Right,” Ty said, “so a woman doesn’t usually strangle her victims.” He lifted a cautioning finger. “But we both know that means nothing. Under the right circumstances, anything goes.”

“Granted,” Paul said, “but if she really does check out at six-fifteen every night and we can prove it, then it’s an established pattern that anyone who knows her could use to frame her.”

“We need the logbooks for at least a year,” Ty said, beginning to pace the room as Paul took notes. “We’d better pull the phone records for Maitland Maternity Clinic and the residence.” He snapped his fingers. “Check to see if Beth Maitland has a cell phone, too. If she’s been harassing the happy couple, we’ll find some sign of it.”

Paul scribbled it all down. “Got it.”

Ty paced the narrow confines of the interrogation room. “What do you think happened to the murder weapon?”

Paul shrugged. “Nearest trash bin, probably.”

“We searched with a fine-tooth comb,” Ty reminded him.

“She must have taken it with her. I kept expecting you to ask about it.”

Ty shook his head. “If she hasn’t gotten rid of it, I don’t want her to rethink and do it now.”

“You figure she still has it?”

“Maybe. Anyway, we won’t have a decent idea what Brianne Dumont was strangled with until forensics has done their bit. No sense trying to look for it until we do. Make a note to ask forensics for an early determination,” Ty instructed. Paul dutifully made the note. “Okay, back to the breakdown.”

“One big consideration,” Paul said, “is that we only have Dumont’s word for it that the Maitland dame set up the appointment with the victim.”

“Or that she harassed her,” Ty said, picking up the thread of the argument. “And since Dumont was seeing Ms. Maitland until fairly recently, we can assume that he’s spent a good deal of time around the maternity clinic and the day-care center.”

“Which means he could probably get himself in and out without being seen,” Paul concluded. “There’s a working theory. He baits the trap by telling his wife that Beth’s asked to see her.”

Ty stopped pacing and brought both hands to his hips. “I have to wonder why she would go for that, meeting the other woman on her own turf, especially if the other woman was displaying threatening behavior.”

Paul shrugged. “Maybe she wanted to apologize—Maitland, I mean.”