Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest
19.
Kimberly Cowen worked downtown with an advertising firm, but she didn’t want to meet at her own office. She hadn’t held the job very long, and she wasn’t interested in answering any questions about why cops might want a word with her regarding a murder case, thank you very much. However, she’d agreed to show up at the big library on Fourth Avenue.
“Meet me after work, upstairs near the local history archives, and we’ll talk,” she’d told Grady Merritt on the phone.
Leda found it all a little fishy, but Grady shrugged it off.
“People get weird when you tell them that you’re in law enforcement and you want to talk. Everybody starts shuffling through their memories, trying to figure out if they’ve done anything wrong and wondering if they need a lawyer.”
Leda shut the passenger door of Grady’s car and leaned against it while he paid for parking. “But she already knows you, and she knows all about the case.”
“She knows a bit about the case. She doesn’t know more about it than we do, unless she’s the one who murdered everybody.” He started to walk uphill. “Come on, and be cool.”
“I’m getting better about being cool.”
“Are you?” Grady asked, his voice pitched a little too high.
Leda adjusted her purse, slinging it across her chest like a messenger bag. “Well, I’m working on it.”
“That’s more like it. Where’s your shadow?”
“Niki? She had a doctor’s appointment. It’s just you and me.”
They were about two blocks from the downtown library building, a flagship of King County’s commitment to reading and education, and also a flagship of modern architecture, or that was Leda’s guess. What other explanation could there be for a building that looked like someone had overinflated a glass Rubik’s Cube? She’d been led to believe it was a vast improvement over the previous library at the same location, which in turn had been a vast improvement over the old house that had initially gotten the library party started—considering that the house had burned to the ground.
Leda Foley had never actually been inside this particular library. She’d been to the Columbia City branch, as well as the one in Fremont, and one in Rainier Beach—usually because she needed free Wi-Fi before it became ubiquitous around town. But this was the granddaddy of them all—eleven geometrically styled stories of pure, weapons-grade knowledge.
Inside, the library looked like the interior of a UFO, if the aliens were super into reading: lots of grays and vivid greens, electric yellows, and illuminated escalators that disappeared up into the ceiling or down through the floor.
Leda said “Wow” as she trailed along behind Grady.
“It’s really something else, isn’t it?” He led her to a narrow, mirrored escalator, and she climbed on behind him.
“It sure is. You know where we’re going, right?”
“All the way to the top. Hope you don’t have vertigo.”
She stared at his back, on the steps ahead of her. “No, but what if I did?”
“Then you might want to wait this one out.”
On the top level, the sky was the limit. The world above was glass and metal, and the whole city loomed around them, but when Leda stepped toward a window to look outside, yes, maybe she did feel a touch of vertigo. It was something about how the building jutted out over the street. She shook her head and fell back in line behind Grady, who was making a beeline for a common area with tables, chairs, outlets, and a number of people sitting around on laptops and wearing headphones.
“Over there,” he said, pointing to a woman seated near the windows, at a small table surrounded by four comfy chairs. She was a young white woman with hair that had never been a natural shade of red on anyone, anywhere, in the history of hair. She was pretty and soft, with a bright blue tattoo of what looked like a bird on the back of her wrist.
As Grady and Leda approached, she closed a notebook. She rose to her feet. “Detective Merritt.”
“Ms. Cowen.” They shook hands, and Grady turned to Leda. “Kimberly Cowen, this is my associate Leda Foley. I mentioned her on the phone.”
Kim smiled and extended her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Leda attempted to reply, but she choked a tiny bit on the second syllable. Her hand in the grip of the other woman’s hand had sparked something. A moment of light. A promise. She blinked repeatedly, reclaimed her hand, and said, “Sorry, I don’t mean to be strange. Just a touch of vertigo.”
“Tell me about it. This place takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?”
Grady dropped himself into the chair across from her, and Leda took the one to her right. “I love it here,” he said. “I was so excited when it opened. I was still in school, and the old library was nothing to write home about. Mostly just shelves full of mysteries and romances with beat-up covers.”
“No, it hadn’t been anyone’s priority in a while,” Kim agreed. “This place is a palace in comparison.”
“A sci-fi palace,” Leda observed.
“Some of the neon accent lighting is a little much. But hey, someone picked it out, thought it was cool, and paid for it. Who am I to complain?” Kim asked with a shrug. She crossed her legs and leaned back in the overstuffed chair. She’d been there long enough to sprawl out; her end of the table was covered in folders, open books, a cell phone, and a tangled strand of earbuds that were tethered to a very old iPod Nano. The Nano’s screen had shattered at some point and was being held in place with a strip of clear packing tape. “Now, what’s going on with this case, Detective? It’s been… what? More than a year.”
“I know, I know. But I’m still here, and I’m still plugging away at it. We’ve gotten a few new leads, and—”
“Ooh, what kind?” Kim asked.
“Nothing I can really discuss at this time. However, I believe that you can help us, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
She settled more deeply into the chair. “Fair enough. What do you want to know?”
“Thank you, Ms. Cowen. We appreciate your cooperation. First of all, for the record, you were Christopher Gilman’s assistant for how long?” He whipped out his little notebook and a thin ballpoint pen.
“About eight months,” she said confidently, as if she’d been asked to calculate this particular detail more than once. “He hired me right out of grad school. It was maybe the worst job I ever had, though it helped me get some professional experience on my LinkedIn profile. Except for that, yeah. It was the worst.”
Leda sat forward, elbows on the top of her thighs. “How so? If you don’t mind me asking. Was he a creep? Did he try to sleep with you, in exchange for… for a good reference? Is that how it works these days?”
Kim laughed again. “Oh honey, no. He did not want to sleep with me—which is, I always assumed, why his wife let him hire me. In case you haven’t noticed…” She sat forward and whispered the rest with an air of conspiratorial intent. “I’m a bit fat.”
“No, no. You’re not… don’t be ridiculous. You’re lovely!” Leda protested.
“Damn right I am—and lucky for me, my flavor of lovely was not Chris’s preferred type. I know he burned through a couple of skinny girls before he brought me on board. I know that his wife eventually decided that she’d tolerate my existence in his orbit. I can do the math. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure he tried to sleep with everyone else. But either his wife thought he wouldn’t try to poke me, or she figured she outranked me from a social capital standpoint, so she didn’t care.”
Leda was surprised. “Good God, you’ve got a mercenary attitude about all this.”
“Mercenary? I prefer to think of myself as practical. I know how the world works, and I’m prepared to operate within its parameters, at least until I can change them. But no, to come back around to your initial question: I wasn’t shagging him, not in the office, not out of the office, not anywhere. If he was creeping on his wife, he did it on his own time—and he didn’t do it with me. That’s not why the gig sucked so hard.”
Grady did not pause in his fast-paced scribbling. He didn’t even look up when he asked, “Then why did it suck so hard?”
“Oh God,” Kim said, with a stretch of the vowels that said she had a rant on deck—and she’d let it fly more than once, on more than one person. Over drinks, unless Leda missed her guess. “For starters, I was salaried at twenty-five grand a year. Do you know how far twenty-five grand a year goes here in Seattle? I’ll tell ya: not very damn far.”
Leda said, “Yikes,” even though she was really, really hoping that she was going to make that much in the current year. Too much less, and she’d have to fold the travel agency and look into some other form of day job to support her singing and crime-solving hobbies. She didn’t have a super-great track record with day jobs.
Her first “real job” had been answering phones at a streetlight outage hotline. She’d lasted four weeks before getting fired for experimenting with sex-phone-operator voices when she was bored. Then it’d been all of a single shift at a hospital laundry because she was desperate, but not desperate enough to get bags of sheets soaked with bodily fluids dumped on her head. It only happened once. The once was enough. After that, she’d taken a barista position at an indie coffee shop, but she’d somehow set the grinder on fire and melted half a plastic cabinet full of muffins. Next she’d tried petitioning with a clipboard and a lanyard, collecting signatures to protect Olympic National Park. She had no idea what the meth-head with the plastic shiv had wanted with the signed petitions, but she’d let him have them and run the other direction when he grabbed her boob and screamed in her face. After that, it was a series of receptionist and retail jobs—abandoned or evicted from—for an assortment of reasons.
She was still mad about being let go from the Clinique counter at Macy’s. It wasn’t her fault that a customer didn’t mention a fierce allergy to talc.
If you’d asked Leda, after a couple of rounds of death by bananas, she would have freely admitted: Going back to a nine-to-five was essentially her deepest fear.
Kim was excited to have found a fresh audience, so she leaned forward and used her hands to talk when she said the rest. “Oh, I know. For a part-time gig, sure. For a freelance gig—something I could work while also working other gigs? Okay, maybe. But for a fifty- to sixty-hour-a-week full-time grind with no overtime and no benefits?”
Grady winced. “Ouch.”
Kim shook her head and stared briefly at the ceiling, as if remembering all the times she’d openly prayed that someone would murder her boss. “And then he would call me—any time of day or night—with more work, more questions, more stuff he either couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do for himself. That man ate my life, and I’m glad he’s dead. Is that what you want to hear?”
“God, no,” said Leda. “Unless you killed him. Did you kill him?”
Grady groaned “Leda,” and rubbed at his temple.
But Kim didn’t seem especially offended. “No, I didn’t kill him. I fantasized about it. A lot. Fantasizing is still free and legal, isn’t it?” Her warm humor returned. “Honestly, if you find whoever did it—I’d probably start a GoFundMe to help pay for his legal bills.”
The detective seized on the pronoun. “His legal bills? You think the killer was a man?”
Kim flopped her hand dismissively. “His, hers, whatever. Dude pronoun for the sake of statistical likelihood, though I wouldn’t count out his wife. If anyone hated that guy as much as I did, it’s probably her.”
“We just talked to her,” Leda admitted.
Grady shot her a harder look than usual. “Apart from marital hatred, why would you point at the wife?”
“Marital hatred is plenty of reason for plenty of people to kill plenty of spouses,” Kim pointed out. “Plenty of them get off scot-free, too.”
Another flash. Leda blinked one long, slow blink, then sniffed and rubbed at her nose as if she needed to sneeze. It was the phrase scot-free that had tickled the back of her head.
“Especially the ones with money.”
Leda considered this. “Money?”
“If she didn’t do it,” Kim continued, “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that she’d paid someone to do it.”
Grady’s look grew dimmer and darker. Leda knew she was spilling information, but she couldn’t stop herself. How did anyone ever get any information, unless they were willing to give some away first?
Kim answered the question anyway. “Come to think of it, no. I don’t think she’d have done it for money. I mean, poor Kevin got caught up in it, didn’t he? That couldn’t have been deliberate. Everybody liked him.”
Grady kept his eyes locked briefly on Leda’s, as if he could stop her from opening her mouth through sheer force of will. “That’s what everyone says.” He looked back at Kim. “You liked Kevin, too?”
“Sure, I did. I always figured he got wise to his dad’s skimming campaign, and someone just… I don’t know. Lumped him in with the real bad guy. Kill ’em all, and let God sort ’em out. You know what I mean.”
The word skimming jumped out at Leda. It wasn’t the first time she was hearing it.
Maybe Grady noticed it, too. He paused. “You said as much a year ago, when all of this was fresh. You think Christopher was taking money from the company?”
“Yeah, he wasn’t as rich as he liked to pretend. Most of the money belonged to his wife, and the company was his own pet project. He probably didn’t even think of it as stealing, since it all belonged to him anyway. In his head, you know. But the guy was absolutely a criminal, from head to toe.”
Grady made a hmm noise. “People find all kinds of ways to justify their behavior. Do you think he was up to anything more complex than light theft?”
Kim stared into space for a few seconds. “Maybe something to do with insider trading? Or… God, he really hated that Beckmeyer guy. I hope he didn’t have anything to do with him.”
“Richard?” Leda blurted.
“Yeah, that was his name. Richard Beckmeyer. Always seemed like a cool enough fellow to me, but he rubbed Christopher the wrong way. Christopher wanted to burn that dude to the ground.”
“Why did he hate Richard so much?” Leda pushed.
“Richard was close to the money, courtesy of his wife’s investments—and Chris didn’t trust him. I was always kind of waiting for the day that Chris would tell me to go TP Richard’s house or whatever. It all started when Richard turned up that stupid account in the Cayman Islands.”
Grady looked up from his notes. “What account?”
“Oh, it was linked to the company’s bank account—but it was in the name of Ringo Gilman.”
Leda was the one who asked. “Who’s Ringo?” Another son? A distant relative?”
“A dog,” Kim said. “Chris’s childhood dog, who he still had a picture of. That stupid picture, of that stupid dog… it was the one thing he had in his whole life that ever… I don’t know. Humanized him, I guess. Made me feel a little sorry for him—this adult man, with money and a wife and a great son and his own company… he still didn’t have anyone close to him. No one had ever taken the place of some dog he’d had when he was a kid.”
“Did he ever get another dog?” Grady asked.
“Not that I know of. Janette was allergic, I think. Or she said she was. Maybe she hated dogs. She struck me as the kind of woman who’d throw a fit if she found one sitting on her couch. She was always so… fussy.”
Grady sat back and left his notepad on his knee, his pen held loosely in his hand. “Dogs aren’t for everyone.”
“Yeah,” Kim agreed. “But she was the kind of lady… I think she’d go out of her way to kick one. I never liked her.”
“Even though you both hated her husband?” Leda asked.
“All right, we had that in common—but there was something about her… it’s hard to explain. She basically refused to talk to me, even when I needed her help with something business-related. After Chris was gone, there was so much paperwork to be done, untangling this company from all the others it had contracts with, or owed money to. There were so many things I needed signed—by her, since he was dead. And it’s like she’d just totally checked out. She wasn’t depressed or upset, she was free—and she acted like it. All she ever wanted was to get away from that guy, and I don’t blame her. I wanted away from him, too, but I didn’t kill him… and I always thought that maybe she did.”
A hunch was pinging hard in the back of Leda’s head, prompted by Kim’s mention of other companies. She knew she was likely to earn an eyeball-scolding from Grady, but she couldn’t stop herself, so she didn’t. “Ms. Cowen, are you familiar with another digital content company called Probable Outcomes? They folded a year or two before Digital Scaffolding got a good toehold in the market.”
“Oh yeah, I knew about Probable Outcomes. As soon as they closed, we had a dozen of their former people applying for jobs with us. We kind of ran them out of business. Well, that’s overstating it,” she backtracked. “We were their biggest competition, and this town wasn’t big enough for the both of us. They went under, and we survived.”
Leda gasped, “Oh my God!”
She frowned. “I’m sorry, what?”
“No, no.” The psychic flapped her hands. “Please, I’m sorry, don’t let me interrupt.” But she was absolutely vibrating. There it was! The connection she’d been looking for, between the two cases! Why wasn’t Grady excited, too? He must not have seen it on her murder board, or else he’d forgotten. Well, it was a busy murder board. He could be forgiven for blanking on a single detail.
The detective tried to drag the conversation back around to where he wanted it. “So that company failed, and yours survived. For another year or two, at least.”
Kim smiled a warm, happy smile—as if the thought gave her genuine pleasure. “Yup, for another year or two. Now they’re both defunct, and honestly, the world is probably a better place. The services those companies provided were taken over by bigger consulting firms, and the world kept on turning, didn’t it?”
“Not for Christopher or Kevin,” Grady said carefully, watching her face as he spoke.
“Well, no. Not for them.”
He fidgeted with his notebook. “Do you remember, off the top of your head, any employees from Probable Outcomes who came on board at Digital Scaffolding?”
“There were three or four, I think. I’m sorry. I don’t remember the particulars, it’s been so long, and I went out of my way to forget everything that had anything to do with that place. God, it’s like I had PTSD coming out of there.”
“Was there anyone named Scott?” Leda asked fast, while Grady was still scribbling.
Both Kim and Grady looked at her like they weren’t sure where she was going with this. That was okay. Leda wasn’t sure, either.
“Nobody springs to mind, but like I said, it’s been a minute,” Kim said. “The old records might tell you, but I don’t know what became of them. So much of that stuff was shredded or otherwise disposed of. If anything’s in storage anywhere, you’d have to ask Janette, I guess. She’s the one who closed the company. She’d have to keep something around for the sake of the IRS; they make you keep records going back seven years, I think. Maybe I’m wrong.”
“You’ve seen those records, right?” Leda asked.
“Some of them, but not all of them. Like I said, you need either Janette or… or one of the accounting people, maybe? Richard or his wife? I honestly don’t know where you’d go, or who you’d talk to, if you wanted to know more about the personnel makeup of a company that’s been out of business for almost a year.”
“That’s fair,” Grady told her. “We can do some digging around elsewhere.”
“Hey, thanks for staying on the case. I’d still like to know what happened to those two. At least, I’d like to know what happened to Kevin. I don’t honestly care what happened to Chris.”
Leda said, “Ouch. Tough, but fair.”
“I liked Kevin. He was so kind and thoughtful. I was working my way up to asking him out. He was only a couple of years older than me.” She sighed, and it was a sigh that said she had already mourned the lost opportunity but still considered the possibilities quite fondly. “And to think, I’m the one who sent him to that hotel that day. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know he’d never come back.”
Grady leaned forward. “You did?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “He was looking for his dad. It was on Chris’s calendar. I didn’t know it was a secret. Plus, I would’ve told Kevin my social security number if he’d asked me for it.”
Leda’s face scrunched up in confusion. “Wait, he put a secret meeting on a calendar?”
Kim nodded more enthusiastically than the question seemed to warrant. “Oh yeah. He couldn’t remember anything, unless it was written down somewhere, on something. The really shady stuff went onto his Google calendar.”
“But you had access to it?” Grady asked.
“Right. The man was not a genius.” She shrugged and shook her head. “I’m just sorry that he wasn’t smart enough, or kind enough, or… or… aware enough to keep his own son out of it. That’s the thing that sticks with me more than anything. I wish Kevin hadn’t gotten caught up in it.”