Marino replied, “Comes back as registered to him, and he’s got a license to carry a concealed weapon, issued six years ago by some senile judge up here in northern Virginia who’s since retired and moved down south somewhere. According to the background check included in the record I got from the circuit court, Price was unmarried, was working in a D.C. gold and silver exchange called Finklestein’s at the time he was issued the license. And guess what? Finklestein’s ain’t there no more.”
“What about his DMV record?” Wesley continued to write.
“No tickets. An ‘eighty-nine BMW is registered to him, his address in D.C., an apartment near Dupont Circle he apparently moved out of last winter. The rental office pulled his old lease, lists him as being self-employed. I’m still running it down, will get the IRS to pull records of his tax returns for the past five years.”
“Possible he’s a private eye?” I asked. “Not in the District of Columbia,” Marino answered. Wesley looked up at me and said, “Someone hired him. For what purpose, we still don’t know. Clearly, he failed in his mission. Whoever’s behind it may try again. I don’t want you walking in on the next one, Kay.”
“Would it be stating the obvious to say I don’t want that either?”
“I guess what I’m telling you,” he went on like a no-nonsense father, “is I want you to avoid placing yourself in any situation where you might be vulnerable. For example, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be in your office when no one else is inside the building. I don’t mean just on the weekends. If you work until six, seven at night, and everybody else has gone home, it’s not a good idea for you to be walking out into a dark parking lot to get in your car. Possible you can leave at five when there are eyes and ears around?”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. “Or if you have to leave later, Kay, then call the security guard and ask him to escort you to your car,” Wesley went on.
“Hell, call me, for that matter,” Marino was quick to volunteer. “You got my pager number. If I’m not available, ask the dispatcher to send a car by.”
Fine, I thought. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll make it home by midnight.
“Just be extremely careful.”
Wesley looked hard at me. “All theories aside, two people have been murdered. The killer’s still out there. The victimology, the motivation are sufficiently strange for me to believe anything’s possible.”
His words resurfaced more than once during the drive home. When anything is possible, nothing is impossible. One plus one does not equal three. Or does it? Sterling Harper’s death did not seem to belong in the same equation as the deaths of her brother and Beryl. But what if it did?
“You told me Miss Harper was out of town the night Beryl was murdered,” I said to Marino. “Have you learned anything more about that?”
“Nope.”
“Wherever it was she went, do you suppose she drove?” I asked.
“Nope. Only car the Harpers had was the white Rolls, and her brother had it the night of Beryl’s death.”
“You know that?”
“Checked it out with Culpeper’s Tavern,” he said. “Harper came in his usual time that night. Drove up just like he always did and left around six-thirty.”
In light of recent events, I doubted anybody thought it the least bit strange when I announced at staff conference the following Monday morning that I was taking annual leave.
The assumption was that my encounter with Jeb Price had stressed me to the point I needed to get away, regroup, bury my head in the sand for a while. I didn’t tell anybody where I was going because I didn’t know. I just walked out, leaving behind a secretly relieved secretary and an overwhelmed desk.
Returning home, I spent the entire morning on the phone, calling every airline that serviced Richmond’s Byrd Airport, the airport most convenient for Sterling Harper.
“Yes, I know there’s a twenty percent penalty,” I said to the USAir ticket agent. “You misunderstand. I’m not trying to change the ticket. This was weeks ago. I’m trying to find out if she ever got on the flight at all.”