“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.”