Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

to his—
    “I’ll pay you five thousand dollars,” Gail said.
    “What?” Keisha said.
    “I’ll pay you five thousand dollars to help me with this, to get to the truth.”
    Keisha shook her head, “I don’t know, Gail. I—”
    “She’ll do it,” Kirk said.

Twenty-five
    “Can I talk to you for a second?” Keisha said to Kirk, drawing him into the kitchen while Gail Beaudry stayed in the living room.
    “Are you crazy?” she whispered to him once they were out of earshot.
    “It’s five grand,” he said. “Just don’t go into the house and go all weird and say holy shit, I think
I
did it.”
    “I can’t go into that house. Not again.”
    “Sure you can,” he said. “Might as well make something out of this fucked-up day.” Kirk didn’t know she’d actually gotten some cash out of Garfield before things went off the rails. But even if he did, he’d still want her to go after this. Five thousand was a lot of money.
    “It’s wrong,” Keisha said. “You don’t see something wrong, taking this woman’s money to help her figure out who killed her brother? You don’t see something just a bit off with that?”
    Kirk shrugged. “So? Like you’ve never faked this stuff before?”
    “I can’t do this. I—”
    “Is everything okay?” Gail asked. She was standing in the kitchen doorway.
    “Yes,” Kirk said. “Keisha was just saying, she hates to ask you at a time like this, but she needs her fee up front, in cash.”
    Gail’s eyes popped for a second, but she said, “We can stop at the bank on the way to my brother’s house. Would that be okay?”
    “That’d be fine,” Kirk said.
    Keisha struggled to focus. She said to Gail, “Why don’t you wait in the car and I’ll be right out.”
    Once the door was closed, Kirk said, “This lady has to be loaded. I bet you can get even more out of her. Where’s she get all the dough?”
    Keisha shook her head, like this was not uppermost in her mind, but said, “Her husband’s in real estate and she inherited some fortune when her parents died. I don’t care if she’s married to Bill Gates, I’m not going to milk this beyond the five grand.”
    Kirk gave her a disapproving look.
    “And you,” she said, “have to go back and find out what happened to that bag.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I hear ya.”
    Keisha glanced at the wall clock. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be with her. You have to be back here for when Matthew gets home.”
    “Why? He’s got his own key. Since when do I—”
    “What if the police are here? I don’t want him coming home, finding a cop on the doorstep. He’ll be scared to death, thinking something has happened to me.”
    Kirk sighed. “Fine, I’ll be here. But you’re really turning him into a momma’s boy.”
    * * *
    Keisha got in Gail Beaudry’s Jaguar. The woman talked non-stop all the way to her bank in downtown Milford, on the green.
    “I don’t know why they have Melissa in custody or why they think she had anything to do with this. They say she confessed, but that’s ridiculous. Why would a girl kill her own mother? That’s absolutely unthinkable. I don’t understand how something like that could happen. Maybe if it were an accident, like if she’d backed into her with her car, didn’t know she was there, but to deliberately do it? That defies belief. I know that girl was a world of trouble to her mother, but deep down she loved her very much. I just know that.”
    Keisha wondered whether she was going to be sick again. Any second now, she might have to ask Gail to pull to the side of the road.
    Since killing Garfield, she’d devoted all of her energy to covering her tracks. Going back for the earring, disposing of her clothes (a problem she hoped would soon be resolved), standing in the shower until the water ran cold, getting Kirk to clean her car. And after an initial panic about her business card, she’d come up with a creative solution involving Gail that she believed could withstand scrutiny.
    But having made all these efforts to distance herself from the event, here she was, sitting in this car, heading back to the crime scene.
    “I’ll just bet the police put Melissa in a room and browbeat her with questions and that was how they made her confess to something she never did,” Gail continued. “That’s what the police do. We think that kind of thing only happens in Russia or China or Latin American countries, but it happens right here in the good ol’ USA, don’t