is hopelessly dull, and my car’s eight years old.” Patrick had given her the BMW as a wedding present. “I’m not even carrying a balance on my credit cards. Patrick may have been careful with his money, but he was generous, too. I haven’t had to touch the trust fund that my aunt Jane set up from my father’s life insurance and the settlement from the ferry company.”
“You’ve probably been through this with the police,” Shoe said, “but what did Patrick do on the weekend? Did he meet with anyone?”
“He spent Saturday morning in his home office, playing with his new computer. I think he was surfing the Internet.”
“The Internet. Patrick?” Patrick had known even less about computers and the Internet than Shoe did, which was next to nothing.
“It had to do with a business he was thinking of investing in, I think,” Victoria said. “After lunch he worked for a while longer, then went out. He got his hair cut, had his car washed, and ran some errands. After dinner he spent more time in his office and came to bed around eleven. On Sunday he played with his computer some more, then went to see Sean to tell him he wasn’t interested in working on his campaign.” She took a breath. “On Sunday night we argued about his leaving his job.”
“Was Sean upset that Patrick didn’t join his campaign?”
“No, I’m sure he wasn’t. In fact, I think he would have been surprised if Patrick had actually agreed.”
The telephone rang. Victoria excused herself and went into the kitchen to answer it. Shoe heard her say, “Hi, Kit,” then, “Can I call you back?” After a lengthy pause, she said, “Sure. That sounds fine. See you later.” She came back into the living room. “Kit,” she said as she sat down again. “She worries about me.”
Shoe hesitated, then said, “Pardon me for asking you this, but are you and Kit, well, involved?”
Victoria’s hazel eyes blazed. “Having an affair, you mean? No, we’re not having an affair. Not that it’s anyone’s goddamned business.”
“Don’t be so sure about that,” Shoe said. “The police can’t afford to have much regard for privacy, not in a murder investigation.”
“Well, then it’s none of your goddamned business.” She picked up her wineglass, then put it down again. “Did—did Patrick say anything to you?”
“Only that he thought she was gay,” Shoe said. “Why? Did he think you were having an affair with her?”
“He may have,” Victoria replied. She sighed heavily. “I’m pretty sure Kit’s in love with me, but we’re not having an affair. Even if we were, she wouldn’t have to kill Patrick to get him out of the way, if that’s what you’re driving at. If he’d found out I was having an affair with her, he’d have thrown me out the door faster than you could say Billy Jean King.” She shook her head. “No,” she amended. “He wouldn’t have thrown me out. He would have politely asked me to leave. And I’d’ve left, too. I could easily live on my trust fund.”
“Maybe your trust fund isn’t enough,” Shoe suggested. “Patrick had a pretty hefty life insurance policy and the mortgage on the house was undoubtedly insured. You stand to come into a sizable chunk of money.”
“Which would make me the prime suspect, wouldn’t it?” she said. “I killed Patrick so I could have the money and my lesbian lover both.”
“That works too,” Shoe said.
Victoria’s brief smile was sour. “Let me ask you a question,” she said.
“Sure,” Shoe said.
“Was Patrick having an affair with Sandra St. Johns?”
“What do you think?” Shoe replied.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t blame him if he was. We haven’t been very close lately.” She shook her head, ponytail swishing from side to side. “No, I don’t think he was. Patrick was never very good at deception. He was a terrible liar and an awful poker player.”
Shoe hoped she was right, but he didn’t think she was. Sandra St. Johns wasn’t a very good liar either, and Patrick may have been a better one than Victoria thought.
“Can I take a look at Patrick’s home office?” Shoe asked.
“Sure,” Victoria said, standing. “It’s upstairs.”
Patrick’s home office was a small bright room at the rear of the house. It was neat and well organized, but there wasn’t much in it. A new Apple iMac computer sat on the desk, a small printer beside it, a flatbed scanner beside that. The shipping boxes still stood against the wall by the door. The furniture also looked new. The two-drawer filing cabinet was wood-grained, matching the desk. A bookcase, also matching, contained mostly software packages, some still shrink-wrapped, and a couple of black and yellow “For Dummies” books on computers and the Internet.
“He’d only had the computer a few days,” Victoria said. “The police looked at it but said there was nothing on it but the stuff that came with it. They checked the Internet browser history, but they said he visited mostly e-commerce sites. They seemed disappointed that he wasn’t surfing kiddie porn sites,” she added with a flicker of a smile.
Shoe opened the drawers of the desk and filing cabinet. The desk contained nothing of interest—hardly anything at all—and all he found in the filing cabinet were a few files pertaining to the purchase of the computer and the office furnishings. A small paper shredder stood beside the desk, similar to the one in his Hammond Industries office. Shoe examined the mound of colourful strips in the collector bin. It appeared that Patrick had tested the shredder by shredding printouts from the printer: computer spec sheets and photographic quality prints of tropical birds and beaches.
Shoe drove back across the Lions Gate Bridge and downtown. Leaving his car in the underground garage of the Hammond Building, he walked the few blocks to the restaurant near the Waterfront SkyTrain station. He didn’t expect to learn anything helpful from a visit to the scene of Patrick’s murder, nor did he. The manager refused to speak about the incident and none of the staff on duty had been working on Monday. As he emerged from the restaurant, though, Sergeant Matthias and Detective Constable Worth were waiting for him on the sidewalk, leaning against the front fender of a blue Ford Taurus.
“We need to talk,” Matthias said.
“All right,” Shoe replied.
“Let’s get some coffee somewhere.”
“As long as it’s not this place,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder at the entrance to the restaurant in which Patrick had died.
“Not a problem,” Matthias said.
They got takeout coffees, Matthias’ treat, and took them out onto the Canada Place promenade overlooking the harbour, where they found an unoccupied bench. Matthias and Shoe sat on the bench while Worth leaned against the railing.
Mathias prised the lid from his coffee cup, saying, “You want to tell me what the hell you think you’re up to?”
“I’m conducting an internal investigation into Patrick O’Neill’s murder,” Shoe said. “At Mr. Hammond’s request.”
“Oh, swell,” Matthias said. Then he said, “Wait a minute, I thought you’d been fired.”
“I’ve been temporarily reinstated,” Shoe explained.
“And O’Neill? He’d resigned too, hadn’t he?”
“He had,” Shoe said. “But Mr. Hammond hadn’t accepted his resignation, so technically he was still an employee of the company when he died.”
“You know you’re a goddamned suspect, don’t you?”
Detective Constable Worth raised a finely shaped eyebrow at her partner’s language.
“Yes,