“I don’t. I’m sorry. She didn’t say anything to us. Maybe she was being threatened about something. Debts, maybe. I know she had quite a few. I tried to help her with…with money. A hundred times I tried to help her but she would only get angry.”
“That must have been difficult.”
“Yes,” she answered, hoping the simple word would conceal the world of pain behind it. When they were children, the disparity between their financial situations hadn’t existed. Only as they grew older had Tina begun to resent that Elizabeth would never want for anything.
Nothing financial, anyway, she thought with old, familiar bitterness. Her father had paid her bills—her tuition, her car, her apartment. Or rather, the trust fund he and her mother had set up for her before her birth paid her expenses. But Jonathan Quinn had given her little else.
To her relief, the detective didn’t seem inclined to pursue that line of questioning. He opened the last box. Halfway through, he found the soft burgundy Coach handbag she had given Tina for Christmas the year before. Another harsh sliver of grief jabbed into her. Tina had adored that purse and had used it constantly.
“Pay dirt.” Beau pulled it from the box. “Just what I hoped to find.”
“Why?” She managed to squeeze the word out around the lump in her throat.
“I don’t mean to sound sexist here but most of you women carry your lives around in their purses. All the little bits and pieces that give a clear picture of who you are, what you do with your days. Makeup, credit cards, appointment books. Everything. I’m willing to bet that somewhere in here hides the key to unlocking the mystery of what really happened that night. We just have to find it.”
Chapter 4
Elizabeth couldn’t contain a small gasp as the detective dumped the contents of Tina’s purse out on the bedspread in the guest room. It seemed a terrible invasion of privacy, letting him paw through the contents. Like reading someone’s diary or opening another person’s mail. A woman’s purse was sacred!
I’m sorry, she whispered again to Tina. Even as she thought the words, she knew Tina wouldn’t have objected. Not if it meant finding out the truth about her death.
“A lot of cops think working a case is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with half of the pieces missing. To me, it’s more like a big, dead-serious scavenger hunt. The clues are there, you just have to know where to look for them. Then work your tail off to figure out what they mean.”
“Is there something I could do to help?”
He glanced over at her and she was startled again by the green of his eyes. “While I read the entries in her planner, why don’t you look through her address book here and put a small check by the people you might know in common? If you see anything unusual in there, make a note of it.”
Elizabeth nodded and took the slim address book from him. Only after she perched next to him on the edge of the guest bed did it occur to her to be uneasy at working in such close proximity to Beau Riley. Despite the solemnness of the task ahead of her, she was suddenly intensely aware of him, his broad shoulders just a few feet from hers, the masculine scent of his aftershave, of pine and sandalwood, the lock of unruly dark hair dipping across his forehead like a comma.
How many women had been tempted to smooth that lock of hair back into place? she wondered. And how many had acted on the temptation? Well, she would most certainly not be among their number.
If not for this case, she would be doing everything she could to stay as far as possible from Beau Riley. He made her so nervous. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been so edgy and off balance. It wasn’t a sensation she cared for at all—especially when she knew she should be focusing on finding out who had killed Tina, not on gorgeous police detectives with intense eyes and tousled hair.
Reining in her wild thoughts, she forced her attention back to the book in her hands and began poring through the pages. Most of the names were unknown to her and she assumed they were co-workers or men Tina might have dated. A few names seemed vaguely familiar, as if Tina had mentioned them in passing, but Elizabeth had never been very good at remembering names, especially when she didn’t have a face to assign to it.
By the time she reached the end, she had made small checks by a few dozen names, schoolmates of both of them or acquaintances from their time in Los Angeles but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. If only she had some clue what she was supposed to be looking for. She was terribly afraid she would miss something important and just be too stupid to recognize it.
She turned the last page, to the Zs, then stared at the page. “This is odd.”
She hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud until the detective looked up from the day planner.
“What?”
“Tina has the name of Dr. David Zacharias listed here. I had no idea she knew him.”
Beau sat back. “Zacharias. That rings a bell.” He thumbed back through Tina’s planner. “Yeah. Here it is. She had an appointment with him listed a few days before she died.”
She gaped at him, questions whirling through her mind. “Are you sure? She never said a word!”
“Yeah. It says Dr. Zacharias, three in the afternoon, Tuesday the first. What’s the big deal? What kind of doc is he?”
“He’s a…” Drat, the word escaped her. She closed her eyes for just a second while she tried to find it again, reeling from a complicated mix of astonishment, disbelief and an odd sense of betrayal.
Tina had never said a word. Nothing! How could she have kept it from them?
“He’s a doctor who specializes in treating hearing impairments in children,” she finally answered. “She must have been looking for a consultation for Alex. But this doesn’t make sense. I don’t believe Tina would make an appointment with Dr. Zacharias without telling her mother or me.”
“Well, Alex was her son. Maybe she didn’t feel the need to consult you about his medical care.”
Elizabeth wished she had the words to adequately convey to Beau how unsettling this discovery was. “For three years Luisa and I have been begging her to let us take Alex to Dr. Zacharias. He’s a surgeon whose clinic specializes in cochlear implants in children. It’s one of the best of its kind in the country.”
“Oh, right. I saw a documentary about those a few months ago. Isn’t that a pretty controversial procedure?”
She nodded. “Some people oppose them because they say they’re eliminating the…the culture of the deaf. Some advocates think children with hearing impairments are better off simply adjusting to their challenges, learning ASL and lip reading instead of trying to change the way God made them.”
She respected the point of view, but life experience had shaped her own strong opinions. As a person who had spent most of her life trying to make herself understood, she believed children with hearing impairments deserved the chance to communicate with the entire world, not simply others who were deaf or those who had learned ASL.
“So why didn’t Tina want you to take her kid to see this guy? Did she agree with the anti-implant sentiments?”
“No. It wasn’t anything like that. Her health insurance wasn’t the greatest. It wouldn’t cover the procedure and Tina could be…stubborn. She refused to even consider allowing me to pay for it.”
Oh, how that had hurt. By default, since he had no place else to leave it, Elizabeth’s father had bequeathed her more money than she could ever spend in a dozen lifetimes.
She had wanted so desperately to do everything she could to help Alex, but Tina had been adamant. Alex was her son and she would find a way to take care of him herself.
And yet before her death Tina had made an appointment with Dr. Zacharias without informing her or Luisa.