Chapter Thirty-One Margo Angelhart
Chapter Thirty-One
Margo Angelhart
Nico didn’t like that Jack and I insisted on dropping him off at work and picking him up at the end of the day, and made him
promise not to leave the security of the Maricopa County crime lab. Though sometimes Nico was tasked with going into the field
to collect evidence at a crime scene, he was primarily an analyst.
We left him, and then headed to Christina Aberdeen’s sister’s house in Avondale, not far from where Jack’s son lived with
his ex.
I first tried calling Teri Stockman, Peter Stockman’s ex-wife, in Maine. She didn’t answer. I left a message without any detail
about why I wanted to talk.
“Have you talked to Austin?” I asked my brother. “Is he going stir-crazy?”
Jack laughed. “In Logan’s house? It’s a haven for young boys.
Laura is making sure they’re doing their homework, but both Austin and Cody are good students and are staying on top of it.
Logan has an arcade, huge consoles of every classic video game, not to mention every gaming system known to man, and a full theater.
His pool is heated and he has an indoor half basketball court. ”
I laughed. “So he’s having fun.”
“I wish I was,” Jack grumbled. “Laura is anxious about our investigation, but she’s doing a good job keeping the kids from
worrying. I hope this doesn’t go on much longer, but I don’t know—I don’t feel like we’re that much further along in finding
out what happened to Liz.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “We know that Jim Novak was at the medical center on Monday, and we know from Luisa that Novak’s
records are missing. We also know that he remembers Liz. It’s all coming together.” But I understood his frustration. Things
were still murky, and we didn’t have enough evidence to get Dad out of prison.
“Yeah,” he muttered.
“We also know that Devin Klein was going to blow the whistle on falsified data in a drug trial—of a drug that will be going
to market imminently. There’s no other reason we’ve found why he would be killed and Dad framed.”
“That’s the thing that’s bugging me,” Jack said as he merged onto I-10 heading west. “Why Dad? Why was he threatened and framed?”
“I was thinking about that,” I said. “I have a theory, and Dad can probably confirm it when we talk to him. Devin was talking
to Dad about the trial, Dad hooked him up with Dr. Pierce. He didn’t know details, it’s not his area of expertise, but he
knew enough that he may have been a threat when the detectives followed up with more questions. At a minimum, he might say,
‘Well, call Dr. Pierce, she knows more about what Devin was working on.’ Or he might tell them that Devin was preoccupied
with the trial, and they’d follow up on that, find more information, seal his office and get the records that Georgia said
disappeared sometime after the murder.”
“True,” Jack said. “Once law enforcement starts asking questions—maybe even getting the FBI involved—covering up the fraud would have been more difficult.”
“And even if they didn’t uncover the falsified data,” I said, “Phase 2, 3, and 4 may never have happened. It could have been
enough controversy to shut the whole project down.”
Jack nodded. We were on the same page.
“My main sticking point,” I said, “is why did Dad go over to talk to Devin in person that night? Why not have Devin come to
the house? Or meet at a bar? Or talk on the phone?”
“They were friends. If Devin asked, Dad would go.”
“Why would Devin need to see him that night? Right then? Why couldn’t it have waited until morning?”
“I see what you’re getting at, but I know Dad. If Devin said, ‘Coop, I need you to look at something, make sure I’m right
about A, B, and C,’ Dad would go.”
“And just happen to arrive right after he was shot. A shot no one heard. Just like Liz Swanson.”
“Silencers aren’t silent, but they do suppress noise. I’ve never seen the ballistics report from the murder, and ballistics
would be inconclusive about whether a silencer was in fact used,” Jack said. “It’s usually GSR and iron fragments for a close
range suppressed shot that will tell you. Of course, some older suppressors or a homemade one might yield different information.”
“I wonder if Nico has ever looked,” I said.
“I think we can safely assume that a suppressor was used. The medical building was closed that time of night. The emergency
room was open, but someone would need a card key to get into the medical building from the emergency wing.”
“And because Dad confessed, the detectives didn’t follow up.”
“We don’t know that,” Jack began.
“I do. I talked to them. Why do you think I was adamant back then that we needed to investigate Devin’s murder?
Because the police didn’t. They had no reason.
They believed they had the killer. They didn’t verify Dad’s statement, because he had possession of the gun that killed Devin. He had the means.
The opportunity. And he made up a believable motive, that they were arguing and it was an accident. I read Dad’s statement.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You didn’t?”
“I didn’t want to.”
That explained a lot, I thought. Though Jack was going through his own hell back then—he left the force in part because of
Dad’s arrest and in part because he was in the middle of a divorce. It had been a dark time for him.
“It’s why I never took Dad’s confession at face value,” I said. “Dad is not one to lose his temper and act out. He wouldn’t
hit someone in the heat of an argument. How could we believe he shot someone? With a gun that he didn’t even own? That suggests
premeditated murder, that he bought the gun for the sole purpose of killing Devin.”
“What did Dad say about the gun?”
“That he’d always had it. But I know for a fact that he didn’t. Okay, maybe not for a fact, but Mom and Dad own two guns. Dad a .45 revolver, and Mom has a 9mm semiauto that she used to carry when she was a prosecutor
and is now in her nightstand drawer. I think if Dad bought another gun, he would have asked you or me about it because he
really didn’t know much about them, and he rarely went to the gun range. And the gun that killed Klein was a Sig Sauer P320
compact.”
“You carry a similar gun.”
“Yeah, not that model, but I do love my Sig. There is a specific suppressor built for it. I don’t have one because what would be the point of spending the money when I have no cause for a suppressor?
But the point is that Dad didn’t turn in a suppressor with the gun.
It wasn’t even mentioned in the report. The police never followed up, and I doubt that even if no one else was in the medical building the gunshot would have been heard in the emergency room or in the hospital rooms in that wing.
There was janitorial staff on-site, and no one in the original reports stated that they heard a gun discharge. ”
Jack was quiet.
“I used to push Dad to tell me the truth,” I said quietly. “He never would. He told me not to visit if all I wanted to do
was rehash the crime. I finally decided that it would hurt both of us if I cut off ties because he lied.”
“I thought he could be guilty,” Jack said equally quietly.
That surprised me. “You did?”
“Because he confessed. He had the gun. He confessed out of guilt and, while it made me angry that he would do something that
hurt his family, something that gutted Mom, he was willing to take his punishment, which I could respect.”
“You thought he was guilty.” I was floored.
“I would say . . . I thought it was a possibility. I never had the one hundred percent faith in his innocence that you had.
It hurts me to say it, but it’s true.”
“You never told me that.”
“Because I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to believe you were right, but my head told me only a guilty man would
confess. Yes, I know, there are false confessions all the time, but this was Dad, not a career criminal, not someone seeking attention, not someone who was browbeat into a confession by a corrupt cop. But . . .
if I’d read the report in detail like you had, I might not have come to that conclusion. It’s damning that he didn’t turn
in the suppressor, and it’s negligent that the police didn’t document that one had been used.”
“They didn’t document it either way,” I said.
“They didn’t try to explain why no one heard a shot, because they didn’t have to.
Confession, plea deal, no trial. Case closed.
And, to be honest, I think Mom had a lot to do with why the county attorney’s office didn’t conduct their own investigation.
She probably used her clout to get them to sign off on the plea deal, and because everyone respects her, they didn’t want her name or Dad’s to be dragged through the media if there was a prolonged investigation. ”
“You’re probably right,” Jack said. “But why Dad?”
“Well, think of it this way. If Dad never went to see Devin that night, and he was found dead in the morning, the police would
have done a full investigation. The FBI may have been called in because it’s a federal building. They would have talked to
his nurses, to Georgia, to the administration. Looked at his phone records, seen that he talked to Dr. Pierce. Called her,
asked her what they talked about, and she’d say he was worried about a drug trial. She would give them a copy of the report
that he shared with her, and then they might be suspicious because, according to Georgia, all the information Devin had collected
was gone. The killer took it—most likely—so that would have given the police a motive. Maybe they call in the Neurovantix
team and anyone at the VA who worked on the project. It would have shined a light on their fraud.”
“But Dad was there. He called the police.”
“Exactly. What did Mom say? It was two days after he was killed that Dad found the gun and the threat? Gives the killer enough
time to research him, track us down, take our pictures, create a viable threat against us.”
“It fits,” Jack said. “Do you think they would have framed someone else?”