Chapter 9
I met Katy in the lawyer’s room at the county jail.
Mercifully, she hadn’t been required to wear cuffs or leg irons but that didn’t make her appearance any less shocking.
After six weeks in jail, she had an inch of gray roots showing under her bleach-blonde hair.
Her skin broke out and her lips were cracked and chapped. She saw me notice.
“Could be worse.” She smiled. “A lot of the women here are detoxing. Their withdrawal symptoms keep all of us up at night. My cellmate picks her skin. Turns out I was only addicted to lip balm.”
“How are you?” I asked. “Is there anything I can get for you?”
“I have everything I need,” she answered. “At least everything I would need in here. Don’t worry about me. I look worse than I feel. Promise. Things are settling into a routine of sorts. I’ve even made a friend. I’ll be okay. As long as there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
I pulled a thick file out of my bag. It contained copies of the relevant portions of Tom’s HR files.
“How are Joe and Emma?” Katy asked.
“Okay, I think. For obvious reasons, I haven’t been talking to them very much. We’re working your case out of my house. I don’t see any scenario where Joe isn’t called as a witness at trial. I need to be careful of even the appearance of impropriety.”
“Plus, you’ve got to be pretty angry with him,” she said. “And with me.”
“I’m trying to focus on the matter at hand.”
“I love you, Cass,” she said. “I still think of you as my sister. I know I’ve burned some pretty big bridges with you and Matt, and Vangie. There were a lot of reasons Joe and I broke up. I take the blame for most of them. But not all of them.”
I put a hand up. “Let’s not do this, okay? Today I’m your lawyer, not your former sister-in-law. And I wouldn’t even be that if I didn’t care.”
“Okay.”
I thumbed through a few of the pages from Tom’s WDTN file. “I need to understand Tom’s reasons for leaving Detroit. It puzzles me why he’d voluntarily leave a higher-paying job in a bigger market to come down here to Delphi. Did he ever talk to you about it?”
“Sure,” she said. “If you want to call it a mid-life crisis, that was part of it. He was forty-two years old. For a man in the news business, that’s nothing.
If he’d been a woman, that’s when they start putting you out to pasture.
But he said he wasn’t satisfied with the direction things were going at WDTN.
When WLAN offered him the job, it came with some perks that appealed to him.
He’d get more airtime. They were going to basically let him run the sports desk any way he wanted.
And he didn’t like how cutthroat things were in Detroit. ”
I considered her answer. Then I flipped one of the pages so she could read it.
“This is what’s giving me pause,” I said.
“Three weeks before Tom handed in his resignation, he was given a promotion at WDTN. Did you know that? They were going to move him off weekends. It came with a significant pay raise. He would have been pulling in an extra thirty grand a year. Whereas the job here at WLAN-7 had him earning forty grand less. Does that make sense to you?”
She shrugged. “We didn’t talk about money very much.
Tom had been a bachelor for a long time, though, Cass.
He never had kids. He inherited quite a bit when his parents passed away.
He was frugal. He could afford to pay cash for the house he lived in.
I think he figured money wasn’t the only thing. ”
“Sure,” I said. “Only, doesn’t it seem strange to you that he accepted the promotion? Then he turned around and resigned rather abruptly. I can’t find anything in the file to explain why.”
“Why does it matter? This was years ago. What could it possibly have to do with him getting killed?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing. It just seems like a major life event for him and I can’t quite understand the logic.”
“What are you getting at?”
“It’s just a hunch. I’m going to keep at it. I’m just wondering if something might have happened that forced Tom to resign.”
Katy shook her head. “He never said anything about that. And he was happy here. He didn’t like living in the city. Delphi was more his speed. He grew up in a smaller town.”
“There’s something else,” I said. “Something more recent.”
I pulled out a stapled pack of papers. It contained printouts of several emails Tom received at WLAN. I showed them to Katy.
She rested her chin on her palm and flipped through the pages with her other hand. She didn’t appear shocked or bothered by what she was reading.
“Tom always said this came with the territory,” she said as she handed the papers back to me.
“Those aren’t your typical fan letters though,” I said.
“He got snail mail letters too. One of them contained a pair of women’s underwear.
The sender of those emails seemed to grow increasingly hostile that Tom wasn’t replying.
She calls herself Sugar Bear. She says she knows where he lives. Did Tom ever tell you about her?”
“No. I mean, not specifically. And he never got letters addressed to the house. As far as I’m aware, nobody knew where we lived. I mean, not the general public.”
“It’s a small town though. You can never really know who knows whom.”
“Do you really think one of these crackpots would have gone so far as to break into my house and kill Tom?” She recoiled. “How? The police keep saying no windows were broken and all the other doors were still locked.”
“This person, Sugar Bear. She shows up in emails she sent to Tom while he was with WDTN in Detroit, too. They got pretty creepy and personal. While they weren’t overt threats, there was some serious crossing of boundaries.
What bothers me is that neither Detective DePaul nor anyone else bothered running any of this down. ”
“That surprises you?” Katy said. “I don’t think Sharon DePaul did any investigating at all. She assumed I’m the one who killed my own husband and that’s that.”
“And that will form part of your defense at trial,” I said. “It’s a big weakness in the prosecution’s case I plan to exploit.”
“Will it work?” Hope filled Katy’s eyes.
“It’s hard to say. But it’s a valid argument.”
Katy looked back down at the emails. “Sugar Bear? She actually has the word Sugar Bear in her email? Do you know who she really is?”
“Eric’s trying to find out. I talked to the WDTN station manager at length.
He says a lot of these people are well known to all the on-air talent.
Sugar Bear in particular seemed smitten with Bill Bryant, the meteorologist before she glommed on to Tom.
Bill had some insights that might help identify Sugar Bear’s real name.
She apparently showed up to a couple of events Bill attended years ago.
Photographs were taken and posted. Eric’s working off of those. ”
“But how would she have gotten into my house?” A tremor went through Katy. “My God. If she was in my house. If she killed Tom right next to me like that. Why wouldn’t she have come after me? I mean, if she was infatuated with him, shouldn’t I have been the target?”
“We can’t know the answers to those questions,” I said. “First, we have to find her. Then we have to figure out if she had an alibi. Those are a lot of ifs. I just wanted to see if Tom talked about any of this with you.”
“I wish he had,” she said. “I’m not na?ve. Look, I’ll even admit that I first had a crush on Tom from seeing him on television.”
“I don’t want to get your hopes up,” I said. “This could all lead to nothing. But it won’t be enough to rely on the fact nobody actually saw you kill Tom. We have to give them an alternate suspect.”
She buried her face in her hands. “Everyone loved Tom.”
“Katy,” I said. “Are you sure about that? A lot of people showed up to his memorial service at the funeral home. The public one. But there were barely any people at the more private graveside service. No family at all. If he had a large work family, they were no-shows. Who was he really close with besides you?”
I was beginning to wonder if he had ever really been close to Katy at all, either. She shrugged helplessly.
“Sure, he had the reputation of being a bit of a cad,” she said.
“That was all an act though. A persona he wore for the cameras. Tom knew exactly how handsome he was. He knew the effect he had on women. And a lot of men too. He definitely knew the effect he had on me. I just don’t know, Cass.
We never talked about any of this stuff.
It seemed like he always had people to go places with.
I didn’t get the sense that he wasn’t well liked by people at work.
I don’t know. He didn’t bring work home. ”
None of this was helping. And it underscored a complaint Joe often had of Katy during their marriage.
She was content with a more traditional, wifely role.
She expected Joe to simply take care of everything.
She didn’t want to worry about finances.
She didn’t want to hear about whatever struggles Joe had if he was between jobs.
It made me wonder if it was Tom’s idea not to talk about work, or something Katy expected.
She could be shallow. But she’d always been wonderful to Emma. Despite her failings over the last couple of years, she’d been a good mother to her. For that, I’d forever be grateful.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish I knew more.”
“Katy, I need to be blunt. I don’t know if the jury is going to believe that things were harmonious in your marriage if I put you on the stand. And I haven’t decided whether I should. I’m leaning heavily against it.”
“But you have to let me tell my side,” she said. “How else can I clear my name?”
“What about the argument your neighbors said they overheard the night before? You still haven’t given me a solid answer what that was about.”
“It was nothing. Just normal marriage stuff. I got angry because he left his dishes in the sink. It was something stupid like that. He got angry because he felt like I was harping on him and he had a long day ahead. We both had tempers that ran hot. We would argue. Blow off steam. But then that would be the end of it. I swear. Nobody believes me. But things were good between us. Better than they’d been since before we got married.
Cass, we were talking about trying to have a baby. ”
I looked at her. “You never told me that.”
“I never told anyone. It was all so new. I didn’t want people asking me about it.”
“Does anyone else know that? Do you have any proof of that?”
“Would it help?”
I closed my file and slipped it back into my bag. My phone vibrated. It was an incoming call from Eric.
“It could,” I said. “It could counteract the fact that Tom went to a divorce lawyer.”
“But he never filed,” she said. “You said that matters. I swear I never knew he did that. He never told me. Which makes me think it was just something he did because he was mad at me about Joe. Which is justified. I’ve never denied that. But I am telling you, we were working things out.”
“Tell me more about the plans for a baby,” I said.
She bit her lip. “We were just starting to talk about it. But I made an appointment with a fertility specialist my doctor recommended. She had a waiting list so I wasn’t going to be able to be seen until this fall. Good lord, my appointment is probably still in Dr. Fenton’s books.”
Katy broke into near hysterical laughter.
“It’s okay,” I said, reaching across the table and taking her hand. I let Eric’s call go to voicemail.
“It’s not though. I feel like I’m drowning, Cass. I try to put on a brave front. I try not to feel sorry for myself. I feel guilty because I can’t even grieve for my husband. People forget about that. They all just think I killed him. But I miss him. And I need him.”
My phone started ringing again.
“You should take that,” she said. Before I could stop her, she rose and walked over to the door.
“Katy …”
She called for the guard. Katy put on a fake smile as she was led back out of the room. Feeling a little despondent myself, I answered the call.
“Please tell me you’ve got good news. Please tell me you found Sugar Bear. Katy wasn’t much help today.”
Eric sighed. “I’m not surprised, unfortunately. Well, I’ve got partial good news. I didn’t find Sugar Bear, but I found Sister Bear. I just got off the phone with her. It’ll be a little bit of a hike, but she agreed to meet with us tomorrow morning.”