Chapter Nine #2
“Uh, no. I mean, yes, I’m safe. The deputy is still guarding my door, and no one has tried to get in.” She muttered something Livvy didn’t catch. “Sorry—I’m rambling. I remembered something that my sister said, and I’m not sure if it’s important, but…” Her words trailed off.
“What did you remember?” Livvy pressed.
“It could have been a joke,” Sunny blurted. “But it didn’t feel like one. Zadie and I were talking about Franklin. Sometimes he can have that holier than thou attitude. Know what I mean?”
Livvy did know and made a sound of agreement, hoping that Sunny would continue and get to the point.
“Anyway, Zadie said she wouldn’t be surprised if Franklin had fathered some of the babies with the surrogates.”
She certainly hadn’t been expecting that. Judging from his expression, neither had Ethan.
“Sometimes when the husbands are sterile or incapable of fathering a child,” Sunny added, “donor sperm is used. But Zadie must have seen something in the records because she said maybe Franklin skipped the donors and used his own. I don’t know if it’s true,” she quickly added.
“And I have no idea if it’s important, but I didn’t want to keep it to myself if it could help.
Will it help?” she asked after a short pause.
“Maybe. We’ll definitely look into it,” Livvy assured her. “Do you recall Zadie mentioning if she actually looked at any of the records or talked to anyone else about this?”
“Sorry, no. To be honest, I didn’t understand why Zadie even said something like that. I mean, I know she didn’t care much for Franklin, so it could have been something just off the cuff, with no proof whatsoever to back it up.”
The proof could be in the children who’d been born via surrogates. But Livvy didn’t see how they were going to get that kind of DNA data. Still, it was something they could perhaps try to verify with the surrogates themselves during the interviews.
“Thank you for this, Sunny,” Livvy told her. “Has the doctor told you when you’ll be released from the hospital?”
“Maybe this afternoon, but my blood pressure’s a little high, so they might keep me an extra day. I don’t mind staying here,” she added in a mutter. “I, uh, know I’ve already told you that I don’t want to go back to New Hope. I haven’t changed my mind about that.”
“I understand,” Livvy assured her. “And when you are released, we have a safe place for you to go.”
“Good,” Sunny said, the word tumbling out with a stream of breath. “Thank you, Deputy Walsh.”
Livvy ended the call and looked at Ethan. “Sounds like a motive for murder if Zadie truly did uncover that about Franklin.”
“It does. As Sunny said though, Franklin might not have even fathered those kids. And if he did, he possibly had permission from the clients. But if it was all done hush-hush, then that could indeed be motive.”
Yes, that could trigger some charges, but more than that, this could turn out to be a scandal. Something that spread on the news media and ended up ruining New Hope’s reputation.
Which gave Chloe motive for murder, too.
Even if Chloe had approved of what her brother might have done, she seemed devoted to New Hope, and she might not want anything to put a stain on it.
But murder?
Maybe. That could be particularly true if the woman had already killed someone before. Livvy thought of Ivy. Of what Anthony had said. And if that was the truth, then Chloe was more than capable of ending a life.
Ethan minimized the list from Eden and used the laptop to do an internet search for mentions of both Hank Stover and Franklin. He groaned when there were no hits, and then he widened the search to include New Hope and Chloe.
“Still nothing,” he grumbled.
“Try the names we got from Eden,” Livvy suggested.
“Good idea.” He copied and pasted the names into the search, and this time, they got something.
“Sherry Elmore,” they read in unison. “She’s Hank’s half sister.”
Yes, that was a connection all right. But did it mean anything?
Ethan shifted the search back to police background database, and he pulled up what they had on Sherry.
She had a record for DUI, arrested eleven years earlier, and while she hadn’t served any time, it was enough to provide them with plenty of info collected while she was in custody.
Including her place of employment at the time of the arrest.
New Hope, where she’d been employed as a housekeeper for nearly thirty years.
A position she’d kept until six weeks ago.
“It doesn’t prove anything,” Ethan admitted. “But we can show Hank’s picture to Chloe and Franklin and see how they react.”
True, and while it might come to nothing, it felt like something to Livvy. Perhaps hitting Chloe and Franklin with this info would rattle them.
“Let’s go to New Hope,” she said, standing. “You can maybe continue to dig on Sherry while I drive.”
Ethan was quick to agree. “I’ll message Grace first to bring her up to speed, and then I’ll try to call Sherry and speak to her.”
He fired off the text to Grace as soon as they were in the cruiser, and she sent a reply within seconds. “She gave the okay for me to contact Sherry. Oh, and Grace said to let you know that you have an appointment with the sketch artist at noon today.”
Noon. Still hours away. But she’d need to do some steeling up for that. Still, Livvy was glad it had been arranged.
She kept watch around them as she drove, but from the corner of her eye, she saw Ethan accessing Sherry’s phone number from the background.
Considering it’d been so many years since her arrest, Livvy knew it was possible that the woman’s contact information had changed, so it was a nice surprise when someone answered on the second ring.
“Sherry Elmore?” Ethan asked.
“Yeah,” she verified in a snap. “What do you want? If this is about my good-for-nothing half brother, then I got nothing to say to you.”
She definitely didn’t sound very friendly, but at least she knew about Hank’s death. That meant this wouldn’t turn into a notification.
“I’m Deputy Ethan Oakley, and I’m with my partner, Deputy Livvy Walsh, from the Renegade Canyon Sheriff’s Office. I understand you used to work at New Hope,” he said, obviously steering clear of mentioning Hank for now.
“Yeah, so what?” she barked out.
“We’re just doing some backgrounds on New Hope and the staff, and I wondered about your experience working there.”
Sherry huffed a humorous laugh. “Well, it wasn’t a picnic, that’s for sure.”
“Could you share any details about that?” Ethan pressed.
“Chloe and Franklin treat their employees like crap. Asking us to do overtime but not paying us for it. Searching us to make sure we weren’t taking pictures of clients or recording their conversation.”
Livvy glanced at Ethan to see his reaction. Like her, he was no doubt wondering why Chloe and Franklin had insisted on such tight security measures.
“Still you worked at New Hope a long time,” Ethan pointed out.
“Yeah, I did. The money was good, and I didn’t exactly have a lot of people offering me jobs. And I woulda stayed on had Chloe not fired me.”
“Why did she fire you?” he asked.
Sherry cursed. “It started with Chloe yelling at me because I walked in on her having an argument with Zadie. God rest her soul,” she added in a murmur. “Chloe said if I repeated a word of anything I’d heard, she’d fire me on the spot and give me bad job references.”
“Did you hear what they said?” Ethan asked.
“Nope. But apparently Chloe didn’t believe that because she ended up firing me anyway. We have to sign this nondisclosure agreement to get hired there, and Chloe reminded me if I told anyone anything about the goings on at New Hope, then she’d sue me.”
That was something they would definitely ask Chloe about, but they’d have to do it in a way that protected Sherry, to make sure Chloe wouldn’t be able to sue the woman.
“Did Hank ever visit you at New Hope?” Ethan continued a moment later.
Sherry groaned. “I said I didn’t want to talk about him—”
“It’s important,” Ethan interrupted. “Please. I just need to know if he was ever there.”
Silence for a long time. “Yeah. I didn’t live at New Hope like a lot of the other staff, so once or twice Hank dropped me off at work when my car was in the shop. And yeah, he did that recently. Now you’re thinking Hank saw Zadie and got obsessed with her or something.”
Ethan jumped right on that. “Could that have happened?”
“Maybe,” she conceded. “Yes,” Sherry amended several moments later. “Hank was an arrogant SOB who treated women like dirt. If he put the moves on Zadie and she resisted him, he could have killed her.”
Ethan frowned. “Any reason you didn’t tell the cops that before now?”
“Yeah, because I haven’t had time. I just got off the night shift at the cleaning service where I work.
Also, nobody’s asked me about him. I only heard about Hank’s death about an hour ago because I’m not Hank’s next of kin,” she added.
“Our worthless father has that privilege. He’s the one who messaged me with the news. ”
Now that Grace knew about Sherry and the link to New Hope, she would almost certainly want to do an in-person interview with the woman.
“Is that it?” Sherry snarled. “Because I gotta go.”
She didn’t wait for Ethan’s response but instead ended the call. Ethan texted Grace to give her the update just as Livvy pulled to a stop in front of New Hope. The minute or so that it took him to do that gave Livvy some time to think and process everything that Sherry had just told him.
And now she had to wonder if Hank had acted alone.
Maybe he had become obsessed with Zadie, and since Sunny and Zadie were identical twins, that could explain why one was dead and the other had been attacked.
But while that theory worked, it didn’t feel right to Livvy.
Apparently, it didn’t feel right to Ethan either. “Hank could have met Chloe or Franklin on one of the visits here to New Hope,” he said the moment he’d fired off the text to Grace.
“Yes,” she agreed. And that was yet something else they could bring up to Chloe and her brother.
They got out of the cruiser, but before they even rang the bell, a woman in a housekeeper’s uniform opened the door. Livvy recognized her from the photos they’d gotten of the current employees, and this was Veronica Baskar.
“I saw you drive up,” the woman said, stepping back for them to enter. “Are Dr. Franklin and Chloe expecting you?”
“They’ll need to talk to us,” Livvy settled for saying.
A sliver of dread went through Veronica’s eyes. “I’ll let them know you’re here. You can wait in the parlor.”
Since they knew the way, Livvy and Ethan headed there while Veronica went toward the stairs. They had only made it a few steps when Livvy heard something she definitely hadn’t wanted to hear.
A gunshot blasted through the house.