Chapter 21 #2
“Wait, you caught someone at Briscoe’s house?” Robert planted both feet on the floor and leaned forward.
“Yep.” Cillian looked across the coffee table at him. “Well, nearly caught him. He was ransacking Briscoe’s office, searching for something.” Cillian paused, shifting his hand to rest more fully on Victoria’s far shoulder as he looked at her for a moment. “He knocked Victoria down and ran out.”
Heat crawled up her neck toward her face, generating from her heart rate’s shift into overdrive, no doubt. Hopefully, none of her siblings would notice.
He shifted his protective gaze away to face the others. “I chased him, but he got into the Mercedes and drove off.”
“Did you get the plates?” Torin asked the natural police officer’s question.
“Too dark.”
“Why are we only hearing about this now?” Spring pinned Victoria with a disapproving stare.
A ready answer eluded Victoria. She’d never been on the receiving end of a question like that from her siblings. It was something she would say to them.
She quietly cleared her throat. “I wasn’t hurt. There was no reason to bother any of you with the information. You have your own lives and concerns to focus on.”
“Victoria, your life is part of ours.” Spring’s tone carried more urgency than the minor incident warranted. “We care about what happens to you.”
An awkward silence filled the room.
Victoria was supposed to care for them, not become a burden for them.
She wouldn’t add stress or trauma to their lives through her own difficulties, wouldn’t distract them from their goals and success.
And she wouldn’t quit the role of being the most stable, dependable, and loving person in their lives whom they could look up to and count on, no matter what.
They still needed someone to fill those shoes their mother had worn, or at least to try.
“Thank you.” She gave Spring a nod. “I appreciate that.”
“So like I was saying…” Cillian followed her answer quickly, as if he’d been ready to end the silence. Was he trying to help her out again?
Her chest squeezed.
“McCully refused to even consider another suspect. He’s doubling down on building a case against Victoria. I don’t think he’ll pay attention to anything else, unless someone can show him the smoking gun.”
“So you think this man you found searching Briscoe’s home office is Clinton?” Robert glanced at Cillian and then Victoria.
“You know him?” Treese directed the question at Robert.
“We attend some of the same functions.” Robert ran his fingers along his jawline Balbo beard.
“Ah, the parties of the wealthy and influential.” Treese grinned.
Robert cast her a smile but continued. “He didn’t seem like the burglar type, but people will do extreme things with the proper motivation. Any idea why he would be searching the office or want Thomas Briscoe dead?”
Victoria met Robert’s gaze. “Nothing concrete. Thomas told me that I was the only one in his life he could trust. He said that, even though I asked him about Mr. Glenn, because I had thought they were friends. Then Mr. Glenn arrived to see Thomas the last day I was at the house, and Thomas sounded cold with him, almost angry.”
Robert nodded. “So there was something going on between them. Let me do a little digging and maybe drop in on Clinton at the museum.”
“There are probably other people who wanted him dead, right?”
Victoria landed a surprised gaze on Hank, who rested his arm across one propped-up knee.
He gave her a cute smile. “Sorry, but in murder mysteries, there are always a bunch of suspects.”
Torin chuckled. “If only real-life police work was as easy as on TV.”
“Okay.” Hank held up a hand and grinned. “But this guy was rich and told you,” he aimed his blue eyes at Victoria, “that he couldn’t trust anybody. That has to mean more people could’ve wanted him dead.”
Victoria moistened her lips. “You’re right. His niece and nephew visited him frequently, but even I could tell their interest in him was inauthentic and selfish. He always said they were waiting for him to die so they could inherit his fortune.”
“What are their names?” Spring accepted the glass of water Torin handed her from the end table beside him.
“The nephew is Ryan Briscoe. Brenda married and is Brenda Fellsworth now. They’re siblings, the children of Thomas’s deceased older sister.”
“Are either of them into fitness?” Treese pushed her straight long hair behind her shoulder.
“Oh, yes. Ryan is very proud of his workout regimen.” Victoria would never forget the first time they’d met, and Ryan had flirted with her, trying to impress her with his flexing muscles.
Only later had he apparently decided she was a threat to his inheritance, an idea she’d thought unbelievable at the time.
Evidently, he and Brenda had been smarter than Victoria had thought.
And their suspicions about her and Thomas could have led to his death.
“Perfect. Know what gym he goes to?”
“I think he may have mentioned it, but I don’t recall.”
“No worries. Does he live in Gealanden, too?”
“Yes.”
“Great. I’ll find him. I know all the gym managers there.”
Robert laughed. “And you’ve probably dated every single one.”
Treese lifted one slim shoulder with a sly smile. “How else would I know them?”
“Okay, commercial break from the Treese reality show.” Spring rolled her eyes before angling her head toward Victoria. “Do you know any background on Brenda?”
Victoria took a moment to think. “Well, she’s very involved in raising money for charities with fundraisers. I believe she sits on a few charity boards, as well. She was often trying to impress Thomas with the money she raised or the charities she was helping.”
“Oh, I know.” Spring glanced at Torin with widened eyes before sharing the same lightbulb idea look with the others. “I could approach her about the Chicago Wheels benefit.”
Victoria smiled at Spring’s enthusiasm. Only four months ago, Spring didn’t want to get out of bed to sit in a wheelchair, and now she was volunteering with the local nonprofit to help disabled people in need.
“Okay, but what would be the purpose? The goal?” Torin took the glass Spring handed back to him. “It would take a long-term friendship and trust to get her to confess anything incriminating.”
“True.” She glanced at Robert across the room. “Robby could probably get them to talk more quickly with his get-people-to-tell-you-everything superpower.”
Robert grinned. “About time someone recognized my superpower status.” He earned chuckles from several of his siblings.
“But seriously, I think all we need to do for now is establish if they have alibis for the time of the murder. Am I right about that?” He landed his attention on the only one with law enforcement experience in their midst.
Torin set the glass on the end table. “That would definitely help, and it’s something the current detective on the case is apparently not looking into.”
“Great. We can do that easily enough through natural conversation.”
“We don’t know the time of death.” Victoria looked at Robert. “I found him in the morning, but he had likely been killed overnight.”
“Between eleven p.m. and one a.m.” Treese inserted the strangely precise information.
“How do you know that?”
She smiled at Victoria. “Your lawyer.”
“Why is it everyone knows more information than I do, when I’m the one they suspect of committing the crime?”
Her siblings laughed, and Cillian chuckled beside her.
“That wasn’t actually meant to be a joke.”
“Sorry, sis.” Hank sent her a loving grin. “You just aren’t a very good criminal.”
A smile tugged at her mouth. “Thank you.”
“Though I can’t get directly involved in this case,” Torin wrapped his arm around Spring’s shoulders from behind as he addressed the group, “I can run background checks on all the suspects.”
“That’d be great.” Cillian looked at the sergeant. “Can you check out the staff, too?”
“The staff?” Victoria hadn’t considered them suspects.
Cillian turned his head toward her, accelerating her pulse from the nearness of his dark eyes. “Yeah. He had a cook or something, right?”
“Mrs. Kline was his housekeeper and cook, yes.”
“Any other staff?” Torin lowered his arm to pull the miniature notepad from his pocket that he had used when he had first interviewed Spring at the rehab center.
“The groundskeeper, Ned Parker.” Victoria tried to imagine either of them wanting to harm Thomas. She couldn’t. “They’ve both worked for Thomas for decades. I believe Mrs. Kline was with him thirty years, at least. I can’t believe they would want to hurt him.”
Torin met her gaze with a grim one. “Sadly, I’ve learned you can never really know what people are capable of. Like Robert said, the right motivation can turn anyone into a criminal. Even into a killer.”
Exactly as he, Spring, and Victoria had experienced firsthand four months ago.
Victoria nodded. “You’re right, of course.”
Cillian squeezed her shoulders, his arm making full contact. “Glad you said that.”
She could hardly pay attention to his words or his grin as her senses flew into overdrive at the touch of his muscled arm, a tender embrace around her.
“I’m thinking you and I can talk to the housekeeper. Try to feel out what she knows and check for an alibi.”
Victoria rotated her head away. She couldn’t articulate her instinctive dislike of trying to trick Mrs. Kline while electricity sparked through her limbs and pumped her heart at an alarming rate.
Honestly. She was a grown woman, not an inexperienced girl of fifteen. She would not be swept away by emotion and hormones into mindless foolishness again.
If only his arm around her shoulders didn’t feel so strengthening, so comforting, giving her support she didn’t know she needed.
What if God had sent Cillian into her life again for such a time as this to help her, not to be a hindrance or temptation?
The possibility shifted something within her, as if a door had swung open, allowing tension and stress to escape as calm and optimism took their place.
So she found her voice and met Cillian’s gaze. “Yes, let’s do that.”
How much more God wanted them to do together now and in the future was a question she would have to give serious consideration. After she was no longer the number one suspect in her friend’s murder.