Page 111 of Dead Man's List

“Estelle White said she’d had an affair with Munro,” Marshall said when Kit, Connor, and the other two detectives had gathered together to debrief their interviews.

She and Connor had shared what Trisha had disclosed, but neither of the other women who Munro had had affairs with had been as forthcoming. Juanita Young hadn’t even let Kit and Connor into her house. She’d closed the door in their faces.

Ashton pulled four sub sandwiches from a bag and passed them around. “Estelle was lying,” he said bluntly. “About the sex and the blackmail. She wouldn’t look at us through the entire interview.”

“She has three kids,” Marshall added. “Oldest is fifteen. He wouldn’t leave the room. I think whatever Munro had on her, she didn’t want her kids to know.”

“Thanks for lunch,” Connor said. “We’ll provide dinner if we’re still working.”

“We will be,” Kit said glumly. “And yes, thank you so much for lunch. I always forget to eat.”

“We know,” Marshall said.

“We all know,” Ashton added. “You work so many hours, you make the rest of us look bad.”

Kit rolled her eyes. “Anyway. If you’d been able to get Estelle alone, do you think she would have been more honest?”

Marshall shook his head. “She was afraid. Even though both Munro and Grossman are dead and Veronica’s in jail, she was terrified.”

“I thought the same,” Ashton said. “So we didn’t get anything from her. Nothing like you got from Trisha Finnegan.”

“Trisha had stopped paying Munro,” Kit said. “And the thing he’d held over her head no longer had any power over her. The other women may still be paying. Or at least they were up until last week. If we have to, we can subpoena their bank records. Trisha volunteered to show us hers. Maybe the others made monthly cash withdrawals, too.”

Marshall noted it on the whiteboard as a possible next step. “I’ve been thinking about the drop boxes that Trisha said she used. Lockers at the bus stop and the train make sense, but the gym? Why the gym? That meant whoever picked up the money that month had to have been a gym member to get access to the locker room, right?”

Kit nodded. “That would have been Veronica. Connor goes to the same gym and he confirmed her membership on our way back here after Juanita Young slammed her door in our faces.”

Connor crumpled the now-empty sandwich wrapper andlobbed it into the trash can. The man could inhale food so fast it made Kit’s head spin. She was still eating.

“So…what about Tamsin Kavanaugh?” Connor asked. “Did you talk to her?”

“Only briefly,” Marshall said, his expression darkening. “She said that she had indeed had an affair with Munro. She said that it was ‘perfectly consensual’ and that they’d both benefited. He gave her early access to any newsworthy items coming out of the council and he got a few complimentary articles in her paper. She said it lasted about three months. She admitted to making the donations. She said that’s how she got access to Munro to begin with. She also said that she didn’t know who’d killed him, that if she did, it would have been all over the internet by now. Then she asked us why we’d asked her about consent with Munro, and she got that gleam in her eye. We left soon after that. We didn’t want to inadvertently give her a story.”

“I get that,” Kit said. “I knew she’d do anything for a story, but Munro? Ick.”

“A lot of women liked his looks,” Ashton said. “My wife thought he looked like Rock Hudson.”

“Who?” Connor asked, and Kit elbowed him in the ribs.

“You know who that is. You’re just trying to make Ashton feel old.”

Connor grinned. “Did it work?”

Ashton laughed. “No, because I already felt old. You’re way too late for that, young pup.”

Kit’s mind was racing. “Veronica didn’t lie about the locations changing each month. What if she used the bus and train stations often? What if she used one of those locations in the last month? What if we get the surveillance footage from both places for the last month?”

“That is a lot of footage,” Ashton said. “We’ll need to ask for help.”

“But it’s doable,” Marshall said. “You ask Navarro for more assistance, McKittrick. He likes you best.”

“He really doesn’t,” Kit said. “But I’ll ask.” She called Navarro and he said he’d coordinate getting the footage and a team to review it. She turned back to the three men, who were stuffing themselves with potato chips. “Done. So we have one confirmed blackmail victim. I didn’t get killer vibes from Trisha Finnegan. Did you, Connor?”

Kit wished they’d taken Sam with them. He was good at reading people.But so are we. We survived before Sam was our psychologist.

“I didn’t. But she was alsoverycooperative.”

“Too cooperative?” Ashton asked.