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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

COTTONWOOD, ARIZONA

THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 2023

8:00 A.M.

Ali and B. drove to the office together the next morning. She had barely settled in at her desk when a text came in from Frigg.

Can we talk?

That was odd. Ali sent an immediate reply:

What’s going on?

Mr. Brewster’s will was read on Tuesday, Frigg replied. I’m sending two more videos.

While waiting for the videos to arrive, Ali found herself shaking her head. How on earth could Frigg have gained access to the reading of Chuck Brewster’s will?

Thinking the reading of the will would have occurred in an attorney’s office with a wall filled with legal tomes forming the background, Ali was surprised when the video opened in what was clearly a police interview room. The detectives Ali knew to be Horn and Burns were seated across the table from a clearly distressed Donna Jean Plummer.

“This interview is starting at six twenty-three p.m. on Tuesday, March 21, 2023,” Detective Horn announced. He was clearly in charge, and his smug attitude rubbed Ali the wrong way. “Present in the room are Detectives Monica Burns and Raymond Horn of the Edmonds Police Department, along with Donna Jean Plummer.”

Unlike Detective Horn, Donna Jean seemed uncomfortable and beaten-down. During the course of the interview she seemed totally floored when she learned that she was a named beneficiary in Chuck Brewster’s will. She didn’t seem fazed by the idea Detective Horn seemed to think that her inclusion in Mr. Brewster’s will might have motivated her to participate in his sudden death, and that he believed Donna Jean had known about it well in advance of Chuck’s death. She denied it, of course, but without any visible reaction. What really seemed to bother her was Horn’s suggestion that she submit to a lie detector test. That was when she abruptly ended the interview.

At the time Frigg had brought those previous interviews to Ali’s attention, she had expressed concern about the possibility that both Clarice and Donna Jean were being railroaded. Based on what Ali had seen in this one, it occurred to her that the AI’s assessment of the situation was correct and that now both women were in Detective Horn’s crosshairs.

Ali went back and watched the interview again from beginning to end. As far as she could tell, nothing in Donna Jean’s behavior was off. She was understandably distressed at being hauled into a police interview room for a second time, and who wouldn’t be, especially since it involved an on-going homicide investigation? Ali knew how that felt. In the aftermath of her second husband’s murder, she herself had been considered a suspect and remembered exactly how being cast in that role had felt. At the time, she had been utterly mystified to find herself dealing with something so devastating, and Donna Jean Plummer appeared similarly lost.

As for her reaction to learning that Chuck Brewster had left her with what must have seemed like a huge amount of money? From Ali’s point of view, the woman’s response was totally in keeping with someone who was astonished by that news. Detective Horn’s reference to a polygraph test taken during the course of the investigation following Donna Jean’s husband’s death suggested to Ali that Donna Jean’s previous conviction for that had a lot to do with Detective Horn’s current laser focus on her as a suspect.

Detective Horn had not yet gotten around to placing Donna Jean under arrest and charging her. If and when he did that, Ali guessed Donna Jean would then qualify for the services of a court-appointed defense attorney. Ali also knew how well that had worked out for Mateo Vega in this very same jurisdiction—Edmonds, Washington. Mateo had ended up spending sixteen years of his life in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed, and Ali worried that Donna Jean might be looking at a similarly grim outcome.

Ali called Frigg back. “Thanks for sending that,” she said. “Let me know if there are any further developments.”

“You haven’t watched the second video,” Frigg reminded her.

Ali sighed. Her desk could wait. “All right,” she said. “Go ahead and play it.”

As soon as the video began to play she realized that this was probably the same room she had seen before during Donna Jean’s interviews, only this time, with Adam Brewster in the room, the atmosphere was entirely different. The time stamp read 10:00 a.m., on Tuesday, March 21, 2023. Detective Horn was once again running the show, but where he had appeared to be overbearing and almost threatening while dealing with Donna Jean Plummer, with Adam Brewster his behavior was almost deferential. And unlike Donna Jean, who had appeared to be beyond stressed, the well-dressed thirtysomething young man seated opposite the two investigators seemed completely at ease.

“Thank you for stopping by to speak to us,” Horn said. “With the funeral scheduled for later today, I’m sure it’s been a very challenging time for you.”

“Yes, it has,” Adam agreed. “There was a crisis at work last week, and we weren’t able to get back any sooner.”

“Please accept our condolences on the loss of your father, Mr. Brewster,” Detective Horn began.

Adam replied with what appeared to be a rueful half smile. “ Actually,” he said, “my father and I lost each other a long time ago. We were estranged for a number of years. I finally reached out to him by phone only a few weeks ago in late January. We talked for far longer than I ever expected. Before the call ended he had invited both of us to his upcoming sixtieth birthday party.”

“By ‘us’ you mean you and Joel Franklin?” Horn inquired.

“Yes,” Adam replied. “My husband. We flew in from L.A. for the party and were on our flight home by the time the body was discovered. I had a number of things going on at work and wasn’t able to return until today.”

“Tell me about the party,” Horn suggested.

“Except for my dad and Clarice, I didn’t know anyone there,” Adam began. “Clarice was the nominal hostess, but I got the feeling that she didn’t know many of the guests, either. When she found out I was there, I thought she was going to faint dead away. I don’t believe she had any idea that Dad had invited me.”

“How did you and your father come to be estranged?” Horn inquired.

“I was still in high school and my mother was dying of cancer when I found out that my father was screwing around with Clarice behind Mom’s back. Not long after that, my father figured out I was gay. At that point we came to a mutual parting of the ways.”

“A parting that lasted this long?” Detective Horn asked.

“After spending some time walking in my father’s shoes, I began to rethink some of what happened back then. My first partner, Michael Lafferty, was twenty years older than me. We were together for ten years. When he was diagnosed with ALS, it came as a huge shock.”

“ALS,” Detective Horn repeated. “Lou Gehrig’s disease?”

Adam nodded. “His initial prognosis was two to five years. He was a fighter and refused to give up. He made it all the way to six, but the last two years were pure hell. Joel is the RN Michael had hired to be his live-in nurse. After Michael was gone, somehow Joel never left. It was like the two of us had been through a war together.

“That’s when I finally began to have some real understanding of what my father must have gone through when my mother was dying. When you’re stuck in a lose/lose situation like that, you end up being really isolated. You crave companionship and solace. I suppose he and Clarice started out as friends back then, but eventually it turned into something more. The same thing happened to me with Joel. We started out as friends and ended up falling in love.

“After we married, Joel was the one who encouraged me to get back in touch with my father. Joel’s family was a lot like mine, but his father died before the two of them had a chance to mend fences. Joel didn’t want me to make the same mistake.”

“How long ago did you and your father bury the hatchet?” Detective Horn asked.

“Only a few weeks—the end of January maybe? I finally worked up enough courage to reach out to him at work. I wasn’t sure if he’d even take my call. When he invited Joel and me to come to his big party, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

Watching the video, Ali was struck by Adam’s visible emotion when he told about how recently he and his father had become reacquainted and his obvious regret that there hadn’t been enough time for them to effect a real reconciliation. She saw him swallow a lump in his throat before answering and heard the wistfulness in his voice. She also noticed a tear beginning to form in the corner of his eye, one he quickly dabbed away. At that point Ali paused the video, rewound it, and then played that portion of the interview again.

In police interviews following homicides, guilty parties often resort to over-the-top hysterics. Those are easy to spot, especially when no tears are present. But in Ali’s experience, real regret is hard to fake, and that’s what she was sure she was seeing here—a man whose chance of reestablishing a relationship with a long-estranged father had been snatched away from him forever. Would someone like that viciously slaughter his father only a matter of hours after arriving at the family home for the first time in decades? That made no sense.

The interview ended with Horn asking for fingerprints and a DNA swab, both of which Adam Brewster provided with no objection. Those weren’t the actions of someone with something to hide, either. So if Adam hadn’t killed his father, and if neither Clarice Brewster nor Donna Jean Plummer were responsible, who was?

Ali was sitting there staring at her computer screen and puzzling over that when Frigg’s voice came back on the line.

“Somebody’s lying,” she said.

“Who?” Ali asked. “It sounded to me as though he was telling the truth—like he didn’t do it.”

“Either Adam is lying or his husband is,” Frigg replied. “Or maybe both of them are. According to Adam, he was motivated to reach out to his father due to a similar situation that had occurred in Joel Franklin’s life in which he, too, had been ostracized by a father who died prior to the two of them having any kind of reconciliation. The problem is, Marvin Franklin, Joel’s father, is alive and well and living in Hammond, Indiana.”

“That’s a surprise,” Ali said. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know what you’re going to do,” Frigg replied, “but I’m going to start by doing a more thorough inquiry into Joel Franklin’s background.”