Love You More - Lisa Gardner [91]
D.D. shrugged. She filled the taskforce in on Trooper Lyons’s revised statement—that Tessa Leoni had called him Sunday morning, claiming a mysterious hit man had kidnapped her child and killed her husband. She was to take the blame in order to get her child back. Shane Lyons had then agreed to assist her efforts by beating her to a pulp.
When she finished, most of her fellow investigators wore similar frowns.
“Wait a minute,” Neil spoke up. “She called Lyons on Sunday? But Brian was dead at least twenty-four hours before then.”
“Something she neglected to tell him, and yet more evidence she’s a compulsive liar.”
“I traced Darby’s Friday night call,” Detective Jake Owens spoke up. “Unfortunately, it went to a prepaid cellphone. No way to determine the caller, though a prepaid cellphone suggests someone who doesn’t want his calls monitored—such as a loan shark.”
“And it turns out Brian suffered two recent ‘accidents,’ ” Neil offered. “In August, he received treatment for multiple contusions to his face, which he attributed to a hiking mishap. Let’s see …” Neil flipped through his notes. “Worked with Phil on this one—yep, Brian shipped out September through October. Returned November three and November sixteen was in the ER again, this time with cracked ribs, which he said he received after falling from a ladder while patching a leak on his roof.”
“For the record,” Phil spoke up, “Sophie Leoni’s credit cards were all maxed out in November, meaning if Brian had accrued debt, he couldn’t use her lines of credit to pay it off.”
“Any withdrawals from the personal accounts?” D.D. asked.
“I found a major one in July—forty-two grand. But that money was replaced right before Brian shipped out in September, and after that, I don’t see any more significant lump sum transactions until the past two weeks.”
“The intervention,” Bobby commented. “Six months ago, Tessa and Shane confronted Brian about his gambling, which Tessa had figured out due to the sudden loss of thirty grand. He replaced the money—”
“Winning big, or borrowing large?” D.D. muttered.
Bobby shrugged. “Then he moved his habit underground, using a bunch of phony credit cards, with the statements mailed to a separate PO box, so Tessa would never see them. Until two weeks ago, when apparently Brian Darby fell off the wagon, this time withdrawing fifty grand. Which maybe Tessa found out about, which would explain its rapid replacement six days later.”
“And why she might have withdrawn it Saturday morning,” Phil pointed out. “Forget starting a new life; seems to me Tessa Leoni was working pretty hard to save the old one.”
“All the more reason to kill her spouse,” D.D. declared. She moved to the whiteboard. “All right. Who thinks Brian Darby had a gambling problem?”
Her entire taskforce raised their hands. She agreed, added the detail to their murder board.
“Okay. Brian Darby gambled. Apparently, not successfully. He was in deep enough to run up debt, commit credit card fraud, and perhaps receive some poundings from the local goons. Then what?”
Her investigators stared at her. She stared back at them.
“Hey, don’t let me have all the fun. We assumed Tessa Leoni’s lover beat the crap out of her. Instead, it turns out it was a fellow police officer, who felt he was doing her a favor. Now we can corroborate half that story—Brian Darby did gamble. Brian Darby may have had debt worth an enforcer paying him a visit. So where does that leave us?”
D.D. wrote a fresh header: Motive.
“If I were Tessa Leoni,” she stated, “and I discovered my husband was not only still gambling, but that the sorry son of a bitch had run up tens of thousands in credit card debt in my daughter’s name, I’d kill him for that alone. Interestingly enough, my-husband-is-a-worthless-asshole is not an affirmative defense, meaning Tessa’s still better off arguing battery and getting Lyons to beat the shit out of her.”
Several officers nodded agreeably. Bobby, of course, poked the first hole in the argument.
“So she loves her daughter enough to be offended by the credit card scam,