Playing Dead_ A Novel of Suspense - Allison Brennan [56]
“I think you’re a desperate young woman trying to cling to the false hope that your father is innocent of two brutal murders.”
“Why are you lying?” Claire said, hackles raised. Collier went on the offensive when cornered; so did she. She tried to slow her heart rate, but she was angry.
“If you don’t leave, I will call for security.”
“I’m not stopping you from getting to class.” She glanced at her watch, mostly to prevent herself from decking him. “You’re already late.”
He glared at her, turned, and walked briskly to the lecture hall.
Claire went back to her Jeep and took several deep breaths to calm down. She rested her hot head on the steering wheel. Maybe she’d played him wrong. Maybe she should have gone in all honey and sweetness and asked if he had a copy of Oliver’s thesis, or his notes.
Collier would never have given them to her. If he was involved in Oliver’s disappearance, he had either hidden or destroyed everything Oliver had shared about the case. But why would a college professor be involved in hiding information about her father’s case? Why would he even care? Or maybe he was just a touchy, crabby guy. Had she misread his reactions to her questions?
Might Collier lie because he’d made a mistake in reviewing her dad’s case and his weak ego couldn’t handle it? There had to be something else, something more.
The key was finding out more than just who wanted Chase Taverton dead. Who had the means and the motive to kill Chase Taverton? Claire had to learn everything she could about her mother’s dead lover if she was going to figure this out.
Time was her problem. Fifteen years had passed since the murders. Memories faded. People moved or died. Criminals whom Taverton prosecuted might not even remember the man who put them away. Unless, of course, they had been involved in his murder.
Was Taverton involved in any gang- or mob-related prosecutions? Sacramento didn’t have a “mob” problem in the traditional way New York and Chicago and, to a lesser degree, nearby San Francisco did. But there was a powerful criminal Russian community in Sacramento and Stockton. But would they or any other petty criminal have set up such an elaborate frame?
She pulled out her father’s letter. Frank Lowe. She knew nothing about him except what her father said: that he was someone Chase Taverton had cut a deal with. How would Lowe be able to clear her father?
Was he dead, like Oliver?
She needed to see the evidence against her father. She was an investigator and while she didn’t investigate murder, she knew what was staged and what was real. Like Ben Holman’s arson. Obviously arson, staged to look like a theft.
Claire broke out in a sweat. Her father’s guilt made sense on the surface, but there were so many layers when Chase Taverton was added to the equation as more than her mother’s lover. There was a damn good chance that everyone had drawn the wrong conclusions. And Claire saw a new reality, one where she’d been deadly wrong.
Claire now saw flaws in the prosecution’s argument. Flaws that a good defense attorney should have exploited. Or was she seeing the flaws only because she wanted her father to be innocent? She rubbed her temples, feeling the pressure of a growing tension headache.
A criminal lawyer named Prescott had represented her father. She made a note to track him down and find out what, if anything, he knew or remembered from the trial, perhaps something that Claire had been too catatonic to notice at the time.
She had told the truth on the stand. The whole truth as she’d seen it. That alone may not have been enough to convict her father, but it had destroyed his life.
She would discover the truth about that terrible day no matter what it took. Once and for all, Claire had to know for certain that her father was guilty . . . or innocent.
SIXTEEN
Mitch had only worked in the Sacramento regional FBI office for two