The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [18]
“There’s one thing that doesn’t fit,” Whitney said. “This friendless, isolated woman in your scenario? You said she was always on her cell phone when she walked her dog. Who, pray tell, was she talking to?”
Tess conjured up the image of what she had seen—Carole Epstein in her green raincoat, hand cupped to her ear, always in conversation. Tess had judged her for that, just a little. That initial judgment seemed unfair now, as initial judgments often tend to be.
“Maybe her husband had her on a figurative leash, and required that she check in,” she said.
“She had a lover,” Whitney said. “A lover or a confidante. If Don Epstein is the monster you think he is, any kind of confidante would have unnerved him. The mere fact of a secret relationship, even a nonsexual one, would have bothered him.”
“Especially if she had information that could connect him to a homicide. I think she knew something, Whitney, and that’s why she had to disappear.”
Whitney paged through Tess’s file. Tess always kept her work in an orderly fashion, but this file, entered into the black-and-white Roaring Springs composition books that Tess had always favored, was a masterpiece of color-coding and charting. She had a lot of time on her hands, after all.
“Nice car,” Whitney said, stopping on the page with all the MVA data on the Epsteins. “And you know what? I think LoJack was being offered as a sweetener on that model for a while. I got a flyer from the dealer. As if I would spend that kind of money on a car.”
“So?”
“God, you’re slow. Is the baby keeping oxygen from getting to your brain? If Carole’s driving to boutiques up and down the eastern seaboard, as her husband insists, then LoJack will confirm his story. But if she’s disappeared, then she’s not driving her car, and it’s parked somewhere. Get Martin Tull, your cop friend, to engage the device.”
It wasn’t quite as easy as Whitney made it sound, but Detective Tull eventually found the dealership and convinced it to track the car. Carole Epstein’s green BMW was discovered in the parking garage at Baltimore Penn Station. The electronic ticket in the well between the front seats established that it had been there since the evening of the day that Tess saw her last. Her keys had been left in the ignition of the unlocked car, dangling from a Gucci key chain that should have been temptation enough unto itself. Impossible to say why the keys hadn’t been taken, but it was easy to establish why the car hadn’t been—the alternator was on the fritz.
Police returned to the home of Don Epstein that night, local television crews not far behind. In an impromptu press conference on his lawn, a red-eyed Epstein announced: “She left me. I just learned today that she’s stolen thousands of dollars from me. The e-mails, the texts—I have to assume they were all cover, so she could continue cleaning out our joint accounts. She left me and covered her tracks, just to get a head start on bleeding me dry.”
Tess, watching from her chaise longue, threw her hands up in frustration. Crow got out the blood-pressure cuff.
“He’s telling the truth about the accounts,” Martin Tull said. “She did it electronically, transferring money to an Internet-based bank, then moving that money to an account we can’t find, probably offshore.”
“It was a joint account,” Tess said. “He could have done it.”
“If he did, he didn’t use his home computer. The ISP doesn’t match.”
“Doesn’t match his home computer, but how do you know he doesn’t have a secret laptop? He runs a check-cashing business, Martin. He probably knows a few tricks about how to move money around.”
Tull was a murder police, one of the best. But he also was a friend, and Tess was beginning to realize he was here in that role, indulging the hysterical pregnant woman.
“She could have taken light rail to BWI,” he said. “She’s probably