The Panda of Death by Betty Webb

The Panda of Death by Betty Webb

Author:Betty Webb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-12-15T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter Fourteen

“Why didn’t you tell me you had an altercation with Cliff Flaherty the day before he was murdered?” Joe snapped at me the minute I came through the door.

He had changed into civvies, but still looked disheveled. His black hair stood out in clumps, like he’d been running his hands through it. The lines in his face had deepened to the point where he appeared to have aged several years since this morning.

I looked around for rescue, but Colleen, Dylan, and the kids must have been in the granny cottage, so I was on my own. At first, I tried to downplay the event. “Well, I knew the Cliff thing would be a problem for you, it happening so close to the time of his murder, so I didn’t mention it. After all, it wasn’t really a big deal, just a difference of opinion about how many articles of clothing should go into a washer.”

“You assaulted him.”

So much for downplaying. “With a towel. And he hit me first. If you saw the tape, you’d know that. Speaking of, how’d you find out about it?” I knew darned well that Chief Deputy Emilio Gutierrez wouldn’t have told him of the tape’s existence.

“Deputy Orville Thompson found it misfiled in the evidence room, and brought the tape straight to me, as well he should. I played it, and there you were, in the starring role. This kind of thing has got to stop, Teddy.”

“This kind of thing? Like defending myself when someone assaults me? Surely you don’t expect me to just stand there and take it, Joe. You didn’t marry a wimp.”

We were well into our first real marital fight—both of us yelling at each other and scaring the hell out of the dogs and cat—when I finally realized something. Joe was overreacting to a tape that showed me getting hit, yet he was mad at me. His reaction was so odd, so wrong, and so unlike him that something else had to be going on. This was deflected anger I was seeing.

So I stepped forward, put my arms around him, and found his body trembling. “Tell me what’s really wrong, Joe,” I whispered.

He looked down at me, his eyes red and raw. After a couple of false starts, he managed, “Laur…Laur…Lauren’s admitted to killing Cliff Flaherty.”

When I led him to the sofa and sat down beside him, it all came pouring out.

He’d been sitting at his desk, running statistics on extreme DUI as related to head-on collisions when Emilio entered his office to tell him Lauren had come in and demanded to see the officer in charge of the Cliff Flaherty investigation.

“That would be me,” Emilio had answered.

During the following interview, she had told him the following story.

Three days before the murder, Lauren had found the note Dylan had left for her, describing what he’d discovered on his DNA test, and that he was driving to San Sebastian to meet his paternal grandmother, with whom he’d been exchanging emails. She stewed



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