if I had a witness who can put you there?”
“Your witness is lying. I haven’t been anywhere near my parents’ house in months. I’d be willing to take a polygraph, if necessary.”
Interesting, Sam thought. If he’s lying, he’s one hell of an accomplished liar. “Why did you and your sister decide to go to the Bahamas days after your mother’s murder?”
“I told you—because Mandi is on Thanksgiving break from school, and we both wanted out of here for the holiday, seeing as we no longer have a family to spend it with.”
Sam hated that the explanation actually made sense, but she couldn’t reconcile what Mandi had told her with the cool customer sitting before her.
“So you’re close with your sister, then?”
“We’ve had our differences over the years, but we’ve stuck together during this nightmare our mother brought down on us.”
“What kind of differences?”
“The usual sibling shit. Who got to use the car our parents made us share as teens, who took whose earbuds and didn’t return them. That kind of stuff. Things were a lot better between us after I left for college, and we weren’t living together anymore.”
Recalling her own sisters saying the same thing once upon a time, Sam stood. “We’ll be back.”
“I haven’t done anything. You can’t hold me here indefinitely.”
Sam let him have the last word and left the room with Captain Malone following her out.
“What’re you thinking?” Malone asked when they were in the hallway.
“That the sister is minimizing her own involvement and pointing the finger at her brother to save her own ass.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to talk to Mandi again.”
“I’ll watch from observation.”
Sam led the way back to interview one, where Dominguez was overseeing Mandi’s efforts to record her version of what’d happened.
Mandi popped up out of a slouch, her eyes wide with fright. She looked like someone who had something to hide. “Did you talk to Ken?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“He says he didn’t do it.”
“He’s lying!”
“See, the thing is, I don’t think he is.”
“He is! He did it!”
“Convince me.”
“I told you! He called me at one thirty on Sunday in a complete panic. I left my dorm to get the things he said he needed, and I was at my parents’ house by three and found him standing over my dead mother.”
“He says he hasn’t been to their house in months. Did he tell you why he went there that day?”
“To beg her to do the right thing and give back the money.”
“Does he know you made the Cayman deposits for your mom?”
She blinked and squirmed, and Sam could almost see smoke coming out of her ears as she tried to figure out how to reply to that. “No.”
“How did you explain your frequent trips there to him?”
“I told him I was taking a break from school. Like I said, this was long before we knew what my mother was really doing. I had no clue she’d stolen the money I was depositing for her until the Feds charged her.”
“And then you knew exactly why she’d sent you to the islands and basically implicated you in her crime. The way I see it, Mandi, you had much more of a motive to end her than your brother did.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“So you say.”
A knock sounded on the door, and Sam got up to see who was interrupting her interrogation. The only time that happened was if someone had found something that would help.
Cameron Green gestured for her to come out of the room.
Sam closed the door behind her. “What’s up?”
“After we found Mandi’s ties to the Cayman Islands, I did some digging in some of the other more notorious tax shelters and found something interesting in Delaware. The VMcL Corporation was formed just over two years ago, and I thought you might be interested in who’s on the four-person board of directors. The company’s assets are listed at fifteen million.”
Sam took the paper he handed to her and scanned it quickly. It listed Amanda McLeod as chair, Kenneth McLeod Jr. as vice chair, Kenneth McLeod Sr. as treasurer and Virginia McLeod as director-at-large. “Great work as usual, Green. This helps.”
“Are you liking the daughter for this?”
“I want to, but she insists it was the brother, who’s the coolest-under-pressure dude I’ve ever encountered if he murdered his mother. I don’t know what to believe. We need a warrant to dump their phones and the father’s,” she said, adding Ken Sr. on a hunch. “She insists the brother called her at one thirty