little bit obscene. Not the location, but the size of the house. It looks more like a hotel than a place for a couple with no kids.”
I stepped out farther and turned back and looked up at the beige facade of the house. The second floor was lined with little balconies. One for every bedroom, I guessed. There was a built-in fireplace on the stone patio, and a place for a grill and a minifridge. I wondered what would happen to this place. If someone would swoop in and pay to have it finished, or if it would just languish and rot, become a luxury home for a colony of bats or raccoons.
“Another thing,” James said. She was still looking out at the ocean. “If our assumption is correct, if Miranda Severson talked Brad Daggett into killing her husband, he must have done it thinking he would come into all of this wealth eventually.”
“Maybe he was in love with her, James. Don’t be cynical.”
“Whatever. It doesn’t change my point, which is why does he kill Miranda less than a week after killing her husband? I mean, she’s the reason he’s doing all this. Killing her means it all goes away. No more money, no more sex.”
“Yeah, it’s strange. There could be lots of reasons, though. He panics, thinks Miranda is going to turn him in.”
“If that’s the case, then why not just run instead of killing her first and then running?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he acted alone. Maybe he’d fallen in love with Miranda, thought that killing the husband would make her fall into his arms. When that didn’t immediately work, he killed Miranda so no one else could have her.”
“I thought of that,” James said, “but if that was the case, then how’d he get Miranda to agree to come here with him?”
“Well, we’ll find out. They’ll get him soon. Twenty-four hours, tops. In the meantime, we’ve got a case to build. I’m going to go talk with this Polly Greenier, Brad’s alibi for Friday night.”
“You need me?”
“I always need you,” I said. “But I can manage Polly. Something makes me think that as soon as I tell her we have a positive ID on Brad down in Boston her alibi will break.”
“Okay. Call if you need me. The state detectives want us to pass over all we have on the Ted Severson murder case, and I said I’d oblige.”
After getting the address from Chief Ireland, I drove north to Kennewick Beach, passing Cooley’s, the bar that Brad had supposedly been in with this Polly last Friday afternoon. From the beach road I turned inland onto Sea Mist Road, going about a mile, the houses getting smaller, the woods getting thicker. Polly Greenier lived down a dead-end street called York Court in a small single-story gray house situated on a yard that hadn’t been mowed all summer. I double-checked the number on the mailbox. The house, blinds pulled down in all the windows, looked unlived in.
I waded across the foot-high grass to the front door. The doorbell produced an echoey bong from within the house, and almost immediately, a blond woman with a phone tucked between her shoulder and her chin swung open the door. I had my badge out.
“Jan, I gotta go,” she said into the phone. She kicked the screen door open a half inch and gestured me in. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll call you back. I gotta go, the police are here.”
“What’s going on?” she said to me after I’d scraped my feet on the welcome mat and entered the messy living area.
“I’m here to ask you some questions about the last time you saw Brad Daggett. Would that be okay?”
“Oh God, yeah, of course,” she said. She still held the phone in her hand. In her other was an unlit cigarette. She wore a long pink nubby robe, hanging loose in the front, the side of one of her heavy breasts visible. I kept my eyes on her face. She invited me in, bunching up her robe in the hand that held the cigarette, then pointed me toward a living area that contained a matching couch and recliner. A cocker spaniel in a dog bed turned his wet eyes toward me. Polly excused herself for a moment and I sat down on the corduroy recliner. The house smelled of cigarettes and Febreze.
When Polly came back into the living room, she was still wearing the robe, but had knotted it tightly around herself. Her blond