moment until all my gears meshed, wondering what the hell Chalmers was doing here anyway. What use to anyone was he on crutches, unless it was to keep an eye on things, or maybe just to supervise me? He'd said as much. I'd thought he was just indulging in a little unfriendly banter; perhaps I should be taking him at his word. Whatever. Chalmers was in the wrong job. He was even too much of a shit-head for CIA. I could see him working out just fine with Wu and De Silver over in the GAO, which gave me an idea. Maybe the three of them should meet up. If I did make it back in one piece, I decided I'd do a little matchmaking.
I read Arlen's note and a choir of internal alarms went into meltdown. Clare Selwyn had come through. She'd filled in some of the holes I'd left behind in the Ruben Wright investigation. Phone company records revealed Amy McDonough and Ruben's lawyer, Juan Demelian, had been calling each other regularly before Ruben died. Why would they be doing that? Demelian wasn't her lawyer and they weren't friends. All they had in common was Ruben. Moreover, both insisted to me that only one call had been made to the other, and that was after Ruben had died. The reason for these calls, according to what Demelian had told Clare after she leaned on him, was that he had been trolling for business. He'd simply forgotten that he'd made the calls. Yeah, right.
I pieced the case together with this new information and the how went something like this: Ruben found out about McDonough and Butler, and called Demelian telling him he intended to change his will. Demelian stalled him and immediately informed McDonough of Ruben's intentions. Demelian told her he couldn't put Ruben off indefinitely. I wondered who had the idea first to kill Ruben. It didn't matter. Demelian's payment for betraying his client was for Amy to agree to cut him in on Ruben's estate. Her side of the deal was to come up with a method of doing the deed that wouldn't incriminate anyone. Enter Staff Sergeant Chris Butler. All three obviously knew about Ruben's MS, and also knew how important it was for him to keep it a secret.
Butler stuck his head in the door. I flinched like I'd been caught in the act of something distasteful. He said, “Let's go, then, guv.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “One minute.”
“Hurry,” said Butler, disappearing.
I reread the last page. Clare had also obtained a search warrant for Amy McDonough's home, including the sewerage pipes. She'd had the lines at Ruben Wright's accommodation checked out, too. While Ruben's came up clean, old tree roots clogging McDonough's pipes had snagged a range of medicines used to control the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Clare had cross-checked the list of meds with Dr. Mooney and was of the opinion Ruben kept only a small portion of his pharmacopeia at McDonough's—a backup emergency supply, perhaps. In a statement to police, Amy said she'd tried to get rid of the drugs after he died—in fact, right after she'd returned home from identifying him at the morgue. She said that when she discovered them she was worried no one would believe her story about her not knowing a thing about Ruben's condition, and that this might somehow connect her with his murder. Damn right. There was no way to check she wasn't lying about the timing, but she'd lied about practically everything else, so why not this? I was convinced that McDonough had simply flushed the drugs down the head on the day Ruben died.
I recalled the trip to her house and the stump of what must once have been a very big tree in her front yard. I wondered whether its roots had been the ones responsible for clogging her drains. If so, its revenge for being turned into firewood had been sweet.
The search of Amy McDonough's home also turned up a spare key to Ruben's on-base accommodation—the quarters I'd been occupying. Amy could quite easily have gained access to the base with someone carrying a DoD ID—someone like Butler, for example—and not have had her name recorded at the base's entrance security checkpoint. No one would have raised so much as an eyebrow.
While it was pure speculation on my part, I was convinced Amy had planted that single pill under the fridge after Ruben's death, knowing it would eventually be found when the investigation got