walked up to the front door fully expecting a uniformed butler to answer her knock. But he didn’t.
The thick portal flew open and there stood her mother, dressed in a long black designer skirt, calf-high boots, and a starched white embroidered tunic shirt over which a gold chain was hanging. Dana Perry still wore her whitish-blond hair long, though it was held back today in a French braid. She looked at least ten years younger than she was. Beth had her mother’s facial structure, long and lovely, with a nose as straight and lean as the edge of an ax blade. The cheekbones still rode high and confident. Her mother cradled a comb-teased Yorkie in one slender arm.
Mace didn’t expect a hug and didn’t get one.
Her mother looked her up and down. “Prison seems to have agreed with you. You look to be lean as a piano wire.”
“I would’ve preferred a gym membership, actually.”
Her mother pointed a long finger at her. “Your father must be turning over in his grave. Always thinking of yourself and never anybody else. Look at what your sister’s accomplished. You’ve got to finally get it straight, little girl, or you’re going right down the crapper. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Do you actually want me to come in, or will your ripping me a new one on the front porch satisfy as a visit so I can get back to the real world?”
“You actually call that garbage pit of a city the real world?”
“I’m sure you’ve been tied up the last two years, so I can understand you not bothering to come see me.”
“As though seeing you in prison would’ve been good for my mental health.”
“Right, sorry, I forgot the first rule of Dana, it’s all about you.”
“Get in here, Mason.”
She had lied to Roy Kingman. Her father hadn’t named her Mason. Her mother had. And she’d done it for a particularly odious reason. Chafing under the relatively small salary her husband drew as a prosecutor, she’d wanted him to turn to the defense side, where with his skill and reputation he could have commanded an income ten times what he earned on the public side. Thus, Mason Perry—Perry Mason—was her mother’s not-so-subtle constant reminder of what he would not give her.
“It’s Mace. You’d think after all these years you might get that little point.”
“I refuse to refer to you as a name of a weapon.”
It was probably a good thing, Mace thought as she trudged past her mother, that she could no longer carry a gun.
CHAPTER 22
ROY KINGMAN had skipped basketball that morning. He passed by Ned, who looked far more attentive than usual and even had the tie on his uniform tightened all the way to his fleshy neck. Ned gave him a jaunty two-finger salute and a confident dip of the chin as though to let Roy know that not a single murderer had slipped past him today.
You go, bro.
Roy took the elevator up to Shilling & Murdoch. The police were still there and Diane’s office and the kitchen were taped off while the cops and techs continued to do their thing. He had snatched conversations with several other lawyers. He had tried to play it cool with Mace, who’d obviously seen far more dead bodies than he had, but finding Diane like that had done a number on his head. He kept replaying that moment over and over until it felt like he couldn’t breathe.
He walked by Chester Ackerman’s office but the door was closed and the man’s secretary, who sat across from her boss’s office, told him the police were in there questioning the managing partner. Roy finally went to his office and closed the door. Settling behind his desk, he turned on his computer and started going through e-mails. The fifth one caught his eye. It was from Diane Tolliver. He glanced at the date sent. The previous Friday. The time stamp was a few minutes past ten. He hadn’t checked his work e-mails over the weekend because there had been nothing pressing going on. He had intended to do so on Monday morning, but then Diane’s body had tumbled out of the fridge. At the bottom of the e-mail were Diane’s initials, “DLT.”
The woman’s message was terse and cryptic, even for the Twitter generation.
We need to focus in on A-
Why hadn’t she finished the message? And why send it if it wasn’t finished?
It could be nothing, he knew. How many flubs had he committed with his keystrokes? If