Kelman clenched a fist and tapped it against his mouth. His mind seemed to be racing, trying to make pieces fit.
“What?” she asked.
“You know who’s in Ann Arbor?” he said.
“No.”
“The member of the advisory board who Kennelly corrupted. He’s a professor emeritus with the university. So I bet Matt was part of the illegal trading scheme.”
He looked stricken by the revelation. Betrayed by someone he trusted and also played for a fool. But had it been one thief against another? She still didn’t know.
“So who ran over Healy?” she asked. “His death has been ruled a homicide.”
“It has to be someone from Ithaka—or hired by them.”
“But why? Whether he was in on the illegal trades or he just wanted to cover his ass by letting Wainwright know you were blowing the whistle, there’d be no reason to murder him.”
Kelman ran a thumb over the lip of his beer bottle, thinking.
“I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “They may have wanted one less player in the mix. Or maybe I was the one who was supposed to die. Healy and I had vaguely similar coloring, and if someone was hired to take him out using a photo, he might have been mistaken for me.”
Yes, she knew all about that kind of confusion.
“Frankly, I’m mystified they’d go this far,” he added, flipping his palms over. “Trying to steal the flash drive is one thing, but murder is a whole other ballgame. There’ve been a lot of these insider trading cases and as far as I know, they don’t come to violence. The bad guys are so cocksure of themselves, they assume that even if someone blows the whistle, they’ll manage to weasel out of trouble.”
“Of course,” she said quietly, her heart starting to pound, “there’s someone else with a motive for killing Healy. Someone besides the people at Ithaka.”
She had to get it on the table, see how he’d react.
“Who?” he asked.
“You.” Her voice was just a whisper now. “Maybe you discovered Healy had betrayed you. You could have told him to meet you on the street in Miami and waited in your car, ready to mow him down.”
His body went totally still and all the expression drained from his face. He stared at her, pinning her eyes so tightly with his that it almost hurt. She would have liked to tear her gaze away but she didn’t. She needed to read him, find a tell of his that would help reveal where truth ended and lies began.
“Is that what you believe, Kit?” he asked, his voice disarmingly soft. “That I’m a cold-blooded killer? That you went to bed with someone who murdered a friend a few days later?”
His eyes never left hers as he spoke. But she knew that didn’t mean anything, not with Kelman. He was the master of looking at you and not letting go, and she assumed he could do that whether he was being honest or lying through his teeth.
“I didn’t say I believe it. I said it was a possibility. . . . Did you kill him?”
He stared for a few moments more. In the dim light, his blue eyes were now the color of slate.
“No,” he said. “No, I didn’t.”
“You should know that the Miami police consider you a person of interest in Healy’s homicide,” she said. She was tipping him off, but if his story was legitimate, it seemed wrong not to.
“How do you know that?” he asked. “I mean, it makes sense. I even wondered if Ithaka would try to implicate me. But what makes you so sure?”
“The police found my business card in one of Healy’s pockets and called me about it. At first I thought you were the victim—the description seemed to fit, and I’d given you my card after all. I told them about my encounter with you. Later, after they had me I.D. the body and I saw that it was actually Healy, I helped them do a sketch of you.”
“Oh great,” he said. “That’s just the extra nightmare I need.”
“You can hardly blame me. The only thing I knew about you at that point is that you’d totally deceived me.”
“You’re right,” he said, letting the sarcasm fall away. “And I can’t blame you. But this complicates everything.”
“Then all the more reason to go to the police. To clear your name so it doesn’t interfere with what you’re trying to do about Ithaka.”