looks wronged, and it’s not lost on me he won’t refer to Dan Steward by name.
“I’m sure you saw all over the news that the prosecution suggested I wasn’t really traveling,” he says. “That my being in Tokyo the night Millie disappeared was a ruse somehow, that I actually was back here and in collusion with whoever I supposedly hired to murder her. The point the prosecution made relentlessly is my wife would never have left the house late at night unless the person she heard was someone she completely trusted.”
“Exactly right, she wouldn’t if she didn’t know who it was,” Shelly Duke agrees.
“Yes, that we all knew about Mrs. Lott,” Al Galbraith says. “Considering the position she had in life, she was keenly aware of the risks. I don’t want to use the word paranoid.”
“Kidnapping for ransom,” Lott says to me. “Which was her first thought about what happened to our dog.”
“That someone grabbed Jasmine and soon enough would demand ransom,” Shelly Duke, his chief financial officer, says. “Kidnapping is a billion-dollar industry, and it’s a depressing reality that certain individuals, particularly those who travel internationally, should have appropriate insurance coverage. Millie asked me on a number of occasions if one could get the same insurance for Jasmine.”
“She worried someone might pull a boat up to our dock in the middle of the night.” Lott has a way of talking over people without interrupting them. “After those Somali pirates abducted that British couple from their yacht? Well, that was upsetting enough to Millie, and then when bandits murdered a tourist and kidnapped his wife from that luxury resort in Kenya, she became quite concerned. Obsessively concerned. Our property is fenced in and gated, but she worried about vulnerability from the deep-water dock, was sufficiently worried to ask me to get rid of it, which I certainly didn’t want to do, as on occasion I moor the Cipriano there.”
“Your yacht?” I ask, because I can’t help it.
If he in fact is charged with some other crime, I’ve just ensured I will be a witness, possibly for the defense again.
“Was your yacht docked there the night she vanished?” I then ask, because I don’t care about Jill Donoghue.
I care about the truth.
“It wasn’t,” he answers. “It was spending the winter in Saint-Tropez. I usually don’t have it brought back to this area until May.”
I open the door adjoining my office to Bryce’s and give him the envelope, telling him to e-mail copies of the security video to Lucy and me. I let him know that he can show our guests out, and Channing Lott gives me a card, engraved on creamy paper of heavy stock. He’s written his private telephone numbers on it.
“Millie wouldn’t go with anyone, even if a gun was pointed at her head.” He pauses in the corridor, his eyes intensely locked on mine. “If someone tried to grab her in our backyard, she would have fought like hell. He’d have to shoot her on the spot right then and there.”
thirty-five
TOXICOLOGY IN PEGGY STANTON’S CASE IS LIKE SEARCHING for a needle in a haystack when the needle may not be a needle and the hay may not be hay. I can’t grab at straws and wildly guess. I can’t demand every special drug screen imaginable without running out of samples and Phillis Jobe running out of patience.
“An ordeal, I admit,” I say to my chief toxicologist over the phone. “I’m asking a lot and offering very little, I know.”
Frozen sections of liver, kidney, and brain are in poor condition that will only worsen and be consumed with each test we run. I don’t have urine or vitreous fluid. I don’t have a single tube of blood.
“It’s like pulling a sword from a stone, but I believe it can be done.” I’m at my desk inside my office, where the doors are shut as I explore possibilities with confidence I didn’t feel before. “I believe we’ve got a chance if we try a very practical approach.”
New insights about Mildred Lott combined with what I know about Peggy Stanton lead in a more obvious direction, which I suspect strongly is the same direction for each victim, whether it is two or three or, God forbid, more. If what Benton has projected is true and the killer is murdering the same woman every time, perhaps his mother or some other powerful female figure, then he likely picks the same type of woman, at least symbolically, and chooses the same way of