“Come on,” Mel said. “You and I both know that bureaucracies aren’t smart on that score.”
She was right about that, because we had seen it firsthand. Alan Dale, my granddaughter Athena’s other grandfather, had battled for months before being granted permission to take the child back home to Texas.
“I hope they have a good lawyer.”
Mel actually laughed. “Believe me, they do,” she said. “I already gave them some suggestions about that. But the good news for me is that an autopsy has confirmed that the shooter took his own life, so at least I don’t have the added complication of an officer-involved shooting. What’s happening on your end, and where are you?”
“In the waiting room for the ICU at the hospital in Homer.” After that I gave her a brief overview of everything that had happened, and I’d gotten as far as Shelley Adams’s being taken into custody at the airport when Nitz emerged from her father’s room.
“Sorry, Mel,” I said. “I have to go. I’ll talk to you again in the morning.”
Nitz glanced at her sleeping son then went back to the nurses’ station and returned with a blanket. After covering Jimmy, she came over to the chair next to me and sank into it.
“How’s your dad?” I asked.
She bit her lip and shook her head. “He’s nothing but skin and bones,” Nitz murmured. “It looks like Shelley’s been starving him to death.”
“That’s how it looked to me, too,” I agreed.
The word “alleged” was notably missing from the conversation. In my mind Shelley had already been tried and convicted.
“When Helen Sinclair tried to warn me that something was wrong,” Nitz continued, “I should have listened, but I didn’t. I was still harboring a grudge, and now . . .” The remainder of that sentence went unfinished.
I started to tell her she shouldn’t blame herself, but knowing she would anyway, I didn’t waste my breath.
“Do the doctors have any idea about what she used?”
“They’re analyzing his stomach contents and checking his blood work, too. My best guess would be that she gave him an overdose of something, we’re not sure what, although how she could lay hands on illegal drugs, I don’t know.”
All she’d have to do is place a call to her friendly neighborhood drug dealer, I thought. The same guy who works as her supposed handyman.
“At least he’s off the ventilator,” Nitz continued. “And I can’t thank you enough. If you and that Twink woman hadn’t gone to the house looking for Jimmy, my father would be dead by now and maybe Jimmy would be, too. I don’t even want to think about what might have happened if you hadn’t been there.”
I had to agree. We’d all been lucky on that score.
“So tell me about Chris,” she said. “How did you find out he was dead, and who killed him?”
That was a very long story, and as I launched off into telling it, I realized that the next person I’d need to call was Father Jared Danielson. When I finished relating all of it, Nitz was aghast.
“So you don’t think my father had anything to do with killing Chris?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I doubt it,” I said. “I think that was all on Shelley. Your father thought the best way to get rid of Chris was to buy him off with ten thousand bucks. I suspect there might have been something going on at the house that night that caused him to delegate Shelley to deliver the money. Right then, though, she was strapped for funds. She saw all that money and couldn’t bear to simply let it pass through her hands.”
Boom! Just like that, as the word came out of my mind, I made a critical connection between what had happened at the airport and what must have occurred on that cold March night in 2006. Shelley Loveday hadn’t driven home with Chris’s body in the back of her Subaru—not at all. Instead she’d driven him to the airport! I had no idea how she’d managed to transfer the body from the Subaru into the plane, but that had to be how she’d transported it from Homer to Eklutna Lake—by plane. Once the body had been loaded onto the aircraft, there would have been no reason for her to fly him out of town that snowy night. She would have waited for better weather. Then, at a more convenient time, she could have dropped the body off at or near where it had been found, landing on and taking off from the lake’s iced-over surface.
“If Shelley killed Chris,” Nitz was saying, “what about her husband? Was he in on it, too? Aunt Penny told me Jack Loveday committed suicide.”