Ellen reached over to pick it up and said, “What is this?”
“That man may be a contract killer by the name of Gregor Guzman. The woman in this picture looks like Candace Martin,” I said. “She’s got the same blond hair, same cut as Candace — but it’s not actually her, is it, Ellen?”
“It’s hard to tell. I don’t know,” she said.
“You know how we know it isn’t Candace?” Conklin said. “Because when we ran that photo through forensic software, it matched your picture from the DMV. The woman in this picture is you.”
Conklin went to the mantel and picked up a gold-framed photo of Ellen and Dennis Martin on a sailboat out in the Bay.
“No,” she said, getting up to snatch the picture out of Conklin’s hand. “You can’t have that.”
I said to her, “I think Judge LaVan will give us a search warrant to go through everything in your house. Meanwhile, we need to continue this talk at the police station.”
I pulled out my phone and was calling for a patrol car, but Ellen said, “Wait. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
I closed my phone and gave her my full attention.
Chapter 89
IF ELLEN LAFFERTY didn’t try to hire a killer, why was she in that car with Gregor Guzman? I couldn’t wait to hear her explanation.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, certainly nothing criminal,” Lafferty said. She reached into the neck of her sweater and pulled out a small gold cross on a thin chain. She kept yanking it from side to side, a nervous habit — and a telling one.
“Dennis sent me to meet this ‘Mr. G.’ in the parking lot of Vons,” she said. “He gave me an envelope of money to give to this Mr. G., but when he opened it, he handed it back to me and said, ‘Tell Mr. Martin thanks but no thanks.’”
“This Mr. G. gave back the money,” Rich said.
Ellen nodded.
“So, you’re saying you met with a man you didn’t know because Dennis told you to do it. You gave him money — which he gave back to you, and you didn’t know why you were there. Is that your story?”
“I didn’t know he was an assassin until after the trial started and I read about him online. I was just a messenger. This is one hundred percent true.”
“You’re not in any trouble,” Conklin said. “We’re trying to piece some facts together.”
“So, tell us about the blond hair,” I said.
“It was a wig,” Ellen blurted out. “It belonged to Candace when she was having chemo. She threw it out and I took it. Dennis liked me to wear it sometimes. Do you want to see it?”
Ellen Lafferty headed down a hallway toward the bedroom.
“You really think this girl hired a hit man?” Conklin asked me.
“I don’t know. I know less now than I did when I woke up this morning.”
I picked up the sunset-lit, highly romantic photo of Ellen and Dennis Martin and ran it all through my mind again.
Had Ellen hired Guzman to kill Dennis? Was Ellen the intruder, and had she killed Dennis herself? Did Dennis set up the meet between Ellen and Guzman so that his private eye could document a Candace look-alike meeting with a hit man?
If so, had Candace killed her husband before he could kill her?
As I was turning over the possibilities yet again, Ellen came back into the room holding a black satin bag. She opened the drawstrings and shook out a blond wig.
“Mostly I just wore this when we made love,” she said.
I couldn’t hold back.
“Help me to understand you, Ellen,” I said. “Your lover liked you to wear his wife’s wig in bed? Didn’t you find that sick?”