The Mourning Mail (FINAL)

Chapter 23

Traffic was heavy, and I arrived at the memorial gardens later than I'd wanted. Gary was just locking up as I got to his office door. While he was polite, it was clear that he was anxious to get home. Telling him of my latest adventures would have to wait. Still, he'd kept that last letter under the counter for me as promised. In a few moments, I was thanking Gary and wishing him and his wife well, a letter-sized manila envelope firmly in my hand.

Gary had put shipping tape over the metal clasp after he'd sealed it, probably to keep the contents safe from any further damage. Once I'd gotten back inside my car, I used my keys to open it, concerned the letter inside might not be one of those from Brian. The outside of the standard white envelope was a little worse for wear, and it had been wet at some point. But when I flipped it over, there it was—"Sis" written on the front, and nothing more.

The trip home was against traffic. It wasn't long before I'd scanned and photographed the letter under black light on my kitchen table. As I read it, I realized it filled the gap immediately after Brian's complaint that using a voice changer meant the police did not take his anonymous tip seriously. Brian had written it just before a serious uptick in his paranoia level as he described "goons" strange to him rousting residents of his neighborhood.

One paragraph stood out:

"You remember Donnie the hacker who lived above us in the old apartment? He got Docs number for me from the house address. I texted Doc from my burner and told him I'd tell on him if he didn't turn himself in. One day I was casing another house on the same block. They were taking the naber out on a gurney. The people on the street watching said a profesional had shot him dead. He took one to the head and one to the hart in his living room during the football game. The doc probly killed him or got someone else to do it because he thought the naber sent my text. Why does this keep happening Sis? Whenever I try to fix something - the wrong people get hurt."

Could it be ... he's talking about Coach's murder! I thought. My emotions around Coach's death were clouding my judgment, and the first time I read Brian's words I skipped over the "probly" in his most important sentence. I had to read it a second time to realize that Brian didn't know any of this for fact—it was simply a guess by association.

But it still shook me that the two events—Brian's tagging of Seaver's wall and Coach's murder—could be related. Worse, that the possible linkage hadn't occurred to me. Of course, I had no way to know until now that Brian had tried to blackmail Seaver, the event that likely set things in motion.

Still, could this be why Coach was killed? Holy crap...

I checked the date on Brian's letter. Sure enough, it was written three days after Coach's death. So many thoughts were racing through my head that I couldn't focus. I had to get up out of my chair, and I began pacing back and forth.

So, Seaver kills his wife, and Brian catches him in the process of hiding the body. Brian tags the place so Seaver knows there's a witness. Seaver has something against his neighbor ... racist, maybe? Either way, he thinks seventy-year-old Coach sprayed paint on his walls and texted him that blackmail message. Seaver has an alibi and doesn't match the witness description for Coach's first visitor that night. But Richard Ainsworth might. As a neighbor, Seaver's too close and subject to suspicion, so he has Ainsworth kill Coach. Ainsworth's underworld connections clean up the mess. Then Brian tries to take on Ainsworth in his own home, getting himself killed for his trouble.

Not the first scenario you'd think of, but plausible and possible. And Brian's letters tied all of it together. Okay, Debra Ann, concentrate. First question: does Ainsworth make sense for Coach's homicide?

Ainsworth's Medicare fraud perp walk photo showed he fit Jess Nussbaum's general description. At a little under five-ten, the lifts-in-his-shoes theory worked. I knew from what Darrell Woodson said that there was a strong connection and known history between Seaver and Ainsworth.