Chapter 30

THIRTY

FEbrUARY 2023

Whatcom County

It took a while for the formalities to be complete, but by five o'clock, it was official. The woman who had been recovered from the creek was Olivia Greenwood, positively identified by her husband.

Lucas took a break to eat before driving over to the Sheriff's Office, where they had scheduled the interview with the husband. He arrived a little late, and Kelly showed him straight through to the interview room. Longbow was already there, along with Mac and Anderson. The three of them sat around the medium-size table opposite a man in a gray suit with salt-and-pepper hair with his back to the door. As the other man turned, Lucas recognized him from his picture as Edward Greenwood.

Mac stood up and gestured at the two new arrivals.

"Mr. Greenwood, this is Sergeant Lucas of Whatcom County Sheriff's Department. He's assisting us with the investigation out here."

Greenwood turned and rose to his feet. He was in his early sixties, and well-preserved in the way only money can do. His skin was clear and unwrinkled, and the shadows around his eyes was the only hint that anything was amiss.

"Sergeant Lucas," he repeated, shaking Lucas's hand. "I understand you were the one who found Olivia."

Lucas decided not to be pedantic and tell him that he was probably the fifth person to view the body, and instead offered his condolences. First impression: if this guy had had anything to do with his wife's death, he wasn't making it obvious.

Lucas sat down next to Greenwood.

"I believe in not beating around the bush," Greenwood said, fixing Lucas with a steady stare. "I know how this works. You need to assume I had something to do with my wife's murder, because statistically, I'm the most likely to have killed her."

Lucas nodded and couldn't help being a little impressed with Greenwood's candor and self-possession.

"That's true, Mr. Greenwood. But I'm sure the detectives here have already reassured you that we don't make the mistake of homing in on one suspect without good reason. Having said that, the fact you lied about your wife's return raises other questions."

"Which I think I have addressed."

"If you don't mind, Mr. Greenwood," Mac began, "it would be helpful to go through it fresh with Sergeant Lucas."

Greenwood looked at MacDonald and then nodded. Lucas wondered if MacDonald was this polite with all his suspects, and decided there was almost certainly a net-worth threshold.

"I had a meeting in New York the sixteenth of last month, so Olivia decided she would check herself into the Park Plaza for the night. She did that sometimes. You know, me-time. Spa treatments. Pampering. I was pretty caught up with work so I didn't call her that last night. We had arranged for me to get the early flight the next day, pick her up, and we were going to have lunch."

"And this would be the seventeenth," Anderson said. Not a question, just clarifying for Lucas's benefit.

"That's right. So I got to the hotel around noon, parked underneath the building and called Olivia from the car to see if she was ready. No answer. That wasn't unusual, sometimes she's too busy to pick up the phone. But I had had no messages from her in a while either. I decided to go up to reception. I told her I was meeting my wife and asked if she had checked out yet. They asked me for her details and looked her up on the system and found she hadn't checked out. I asked for her room number, and of course they gave me the usual runaround, so I asked for the manager by name."

Out of the corner of his eye, Lucas saw the hint of a smirk at the corner of Detective Anderson's face. Of course this guy asked for the manager by name .

"You know the manager?" Lucas asked, trying to look mildly impressed.

"Sure, we stay there all the time. Phil's a good man. Anyway, Phil wasn't there, but the deputy manager took me up to Olivia's room. It still had the DO NOT DISTURB tag on the door. This was when I started to get a bad feeling, you know?"

"You were worried that something had happened."

"Yeah. I mean, it's not like she was depressed or anything and she wasn't some kind of drug fiend, but…accidents happen, you know?"

"Sure. I can understand why you were concerned. No contact by phone, late checking out and so on."

"So the deputy manager knocks on her door. Then he knocks louder. I can tell he really doesn't want to go in there, but I made him. He opens up the door and the room is empty. Olivia's clothes were still there, including her makeup on the dresser, and her phone. That's when I knew something really was up, because she doesn't go anywhere without her phone or her makeup."

"And that was when you called the police?" Lucas prompted.

Greenwood shook his head. "No, not then. I asked the deputy manager if she could be anywhere else in the hotel. He was pretty on the ball; called down to the gym and the spa, but nobody had seen her since the previous day. Her car was still in the garage downstairs. I asked if we could take a look at the security cameras. He called his security team and asked them to check out the cameras in the corridor on her floor."

"They let you see them?"

"Of course," Greenwood said. "They found a man escorting a woman along the corridor around 2a.m. It was Olivia. It all made me concerned enough to contact the police."

Lucas listened as Greenwood went through the rest of the story: contacting the police, spending the next few hours frantically searching for his wife, and then the terrible moment when he had been contacted by the kidnappers and forced to make the decision about whether to follow their orders. Only once did his voice break a little: when he described opening the package containing his wife's finger.

"Up until that point I thought…I thought this could be resolved," Greenwood said, clearly holding back tears.

Lucas asked a few more questions, with Mac occasionally pitching in too, while Anderson kept her own counsel. The only time she spoke was at the end of the interview.

"Is there anything else you need to tell us, Mr. Greenwood?"

Lucas was watching his face, and for a split second, he saw something in the other man's eyes that suggested a brief internal conflict. But then he just shook his head.

"No, Detective Anderson. That's it."