Page 12 of So Lethal

I’ll remember you, Monica, she promised. I’ll make sure you’re not forgotten.

CHAPTER FIVE

In morning traffic, it took them nearly two hours to reach the Porter residence in Pacific Heights, an upscale neighborhood in the northwest corner of San Francisco. On the way, Faith looked up James Porter.

He was forty-nine years old with two grown children, the youngest of whom had just graduated from MIT. He worked as an accountant for a property management company that owned thirty properties in the Bay Area. During the pandemic, he had started working from home and hadn’t stopped. He was a member of a golf club that met infrequently. None of his social media pages indicated any connection with Monica Smith besides the fact that both were deaf.

He had been married to his wife, Barbara, for thirty years. They had been high school sweethearts who married as soon as she turned eighteen. As nearly as Faith could tell, they had never looked back.

But then, thirty years was a long time, and nineteen years old was adult only in the legal sense. It was a long shot, but Faith wasn’t dismissing the possibility that James had met Monica somewhere and hit it off with the attractive young deaf woman.

“Would you ever cheat on Ellie?” she asked Michael.

Ellie was Michael’s wife. The two had met a couple of years ago and married about a year after that.

“What? Are you serious?”

“Yeah. I’m not going to tell her your answer.”

“I’m still not happy about the question,” Michael retorted. “You want to give me some context?”

“I’m trying to think of a connection between Monica Smith and James Porter. The only thing I can come up with besides them being deaf is that they had a thing on the side and Mrs. Porter had them killed.”

“You think she could have strangled them both to death?”

“I won’t know until I meet her, but it’s possible. Or she could have paid someone to do it.”

“You don’t think them being deaf is enough of a connection?”

"Come on, Michael. There are nine million people in the metro area. There's got to be thousands of deaf people between Monica's studio and James's house. Why are these two people an hour away in no traffic and two hours away in traffic?"

Michael shrugged. “Well, no, I would never cheat on Ellie. I can’t imagine putting her through that kind of pain. If we were ever on our way out, I’d talk to her. It’s a tough conversation, but I would be an absolute piece of shit if I ever betrayed her that way. Does Porter seem like an absolute piece of shit to you?”

“No, the opposite. His social media is active and full of people who seem to genuinely love him.”

“Well, you never know what’s under the surface, I guess, but we should reserve judgment until we talk to Barbara.”

“Yeah. Fair enough.”

They pulled next to the curb in front of a three-story Victorian mansion with a white façade that might very well have been real marble. CPA work apparently paid very well.

There was a car in the driveway, a late-model Lexus sedan in immaculate condition, so Faith assumed Barbara was home. Turk looked around and sniffed every few yards but showed no sign of suspicion or wariness.

Michael knocked on the door somewhat more gently than he had at Cliff Kowalski’s apartment. Faith heard shuffling, and a moment later, the door opened. A woman in her late forties stood in the doorway. Her hair was blonde with a liberal amount of gray sprinkled in, and her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed. She wore a plain cotton nightgown that didn’t at all flatter her figure that had once been statuesque but seemed to have softened considerably as she aged.

In other words, she looked exactly like a woman who had just suffered a devastating loss.

“Yes?” she asked. “Can I help you?”

“Barbara Porter?” Faith asked.

“Yes.” She looked at their uniforms. “Is this about James?”

“Yes,” Faith confirmed. “We were hoping to ask you some questions.”

“Oh. Okay. Come on inside.”

She led the two of them inside. The contrast between the cheap, faded interior of Cliff Kowalski’s apartment and Barbara Porter’s mansion was profound. The floors here were granite tile polished to a mirror-like shine. The countertops were of darker stone, some sort of basalt, and equally shiny. The furniture was all oiled maple and richly upholstered with leather that was neither wrinkled nor cracked. The walls were decorated with art ranging from oil paintings of abstract shapes and colors to equally abstract statuary that looked the way a person might look if a farsighted man took his glasses off and squinted into a funhouse mirror. Faith thought the décor would look much better with a few of Monica Smith’s statues.

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