The decoy

Chapt 34

Chapter Thirty Four

"Starr was a bully but he wasn't a killer. Guys like that get used to intimidating people because of their size but there's no follow through with them.

I was convinced it was him or it was Pezzo until Morgan swallowed mommy's pills."

Sebastian stopped speaking long enough to swallow a bite of sausage. Grace ate a small bite of her scrambled eggs with brown toast, no butter.

She sat beside Sebastian in a booth at the diner. Sebastian ate his eggs sunny side up and across from Sebastian, Robert Kelly had a plate full of corned beef hash.

Kelly said, "We all thought it was Pezzo. Even when he appeared to have killed himself I still thought it was him. It made more sense that he had gotten so caught up in things that he took the easy way out. I thought for sure he was getting pressure from his people who had given him money and then when you told me he was fooling around with Jessie Vail it seemed like a sure thing."

Grace looked up from her breakfast.

"Keon said that Morgan regularly raided her parent's medicine cabinets for drugs. She often mixed whatever she found as a recreational narcotic. She had cleared them all out. Her mother had some sleeping tablets and some pain killers but he said she had already used those. After her father passed away she emptied all of the drugs that had belonged to him. He even had a small quantity of oxycodone that had been prescribed when he hurt his back a year ago. It was past the due date but she swallowed it anyway. Morgan was sure she had used up everything in the house. Keon said he didn't worry about her stealing drugs from home because she had already taken everything.

Then she found a secret stash that her mother had hidden in a shoe box. It was the roofies that Jessie had asked Teddy Arsenault to get for her. Morgan had no idea what she was taking but she didn't care much anyway. She never met a pill she wasn't willing to pop.

She dropped a large quantity of roofies that evening and when the boyfriend brought her to the hospital to get her tummy pumped it all came together. Starr told Arsenault that he needed to get roofies for Jessie. Just like us, Arsenault that he was going to use them on Jessie but it was an order. Starr bought them for Jessie, who had plans to render her husband unconscious."

Grace passed her last sausage to Sebastian's plate. He speared it and then he spoke up.

"I dismissed Pezzo early on. When I first met him he didn't seem like the type to get his hands dirty and the more I met Starr the more I didn't like him and felt he had the most to gain with Vail's death.

Of course when Pezzo killed himself that didn't make any sense at all and of course his uncle took me for a little ride and told me upfront that Pezzo wasn't a killer. I believed the old crook. I knew Pezzo didn't do it and I wondered if he had killed himself or if someone had helped him out. I still thought Starr was involved but I thought by then that Jessie Vail was looking more and more like Lady Macbeth.

When her daughter showed up at the hospital and all she wanted to do was meet up with me it didn't seem like a concerned mother. It seemed more like someone trying to cover her tracks and she was starting to look more conniving.

I thought I would get to the gym and she would be washing her hands of the killings ...out, out damn spot."

"How did you know about Pezzo's murder?" Kelly asked.

"I really didn't know for sure but like I said I just didn't believe he killed himself. It seemed to me someone had helped him do the deed. At first I thought it was his partners from Denver but then when I heard that Morgan had access to roofies, I figured that Jessie and probably her friend Starr were involved in Pezzo's death and obviously Paul's as well."