No Way to Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

couple of procedural-type things?”
    Katherine nodded.
    “First, do you mind if we take notes?”
    “No, please do what you need to do,” Katherine said.
    “Thanks,” Toni said. She pulled out a notepad. She looked up and saw me looking at her. She did that eye-roll thing again and pulled out another pad for me. Apparently, she’d anticipated that I’d forget mine.
    “Second thing,” she said. “Let’s work the interview this way: you go ahead and tell us what you told Mr. Logan over the weekend. We’ll try not to interrupt you. We’ll take notes and just listen. Then, we’ll probably have a bunch of questions for you. Does that work for you?”
    “Perfectly,” Katherine said, nodding. She paused to collect her thoughts. “Since Thomas died, I’ve been studying suicide on the Internet for the last couple of weeks. I’ve found that people of all ages commit suicide for all sorts of reasons. And even though the number of reasons is pretty broad and sometimes not all that visible, there always
is
a reason, at least something that makes sense to the person at the time. Why else would they kill themselves? They have some sort of motivation. They have a problem—some sort of trouble. Something they’re trying to escape.” Her eyes filled with tears again.
    She stared at the ceiling for a moment and regained her composure. “First thing—Thomas
didn’t
have any reasons like that,” she said emphatically. “He had no reason to take his own life,” she repeated. “I’ve known him—knew him—for twenty years, ever since high school. We were best friends. We shared everything. I know—here in my heart,” she tapped her fist on her chest twice for emphasis, “that Thomas had every reason
not
to take his own life. We had a good marriage and a good home. We have two beautiful children. We’re all healthy. We don’t have money problems. His company has developed a new product that should have high demand. After years of breathing life into it, we were about to see the payoff. He had no major problems, no concerns. There’s just no reason why he’d want to kill himself.
    “Second thing. The police say Thomas used his own gun. But Thomas didn’t own a gun. We don’t even like guns. The police say he bought the gun at a local gun store. Well, he never said a word about it to me. He’d have told me about having a gun, especially with the children around.
    “Third thing. The so-called note. The police had the handwriting analyzed, and they say it’s in Thomas’s hand. I looked at it, and I agree that the writing—the actual penmanship—looks like Thomas’s. But the words aren’t his. I know him—knew him—and it’s not what he would have said or how he would have said it. For example: something simple like the signature. Sometimes, other people called him Tom. He never corrected them. He answered to Tom around many people, just because it was easier to do that rather than having to correct people all the time. But he really preferred Thomas. Between the two of us, he was always Thomas. For twenty years, he was Thomas.”
    “But the note?” I said.
    “The note is signed
Tom
,” she said.
    She thought for a moment and said, “Those are just the three most obvious reasons why what they say happened makes no sense to me. There are others. But bottom line, I don’t believe Thomas killed himself—I’ll never believe it. So yeah, Danny, to answer your question again, I guess that means I think he was murdered.”
    It was quiet for a minute, and then Dad said, “I heard Katherine go through this over the phone when she called me Saturday. I was struck by the logic of her arguments. That said, I don’t have the experience you two do in working on these sorts of cases. I thought I’d call the two of you and have you listen to what she had to say.”
    I nodded. I had to agree that Katherine’s rational sounded logical. It sounded, at least on the surface, like her concerns could be valid. But