I walked over to the fridge and took out a couple of diet cokes, and grabbed the last bag of potato chips. Kat went out to the lanai, deep in thought.
“What are you thinking about, Kat?”
“I’m thinking of Nadia and feeling sorry for her. If her fiancé is our blackmailer and murderer, she’ll be crushed. The way she talks about him you can tell she’s madly in love with him. After the incident of Sue's death on Paul’s Island, can you imagine what this will do to her? She’ll probably try to disappear off of the face of this earth. I want to call her and comfort her, but what we know isn’t solid enough to make any decisions. We’ll just have to pray extra hard for her.”
“You’re right, Kat. It’s much too early for decision making. But at this moment we have only two suspects, and one of them is Nadia’s fiancé who goes by the last names of Lang and Davis. The case against him gets stronger and stronger by the moment. I think I’ll call Mrs. Sinclair tomorrow and see if I can find out why she was being blackmailed. She’s never confided the whole story to us. She’s either afraid, or she’s a very private person. But after all, she did hire us to find out who the blackmailer is, and she should be willing to tell us why, especially since it might help us solve the case.”
“Kit, look over there. I’m pretty sure that’s Gary Smith. Quick, get the camera.”
Looking out from our lanai, I agreed it looked just like him according to the description we had, especially the big red floppy hat with the black band. I quickly went in the room and retrieved the camera. In power focus, I took many pictures of the man we were sure was Gary Smith, the blackmailer of Anita Sinclair – and this time the hat didn’t hide his face.
As I showed them to Kat, she said, “Maybe we should send them to Mrs. Sinclair and see if she recognizes him. And tell her you’ll be calling her tomorrow.”
I sent them right off in an email. We were hoping she would know the person by the pictures we sent, so then we could put all of our energy on the two murders. She wrote back right away saying the man in the picture was no one she knew. We were back to square one again.
Kat questioned the two murders. “Yes, Kat, we have Chas Baker’s murder and also the murder of Nick Lang’s best friend. I’m sure they’re connected in some way, and I wonder what it would take to murder your best friend.”