THE INITIAL HEARINGS dragged on until almost four. Julia’s phone, off while she was in court, vibrated with a message as soon as she turned it on again.
Acting Peak County prosecutor Claudette Greene, along with the mayor and chief of police, had called a news conference for four PM sharp.
Julia slumped. Pinkham had promised her updated report on Leslie Harper’s cause of death then, and she’d wanted to pore over it. But whatever Claudette was up to sounded important.
At least, thanks to the weather—the calendar finally said spring, but snow squalls made a mockery of that—the news conference would be held indoors, in the courthouse’s vast and echoing rotunda.
Julia trudged down the grand curving staircase and joined the crowd already gathering. An elbow dug into her ribs.
“Do you know what this is about?”
Somehow Marie had gotten wind of the news conference. She bounced on the balls of her feet, betraying her excitement despite her habitual studied indifference.
“No idea. But if she’s including the mayor and Chief McNulty, it’s going to be quite the dog and pony show. We’re about to find out. Here they come.”
Claudette strode to the lectern that had been set up in the middle of the rotunda, the mayor and police chief scurrying like minions behind her. Julia looked up. The rotunda rose three stories, capped by the courthouse dome. A few curiosity seekers leaned against the polished brass second- and third-floor balustrades. They jumped when Claudette’s voice boomed through the microphone, running through the de rigueur Thank you for being here remarks.
“I’ve asked our mayor and police chief to join me because of the seriousness of this matter and the importance to our community. I’ve just received an updated report from the medical examiner’s office about the death of state representative Leslie Harper.”
“Goddammit.”
Marie turned to Julia in surprise. “Is that a bad thing?”
“No. It’s just that … oh, never mind.” Claudette had probably leaned hard on Pinkham to break her usual practice of not playing favorites, and when Claudette leaned, people tended to comply. Quickly. “Shhh. Whatever it is, here it comes.”
“Representative Harper was found dead in the kitchen of her home on March fifteenth after failing to report to work. There were no signs of forced entry, and her death initially was thought to result from a tragic accident. The preliminary cause of death was listed as a head wound attributed to striking her head against the granite counter as she fell, causing a fatal hemorrhage.”
Claudette tactfully omitted the alcohol and prescription sleep medication noted in the original report, something that could have contributed both to the original fall and to Harper’s inability to rouse herself and call for help before she bled to death.
“But a subsequent examination by the medical examiner of the kitchen itself, made at my request”—nifty bit of grandstanding there, Julia thought—“revealed her discomfort with that initial assessment.”
Julia cut her eyes to the police chief, who seemed to fold a bit farther into himself with every word Claudette spoke. The initial accidental death determination had come from the police.
“Dr. Pinkham remains unconvinced that Representative Harper could have fallen with such force against the counter to have caused the blow that killed her.”
Claudette paused, her face set in grim lines.
“Because of this possibility, our law enforcement agencies will continue to pursue the possibility that Representative Harper’s death may have been a homicide.”
Even though her previous words had made it clear, a gasp ran through the crowd.
“The police will intensify their investigation—Chief McNulty will speak to that—and I want to assure this community that if this possibility is borne out, in order to bring justice to the family of Representative Harper and to ensure everyone’s safety, my office will prosecute the perpetrator or perpetrators to the fullest extent of the law. Mr. Mayor?”
Julia ignored the mayor’s blathering, which merely expanded upon Claudette’s remarks about community safety. “Our police force has our utmost confidence …” That sort of thing.
But she perked up when Chief McNulty stepped to the mic, vowing to interview anyone recently convicted or even accused of a violent crime in Duck Creek, adding that the Peak County Sheriff’s Office would assist in the investigation. “And,” he said, “we’ll be looking at associates of Representative Harper. To her credit, she worked on behalf of people many of us would consider unsavory.”
By which, Julia assumed, he meant that he found them unsavory.
“Who knows how one of them might have taken offense at something she said or did? We intend to find out.”
He was talking about people like Ray, Julia thought. Anyone other than a solid citizen would now become a suspect—even though people were usually killed by those close to them, which meant more than even odds one of those same solid citizens had killed Harper. Her heart dropped at the thought of the pending harassment of Duck Creek’s less reputable citizens, many of them her clients.
And one of those clients, though now sitting in jail in connection with one of those deaths, had been a free man when Harper was killed. She pushed the thought away as soon as it arose.
But Chance Larsen had had the same thought. His hand shot up.
“Chief McNulty? Duck Creek hasn’t seen a homicide in five years. Now we have two in the space of a week, with both victims—while vastly dissimilar in all other respects—suffering head injuries. Is it possible the same person killed them both?”
No, Julia thought. It was not.
“Of course,” McNulty said. “It’s a possibility we’ll examine very carefully.”
At his words, Julia wrapped her arms around herself as though someone had flung up the courthouse’s double doors, letting in great gusts of snow and frigid air.