“Darn it,” I said. I’d forgotten that Shana had said the sheriff was going to come out to Kami’s this morning, possibly to arrest her. Naturally we’d see her patrol car on the tape. “Any other cars?” I asked.
Kami shook her head. “That’s it, Bob. But anyone who knows my security setup could conceivably manipulate it at some other point along the fence itself, I think.” She looked up at me apologetically. “And whoever’s been messing with my fence seems to know it well enough to do just that. Nice try, but we’re not getting anything we don’t already know from these recordings, I’m afraid.”
“Although they’re going to come in real handy when the prosecution builds its murder case against you, Kami.”
The three of us spun around to find Sheriff Paulsen standing in the doorway of the garage. “Jack and Billy were both here late Saturday night. You’ve got the tapes to prove it. The same gun killed both of them, and Billy had a tranquilizer dart in his neck, a dart identical to the ones you use for your animals. You’re the only one left, Kami. Simple arithmetic. Three minus two equals the killer. You’re under arrest, Ms. Marsden, and anything you say or do will be held against you in a court of law.”
“She has an alibi,” I blurted out. “You can’t arrest her.”
The sheriff gave me a glare. “Are you her alibi, Mr. White?”
I shook my head. “No. But I can get you in touch with the man who is.”
I pulled out my cell phone to find Eddie’s number.
“Don’t bother,” Kami told me, her voice miserable. “Eddie can’t vouch for me.”
I looked at her in confusion.
“He was here on the property, but he was out camping. He can’t swear to my whereabouts all of Saturday morning.”
“What about Ben?” Alan asked. “Could he swear to it? Any of it?”
Kami threw him an angry glance, but said nothing.
“Could he?” I pressed her.
“Now that’s an interesting question,” Sheriff Paulsen observed, her voice sounding unnaturally tight. “Especially if this Ben you’re talking about is Ben Graham. Is it?”
I looked from one woman to the other, and guessed that despite her earlier fury at the mayor, Kami hadn’t gone to the sheriff with her suspicions and accusations about Ben’s role in the property tug-of-war. For some reason, she was still protecting hers and Ben’s privacy, or maybe, unlike Ben, she was too loyal to tip a murder rap in the direction of her lover. I guess love really is blind. Though if she and Ben had been together in the wee hours of Saturday morning, they’d be each other’s alibi, effectively safeguarding them from prosecution.
At least, that’s what I thought.
“Is it?” the sheriff repeated, her voice even more strained than before.
“Yes,” Kami let out on a sigh of resignation.
For a moment or two, the sheriff just stared at Kami. “I’m still taking you in, Ms. Marsden. And as soon as I find Ben Graham, I’m bringing him in, too. He told me he was home alone on Friday night and I didn’t question it. So who’s lying here? You or him?”
I knew the answer to that one: Ben. According to Skip, Ben had been in the A&W late Friday night with the Canadian collections guy. Whether he’d moved along to Kami’s after that, only she and Ben knew. And judging from Kami’s reluctance, she wasn’t happy about admitting it to the sheriff.
“Check the surveillance record,” Alan proposed. “If Ben’s car was here at the house early Saturday morning, you’ll have your answer, Sheriff.”
She turned to Kami. “I want to see it,” she demanded. “Right now.”
Kami punched more buttons on her control board until the recording on the monitor was dated for yesterday morning. We watched Jack’s car back out and drive away, then Kami fast-forwarded the video to the time stamp of three in the morning. Sure enough, a nice looking Audi sedan came into the picture and parked. The big bear of a guy who exited the car and walked up to the front porch of Kami’s home was, without a doubt, Ben Graham.
I slid a glance at the sheriff, her face suddenly suffused with heat.
“Not exactly the paragon of honesty you were hoping for in a mayor, I’m guessing,” Alan observed.
“Not exactly,” Sheriff Paulsen agreed through gritted teeth.
“He wants fossils,” I informed her. “He’s been playing the eco people and ATV lobby against each other to drive down the price of the land.”
The sheriff latched her eyes on mine. “What are you talking about?”
I filled her in on the mayor’s plan as Alan and I had assembled it, including Skip’s report about the Friday meeting with the collections man. By the time I finished, the sheriff was moving rapidly into meltdown mode.
Clang! Clang!
Geez—first Kami at Green Hills, now the sheriff. Ben Graham seemed to have that effect on women down pat.
“So he’s been using everyone and everything to get just what he wants,” Sheriff Paulsen spit out.
“Looks like,” I said, backing a little bit away from the irate lawwoman. I didn’t want to get burned by the steam she was generating in the small space. “Though I guess the rule is still innocent until proven guilty, right?”
She threw me a scalding glance. “I know how to do my job, thanks.”
“So Kami’s off the suspect list?” Alan asked.
“No. And I want you two out of here, or I’ll arrest you for the obstruction of justice. In fact, I want you to get out of the county before you totally screw up my investigation. Are you getting the message here?” She dropped her right hand to rest on the butt of the gun on her hip.
Great. Just because I’d stuck around to give Shana moral support, I was getting the boot from the law. I remembered that Tom had also said this morning that the sheriff wanted us all to go home, but she didn’t have to get nasty about it.
I exchanged a look of frustration with Alan. I didn’t want to leave, and I couldn’t shake a bad feeling about the way the sheriff’s investigation was going if she was planning to arrest Kami for Jack’s and Billy’s murders. It was like Sheriff Paulsen had already made up her mind about Kami’s guilt, even after we’d shared with her all the information we’d collected about Ben. Actually, now that I thought about it, she seemed a lot more upset about Ben’s potential fossil business than she did about the possibility that he might be involved in a double murder.
There was something odd about that.
But she was the law, and she was basically throwing us out of town. Being the good citizen that I am, I didn’t see any alternative but to honor her wishes. Even if that still left me in the dark about who killed Jack O’Keefe and Billy Mason, not to mention who had sabotaged my car and in so doing, had sent Bernie to the hospital to get a plaster fashion statement cemented on her arm.
The hospital.
Shana was having the twins.
“Look,” I said to the sheriff as the four of us exited the garage, “we’ll leave Fillmore, but first I’ve got to stop at the hospital to see how Shana’s doing. She was in labor when we came out here.”
“She’s having the babies?” Kami asked. “She’s early. Jack said she had another five weeks to go.”
“Twins usually come early,” Alan advised her, “or so we hear.”
“I want you to show me this fossil cave entrance that you say is in that meadow on the other side of Ms. Marsden’s property,” Sheriff Paulsen said, oblivious to our conversation about Shana’s impending motherhood.
“I’ll lead you to the meadow,” I offered, “but Alan and I already searched for an entrance earlier today and we couldn’t find it.”
“I know where the meadow is,” Sheriff Paulsen snapped. “It’s the cave part I’m still not believing. Show me the cave, and then maybe we can make some sense of all this.”
I’d already made sense of it, but I didn’t want to point that out to her. She’d already snapped at me once, and I wasn’t about to further upset a woman with a gun on her hip.
We walked past Claudius, who apparently hadn’t moved since Kami had signaled him to lay down on the pavement. I guessed he hadn’t been curious about the sheriff’s car when it had come up the drive. He must have recognized it from this morning, when Sheriff Paulsen had first come to arrest Kami. I expected that Claudius could feel the vibrations of the damaged patrol car as it bounced into the parking area in front of the farmhouse. I remembered how yesterday morning, I was afraid the damaged shocks would send Shana into labor.
And that was when I thought she still had more than a month to go before her due date.
I walked over to my car while Sheriff Paulsen opened the back door of her cruiser for Kami to get in.
“I have to cuff you,” I heard the sheriff tell Kami.
Adding insult to injury, I thought.
And I suddenly knew who had killed Jack O’Keefe.