I left Gil to take care of the food distribution and went to see if I could get a message to Ohlsen. Fred was more than willing to step out into the hallway to discuss it, since then he could dig his cupcake out of the bakery bag and nibble on it.
"Richie Faria is going way beyond just collecting names and contact information," I told him. "Could you let Detective Ohlsen know about it? Faria really doesn't have the experience to question anyone at a murder scene, and I doubt Ohlsen asked him to do it."
"I'll take care of it." Fred swiped at a bit of frosting on his upper lip. "Is that all you needed?"
I wanted to stay and listen while he talked to Detective Ohlsen, just to make sure my message was passed along accurately, but I also needed to stay on good terms with Fred, so I couldn't question his abilities. I needed an excuse to stay outside the noisy boardroom where I might be able to eavesdrop on the conversation inconspicuously.
"I'd like to use the ladies' room, if it's okay." If I timed it right, I might be able to catch at least part of Fred's conversation with the detective.
"Sure," Fred said, reaching for his cell phone. "I should have an answer from Ohlsen by the time you get back."
I headed down the hallway, aware of Fred watching me. He wasn't as obsessed with following the rules as the rookie Faria was but was thorough in his own low-key way. He would be able to report, if asked, that he had kept an eye on me, even though he had to know I wasn't going to make a sudden turn and race down the stairs.
I passed Meg, who had just left the restroom. I spent the bare minimum of time in the ladies' room and returned in time to hear Fred repeating my concerns about Faria almost verbatim. There was a moment of silence, and then Fred said, "I'll send Faria out to you right away."
He put his phone back into his jacket pocket. "I'll be taking over the interviews. Bud's going to have a chat with Faria."
"Thanks." Fred was no detective, but unlike the rookie, he knew his limits, and he was good with people. I couldn't fix what had happened so far today, but at least with Faria reassigned, we should be able to get back to some semblance of normalcy.
* * *
Fred followed me into the boardroom. I paused in the doorway while he went to the back of the room to replace Faria. Almost everyone had claimed their lunch and was quietly eating. I spotted Stefan and Sunny seated together on the floor in the far back corner, past the conference table and separated by the width of the room from the desk where Faria was resisting his eviction.
I scooped up Sunny's and Stefan's lunches and carried them over to where Sunny was leaning against Stefan with her eyes closed. Stefan seemed tense, as if he were on guard duty.
I wasn't sure if Sunny was awake, so I crouched down next to Stefan and whispered, "How's she doing?"
"She's strong," Stefan said in an equally soft voice. "She'll be okay eventually."
Sunny opened her eyes and straightened away from Stefan. "I'm fine now." She laughed ruefully. "I wanted to be an ER nurse originally, but I could never handle the sight of blood. I passed out dozens of times before I finally accepted that physical therapy was a better career for me."
"I probably would have passed out in an operating room too." I handed Sunny one of the take-out containers.
I gave Stefan the second one, which he placed next to him on the wood floor. His face remained tight with anxiety, and his eyes looked a bit dazed, as if he'd been the one to find the body, not Sunny. She, on the other hand, looked completely recovered. Maybe Stefan's seemingly over-the-top praise of her was actually an accurate representation of her. She had been quick to respond to Carl's emergency and had handled it with obvious competence.
Stefan ignored his lunch and asked me, "So, how are you going to find the killer?"
Whispering was only going to draw attention to our discussion, so I spoke in a normal tone. "I'm going to let the police do their job. They're busy gathering the basic information from the crime scene, and soon they'll interview everyone who might be a witness. I'm sure they'll want to talk to both of you eventually."
"I don't have anything useful to tell them," Stefan said. "I didn't see anything. Right after Sunny left, I went to find Gil. I've got information on a quilt she might be interested in acquiring. I thought she'd be in her office, but she must have been downstairs somewhere."
Detective Ohlsen would undoubtedly find it interesting that Stefan had been outside the boardroom at the time of the murder. As long as he hadn't left the museum though, the interior security cameras ought to provide him with an alibi, just as they would for Gil. In fact, they might be able to alibi each other. "Did you ever find Gil?"
Stefan shook his head. "I got distracted. I visited the restroom and then remembered there was something I wanted to check in the archives. Gil gave me a key card, so I can go there any time the museum is open. I only meant to take a quick look at the handwoven blankets, but once I started studying the collection, I lost track of time. I'd probably still be there if Sunny hadn't started screaming."
"Time always gets away from me in the archives too," I said lightly, hiding my concern that Stefan didn't have an alibi.
"I should have been with Sunny," he said. "I meant to meet her in the parking lot and help her bring in the batting. If I'd been there, maybe none of this would have happened. The kid might still be alive, and even if I hadn't prevented the murder, at least I could have given Sunny an alibi."
"It's not your fault," Sunny said briskly. "I didn't need help, or I would have asked. I think whatever happened to that poor young man, it was over before I parked my car. I didn't see anyone else the entire time I was looking for a parking space or even afterwards, at least not until Keely and Matt came running out of the building."
That reminded me of something I'd wondered about. "How did you find the body anyway? That spot is pretty isolated."
"Bad timing," Sunny said. "If I'd parked anywhere else, I never would have seen him. I really didn't want to park way back there. No one ever does, because it's kinda dark and creepy there, with just the big blank brick wall of the building—that's sort of prison-like. Plus, you have to walk past the trash, which I found out today isn't actually stinky, but you'd think it would be. Anyway, someone had taken my previous parking space, and all the other spots in the lot were occupied, so I had to take the one that no one else wanted. Even so, I wouldn't have seen the body in the shadows if I hadn't noticed a cell phone in a patch of brighter light. I went over to pick it up, thinking one of the quilters had stepped outside for a smoke and then lost her phone. That's when I saw the blood." Sunny closed her eyes again and leaned against the wall.
Stefan took her hand and patted it, but he spoke to me. "What do we do now?"
"Eat your lunch."
"No, I mean, about making sure no one blames Sunny."
"Just what I said: eat your lunch. Try to relax. Detective Ohlsen will want to talk to you both. If you have any concerns at all during the questioning, you should tell them you want to talk to your lawyer first."
Sunny opened her eyes and reclaimed her hand. "Stop worrying about me. I'll be fine. Perhaps it's just as well I was the one who found him. I don't respond well to blood, but this isn't the first corpse I've seen up close. No sense in traumatizing anyone else."
"That's my Sunny. Caring more about everyone else than about herself." Stefan stared at me meaningfully. "It's going to get her into trouble someday."
"Not today," I said firmly, hoping I was right.
He turned to Sunny. "Will you be all right for a minute without me? I need to talk to Keely about something."
Sunny had opened her take-out container, and her mouth was full. She wordlessly waved Stefan off. I had a feeling she didn't need his support as much as he needed to provide it for her.
Stefan scrambled to his feet and dragged me over to the front of the room near the white board. Once we were there, he seemed to lose all of his sense of urgency. He leaned against the wall, stared down at his feet, and tugged on his bow tie.
"Well?" I said.
He straightened and abandoned his futile adjustment of the lopsided bow tie. "I want to hire you."
In the middle of a murder investigation, he needed an appraisal?
"We can talk about it later," I said, humoring him, since he was clearly worked up about something. "You can call me any time to arrange for an appraisal if you really want one, but you've got at least as good an eye for both valuation and dating a quilt as I do. You've never needed me to second-guess you before. Why now?"
"I don't need you to do an appraisal," he said earnestly. "I need you to make sure the police understand that Sunny had nothing to do with Alan's death."
"You should talk to a criminal lawyer, not me. That was never my specialty."
"I don't care what licenses you have. All I know is that if it weren't for you, the police never would have found Randall Tremain's killer, and the wrong person would have paid the price."
"That was a fluke," I said. "I'll make sure the police understand anything they need to know about the quilting community to see possible motives in this case, but that's all I can promise."
"There's got to be more you can do," Stefan said, completely undoing his bow tie this time. "They're going to find out that Sunny hated Alan Miller, and they're going to think she killed him."
I couldn't believe it was as bad as Stefan thought. "From what I've heard, Alan had a reason to hate Sunny, but not the other way around. The police don't need me to tell them that."
Stefan huffed in frustration. "I don't understand why you're so determined to avoid using your legal skills. It's bad enough that Matt wastes his potential most of the time, but why are you doing it too?"
I didn't want to talk about my less-than-voluntary decision to leave the practice of law. Besides, while I'd heard what Matt thought the problem between them was—that Stefan couldn't accept he'd been wrong in steering Matt into a career as a fashion model and therefore couldn't accept Matt's decision to quit at the peak of his career—I was curious how Stefan would explain it. "You never did say what your problem with Matt is."
"Forget about him." Stefan waved his hand as if brushing away an irritating fly. "He gets enough attention on his own. We need to focus on protecting Sunny. She was furious with Alan for stalking her at the hospital. He couldn't accept being turned down for a job, especially when he found out no one else had been hired. She lost her temper one night when she found him lurking out near her car in the parking lot. She shouted at him, threatening to have him taken care of permanently. She only meant she'd get a restraining order, but it won't look good if it comes out. And it will. Apparently several of her friends at the hospital overheard her shouting, and they've been teasing her about it. They'd never seen her lose her temper before."
Now I could see why Stefan was so worried. If Alan had confronted Sunny today while she was getting her packages out of the car, it might have triggered something of a flashback to what had happened in the hospital parking lot. Sunny could have felt like she was being cornered and lashed out in what she thought was self-defense. Or, to put a less sympathetic spin on it, she could have seen it as an opportunity to get rid of someone who'd been tormenting her.
My hesitation seemed to push Stefan over the edge. "Please," he begged. "I don't care what it costs. Just make sure Sunny isn't blamed for this. I can't let anything happen to her."
The sensible, logical thing for me to do was to tell Stefan I couldn't help him. There was an irrational part of me though, the part that I shared with many successful trial lawyers, that insisted I was, in fact, the right person to help Stefan, perhaps the only person who could help him.
I wasn't a criminal lawyer, but I had solid negotiation skills, and I knew some of the potential suspects better than the police did. The only problem with allowing Stefan to depend on me was the risk that I'd pass out at an inconvenient moment. Ever since my diagnosis, I'd experienced recurring nightmares that started out pleasantly enough with me presenting a case in court, confident I could convince the jury of my client's position, only to experience the warning signs of a syncope event. It was too late to withdraw from the case and too late to do anything to remain conscious. No matter what happened, I knew that the client was going to pay for my failure and I would be left with overwhelming guilt.
The dreams were bad enough; I didn't need to reenact them in real life by making promises I couldn't keep. "I'll do what little I can to keep the police from heading down the wrong path. But you've got to promise me you'll hire a good defense lawyer as soon as we're allowed to leave."
"Thank you." Stefan gave me a quick hug. "Sorry. Gotta run. Sunny's trying to stand up, and I need to make sure she's steady on her feet. I'll tell her you'll take care of everything."
He trotted across the room, sliding occasionally on his overly long pants hems, before I could stop him and explain again just how little I could do.
The sense of impending failure didn't feel any better in real life than it did in my nightmares.