Monday, 10:32 a.m.
Dallas sat at the kitchen table when Evelyn came in. She studied him as she put on an apron.
She’d stayed last night — the hell with what her boys or anyone else thought — she wasn’t leaving him with all this.
The fire.
J.D. and Maggie.
Scott.
She’d persuaded Dallas to bed as dawn came, but sleep was another matter.
“Morning, Dallas. No stirring from the guest rooms.” Maggie and J.D. had followed the doctor’s orders to rest, but not until most of the night had gone in questions, answers … and horrors, as officials worked along the creek bed to retrieve Scott’s body.
Dallas grunted. “When they get up, tell them I’ve gone to the sheriff’s department. Have a lot of things to go over. They say confession’s good for the soul. I’ll be confessin’ my blindness and my arrogance.”
It was worse than she’d thought.
She’d known he would blame himself for not seeing signs of Scott’s problems. At some level maybe he had known. Those dizzy spells, the tiredness, all the ways his body tried to make him listen to what his heart couldn’t bear.
All because he and that strange son of a strange mother shared a trickle of blood. The old fool.
Her old fool.
“Dallas, I have something to say.”
He looked up, not much interested.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Yes. I’ll marry you.”
A spark lit his eyes, but then they narrowed. “Why now?”
“Because before you thought you were rescuing me.”
Automatic denial came to his lips. He stopped it. “I’ll have to think about that.” He added, “So now my name is disgraced, you’re rescuing me?”
She made a sound. “As if roaring into court as the underdog wouldn’t get your blood pumping like it hasn’t in years. Besides, you know as well as I do that if there’d been rescuing — one or the other — we would have suited all this time.”
He lowered his eyelids. “Then why now?”
“Don’t go closing your eyes like you think it’ll stop me seeing into your head. Why now? Because I’ve got the imagination to live with you, but I’m not sure I have enough to live without you.”
* * * *
Charlotte Blankenship Smith’s laughter could be heard throughout the jail.
Sheriff Roger Gardner could still hear it long after he’d informed the prisoner she was no longer suspected in her sister’s murder, although she continued to be held on charges associated with the attack on Maggie Frye.
Charlotte had hardly seemed to hear what he’d said about how Scott’s confession to Maggie and J.D. of murdering Pan and Laurel affected her. She was already laughing.
Laughing and laughing.
Maggie had heard it, too. Probably why her exit just now had been speedy.
She’d likely be back for an official tie-up, but for now she was headed home.
Home.
The sheriff locked his office door. At the front desk he told Dorrie, “Abner will be back when they finish dismantling at the gym. I’m going home. I’m going to sleep for a week. If you need me tonight or tomorrow—”
“I won’t. You sleep well, Sheriff Gardner.”
She put on her headset, even though the phone hadn’t rung.
He hoped it shut out Charlotte’s laughter.
And her occasional shouts. “Scott Tomlinson! Fucking Scott Tomlinson! The one man she didn’t screw!”
* * * *
She stood at the prosecution table, her fingertips trailing over the wood.
“Maggie.”
She whirled, the way she had a week ago when he’d startled her in this same spot. This time, she relaxed as J.D. stepped out of shadow.
She even gave a half-grimace, half-smile. “Who sent you to see if I’m okay? Dallas or Evelyn?”
“Came on my own. Are you okay?” He leaned in. “Your hair doesn’t smell like smoke anymore.”
“Thanks to Doranna. Even cleared her shop so I wouldn’t be bothered by questions. I will be okay. You?”
“Better than you.”
“Right. Because you only got shot. In the head.” Her sarcasm slid away. “I still think—”
“No hospital. Mostly scalp wound. After your tangle with Charlotte, you know how they bleed. Besides, I told you, I was mostly playing possum to gain the element of surprise.”
She took his arm, trying not to wince at the bandage on his head and those mostlys, and started toward the door. “You couldn’t have surprised him before he threw you on the roof?”
“He thought he’d disposed of me. That added more surprise. If you’d just been a little more patient, instead of dealing with him yourself…”
She grimaced wryly. Then she sobered as the doors of Courtroom One closed behind them. “We have all the things Scott said to us — me — but will we ever know for absolute certainty?”
“Guilt can be as much a matter of guesswork as innocence is. But—”
“Guesswork? That’s—
“Belief then.”
“I’m crap at believing.”
His laughter startled her. Again. After a moment she smiled.
“I was going to say,” he said, “that evidence goes a long way to eliminating the guesswork. Not only do we have what he told us, but Scott being the guy makes sense of a lot. Like using Pan’s gun — that was impulse. But for the other killings he didn’t use guns — he always was a lousy shot.”
She nodded as he held the outer door for her. “Sheriff Gardner said he probably used what he’d picked up from trials and work for the legal system to avoid leaving evidence or a pattern.”
“No pattern in how he committed the crimes, maybe but there was in the relationships that led to them.”
Amazing how fast information could be accumulated once you knew the answer.
With Monroe, Gardner, some of the other investigators, assisted by Bel and Landis by phone, they’d pieced together that Scott had encountered Pan and Laurel at Zales’ office, doing depositions on other cases. Zales, apparently, had no idea.
Bel provided a detailed account from Darcie Johnson, the third woman Scott had met.
Eighteen months ago, Scott was balm during her bad divorce. But as Scott became both possessive and increasingly volatile, the woman withdrew. The more she withdrew, the more demanding he became, until she was spooked, then terrified.
She’d talked to Lynchburg police, changed her mind, and moved to Northern Virginia, covering her tracks… Or so she thought until Belichek found her.
The investigators could only speculate Pan and Laurel had dismissed any similar internal warnings — if they’d had them — because they’d known Scott all their lives.
Their blind spots. Charlotte of all people had spotted that.
She thought the way people responded to her on the surface was how they truly felt.
And Rick? Would he have gone to that isolated spot for promised evidence against J.D., even if he’d been suspicious of Scott? Almost certainly.
When Maggie didn’t respond to Scott’s overtures as her comforter, he upped the stakes with calls, following her, looking through her belongings, using the guesthouse key.
After she left Bedhurst, he must have thought it was safe to use the new key, planning to destroy his original trial notes. He was trapped when Maggie returned. Some argued he’d started the fires by accident. She wondered if he’d been that clearheaded.
She stopped on the courthouse’s bottom step. “Do you think he killed his mother?”
“From what I heard…” He’d caught some while he’d fought for consciousness. “Yeah, though that’s something we won’t know for sure.”
J.D. took her arm to lead her across the street to her car, as if to steer her clear of non-existent. There was none.
He continued, “Mrs. Barrett says that when Scott dropped her off after the memorial, he took the road toward Lynchburg instead of heading back to town, and he was on his phone as soon as she was out of his car.”
“Gardner told me.”
“Probably a burner phone. He had them stashed in his truck, his house — his mother’s house — even the office. More phone records.”
“At least I won’t have to look at them.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe I fell for it when Scott fed me that misinformation about Eugene making sure the pre-nup was ironclad. There was no downside for him, he could always say his informant got it wrong. In the meantime, he’d diverted us to Eugene while he set up Rick.”
At her rental car, she beeped the trunk open, took off a sweater — spring had a firm hold on the mountains — folded it and dropped it inside. The sweater, along with the leggings and shirt she wore were on loan from Theresa Addington.
Her clothes were held for evidence. Everything else she’d had here was lost in the fire that had destroyed much of the guesthouse.
Including her briefcase and the plastic sleeve of photos.
“So, you’re leaving.” His voice was perfectly level.
She stilled with her hand on the trunk lid, then closed it with a neutral thunk.
J.D. rested his butt against the rear door on the driver’s side, his head toward her.
Bones. Sinews. Flesh.
“Need to get back and find out if I still have a job.”
He tipped his head in acknowledgement of her point of practicality.
“How’s Judge Blankenship?” she asked.
“Devastated.”
“And Dallas? How do you think he’s really doing?”
Dallas said his informant about activities in Henry Zales’ office was a disgruntled associate trying to curry Dallas’ support. Maggie had suspected Scott, with Dallas masking his indiscretions. But Scott had reasons far larger than indiscretions for not wanting anyone to connect him with the women going to Zales.
She worried about Dallas, though the doctor said he’d be fine physically with a good stretch of rest and no stress.
“Better. A lot better, I think. Ed Smith called him not long ago.”
“Oh?”
“Asked Dallas to help with Charlotte’s defense for attacking you.”
She shook her head. Defending the woman who’d tried to kill her, yet proclaiming his never-ending friendship. Trouble was, she believed him.
“That must have cheered him up.”
“Almost as much as the fact that he and Evelyn talked — same topic, new response. They’re getting married.”
“Really? That’s great.” She saw he was thinking about their own talks, of whether they were in a position to have a new talk on a new topic — the future instead of the past. “Isn’t it?”
“Who knows with a hard-headed woman.”
She studied the unfamiliar set of keys in her hand. “What about you, J.D.? Are you leaving?”
His silence stretched a minute. “Don’t know yet. Too soon. I do know I’m not locked in anymore. Thanks to you.”
His hand covered hers and the keys, two of their fingers connected, held, then slid apart.
“J.D., when you were getting me off the roof, I couldn’t let myself think about what had happened, or how we’d get to the ground. I concentrated on your voice. On looking at the inch that came next. That’s all I let in. That’s how I made it. Your voice and looking ahead one inch at a time.”
After a pause, he said slowly, “That sounds like a plan. A good plan.”
She glanced up, then away, nodding. “Yes. I think so, too.”
As she slid into the driver’s seat, he went to the outside of the car door. With the window down all the way, he cupped both hands over the doorframe and closed it. He was too close for her to see his face, hidden by the top of the door.
She stared at his hands, even as she fumbled to start the car.
The engine caught immediately.
“Well,” she said, forcing out words. “I’ll be seeing you.”
He bent, caught her face between his palms and kissed her. Hard. Emphatic. Fast.
Too fast.
He released her and stepped back.
This angle allowed her to see his face. His eyes, intent and dark, were locked on hers. His mouth shifted, creating that indentation she knew to look for now.
“Yes,” he said, “you will. You will be seeing me, Maggie Frye.”
* * * *
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If you’d like to investigate Patricia McLinn’s mysteries with humor and a hint of romance, try her Caught Dead in Wyoming series:
“Colorful characters, intriguing, intelligent mystery, plus the state of Wyoming leaping off every page.”
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