“Of course.” I nodded.
She pivoted away from me and turned the key with a shaky hand. “The rest of the crew said they’d come to help, but… I couldn’t do that to them, you know? As the project manager, I needed to step up.”
“Project manager, hey? You must be familiar with the ins and outs of what was going on here then.”
She pushed open the door. She sucked in a deep breath and stepped inside. I followed her. Both of our gazes went immediately to the bloodstain on the floor.
Paula cursed under her breath.
“Hey, Gideon and I can do this for you, if you want.” Yes, I was speaking for Gideon without asking him first, but I didn’t think he’d mind. “We weren’t as close to Jim as you were. This has to be difficult for you.”
“No.” She brushed aside my offer. “I can do it. I want to make sure I get everything, so we never have to come back here.”
“Fair enough, but at least let me help.”
“Fine. You can ask your questions while we haul all this shit out,” Paula agreed.
I grabbed the extension cord that was snaking across the floor and started coiling it as she walked through the site and collected the drills, a saw, and who knew what else.
“So, when did you last see Jim yesterday?”
She bristled. “You accusing me of something?”
“No.” I shook my head quickly. “We’re just trying to figure out a timeline.”
“Like in those police shows on TV?”
“Exactly!”
She pulled out her phone and scrolled through it. “Must have been about three? I remember… I’d just found him by the work van. He was talking to someone on his phone. He was making plans to meet them. Man, I wish I knew who he’d been talking to, you know? I keep wondering if they know something that could help find his killer. Anyway, I was going to wait to talk to him, but then I got this text from Leon…” She nodded and flashed the screen of her phone toward me. “See there? Says the text came in at three-oh-two.”
“What did Leon want?” Had he been making himself an alibi? Just because he’d sent the text, it didn’t mean he was at the festival.
“Some asswipe showed up with a cotton candy machine, and Leon thought I could magic up a power outlet at the table the idiot had been assigned. I went over to deal with it, and then Leon dragged me into dealing with one thing after the other until it was six o’clock and I realized I hadn’t seen Jim all afternoon.”
She’d spent the whole afternoon with Leon. Son of a…
That meant he had a damn alibi for Jim’s murder, didn’t it? I stomped outside with the extension cord and flung it into the back of the van. And yes, I may have scowled at Leon’s shop across the street. I’d been so sure he was the murderer. How could I have been so wrong?
But even if he hadn’t killed anyone, I bet he was still hiding something.
I saw Gideon slip out of Leon’s store across the street. I pushed my glasses up and admired him for a moment. God, he was sexy. The way he moved. The way he filled out his jeans. The cute way he’d blushed when I’d complimented him on his cuddling skills earlier.
He was looking down at his phone, so he didn’t see me. Wait a minute. Why was he at Leon’s? I bet he’d gone to talk to the Sweater-Vest King without me.
I supposed I couldn’t blame him. I never would’ve believed in Leon’s innocence if I hadn’t heard it from Paula. Still, that only cleared Leon of Jim’s murder. He still could have killed Winston.
Was it better to think there might be two murderers in town? Probably not.
And if Leon had an alibi…Shit. Someone must have grabbed the dagger from Leon’s displays when he was running around helping everyone set up for the festival, just like Gideon had suggested. They might have walked right by us, and we hadn’t known.
We really needed to find the murderer before they killed again. I hurried back inside to find Paula lugging a portable cement mixer from a back room.
“Out of curiosity,” I said as soon as I saw her, “were you working here the night Winston told Jim to stop?”
“Yeah. That guy was an asshat. Told us to quit after he’d just told us he wouldn’t pay us until we finished.” She scowled at the corner. “And look at that mess over there. We didn’t leave the place looking like that. I bet he was trying to do shit so he wouldn’t have to pay us to do it for him.”
It was the same corner where Eugene had found that bright fiber, though, so it could be significant. “Are you sure that wasn’t like that when you left?”
