A good boy. A good man, not the same. . . “Will Archer? Is that who you’re talking about?”
“He came in to work this morning, about an hour late, and he was terribly upset. Couldn’t say what the problem was, but he was—he was crying, couldn’t sit still, he looked like he hadn’t slept. Wasn’t shaven, and he’s always so particular about that. And there were—” Mr. Appleby stopped, swallowed, and continued in a smaller voice. “There were stains on his clothes. I couldn’t be sure of the color because the fabric was dark. But under his nails it seemed brown.”
“You suspected it was blood?”
“I called Mary to come help me with him, and we tried to check him over. We thought it washisblood, thought he’d been hurt. But he kept pushing us away. And we noticed there were no tears to his clothes, no sign of injury. So finally I asked him if someone else was hurt, and he nodded, in his way, and I said he had to take me to them. And he did.”
“Where did he take you, Mr. Appleby?”
“Out through the back door. Down the alley, and then down a couple blocks. Then into the house. And that’s where I saw her.”
There were more questions that needed to be asked, details to be worked out. But first, Jericho had to take care of the essentials. “Where is Will now?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Appleby whispered. “He made it through the kitchen, but refused to go any farther. I went on in—I was calling out as I went, truly hoping someone would answer me and demand to know what I was doing in their home—and found . . . what I found. Then I ran back to the kitchen to call the police, but Will was already gone by the time I got there.”
Jericho knew Kayla was listening, knew she’d put out the APB. So he asked the rest of the questions he needed to ask. He did his job, trying not to think about the repercussions. He had to focus on the victim. Lorraine had been damaged by life, struggling to get by, but she’d been surviving. She hadn’t wanted to die.
And just because Will had been at the scene it didn’t mean he’d committed the crime. Not by a long shot. They’d find him, and then Jericho would have to work out some way to question him. They’d need medical records, psychiatric reports, interviews with the man’s friends and neighbors. Crime scene analysis, witnesses from the community, evidence gathered through a variety of tools.
“We’ll find him,” Jericho promised Mr. Appleby. “And we’ll do a thorough investigation. We’ll work out what happened.”
By the time the old man stood to leave, his color was better and he didn’t look quite as shaky as he had before. Jericho walked him out and arranged for a car to take him back to the hardware store. The niceties were observed as if there wasn’t a corpse a few blocks away, wasn’t a murderer running free. Jericho had the discipline to keep an open mind, and he honestly hoped he’d find evidence to cast suspicionawayfrom Will Archer. But he’d investigated a lot of murders, and they were rarely all that complicated, once you got the basics figured out. When there was an obvious suspect, that was usually the person who’d committed the crime.
It didn’t matter that Will was one of Mr. Appleby’s protégés, just as Jericho had been. Didn’t matter that he’d gone to school with Jericho and always seemed like a good guy. Didn’t matter that the accident that had injured his brain hadn’t been his fault. If he’d done this to Lorraine, he would have to be caught and punished. The town would have to be protected. That was Jericho’s job, and he would do it, no matter what.
