Jill balanced her flashlight face-up on a nearby desk. Then she placed her hands on her hips and tilted her perfectly symmetrical head as she looked from one of us to the other.
“Look, Charlie didn’t have a chance to tell me much of anything without another officer around or without us being recorded, but in the few minutes we had while I was getting him from the squad car into the station, he did tell me that he had found a key that he passed along to you and that when I got a security call from the bank, I should go alone and you would be here.”
“Why didn’t he just give you the key?” I asked, my ego a bit bruised at not being the only one with inside intel.
“Charlie said he didn’t want me to have to answer to any higher-ups. In other words, you can’t lose your job over this.”
Jill inhaled deeply and rubbed at her forehead as if she couldn’t believe she was here with us, like this. “So, can you please—for the love of all things holy—tell me what is going on here?”
I glanced at Lacy and she lifted a shoulder.Time to dive in.
“Charlie was right,” I started. “Before you drove him back to the station, he gave me a key. We figured out that it must be to a lockbox, so we came here.” I unfurled the canvas that I’d been holding close and unrolled it onto the long steel table. “This painting, which was stolen from the Salon at The Rose, was inside. I can only imagine that Charlie took the key from Todd’s room right after the man… fell.”
“You mean right after he was shot,” Jill clarified. “The coroner confirmed that it was a single bullet right through the heart, almost like a sniper had fired the pistol. Theyfound it lodged in his sternum.”
Just as Charlie had suspected. The air left my lungs like I’d been punched. I’d known that Todd had been shot, but this confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were dealing with a murder.
But, I realized, it also meant that Charlie was in the clear. I turned to Jill. “Charlie was outside of Todd Anderson’s room right before he was shot, which meant he couldn’t have been the one to kill him.”
“Unless Charlie went inside Todd’s room, they had a confrontation, Charlie pulled a gun on him, and shot him as Todd was standing on the balcony.”
I shook my head. “That’s ridiculous.”
The deputy nodded. “I agree, but Charlie actually suggested the scenario.”
I tilted my head, studying her as if to determine whose side she was on.
“Not because that’s what happened. But because he’s thinking like an investigator, which is smart,” Jill clarified. “Charlie also said that he didn’t hear a gunshot before the man fell, which means someone was likely using a silencer.”
I studied the floor for a beat. “And I can only guess that Charlie’s not involving the other officers because he thinks they’ll either mess it up or that one of them may be in on it.”
The deputy flinched at the last few words as if I’d physically slapped her.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to read her but coming up short. “Wait. What’s wrong?”
Jill bit her lip, obviously considering whether or not to tell me, before relenting. “There is one person that I’ve been monitoring, but I have no idea how he would be involved in something to do with a man from the backwoods of Nowhere, Texas.”
“Who do you suspect?” I asked, my voice growing louder with urgency.
“Not suspect, exactly. Like I said, I’ve just been keeping an eye on one of our volunteers. He only comes in on the weekends, sohonestly, I don’t think he’d even have intel for something like this.” As she spoke, Jill tapped a restless staccato against the tabletop and frowned as her mind moved quickly.
“Who is it?” I practically demanded. I needed to know if her thinking was paralleling mine.
Jill studied me for a beat before relenting. “It’s Will Hurt.”
As soon as she said the name, another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Valerie’s husband was indeed involved in all of this, though I wasn’t sure how deep.
“Will comes in for a volunteer shift twice a month, but once I found him snooping around files that he had no business accessing,” Jill continued. “And another time Charlie said that he went on a ride-along with an officer. Not a big deal except Will didn’t sign in or out—or get permission from one of us. It was almost like he wanted to observe under the radar.”
“I assume the department ran a background check on Will before he started working there?” I asked, thinking about a way we might be able to figure out how far back Will went with Todd Anderson.
“That was before I transferred here, but sure, that’s standard.”
“Can I see it?”
The deputy’s eyebrows tilted down as if she was trying to determine if this was privileged information. Then, she raised her shoulders as if to say she had nothing to lose at this point.
“Sure.” Jill sighed, pulling out her phone. “We’ve gotten this far, so why not?”
