I nodded. “Yes, you’re right. At least I figured it out, even if it took longer than it should have. Let’s just focus on the case. So Megan and Mendoza are both undercover. The little boy—Elias—is Mendoza’s son. Not Nick’s, and definitely not Sal’s or Gio Abruzzi’s. Nick and Megan were not involved, now or in the past. I can forget about all those crazy theories I had. Back to basics.”
To Nick.
Who was dead. Shot in head sometime between eleven-thirty last night and this morning. Mrs. Miller had either slept through the shot, or was lying about it.
There was no reason why she’d lie, although I also couldn’t prove that she wasn’t. She might have heard the shot and now she was feeling bad that Nick was dead, so she was telling everyone that she hadn’t heard it just so no one would blame her for not going to his rescue. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway—bullets to the brain tend to be immediately fatal—although if she had looked outside, she might have seen the killer. Or at least the car he drove.
On the other hand, the killer might have seen Mrs. Miller too, and then she might be dead, as well.
Or—less likely, but possible—she was lying because she had shot him herself. She was the landlady, so she probably had a key to Nick’s place. Whoever shot him had made it inside somehow, and it wasn’t likely that he had left the kitchen door open. A key would have helped, although it probably wasn’t necessary. The locks hadn’t appeared particularly sophisticated. I don’t know if I’d have been able to pick my way in, but someone with a bit more experience surely could have.
“Mental note,” I said, “learn how to pick locks.”
Edwina snorted in her sleep. I tried not to take it as an indictment of my (severely lacking) abilities as a PI.
So that was the case for—or against—Mrs. Miller. Opportunity, but no motive, not unless she’d been lying about what a nice boy Nick was. He might have been playing his music too loud and been three months behind on his rent, although if that was the case, it would have been easier to call the sheriff’s office to have him evicted than to shoot him dead, I assumed.
Jacquie, then.
The significant other is always a suspect, and she had believed that he was cheating. Believed it enough that she had paid fifteen hundred dollars to a private investigator to prove it. That seemed to indicate that the belief was sincere. It was too much money to waste otherwise.
Unless it wasn’t a waste but a calculated effort to throw off suspicion. I hadn’t seen any signs of an affair. If the police tried to arrest her, she could tell them, in all sincerity, “I paid a PI, and the PI said he wasn’t cheating. It wasn’t me. No motive.”
I thought about Jacquie’s tears, the way her face had crumpled when Mendoza told her Nick was dead. It had seemed real, but she had proved at David’s funeral that she was a good actress.
I hadn’t been able to muster up any tears when he’d told me that David was dead, and that was after eighteen years of marriage. Then again, I didn’t have fond feelings for David at that point. If Jacquie had hated Nick enough to shoot him, would she have been able to appear as broken up as she had?
“And a bullet between the eyes, of all things.” I glanced over at Edwina. Her breathing had evened out. She was definitely asleep now. “Would a jealous girlfriend really do that? Wouldn’t she be more likely to shoot him in a rage, and go for the heart?”
Unless she had wanted to make it look like a mob hit to deflect suspicion. To do that, she would have had to know about the mob, and I didn’t know if she did.
So maybe it looked like a mob hit because it was one. Maybe Gio Abruzzi or Izzy Spataro or someone like them had made his way into Nick’s apartment and shot him.
They wouldn’t have had any problem with the lock. And if they’d discovered that Nick had involved the police—if it was Nick who had involved the police—they might very well want to make an example of him. That kind of thing couldn’t be encouraged.
By this point, we had made our way out of Bellevue all the way to Pegram, and now I turned the car onto a smaller road, one with an uneven surface that hadn’t been paved in a while. Edwina opened her eyes and then raised her head to look around.
“Sorry,” I told her as I kept going. “Detour. We were almost in Pegram anyway, and I thought we’d take a look at where Sal lives.”
Edwina put her head down on her paws, but she kept her eyes open.
“This is the road he lives on. Now I just have to find the number…”
The landscape had changed as we left Nashville, from neat, square lots with neat houses to more rural, more wooded. Out here, people had acreage, privacy, and the kind of space you couldn’t afford closer to the city.
The road became narrower as we went, a winding country lane with houses set well back from the road, behind fields or large lawns. Some were old farmhouses, others were newer constructions designed to look rustic. Here and there was an old mobile home that had seen better days. All of them screamed ‘leave me alone’ in one way or another.
When the numbers matched what Rachel had told me, I slowed to a crawl.
Sal’s house was set back from the road at the end of a long gravel driveway. It was a log cabin, the kind that looked like it belonged in the mountains rather than thirty minutes from downtown Nashville. Not ostentatious, exactly, but certainly large, and impressive in its own way. The logs were dark and weathered, and the roof was a steep pitch that probably made the upstairs feel like a proper second story rather than just an attic. Plenty of windows, a wraparound porch, and what looked like at least three thousand square feet. To no one’s surprise—or at least not mine—there was a garage adjacent to the house, with no less than five doors. They were all closed, but it looked like Sal owned plenty of toys.
In front of the garage sat what appeared to be Lieutenant Samantha Copeland’s unmarked sedan.
I pulled over to the side of the road and sat there for a moment, engine idling, staring up the driveway. The gate was open, but it had a No Trespassing sign prominently displayed. On the sign, just to make the point absolutely clear, was a silhouette of a shotgun.
“Better not,” I told Edwina, who was peering through the window just as intently as I was. “The sign isn’t encouraging. And it looks like Lieutenant Copeland is already here, anyway. She must be informing Sal about Nick. Or questioning him. Or both.”
Edwina’s tail wagged uncertainly.
