Fifteen
As soon as she’d hung up the phone, Sherry sat down again to update her suspect chart. She added one new row, but two new suspects, bringing the total up to seven.
SUSPECT
SUSPICION LEVEL
METHOD OF INVESTIGATION
Alan’s sons, Eli and Corey Thompson
High. A huge inheritance is always a strong motive.
They both live far away. Might be in town for funeral? Find out if they have alibis for time of death.
She stared at her chart for a while, trying to extract some sort of sense from it. The results weren’t very encouraging. A growing list of suspects, but nothing concrete: just vague motives and half-formed suspicions and shadowy figures who might not even be real. What she needed, what she really needed, was something more solid than a call with a nonagenarian and a few hopeful spritzes of holy water.
She sighed and rubbed at her eyes, then made two more calls. The first was to the public library in Schenectady, where she introduced herself as the librarian up in Winesap andasked, very humbly and apologetically, whether they had anyone there who’d be willing to dig through their local newspaper archives for her. She then spent five minutes on hold before she was transferred over to a very enthusiastic-sounding young intern, from whom Sherry just as humbly and apologetically requested that she fax over—she stumbled slightly over the wordfax, for some reason—any news articles they might have available from about thirty years earlier referring to a public defender named Alan Thompson. The energetic young intern had apparently never wanted to do anything more in her life than she wanted to hunt down some antique trial reporting, especially since it was for afellow librarian. Sherry refrained from asking whether the intern had, as yet, earned this level of collegial familiarity, and instead thanked her as if the intern was giving Sherry one of her kidneys. Then, confident that the kid was buttered up thickly enough to reduce any friction she’d encounter while trudging through theGazettearchives, she hung up.
She looked up at the wall clock. Five thirty. Perfect. Then she checked her address book and called Greg Walbrook.
The phone rang and rang, then went to voicemail. She tried again. This time Greg picked up, sounding just as baffled by the universe as usual. She’d only ever called him twice before, in the course of arranging Alan’s birthday parties, and he always managed to answer the telephone as if he’d never used such a device before and was surprised to discover that he owned one. There was a faint, distant, “I—yeah, hold on a second.” A brief moment of scuffling sounds, as if he was wrestling the phone away from someone and then dropping it repeatedly onto the ground. Then a much louder and clearer: “Greg Walbrook.”
