Sheriff Brown’s expression remained impassive. “You’re a smart lady,” he said. “I honestly just find it hard to believe that you can solve murders left and right but couldn’t figure out that this guy wasn’t being honest with you.” He paused. “Why’d you break into his house after he died, Sherry?”
Another jolt. “How did you know?”
“One of the neighbors was pretty spooked by Mr. Thompson’s murder. He went out and bought three security cameras the next day and had them up and running by that evening. He saw you going in and out when he was reviewing the tapes and gave us a call. Why’d you do it, Sherry? What were you looking for?”
“Evidence, obviously,” Sherry snapped. “I wasinvestigating. Like I always do.”
“You don’t always break into victims’ houses, though,” Sheriff Brown said.
“You keep sayingbreaking inlike I smashed in the window with a brick,” she said. “I had access to the house whenever I wanted it. I just went and got the key.” She paused then, and blinked. “And—if he left me the house, how could I break into my own property?”
She immediately knew that it was the wrong thing to say when his eyebrows lifted. “I wouldn’t get too ahead of myself, if I were you,” he said. “His estate’s going to be in probate for a while longer, since there was a lot of it.”
“I’m not getting ahead of myself,” she said. “I have my own house to live in, I’m not desperate to have to take over a whole new one. I’m just—I know what you’regettingat.”
“I’m not getting at anything,” he said blandly. She abruptly felt very aware of how horriblyirritatingall the suspects she’d spoken to over the years must have found her. “Walk me through what you did once you were inside of the house.”
She told him, though a bit tersely. There wasn’t too much to tell: she looked around, she got an idea of the scene of the crime, checked the rest of the house, then left. She didn’t mention how the photo had screamed. It didn’t seem like a useful thing to mention. “I didn’t disturb anything or take anything out of the house,” she said. “And it isn’t as if my DNA and fingerprints wouldn’t have been all over the place either way. Youaskedme to investigate.” Then she remembered that there was something she needed to ask him. “Speaking of things being taken from the house. Were the account books from Alan’s shop taken as evidence?”
He was, at this point, starting to look slightly irritated. There was something almost comforting about that. There was something frightening about a man who stayed perpetually and perfectly calm. “I’m just asking questions so we can try to figure out what happened to Mr. Thompson. You know how this works, Sherry. I’m not the enemy here.” He paused. “And no. We didn’t find anything like account books at the scene.”
“Yes, I do know how this works,” she said, and found herselfstanding before she could think better of it. She felt reenergized by the knowledge that she’d been right to think that those missing documents might be significant. If the police hadn’t moved them, then the only other people who might have done it were Alan himself, just before he died, or the murderer. “So I know that I’m free to go unless I’m under arrest. Am I under arrest, Sheriff?”
“No,” he said, after a moment. “Though you could be, for the breaking and entering.”
“Is that a threat?” she asked. “Never mind. I’ll be going, then. Let me know if you change your mind and decide that you want my help with investigating again.” Then she added, with a flourish, “You might want to look into Jason Martinez at the diner.”
“Because Mr. Thompson botched his defense?” Sheriff Brown asked. Sherry had to give him credit for how successfully he managed to seem onlyslightlysmug. “We’re very aware of his connection to Mr. Thompson. I’ve spoken to him and his wife already.”
Sherry felt her whole face go hot. He sounded like a big-city police officer in a television press conference. When had Sheriff Brown learned how to talk like that? “Oh,” she said. “Well—that’s good. His alibi’s weak.”
“Thank you for letting me know,” the sheriff said. It sounded sincere, if you didn’t pay any attention to what seemed like the suggestion of a smirk lurking around the corner of his mouth. Then he said, “Just one more thing.”
Like Columbo, she thought wildly. Somehow whoever was running the TV detective series she was trapped in had rewritten the character of Sheriff Brown. Before, he’d been the blundering local police sergeant who couldn’t keep up withPoirot’s deductions, and now he was Columbo. He had his suspect, and now he was circling around her, cornering her, fixing it so that she couldn’t wriggle out of the trap. She sat, just the way that Columbo’s suspects always stayed to answer more questions no matter how much they complained about him. Was she being compelled to do it? She couldn’t tell. Maybe she just wanted to find out how the episode would end. “What is it?”
“I wanted to ask you about Howard Hastings,” he said. “You were questioned in relation to his disappearance six years ago. What can you tell me about that?”
For a moment Sherry’s mind felt utterly blank. Howard. Caroline’s husband. She’d left Florida and come all the way to little Winesap to get away from the memory of him and Caroline. They’d followed her here, anyway. She licked her lips. “If you’ve been talking to—” Her voice came out in a dry rasp. She stopped. Cleared her throat. “If you’ve been talking to the Tampa police, you already know everything. I told them everything that I knew.”
“I’m sure that you did,” he said. Implacably. He felt implacable, like there was no way for her to escape from this conversation, even though the unlocked door was just a few steps away. “But they talked to you years ago, and the detective I spoke to wasn’t the lead on the case. I’d like to hear it from you now.”
She swallowed. “Caroline had been telling me for months that her husband was abusive,” she said. “At first it was just him wanting to tell her when she could see her friends and family, but then it got worse. He changed the PIN for her bank card so she had to ask him for money. He would turn off the water in the house just so he could control when she took ashower. It was horrible. She cried like a little girl when she first started telling me about it.”
“And you believed her?”
“Of course I did,” Sherry snapped. “Do you know how many women I’ve known over the years whose husbands have treated them like dirt? My own mother—” She stopped. Her own sad childhood wasn’t any of his damn business. “And he was an awful guy. Really nasty and pompous, the kind of guy who’d be really rude to a waitress and then leave a nickel as a tip. Always talking down to her in front of other people. Andcheap, too. She got married to him too young, and he was fifteen years older, so he managed to impress her with roses and teddy bears before she was old enough to know better, then never bought her another present. I still don’t think that she was lying abouteverything.”
“Cheap enough to have saved up a million in cash by the time he vanished,” Sheriff Brown said, in an irritatinglyknowingsort of way. “So, you believed that she was being abused. What did you do then?”
“Like I told the detectives in Tampa,” Sherry said, “I really didn’t do much. I was a listening ear. I told her that I thought she should leave him. Then, when she showed up at my house with her bags one night, I drove her to the airport. That’s all. It never occurred to me that I was doing anything other than helping a friend.” When she said it aloud, it all really did sound very ordinary and reasonable. Like what any good friend would do. The problem was that it was hard to maintain a secure sense of one’s own innocence while being interviewed by the police, for the second time, about a possible homicide.
“So when you drove her to the airport, you weren’t aware that her husband was missing?”
“No. Why would I be? He wasn’t reported missing until days later, and she told me that she’d snuck out of the house while he was out at a bar.”
“Right,” the sheriff said. “So you drove her to the airport, and then a few days later you heard that he was missing. Did you call the police right away?”
“No,” Sherry admitted. “I tried to contact Caroline first. I waited until I knew for sure that she wasn’t going to get back to me before I called the police and let them know what I knew. They were already planning on talking to me by then. They knew that Caroline and I were best friends.”
