"We need to reconsider everything," I said as we left the general store. "The fence cuts, the equipment in the maintenance shed. Mary’s group didn’t agitate the luminooks."
"So we have an unknown suspect with professional capabilities and unknown motives." Riley's investigator mind was already working through the possibilities. "Someone who's been operating while we watched the wrong people."
We strode down the boardwalk to the saloon, finding Cara sitting at a table with Billy when we arrived.
Cara looked up with a smile as I approached. Billy slunk lower in his seat.
Riley and I tugged out chairs and sat. I quickly explained about a letter going missing, noticing how Billy fidgeted and looked ready to bolt.
"Do you happen to know anything about the sheriff's letter, Billy?" Cara asked.
"Maybe," he whispered.
She sighed. "I didn't hear you."
His shoulders slumped. "It's up in my room. I couldn't read it, and I can read a lot."
"Billy," his grandmother grumbled. "Go get it this instant."
He slid out of his seat and raced up the back stairs to the second landing, the thud of his sneakers ringing out as he hurried down the hall. He returned shortly with the letter.
Exactly the same as Aunt Inla's.
"Apologize," Cara growled.
"Sorry." Billy looked ready to slump on the floor.
"Don't think your parents won't hear about this, young man," his grandmother said. She stood and took his hand. "I'm terribly sorry. I promise nothing like this will happen again."
I just nodded as she took Billy back upstairs.
Riley and I left, striding to the jailhouse and settling at our desks, ready to begin our day.
"We'll start over," I said, tugging a fresh pad of paper and a brand-new pen from the drawer, placing them carefully on my blotter. "New investigation, new approach. This time, we'll find the right answers."
"We will." Her confidence in us, in me, steadied something that had been shaking since the interrogation revealed our mistake. "And next time, we'll check with Aunt Inla first."
I laughed despite the gravity of the situation. "Next time, I'll account for five-year-old interference in my contingency planning."
"Now you're learning." She stretched her arm outbetween us, and I took her hand, meshing our fingers together. "Our mistake eliminated three suspects and confirmed the king's initiative. That's progress."
She was right, though it didn't ease the sting of professional failure.
We had work to do, a real threat to identify and stop.
The luminooks were still in danger, and someone could still be planning to exploit them.
Chapter 26
Riley
The sheriff’s office smelled of coffee and pine-scented cleaner as Dungar and I hunched over his meticulously organized evidence board the next evening. Outside, stars spangled the night sky, and Main Street had gone quiet hours ago. Only the occasional creak of the building when a gust of wind hit it just right interrupted our focused silence.
“It’s all here.” I traced a timeline we’d constructed across a sheet of graph paper. “Every luminook disturbance, every security breach, every suspicious sighting. We just missed the pattern.”
Dungar grunted in agreement, his finger tapping three specific incidents marked in red. “The timing shifted. First breaches occurred between noon and two. Then they moved to early evening. Now they’re happening after midnight.”
“Adapting to our surveillance schedule?” I said, my shoulder brushing his arm as I leaned in. The contactsent heat through me despite the seriousness of our situation. “I wonder if they’ve been studying our patterns.”
