Maybe, if Natalie reported the stamp missing and the professor said she’d seen the housekeeper looking in the desk.
She’d have to get rid of the fingerprints. Fast.
But that wouldn’t erase the suspicion.
Meaning that come tomorrow, she might not have a job or a place to live. All she’d have was the two grand that had been bid on the stamp in her purse. But that would be a one-off. The stamp well had dried up.
The scene before her blurred, and she sniffed. Swiped at her lashes with the back of her hand.
Her life was a train wreck.
“Are you getting a cold?” Her brother scowled at her. “I told you, I don’t want no germs.”
“No, I’m not getting a cold.”
But a cold would be much, much easier to deal with than the mess she’d made of her life.
Unless she could figure a way out of her bleak situation before tomorrow.
SIXTEEN
“I HAVE APUZZLE FOR YOU.”
As Rod’s comment crackled over the phone line, Brad glanced at his chief deputy and slid into his patrol car, cell to his ear. Larry had the graffiti situation in hand, and it didn’t take two law enforcement officers to listen to the owner rant about his barn being defaced.
“Lay it on me.”
“It’s about Micah Reeves’s death.”
Brad’s ears perked up. “I’m listening.”
“During the autopsy, I found a small amount of caked matter on the back of his shirt. It bothered me.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. It could have been poop from a passing bird, for all I knew. He’d been lying there awhile. But I decided to send it out for testing. It wasn’t bird poop.”
Silence.
Naturally.
The coroner loved milking juicy tidbits for all they were worth.
Brad played along. “What was it?”
“The report says it contained food-derived proteins and a multitude of peptide digests.”
“Can you translate that to English?”
“Vomit.”
Brad frowned. “Are you saying Micah threw up?”
“Onto the back of his shirt?”
Oh yeah. That didn’t fit.
“Did you run DNA on it?”
