Blair was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and kept rubbing her arms and said, “You know what I can’t get over? Charles didn’t have anyone. No one. No brothers or sisters and his parents are dead. He was never married. He was like a lonely little church mouse. There’s no one in the world who will…will, you know, mourn for him, except me and a couple other people who didn’t…pay much attention to him.”
She rubbed her arms and finished: “I don’t know.”
“Where were you overnight?” Virgil asked.
She pointed: “Down there. Last room.”
“From what you said before, you and Charles didn’t have a relationship,” Virgil said.
“No, no, not at all. He’s from the same town I’m from,” Blair said. “We’re from North Platte. Nebraska…it’s…Ah, jeez.”
Tears trickled down her cheeks and Virgil asked, “How did you wind up here? I mean, at the Wee Blue Inn?”
“Cheap,” she said. “What with gas and everything, from North Platte, we didn’t have much money for other things. Charles used to deliver my mail before he retired, that’s how I knew him. He thought I was kind of a big deal because I’ve got sixteen thousand followers on my blog, but I’m nothing like Anne Cash. All the money I make barely pays for the Wi-Fi. I thought this could be my big break and Charles wanted to come along. He was lonely, I guess, and he had the metal detector and I thought what the heck…”
“Why do you think…” Lucas gestured toward the room where Light was killed.
“Oh, it’s definitely linked to the Grandfelt murder, one way or another.”
“Why do you think that?” Virgil asked.
“Didn’t that other officer tell you? Officer Baily?”
“Bayes.”
“Bayes,” she said. “Didn’t he tell you about the tip?”
Lucas and Virgil looked at each other, and Virgil asked, “What tip?”
“Somebody called Bud yesterday evening. Six o’clock or so, after dinner. At McDonald’s. Said he had important information that would lead to the killer. Bud asked the guy why he was getting the call, and the guy said because he’d seen Bud on TV with Daisy Jones. He looked at our site and found our phone numbers. We listed our phone numbers for tips.”
“What was the tip?”
“The man didn’t say. He asked if we got the money, if we’d share it, and if we would, if we could keep his name out of it. Bud told him we could try. The man said he had to think some more and would call us back this morning. Bud told him to call either one of us and he said he would. He hasn’t.”
“Did you actually hear the call?”
“Yeah, I was sitting right across the table from him in McDonald’s, he put his phone on speaker.”
“And you told all this to officer Bayes?” Lucas asked.
“Yes, all of it. Why didn’t he tell you?”
“He told us to talk to you—I guess he wanted us to hear it firsthand,” Virgil said.
“If this guy calls you back, don’t mess around,” Lucas said. “It might be messing around that got Bud killed. Call us. Immediately.”
Virgil: “Did you see anything at all that worried you last night? See anything that, you know, might give us something to work with?”
She ticked a finger at him and said, “Yes! I told the other officers.I saw a white SUV three times, and it looked…” She straightened and said, “Like that one!”
She pointed at Virgil’s Tahoe. “That’s mine,” Virgil said.
“Well, it looked like that…kinda.” She was peering at Virgil’s truck. “But yours isn’t really white, is it? It’s more cream color. This one was white-white, like a business panel van, but it was big like yours, not a small SUV. We were coming from the park and I saw it behind us, and then when we got into town—we weren’t familiar with St. Paul so we got off at the wrong place and went across a bridge into downtown and had to circle back—and I saw it again, and I didn’t think anything about it, then. But then it passed us, I think it was the same one, when we got here. I was in the parking lot and saw it go past, and that time, I remembered the other times, and I thought, That’s odd. Maybe somebody was following us to see where we were going, or maybe if we had contacts with the police or something. I didn’t see it after that.”
Virgil: “You didn’t see any license plate numbers…”
“No.”
