“Okay. Sure.” He was tired ... worried sick. But no matter how tired he was, he couldn’t waste time.
“You know Ms. Newton is wrong about the Popes.”
“Maybe not, Chief.” Kale told him about Lynda Pope’s trip to Bangor the same day the flowers delivered to his parents’ home had been ordered.
Willard heaved a big breath. “Kale, I’m about to tell you something that only two other people in this whole world know.”
Kale wanted to get the search party started, but the chief’s tone sounded so ominous he was afraid not to listen. “Twenty years ago I made a terrible mistake.”
Kale silently urged him to hurry.
“I’d been married about fifteen years and things were ...” He shrugged. “In a rut, so to speak.”
Kale had no idea what this had to do with anything. “Chief—”
“Bear with me, son. This has relevance you’ll understand in a minute.”
Kale summoned a little more patience.
“I had myself an affair.”
Had he heard right? The chief had an affair? “Who?” Kale hadn’t meant to ask the question, but there it was.
“It doesn’t really matter who.”
Kale nodded, not daring to ask again.
“The morning I discovered those two bodies,” the chief went on, “I didn’t get any anonymous call. I came out here to meet my lover.”
The chief had lied?
“What happened?” Kale’s pulse beat faster.
“She was waiting in her car down by the road. We rushed up to the chapel for privacy. We liked going there. Early in the morning like that, we didn’t have to worry about being bothered.”
“And you found the bodies.”
The chief nodded, his face grim. “For a few minutes we were both in shock. Two poor girls lying there with blood everywhere ... gaping holes in their chests. We were just sick. Stumbling around. She was crying. Hell, she was hysterical. I was torn all to pieces. But I was a cop. I had a job to do.”
“What did you do?”
“I sent her home and I covered our tracks. But first, I called your father and asked him to say he’d had coffee with me that morning. I needed an alibi just in case. Peter questioned me.” The chief shook his head. “I couldn’t tell him the truth and involve him, too. I finally confessed I’d been seeing someone and ...” He sighed. “Peter hasn’t spoken to me since.”
At least now Kale knew the answer to that ancient question. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was finding Sarah. “Chief—”
“I couldn’t let anyone find out,” the chief said, cutting him off. “I still loved my wife. I had two kids. I couldn’t risk my job.” He blew out another of those burdened breaths. “So I tampered with evidence. There were footprints. But in order to conceal her presence—we’d made one hell of a mess stumbling around—I had to make a mess of the snow around the bodies and the tracks leading up to the chapel.”
Damn. “It was a mistake.”
“It was. But there’s one thing that was certain, Kale.” He looked Kale straight in the eyes. “They were men’s footprints. At least a size ten and a half or eleven. The person who’d been there before us was no woman. It was definitely a man.”
Kale didn’t know what to say to that. Polly had said the voice was male. The chief insisted the murderer twenty years ago was a male. “But you said there was no connection between what happened twenty years ago and now.”
The chief heaved another of those labored breaths. “Do you really believe what we saw that morning was the work of a woman?”
Kale just didn’t know. All he knew was that they had to find Sarah.
Before it was too late.
