The color drained from Champ’s face. His chair fell over as he jumped up and grabbed his briefcase, ready to flee.
I started to cast a spell but stopped when Champ went sprawling.
Trey Stone had stopped him, not with magic but with a well-placed leg in Champ’s way.
Ange winked at me. “Shall we go to my place?”
Nick cleared his throat.
“To ours. We’ve had enough excitement for a day.”
I glanced to Harper. She gave me a tiny nod. It was okay with her and Reina if we left them, and the detective.
At Ange’s, we took turns telling Nick the whole story (minus the witchcraft parts).
He frowned when we came to this evening’s development.
“I thought you’d be impressed with our dazzling deductions,” Ange complained.
“I am, I’m deeply impressed. I was only thinking about the people who were going to move into the retirement village. If that project dies, which is very likely if the main investor goes down for murder and the grounds are found to be contaminated, a lot of folks will have to leave the area.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Ange said. “What about you, Bex?”
I shook my head. “I don’t see what else we could have done though. And if there are harmful chemicals in the soil or the groundwater or the air, it’s better this way, isn’t it?” The spell my friends had quizzed me about flashed up in my memory. “Maybe it’ll all turn out well in the end.”
Chapter 30
I’d expected a rapid denouement after the scene at theBlue Moon. I was disappointed.
It took Trey Stone two whole agonizing days until he called on me during my lunch break. “Your friend has been cleared.”
The penny dropped when he broke into a wide grin that unsettled me at first. It transformed the stern detective.
“Candice? That’s wonderful.” I decided against splitting hairs with him about the definition of friend. We may not have become bosom buddies, but with her letter, Candice had restored my self-esteem, and that in itself was enough. I was glad that while I had my inner freedom, I’d helped restore her outer freedom. I’d call that even. “It was Champ, wasn’t it?”
“He was careless enough to keep the gloves he used when he stabbed the victim. They found trace amounts of blood in the lab. We also uncovered a vial with soil in his car. It had Tim Boyd’s fingerprints on it. You probably already know what this means.”
“Is this why Champ killed him? To steal the sample and ensure that nobody else would hear about it? But what about the lab report?”
“Tim used a laboratory down in Florida. It was highly unlikely that the connection would ever come to light.”
“That’s why they both were at the fair. We should have realized sooner that Tim was the last person to be interested in old stuff. He must have arranged a meeting there to collect money or whatever it was, after he’d made it clear to Champ that he could ruin him. After Champ stabbed Tim, he must have stolen the vial with the soil sample, only it wasn’t completely tight.”
“The first meeting was at the motel. I don’t think Charles Martin Pratt was ready to kill back then,” the detective said. “
“Probably not.” I had sensed anger in the room, but no malice when I cast my spell.
“The night the victim was killed, Pratt proposed to slip into the building and hand over a deed, giving Boyd ownership of ten percent of the retirement village. He knew when the place would be deserted.”
“Smart. And evil.”
“Blackmail is a dangerous business.”
“Yes, but however he justified killing Tim to himself, there’s no excuse for framing an innocent woman. And he almost succeeded.”
“Well, he didn’t, thanks to you. That was a clever trick you played.”
I accepted his compliment with a nonchalant shrug and saw him to the door.
