Mary nodded.
“You go on to work, Mary,” Cooper said. “I’m going to borrow Reno and Grace for five minutes, and then everybody’s going to go have a normal Friday. All right?”
“All right,” Mary whispered.
Grace walked her out. Through the glass front, Reno watched Grace hug the older woman in the parking lot, hold her by both shoulders, say something that made Mary almost smile, and send her off.
When Grace came back in, Cooper tipped his head toward the doors to the back. “Two minutes. My office.”
They trooped into an office even smaller and more cramped than Sheriff Wheeler’s.
“I’ll keep it short,” Cooper said. “First, Reno, you’re here as Grace’s counsel. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Mary gave me a statement and consented to let me photograph a notebook she found under the passenger seat of her sister’s car. It is, indeed, a log of times. They’re labeled, as well. Grace’s open and close time , the preschool drop-off and pickup times, when the cottage lights go off at night. Two weeks of it, in the sister’s handwriting. Mary also gave me screen captures from her sister’s phone, calls to a number that belongs to Tara Marchand, and every one of those calls was made the day before something happened to you.”
“So it was Eileen and her accomplice.”
“Mary told me her sister’s boyfriend is named Curtis. She doesn’t know his last name.”
Reno’s jaw nearly dropped open, but he managed to stop it at the last instant. Grace’s jaw did fall open.
Cooper said, “The evidence points hard at them. But pointing isn’t proving. It is, however, enough that I can bring Eileen in for a formal interview, which I’m doing Monday. I want to give her a chance to bring a lawyer.”
“Do you think she’ll cooperate?” Reno asked.
Coper replied, “My read is Eileen is a scared woman in over her head. Her boyrfriend asked for small favors that turned into bigger ones, and somewhere along the way she stopped being able to see the bottom of the swimming pool. People like that talk, once somebody gives them a way out of the trap they’re caught in.”
Reno asked, “Any news on the sender of the email about the fly in the hot chocolate?”
Cooper’s face was deadpan. “Funny you should ask. got an email overnight from the FBI cyber-security folks about that.”
“And?” Reno demanded.
“The header had an originating IP address embedded in its code. The IP is attached to the internet account of a certain fancy bakery in Apple Pie Creek.”
Bingo. Reno felt the cold, clean click of a piece dropping into the slot it had been cut for.
“That’s not enough to arrest Tara,” Cooper went on, before Reno could say it. “She can claim an employee sent the email, or maybe that her wifi’s open to anyone in the store. In which case, half of Apple Pie Creek uses it. As a criminal matter it’s a thread, not a rope.”
“As a civil matter,” Reno said, “it’s a very good thread. It puts her own building behind a libel I’m already suing over. It gives me a reason to demand every device that signed onto that network the day the fly email was sent.”
He broke into his shark grin. “Her lawyer is going to spend all weekend explaining to her what a forensic image of a hard drive is.”
Grace looked between them. “Is that good?”
“It’s good,” Reno and Cooper said at the same time, and both men smiled.
Then Cooper set his forearms on the desk and looked at Grace, and the temperature in the room changed, and Reno knew what was coming a half-second before it came because he was very good at reading people.
“There’s one more thing,” Cooper said. “Arizona. What I went down there to find out. I’m close to being able to lay it in front of you, and I’d rather do it sitting down, with whoever you want in the room, at a time you pick.”
Grace went still in the particular way she had, where she looked calm but was actually holding herself still very carefully so she wouldn’t do anything else.
“Right now?” she said.
Cooper glanced at Reno, and there was a question in it.
