Critical Impact (9 page)

“I
t's obvious to me,” Stu had said, leaning against the patrol car and talking on the phone to Alec, “that someone is trying to frame Anna Barker.” The more he got to know Anna, the more he was beginning to believe her, that someone was behind this. Because surely Anna, in her condition, could not have climbed halfway up Dragon Mountain to string a piece of wire across the path—two feet off the ground.

Stu was trying without much success to keep his anger at bay. On the other end of the call, Alec was assuring him that they had to do this by the book, and that he, Stu, needed to keep a lid on things. What if, on the off chance that Anna
was
responsible, the police had focused their time and their resources on proving her innocence? Even though Alec didn't believe she was guilty, they had to face the facts. And, until the facts said otherwise, they had to follow the leads they had.

“What about innocent until proven guilty?”

“That's for the courts, Stu,” Alec said. “We look at evidence. That's all we do. We collect evidence and give it to the courts.”

Stu felt frustrated. He felt that Anna had nothing to do with this. “What about gut intuition?” Stu had asked. “You and I both know that she's innocent.”

“Then the facts will reveal it,” Alec said in an even voice.

The sight of Anna striding across the beach toward him earlier had flustered him. He didn't know what he would have said to her if she had confronted him, so he had turned away. He didn't know what else to do. He supposed that he would have had no choice but to tell her that, inside the cottage she had been renting, they had found a container of diesel fuel in a closet, behind a suitcase and under a blanket. It was determined that the bomb that destroyed City Hall was made of fertilizer and diesel fuel.

Stu had been in the station earlier when this particular tip about the diesel fuel had come in through the anonymous tip line. Liz had been manning the phone. She had spent a long time jotting down information on the pad of paper. When she hung up, she had said, “We've got some guy who says they saw someone who looked like Anna carrying a yellow can into the cottage that she rented at Flower Cottage. The person said he saw this person—who looks just like the pictures of the lady on the television—carry this in a month ago.”

The Whisper Lake Crossing Sheriff's Department had no choice but to get a judge to issue a search warrant for Anna's cabin at Flower Cottage and for her mother's house, and for Anna's car. At eight this morning, the judge had signed the warrant, and they were here just before nine.

After going around and around some more and getting nowhere, Alec had said he wanted to bring Steve in on this. Steve and Bette and Bette's son, Ralph, who was a simple man in his forties, were very close. If anyone was going to get at the truth it would be Steve. Steve would be here shortly. And by now he was certain that the police were all over Anna's mother's house, as well.

Liz was outside now, standing in front of him, gesturing. “I have some more bad news.”

“How could there be more bad news?”

“We found a cell phone in the glove compartment of Anna's car. We're quite certain it's the one that probably detonated the bomb,” Liz said. “It's a plain black throwaway phone and we can't find out who it's registered to. There's no identifying information on it.”

Stu stared at her. Whoever was responsible for framing her was really doing a bang-up job. “It's a plant.”

“I agree with you. No one who does this kind of crime leaves evidence all over the place for people to conveniently find. It's just too coincidental. Plus, I
don't know Anna as well as you do. I didn't go in to visit her every day she was in the hospital. But I trust you, Stu. I think the quicker we get to the bottom of this, the better. But, and here's the bad news…”

“I thought the phone was the bad news,” Stu said.

“We have to go up to Bette's now and arrest Anna. Shawnigan's pushing for a quick arrest. And if we don't take her in, we're showing favoritism. It'll come out that it's because of you. Everyone knows you visited her every day in the hospital. The officer from Shawnigan took Alec and me aside and said that your behavior in Shawnigan was very unprofessional.”

“Unprofessional! How was it unprofessional?” Stu exclaimed.

“They said when you and Alec went to the Shawnigan Police Department, you sat down beside Anna very close. Those were his words—
very close
. It was clear to all of them that you two were an item. The way you looked into each other's eyes, or something. So if we don't arrest her, it'll show favoritism. They want us to go up now and arrest her, based on the fertilizer in her locker, the wallet in her apron, the can of diesel fuel in this cabin and the cell phone in her car.”

The two of them walked up toward Bette's house slowly. Liz said, “Just to make it easier, I'll do the talking.”

Stu nodded. His mouth felt dry. He knew when
he saw Anna's face that she would know he had betrayed her.

When Bette saw them at the door, she said, “You're here. Good. You can straighten this out. Anna's in the kitchen. She's awfully upset. You can tell her that you found nothing of significance and she can go home and you can go home and everything will be all right.”

Liz shook her head. As they followed Bette toward the kitchen, Stu's heart began that thudding again. It was almost as bad as the pounding in his head.

When they entered the kitchen, Anna looked up at him. She was still beautiful in his eyes, but he had never seen her looking so down, so sad and so thin. It seemed, despite her cast, that her shoulders folded in on themselves as she sat there, small, in her chair. Her lips were pinched and her face was white. She looked up at the two police officers expectantly.

“Stu? Liz? Is everything all right? Are they at my mother's house, too? I can't get hold of her. She's not answering the phone. They won't find anything. I didn't do anything.”

I believe you,
Stu thought but couldn't say it out loud.

Liz stepped forward and faced Anna. As Liz told her that she was under arrest and as she read her her rights, Stu felt as if he were falling into a deep, dark cave that he would never, ever get out of. He couldn't look at Anna, so instead he looked down.

Bette said, “Stu, this is ridiculous and you know it. Stop this immediately. Anna didn't do this, and you know it.”

He only said, “We have no choice.”

“You always have a choice.” It was Anna who said this. Her voice shook with rage and fear.

 

In her wildest imagination, Anna never thought something like this would ever happen.

She was driven to the Whisper Lake Crossing Sheriff's Department in a squad car. She refused to look at Stu. Wouldn't talk to him. She sat in the backseat, looking down and shivering, while Stu drove and Liz sat beside him. Quietly, the two in front talked to each other. Anna didn't pay attention. When they got to the police station, they filled out forms and asked her more questions. She answered with as few words as she could manage. She was feeling sick to her stomach and weak, plus her arm was beginning to ache.

Liz took the fingers of Anna's left hand and pressed them into a pad of ink and then onto a card. The fingers of her right hand were still bandaged. Liz looked at them and frowned. It was clear that Liz didn't know what to do in this situation. Perhaps there was no protocol for broken fingers. They took a picture of her and asked her to please sit down across from Alec's desk.

The whole time Stu merely sat at his desk and wrote while Bette, who had followed them to the
station, leaned over him, gesturing and arguing. Anna couldn't hear what she was saying. Her mother breezed in with a lady from church who was a lawyer. The lawyer came over and told Anna not to say anything. Anna shook her head. She hadn't really talked much at all because she was so numb from the arrest. She was not prepared for this surreal feeling.

The lawyer argued that because of her condition, Anna was not a flight risk. She said that Anna couldn't even drive. Anna, too downtrodden to correct this misconception, just kept her head hung low. Anna went over her story multiple times. No, the cell phone in her car wasn't hers. She had never seen it before and had assumed it belonged to one of her students. Her fingerprints were on it because she'd found it on the floor of her car.

After lots of discussion and telephone calls, Anna was finally released into her mother's custody at four o'clock that afternoon. When the television cameras tried to film her as she and her mother and Lois and Bette walked out of the police station, her mother put her hand up to cover their lenses and Anna dropped her head.

Anna had never felt so humiliated in all her life. Not even months ago when Peter had called her a “goody-goody Christian girl” in front of everyone they worked with at the studio. He was joking. He was always joking like that, calling her his “little hick from Maine,” and then in the next breath he would
bend down and kiss her cheek. Why did she take it for so long? The simple fact was that she thought she loved him. She thought she could change him. But not even when he declared to everyone that she wouldn't sleep with him had she felt this way. That had hurt. But this was utterly humiliating.

She felt debased and ruined. She could already see the headlines, her name and face splashed across the news.
Former Hollywood Makeup Artist Arrested for Double Murder.
They would show her before picture—her face made-up and perfect the way she liked it, her hair gelled and just right, the scarves she always wore at jaunty angles around her neck. And then they would compare it to the picture of her today. Broken arm, scarred face, weirdo red glasses, no makeup, flat hair and an old poncho of her mother's, the only thing she could put on quickly over her cast. No wonder Stu didn't find her appealing. It was stupid for her to think of Stu in any other light than a police officer looking to solve a crime. What did she expect? She thought she'd learned her lesson with Peter, but obviously she hadn't. Because here she was, falling hard.

 

Stu felt terrible about arresting Anna for murder. When Anna finally left late in the afternoon, she was surrounded and ushered out by Catherine, her aunt Lois, Bette and a lawyer. Aside from Bette, who spoke to him when Anna was first brought in, nobody else talked with him, not even Catherine, whom he had
grown to admire over the past week. But how could he blame her? He had just arrested her daughter. When they had all left, he went in a back room to go over the case files again.

Now it was quiet in the station. Liz and Alec had already gone home. It was dark. Stu poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee and went back to his desk with all the files and reports about the bombing. He reread all the police files. He read the news accounts. He went online and read everything he could. There was something the police were missing, some important piece of the puzzle that they were skimming over. It could be right in front of their eyes, but they weren't seeing it.

Could, perchance, Anna be guilty of any of this? Was he blind to the truth because he was attracted to her? She had told him that Peter Remington lied about being a Christian. Was that the truth or was that entire story a lie? Was Anna herself lying about being a Christian?

No! He pounded his fist on his desk. What about the pane of glass? What kind of a person trips over glass just to prove her innocence? Or maybe the glass incident was just a weirdly coincidental accident. And then there was Hilary's blog. He read over those entries again, trying to make sense of it. Were they somehow related to whoever was framing Anna? But why? He picked up the phone and tried calling Jack Habrowser. Miracle of miracles, the man himself
answered on the third ring. Stu was so surprised he was flustered for a moment.

The connection was not a good one. Stu could barely hear Habrowser over the static. He introduced himself as the officer investigating Hilary Jonas's death.

“Such a sad thing,” Jack said.

Stu told him about his ex-wife's blog entries. Did Jack have any idea who she was writing about?

“I thought you already made an arrest in that case.”

How did Jack find this out so quickly? Stu asked him this.

“It's all over the news.”

Oh, great!

Jack said, “I'm only guessing, but wouldn't she be writing about the woman you arrested? Look, I've been out of the loop for a while and out of Hil's life even longer than that. I'm only guessing.”

“We'd like to talk with you. When can you get to Whisper Lake Crossing, Maine and go over a few things with us?”

“So the case isn't closed?”

“There are still a few outstanding issues.”

“Well, I'm on the water. We're on a tight schedule. It'll be a while before I can get up there.”

“Maybe we will come and get you, then.”

“I've told you before. It's been a year since I even
saw Hil. I don't know who she was talking about. I can't help you. I've moved on, man.”

Stu wasn't backing down. “Still, we do want to talk with you.”

“Okay, then.” Jack's voice held something like annoyance, and when Stu hung up he thought to himself that he needed to check out Jack Habrowser some more.

Or maybe he was just grasping at straws, trying to find someone else to blame.

What more could he do here? He turned off the computer, put all the files away in their places, turned out the lights, locked the door and got in his car.

He thought about the cloud mirage, the mountains that looked like mountains but weren't. Maybe he needed to look elsewhere. What if someone were trying to kill the mayor? What if this person framed Anna for the bombing? Was Anna still safe? Was Johnny safe?

Stu didn't go home. Instead, he went to Whisper Lake Crossing Hospital. It was only seven. Visiting hours wouldn't be over for a while. Like Anna, Johnny had been questioned and requestioned since he regained consciousness. Like Anna, he hadn't seen anything or heard anything. But maybe Stu needed to try questioning Johnny again.