In Seconds (17 page)

“We need to know.”

She opened her door, but turned back. “But what if she gave them the numbers I called from?”

He pulled his bottom lip between his teeth as he considered her. “You won’t know until you ask.”

Myles stood in the opening of Jared’s cubicle. “Grab Linda and bring her to my office.”

Jared’s eyebrows rumpled as he twisted around. “Right now? I’m still pulling my notes together.” He tapped the cheap combination calendar and clock near his phone. “See this? Our meeting isn’t for an hour.”

“I don’t care. I can’t wait any longer.” Like yesterday, Myles had spent most of the morning on the phone with the concerned citizens of Pineview, repeating himself, mollifying, placating, soothing and promising to find a killer he wasn’t sure he could catch. He and his investigators certainly weren’t going to solve this case on what they knew so far. And the more time that passed, the weaker their chances grew. He had to have fresh information, and he had to have it right away. He also needed
to keep his mind fully engaged. Even with the pressure he was under, whenever he stopped moving or had half a second to himself, he began thinking about Vivian.

He didn’t like that, mostly because he couldn’t come up with a consistent reaction. One minute he was reliving last night. The next he was picturing the rough-looking character who’d been in her kitchen this morning and wondering if their time at the cabin had been some sort of game.

Rex acted as if
he
belonged in Vivian’s house.

But a woman who just wanted a quick lay didn’t hold back the way Vivian had done…?.

“You’re a little uptight these days, Sheriff,” Jared complained. “If you don’t settle down you’re going to have a heart attack.”

“I’m thirty-nine.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m talking about an hour. Sixty minutes. I can’t have sixty minutes?”

“I don’t need a typed report, okay? For right now, let’s bypass your meticulous but time-consuming process. I just want you to sit down in my office and tell me what you’ve got.”

“What’s the rush?” He rummaged around inside his drawer for a pen.

Myles spotted a pen on the floor and picked it up for him. Jared’s desk was no cleaner than his car. How he could create such orderly reports and detailed investigations out of this chaos, Myles had no idea. He obviously didn’t feel he could be bothered with the mundane details of life.

“I’ve got everybody and his dog blowing up my phone,” Myles told him. “And in three hours, I have to meet with the mayor and tell him that we haven’t got a
clue who killed Pat. Needless to say, I’m not looking forward to that. I want to be able to offer more than what I’ve been telling the people who’ve checked in with me already.”

Wearing a put-upon expression, Jared jotted a few notes on the outside of a manila folder. “Fine. Give me ten minutes.”

“You got it.”

Myles planned to spend that time reading the coroner’s report, which the M.E. had faxed over a few minutes earlier. Instead, he received a call from Chrissy Gunther, who wanted to find out what he’d done with her tip about Vivian’s gun. He tried to convince her to trust him with the information, but she was having none of it, so he was infinitely relieved when Jared and Linda knocked on his open door. Waving them in, he told Chrissy he had a meeting. Then he hung up without even waiting for her to say goodbye.

“Sit down.” He eyed the files his detectives were carrying. Several were quite thick—a sign that they’d been doing their interviews. “So?” He rubbed his hands. “What have you found?”

Frizzy dark hair with a sprinkling of gray framed Linda’s face. The only way to tame it was to wear it in a ponytail, which she did, every day.

Dropping her stack of files in the middle of his desk, she slouched in her seat and met his gaze through a pair of glasses that always sat a little crookedly on her nose. “We don’t have a lot, but we’re making progress.”

That was a fairly standard answer. One he’d given himself at least a dozen times this morning. It wasn’t enough.

“Be more specific.”

She glanced at Jared, who nodded for her to continue. “What do you see here?” she asked, opening the top file.

Myles stared at a picture of the shoe impressions he’d already seen on the linoleum of the vacation rental. “Looks like the perpetrator was wearing athletic shoes.” Which he’d surmised when he saw them the first time. He hoped Linda wasn’t going to suggest that this was some kind of breakthrough.

“Correct. Do you notice anything unusual about them?”

He picked up the photographs so he could study each one. “No.”

“Look at the wear on the soles.”

“There is no wear.”

“Exactly,” Jared said. “All the nicks and gouges and wear patterns that make a pair of shoes unique to their owner are missing.”

The lack of imperfections suddenly jumped out at Myles. “They’re new?”

“They’d have to be, right?”

Linda seemed pleased by this conclusion, but Myles couldn’t imagine why. New shoes would only make it harder to tie a suspect to the crime scene. “And this is good
why?
”

“Hang on,” she said. “What else do you see?”

Tired of playing her guessing game, Myles put down the pictures. “I don’t see anything unusual. Tell me what you’re driving at.”

She set two pictures side by side. “We didn’t spot it at first, either. It wasn’t until we tried to figure out the size of those shoes that it became apparent.”

“
What
became apparent?”

“Pat had more than one assailant.”

Grabbing the two pictures again, Myles held them close. “That would mean two different pairs of shoes. But…every shoe impression here looks
exactly
the same.”

“Because they’re all from the same
type
of shoe. Both pairs are new. The only difference is size. Give me your ruler. I’ll show you.”

Myles searched through his top drawer. It wasn’t as messy as Jared’s, but he’d stuffed too much inside it.

Eventually he came up with a ruler and Jared measured.

“See? One is a size eleven. The other a twelve and a half.”

“You’ve verified this?”

“More than once.”

“You’re saying two men bought the same shoes at the same time.” Myles thought of the guys he’d found on the side of the road. They’d entered his mind so many times. Maybe it was worth stopping over at Reliable Auto to see if they’d picked up their vehicle. If not, maybe he could get hold of them, talk to them again…?.

Linda smiled. “They probably even bought them at the same place.”

Now they were making progress. “Where?” If they could find that out, maybe they could get the store’s surveillance tapes for the two weeks prior to the murder, see who came in to buy athletic shoes.

“According to the database, they’re Athletic Works Brand, which are sold at Walmart.”

They didn’t have a Walmart. The closest one was in Kalispell. There was no guarantee they were even bought at that location, but Myles was willing to try anything.
“Have you spoken to the manager of the Walmart in Kalispell?”

“Yes. We’re going out there this afternoon.”

“Good,” he said, but his brief flash of hope had already dimmed. He tried to focus on how the shoe details fit with all the rest. “The odd thing is…this information contradicts everything we’ve established about the murder.”

Linda blinked at him from behind her thick lenses. “What do you mean?”

“If two men bought shoes to avoid leaving prints that could be traced back to them, they were planning a crime. Yet everything about the scene indicates that Pat’s murder wasn’t premeditated, from the choice of weapon to the lack of any effort to conceal the crime or dispose of the body.”

Resting his elbows on his knees, Jared clasped his hands together. “Maybe the
murder
wasn’t premeditated. Maybe it was meant to be a
robbery
.”

“You do that much planning? Get your buddy to go with you to buy shoes, then call up a Realtor and ask to see a house, just to grab a guy’s wallet?”

“Why not? It’s the perfect way to have a stranger meet you at a private location.”

“But a guy like Pat isn’t likely to carry much on him. Hitting a gas station would probably net you more.”

“They could’ve taken his car.”

“They didn’t.”

“I know. I haven’t quite figured that out,” Jared admitted.

“Maybe Pat fought them, like you were saying earlier,” Linda said. “Maybe he hurt one, and it really pissed him off.”

“If someone else was hurt, there should’ve been some evidence of it at the scene.” “Ron Howard” and his sidekick hadn’t been sporting any scratches or gouges. At least not that Myles could see. But maybe there were marks he
couldn’t
see. The lame guy had been covered from head to toe. His excessive tattoos had reminded Myles of prison inmates. Did they have a couple of violent ex-cons on their hands?

Jared jumped in again. “Not necessarily. Maybe the injury didn’t bleed. And they didn’t take the car because they knew it would link them to the murder.”

That made some sense. Myles rocked back. “What about the partial thumbprint on the door?”

“Turned out to be Gertie’s,” Jared told him. “After Pat died, she wasn’t thinking straight. Instead of using the phone right there on the counter, she stumbled outside and ran down the street to C.C.’s. Or so she said. I can’t imagine walking away from a phone that’s right in front of you, but…there you have her side of the story.”

Myles could imagine Gertie doing precisely what she’d said. He remembered how disoriented he’d felt when Amber Rose passed away, and he’d been expecting it, watching death’s inexorable approach, for months. “Her husband had just died in her arms, Jared.”

Jared cleared his throat and Linda shifted as if his words had reminded them both why he’d know about this particular situation, and he clenched his jaw, trying to contain his irritation. He hated dealing with the discomfort his loss created in others. That made it so hard to ever be normal, to carry on without feeling as if he was constantly being examined under a microscope. If the good citizens of Pineview perceived him as acting too distraught over Amber Rose’s death, they whispered
things like, “He’s got to pick up and go on, for the sake of that little girl. You can only mourn for so long.” And if it seemed to them that he didn’t care enough, as if he
was
putting her death behind him as so many suggested, they began to doubt that he was being honest about his grief or that he’d ever really loved Amber Rose to begin with. Her death was bad enough. The extra attention he’d had to suffer over the past three years made it worse.

Or maybe, given that he’d made love with someone else for the first time last night, he was especially self-conscious today. Did the fact that he’d wanted Vivian so badly, that he’d thought of Amber Rose and yet that hadn’t lessened his desire, somehow take away from what he’d felt for his wife? Was he capable of moving on in an emotional sense? Had he finally reached that point after all the lonely months since he’d buried her? Or was it only hormones?

Trying to regain his focus, he thumbed through the rest of the files they’d brought until he came to the diagram of Pat’s many injuries. He’d already seen it, briefly, in the autopsy report, but this reminded him of the missing can opener. “Any more news on the murder weapon?”

“A little,” Jared replied. “The wounds Pat sustained are consistent with the electric can opener that’s missing.”

“You mean
a
can opener. You haven’t found
the
can opener.”

“No. But Gertie took me to the store to show me the brand, and I bought one. The dents in Pat’s skull match perfectly.”

“Could there be other objects that match?”

“I doubt it. I took a short video of the coroner’s demonstration—” Linda searched through her purse and with
drew a very small video camera “—if you’d like to see it for yourself.”

When she had the camera powered up and ready, she passed it across the desk to him, and he watched the coroner use the can opener like a rock against a Styrofoam head to simulate what had happened to Pat. The indentations clearly matched the protruding magnet.

Poor old guy, Myles thought. Pat didn’t deserve to die, especially like this. It was even more tragic that he’d been killed for less than fifty dollars. “Does Gertie know you’re investigating her?” he asked as he returned the camera.

“She knows I’m doing all I can to find out who killed her husband,” Jared said, “and she appreciates it.”

She’d probably appreciate it a lot less if she knew he’d been snooping around in her personal affairs, looking for a motive. Investigating her added insult to injury. Feeling protective of her, Myles was somewhat offended by Jared’s attitude. “I can’t believe there isn’t any blood at the scene belonging to someone other than Pat,” he mused. “Could we have missed something?”

“No.”

“No trace evidence under his fingernails?”

“No.”

“What about that smear on Pat’s shirt?”

“That was his,” Jared said.

Myles decided he was definitely going to Reliable Auto. He wanted to find “Ron Howard” and Peter Ferguson. They’d given him a bad feeling, and all those clothes “Howard” had been wearing seemed even more suspect now. “Damn, I’d like to think Pat got in a swipe here and there.”

“Against
two?
”

Myles rolled his eyes at Jared’s heavy skepticism. “You can’t allow me the comfort of one harmless fantasy?”

Puzzled by his response, Jared leaned forward. “How does it bring you comfort if it isn’t what really happened?”

“Forget it.” Myles gave Linda a look of exasperation, but he knew she wouldn’t necessarily agree with him. Although she used to complain about Jared all the time—the mess that surrounded him, his obsessive tendencies, his literal nature—she’d gained a great deal of respect for him over the past two years. Since he had no wife or children with whom to spend his evenings, and would work 24/7 if left to his own devices, she and her husband invited him over for dinner probably twice a week. Other times, she brought him leftovers for lunch.