Prize and Prejudice Page 17

  “Okay…”

  “So here’s what I think happened: Reed arrives on the island and stops at the Chamber of Commerce. Because the computer is down, he writes his information on a piece of paper for Jasper to type in later, when the computer is working. Jasper doesn’t see him—he’s trying to fix the computer. Instead, Reed is met by someone else, someone I know has been around the office all day.”

  “Who, Marlee Ingersoll? She’s the college kid, right? Why would she be involved in this?”

  “No,” Angie said. “I think Reed suspected that the Monet was a forgery. What if Reed was right, what if the painting is a fake? What if someone drugged Jasper so they could stop Reed from uncovering the forged painting?”

  “No,” Wyatt said.

  “Yes. Reed had done his research. He noticed Tabitha’s name on the list of employees at the Chamber of Commerce. He did the same research that you did and came up with the same list of names you did. How hard would it be to match the names up?”

  “Does she have an alibi?”

  “She says she left at five, along with everybody but Jasper, who had taken the computer into the back room to work on it where the lights were better. But what if she stayed long enough that Reed came in, gave her his information, and…said something that he shouldn’t have?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything. ‘Did you know you had an ancestor on the island back during the time of the mysterious lovers?’ That’s all it would take. A slip of the tongue.”

  “And then what? She kills him to keep the forgery under wraps? He didn’t die until eleven, or so I heard. Unless that’s not true.”

  “No, I heard that from Detective Bailey.” She made a face. “Oh, Wyatt. I’ve been an idiot. Probably because I’m not a professional detective or a medical doctor. But it’s just the kind of thing that would be in a classic mystery, so I shouldn’t have missed it at all. Reed was found in the harbor in December.”

  “So?”

  “So rigor mortis might not have set in yet.”

  “I would have thought it would have set in quickly, given that it was so cold.”

  “No, rigor mortis isn’t about the body hardening because it’s cold. It happens because the muscle tissues are breaking down. Heat speeds up rigor mortis, because decay is sped up. I read enough mystery novels—I should have this memorized,” Angie said. “Anyway, if it’s cold, the body doesn’t go into rigor mortis right away, because the cell walls are still intact. If you froze a body quickly enough, it probably never would go into rigor mortis, or at least until you thawed it out.”

  “So?”

  “So the people who would normally do autopsies aren’t available. The morgue isn’t ready at the new hospital location yet. Which left the autopsy to someone at the funeral home who’s less experienced. It’s the kind of thing that would have gotten caught on the mainland, but we just don’t have the expertise to handle it here.”

  “And the bloodstain? The murder weapon?”

  “Tabitha came into Sheldon’s Shuckery at six fifteen,” Angie said. “I saw her. She came in right before I did. The Shuckery is along the harbor, although you can’t get a clear view of the part of the beach where we found the bloodstain. Reed comes in, she takes down his information, Reed drops some hint about forgery and that he knows that her ancestress is involved, and then leaves. She follows him.

  “He panics and, realizing what she’s capable of, tries to lead her towards the police station. She finally catches up to him along the beach. They argue. She hits him with something—any blunt object would do. To be charitable, let’s say that she didn’t kill him on purpose. Maybe she was angry and it happened in the heat of the moment.

  “Reed falls down dead. She panics, drags the body into the water and shoves it out into the current. She does the same thing with Reed’s luggage. Then there’s the briefcase. Even though it was still early in the evening, it’s December, so it would have been too dark to read the book and documents. She can’t risk finding a streetlight and reading them there—she needs to get somewhere very public, very soon. So she buries the briefcase, possibly with the intention of coming back for it later. The cleanup doesn’t take long, but like I said, it’s dark, so she doesn’t spot the patch of blood above the tide line. She brushes out the drag marks and lets the tide do the rest.

  “Then she goes to the Shuckery. Okay, it’s not the world’s most airtight alibi. She says she left the Chamber of Commerce at five, then arrives at the Shuckery at six fifteen and hangs around until closing time with a couple of other people from the office. When asked what she was doing between those times, she says she was at home taking a shower. But it works out, because the doctor doing the autopsy isn’t all that experienced at it, and puts the time of death at eleven p.m., when she was clearly at the Shuckery, having a great time. She only needed to get lucky twice. Her first bit of luck was that nobody saw her following Reed out of the Chamber of Commerce, or at least nobody from the island saw her. Any number of tourists could have seen her, thought nothing of it, and gone back to the mainland by now. Her second bit of luck was the doctor calling the time of death for the wrong time.”

  Wyatt said, “I’m all for a good theory, but where’s the data? It’s a big accusation you would be making, and while it does sound pretty plausible, you don’t have proof.”

  Angie frowned. It felt like the case melted in front of her, dissolving like a wet paper towel into mush.

  “I don’t,” she sighed. “You’re right. I have a theory. I don’t have anything I can give to Detective Bailey, and I don’t have anything that could be presented before a judge.”

  “Which means what?”

  “That I need to collect evidence that shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Tabitha Crispin murdered Reed Edgerton.”

  Chapter 14

  The Purloined Letter

  The first step was to talk to Jasper and find out whether it was possible that Tabitha had been in the office any later than five p.m. If, for example, Jasper had been in and out of the back room with the computer and hadn’t seen her there at all, then Angie needed to ditch her theory completely. But if he had been so involved with the computer that he wouldn’t have noticed anyone coming into the office—either Tabitha or Reed—then she would proceed to step two.

  She didn’t know where Jasper lived off the top of her head, but fortunately (or unfortunately), he was still in the hospital. He was willing to talk to her.

  “You’re off early,” he said.

  “I left Aunt Margery in charge of the bookstore,” she said. She’d made a rare exception to her rule to let her great-aunt arrive at the store whenever she saw fit. Aunt Margery had shown up at ten-thirty, which was practically unheard of.

  Jasper waved his hand at the three books she’d brought him to read. “The art book was nothing much,” he said. “Too many snippets of gossip that were not-quite-true, and not enough paintings. Only a single Monet, would you believe it?”

  It was one of the books that Reed had picked out for her as a fun coffee-table art book. She gave Jasper a thin smile, unable suddenly to say anything. He missed her reaction and kept talking.

  “The Jack Reacher put me to sleep,” he said, “I tried to relate to the characters but I couldn’t. I just can’t see myself as a six-foot-tall ex-military cop who never washes his clothes.”

  “Don’t you enjoy the romance of the freedom of the road, with nothing to tie you down?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Leave that for the idiot motorcycle-riders in their cool black leathers and no pension plan.”

  “What about the romance?” she asked. It was beginning to sound like she selected those three books so carefully without managing to find anything he actually liked.

  “Oh, that one I liked,” he said. “Predictable, of course, but I chuckled at it most of the way through.”

  “I’m glad you liked one of the books, at least.”

  He flashed her a smile. “I didn�
��t mean to criticize your tastes. I just wanted to talk about the books with someone who would understand.”

  “It’s been a stressful day,” she admitted. “I’m not as quick on the uptake as I usually am. Witty banter will resume by the time you’re out of the hospital, I promise.”

  “Most appreciated. Did you bring anything else for me?”

  She hadn’t; she had been in such a rush to get out of the bookstore that it hadn’t even crossed her mind. She apologized and offered to run back and pick something out for him. He shook his head. “I’ll see if the hospital library has more by that romance writer. My mind isn’t up for War and Peace, honestly, or even a Ken Follett. But if you didn’t bring any other books, why did you come?”

  She apologized again, feeling quite warm in the face. She really should have thought before she’d come.

  “To be honest,” she said finally, “I’m here to ask you a few questions about the night of Reed’s murder. That is, let me back up. Detective Bailey, at least, is convinced that it’s a case of murder.”

  “He’s come to question me twice,” Jasper said.

  “And…he’s a little tight with his information,” Angie said.

  “As he should be.”

  “As he should be,” she agreed, “but I’m too nosy to let it go. So I came to ask you about the night of the murder.”

  “Yes?” he asked cautiously.

  “What time did you take the computer into the back room to work on it?”

  “After the others left, about five p.m.”

  “And you’re sure they left.”

  He frowned at her. “As I said, I went into the back room to work on the computer. They said they were leaving.”

  “But you didn’t check.”

  “Why would I?”

  She bit the inside of her cheek for a moment. “If someone had come in, would you honestly have heard it? I know you have to claim you would have heard them for the sake of your job, but you were working on the computer in the other room pretty intently.”

  He chuckled softly. “Angie, that’s what’s known as a leading question. You want me to say that I wouldn’t have heard it if someone came in. Why? Do you think that one of the other employees stayed late for some reason, ran into Reed, and…what? Hit him over the head and dragged him out to the bay? It’s only two blocks to the wharf, after all, and who knows? The murderer and victim might have been lucky and gone unseen by the tourists.”

  “Something like that,” Angie admitted.

  Jasper shook his head. “None of the people working at the Chamber of Commerce could have done it, Angie. I know them. This isn’t some kind of game. You can’t just make accusations like that.”

  “That’s why I’m asking you first,” she said. “If you had gone out to the front room and saw there was no one there, I’d just drop it.”

  “But?”

  “But you didn’t. And now there’s another piece of, well, I don’t know if you could call it evidence, but a pretty persuasive coincidence that suggests someone in particular.”

  “Who?”

  Angie shook her head. “It’s confidential.”

  “It’s about the painting, isn’t it?” he said.

  “It’s confidential.”

  He rolled his eyes. “All right. In the interest of strict accuracy, I suppose that it’s remotely possible that I might not have heard someone come into the front office, even though it is my job to step out front if someone comes through the door. But I’d like to stress that I don’t think it happened, and that I would have heard it regardless.”

  “Another question,” Angie said. “When was the last cup of coffee that you had that night?”

  He blinked at her. “The last cup of coffee?”

  “Humor me.”

  “I don’t know. About eleven or so, after I saw the police lights flashing along the streets.”

  Angie thought about the Chamber of Commerce building. The “front” of the office would face toward the wharf and the lighthouse. The police station was on Fairgrounds Road, and any route that the police would have taken between the police station and the lighthouse would have passed near the building. But the back room didn’t have a window.

  She said as much.

  “Oh, by then I’d moved to the front of the office,” he said. “The CPU fan wasn’t working, which was part of what was going wrong with the computer. It was overheating. I took the whole thing apart and blew it out, then replaced the fan. I happened to have one on hand in the storeroom, actually pulled it out of another computer that had failed earlier. But once I had the computer up and running again, about seven or so, I moved it back into the front room. Of course, the fan was only the first of the many, many problems I had to fix.”

  Angie remembered passing the office at one-thirty that morning and seeing Jasper inside at the front desk, and she nearly slapped herself. “So you were in the back room from approximately five until seven, and while you’re pretty sure you would have heard someone come in, you wouldn’t swear to it.”

  “Essentially, yes. But it feels like you’re trying to press me toward an answer that isn’t quite true.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “But you think I shouldn’t be protecting whoever it is that you suspect, is that right?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What about the coffee?” he asked.

  “What time did you become ill?”

  “What time did I collapse? I don’t know. Not long after I finished with the computer.”

  “By nine a.m.?”

  “I’d have to check to see when I was admitted, but I think so. Maybe a little earlier or later.”

  “Did you rinse out the coffee pot after you poured all the coffee out of it?”

  “No, I just left it for the girls in the morning.”

  The pots had been rinsed out when she’d checked them, Angie remembered, but she’d cleaned them out again with a sponge brush and some dish soap before she’d run them through the dishwasher. So someone had bothered to clean them before she’d picked them up.

  “Did the coffee taste unusual in any way?”

  “No. It was just coffee.”

  “Would you tell me if it wasn’t?”

  “No one at the Chamber of Commerce killed Reed Edgerton,” he said stubbornly.

  “Then who did?”

  “How should I know? One of the other tourists. They found out that he had some kind of clue and decided to off him before he was able to take the prize money. Wyatt Earp—sorry, Gilmore. He seems like a likely suspect.”

  Angie said, “Do you have anything on him?”

  “No! I don’t have anything on anyone! I’m just—”

  He stopped.

  “I think you should go now,” he said. “I’m not supposed to get upset right now because of my heart. And I am.”

  She left.

  She couldn’t say conclusively that Tabitha Crispin wasn’t the murderer, and there was no way to determine whether she had done something to the coffee to make Jasper ill. If her suspicions were correct, then she had wanted to get him out of the office in order to either get rid of the paper slips before he could enter them, or to either hide or move something in the office.

  The next step would be to check the Chamber of Commerce office. But that might mean coming into contact with Tabitha herself.

  If she handed this over to Detective Bailey, she wouldn’t have to do it herself.

  She chewed on her lip as she thought it over, and then she drove back to the Chamber of Commerce. As she circled the block, looking for a parking space, she suddenly jerked the wheel and drove toward the boat rental place along the beach.

  She pulled into the first empty spot she spotted and checked her phone for directions to the police station. The bright line marking the nearest route between the Chamber of Commerce and the police station passed right in front of the boat rental shop.

  Underneath her heavy jacket, Angie felt the hair
on her arms stand up straight.

  Reed hadn’t wanted to lead trouble straight to the bookstore. He’d been heading for the police. Had he called them? She dialed Detective Bailey but he wasn’t available, so she left a message asking him to call her. She wasn’t sure how to phrase her request, anyway. “Tell me if Reed called the police office” sounded too direct—he’d look into the matter and tell her that he couldn’t say anything. “Was there any possibility that a call could have been made to the police office at about five forty-five, and get cut off?” Same problem, and phrased so that Detective Bailey’s nose would start wriggling with interest. He might have already known the answer and wasn’t willing to tell her. She didn’t know.

  How was she going to get the proof she needed? Or to at least get Detective Bailey to admit that he already had enough proof?

  She didn’t know what to do next. Talking to Jasper had left a bad taste in her mouth. She could go back to the funeral home and question the doctor who had called Reed’s time of death. That might work.

  A big RV rolled slowly past her and turned toward the bookstore parking lot. The Beauchamps. Angie waved from the window of her car, and to her surprise they stopped and waited for her.

  Angie pulled up alongside them and leaned out the window of her Golf just as Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp were climbing out of the stopped RV. They both looked…unusually happy. Mrs. Beauchamp practically jumped out of her skin when she saw Angie, and slammed the RV door behind her.

  Mr. Beauchamp stood, smiling in front of the RV and looked back and forth from Angie to his wife, from his wife to Angie, as if waiting for Mrs. Beauchamp to say something.

  “Mr. Beauchamp, Mrs. Beauchamp,” Angie said. “How are you?”

  Mrs. Beauchamp said, “Oh, Angie. We are just terrific.”

  Mr. Beauchamp gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  “You see, Angie,” he said with his arm around his wife, “we had a long talk and realized we are both quite sick of this RV and the travel. Even though we both pretended to like it, turns out the Beauchamps are a stationary pair, not meant to wonder. We are headed out on the ferry right after we wrap a little business with this treasure hunt.”