With reluctance, I set the stick down. "You're no fun."
He laughed. "What do you mean? I take you to all the nicest construction sites, all the newest cow fields, and all the hottest crime scenes."
"You're right. What was I thinking?"
"We have to stop by Jamie's and pick up a list of the patents that Carl filed in the last year. Maybe it will give us an insight into exactly how much of Daisy's work Carl was stealing."
As we pulled into town headed to lawyer Jamie's office, I saw Faith on the sidewalk. "Stop."
Aodhagan didn't question me. He just stopped, pulling into a spot near Jamie's office.
"Thanks. If I see any of them alone, I figure it's the perfect time to strike."
Which made it sound like I was planning to kill the Crowes, but I assumed he knew what I actually meant. I scrambled out of the car and started moving casually in her direction, and Aodhagan headed for Jamie's. I casually approached Faith and asked her how she was doing.
She seemed scared by the question, her eyes widening. "I'm all right," she whispered so quietly I had to lean forward to hear her.
"Is it going okay at the house? Do you need anything?" I found that, much like James, I actually meant it. I felt sorry for Faith. She just seemed so beaten down.
She shook her head. "I'm okay," she repeated.
I decided to cut to the chase since Faith didn't seem inclined toward conversation. "Did you realize that your father's will leaves all the money to a cat sanctuary?"
She shook her head again, very slightly. "I heard it last night. And about the potential sale of the company. Jackson told me."
I desperately wanted to talk to Jackson. He seemed to be the one who knew the most from every quarter, and he and the teens were the only ones we'd never been able to catch alone. I knew that Faith would never point a finger at Jackson, but others had. My money was still on weirdly fervent Robert, but Jackson certainly had my instincts in overdrive as well. The only people I really didn't suspect were James and Faith, and that was likely only because I felt bad for them.
"So you didn't know either of those things before?"
She repeated her only motion I'd seen so far, a barely perceptible shake of her head. "My father…he never told me anything. He…I guess he just didn't trust me. Or didn't think I needed to know. Daisy told me I could be independent and have the things I deserve. That I just needed to separate myself from him, but"—she swallowed hard—"I just wanted him to love me."
Her eyes filled up with tears, and my stomach twisted. Poor Faith. She was so fragile in ostensibly every way, and her father had given her nothing. Though, I wasn't sure if that was better or worse than what her siblings had gotten from their father. Maybe being ignored was better in the end. I couldn't say. My mother hovered when it was something she was invested in, like my appearance or a potential to see me as a bride to an appropriate sort of man. My father seemed to like me well enough, but he ignored me most of the time. I didn't have a perspective of what it might be like to have parents who struck an even balance, and Faith had brothers who seemed like they were worse for the attention they'd gotten.
"Who do you think killed your father?" I asked, deciding she wasn't too fragile for me to hit her with a direct question.
She laughed, but it was definitely tinged with hysteria and not actual amusement. "I wasn't really sure, but then after I heard all the news last night, I think maybe…Robert had the most to lose. Is that bad for me to say?" Her eyes filled up again. "I don't know who killed Dad."
She slapped a hand over her mouth, and I had the strong impression that she was barely holding it together and that she sincerely wished she hadn't spoken the words she'd said. I didn't tell her that I also thought Robert seemed like the most likely suspect. She wouldn't take it well. I thanked her for talking to me and offered my sympathy again. Then I gave Aodhagan a look as he emerged from Jamie's, indicating I was finished, before stepping off the curb and heading back to the car.
Aodhagan joined me within a minute or two, shutting the door and glancing my way. "Here's the list Jamie compiled. Carl Crowe filed thirty-two patents last year. I wonder how many came from Daisy. I think we should ask her."
I agreed we should if we came across her, but first we had to watch hours of sped-up footage and talk to the Greek Gods. I hadn't seen them in days. If all else failed, I was pretty sure we could run them down at my house. I didn't want to go there, but I was willing to if it came to that.
The footage Junior compiled was just as awful as I'd pictured. We watched it on double speed, eating chips and drinking beer. I had never been a beer drinker before Texas, but now it was a favorite, and not just because it was all I had access to. Maybe there was more Penny in me than my mother would have hoped. Whatever the reason, it certainly made five hours of double-time Birdwellians more tolerable.
The video had come from multiple people, and each section was time stamped. Junior or Marian had sorted them by times, and we watched the same ten or fifteen minutes from seven or eight different perspectives before moving on to the next one. It was excruciatingly boring until we started making up stories about what everyone we saw was doing while we watched for a single sighting of the Crowe crew. It passed the time.
When we saw one of the people we were looking for, we'd stop the video and note when and where the person was. It was astonishing how many hotdogs Robert ate. Just…so many. Like, possibly he might have a second career as a professional eater if the whole appliances thing fell through. He must have consumed at least fifteen over the last two hours of the fest. The downside was that he was eating so many hotdogs there in front of the stand that there was no chance he'd had the time to sneak off and stab his father. Even when he wasn't actively eating, he never wandered far. Every minute was visible. My favorite suspect was a no-go, and that just sucked.
In fact, in the end, we could account for the majority of the Crowe crew. Jackson showed up on dozens of different cameras. I was willing to assume that was just because he was so stinking hot that he attracted the attention of people he passed. He ate food, he drank beer, he hit on random women. He was everywhere. There was a small five-minute window where he couldn't be accounted for. That left it possible he'd killed Carl if we wanted to be particular about it. It was a single stab, which wouldn't have taken long, but even then it seemed unlikely.
James almost never moved. He was missing from the camera for about ten minutes, but because I'd been there, I knew that ten minutes was exactly when he'd been at the kissing booth. Otherwise, he spent the last two hours watching the stage, apparently finding some enjoyment in listening to Oh, Ohio destroy pop hits that had been substandard to begin with. He looked entirely comfortable just hanging out. Eventually I realized he was likely drunk. He just didn't give a crap about how bad Oh, Ohio was.
Glen was just as easy to spot because he spent all of his time talking to Jamie. I hadn't noticed, and I wasn't sure exactly what they'd been talking about that was so riveting. Whatever it was, the two men spent their time wandering the park together, drinking from red cups and eating fried chicken, talking intently the entire time. It didn't matter what they were discussing, only that they had been otherwise engaged. Glen was almost as easy to spot as Robert had been. There wasn't a moment where I couldn't find him on camera. He was a no-go too.
The women and children in the group were harder to pin down. Faith flittered in and out of screens, never seemingly headed for anything or anyone. She drank a glass of lemonade. She stood next to a tree, hugging herself with her skeletal arms. She wandered slowly through a frame like some kind of wraith. But the majority of the time, I couldn't find her amongst the crowd. I didn't miss it when Aodhagan wrote Faith's name on the paper in front of him under Jackson's name with his five minutes noted. Faith didn't have an amount of time next to her name because it would be impossible to quantify. Faith wasn't noted for most of the afternoon. Just because she wasn't there didn't mean she was stabbing her father, but it did mean we co
uldn't eliminate her that way.
Vi was easier to spot, but there were still long periods of time where she wasn't on camera. Most of the time when she was there, she was hitting on Jackson or Aodhagan. Neither man outwardly rejected her. Aodhagan seemed tolerant but not receptive. That made me happy, even though it shouldn't have mattered. Jackson seemed to enjoy the attention, but it seemed he enjoyed attention from anyone at all. She listened to Oh, Ohio for a few minutes, her face suggesting she felt the same about our local band as I did. She took three bites of a funnel cake before throwing it away. She was nowhere to be seen for thirty-seven full minutes of the final two hours. Plenty of time to stab her husband.
Leslie was visible for long periods of time, mostly just sitting and playing around on her phone, but she did disappear twice, once for sixteen minutes and once twenty-one minutes. It would have been plenty of time to kill Carl and return to the festivities. I had trouble believing it, given how bland her expression was the whole time, but it was definitely possible.
Daisy was always on the move. It was too hard to keep track of her but not at all surprising. She was talking to every adult she could catch standing still. It made sense, given how many people they needed to hire and how seemingly disinterested that Leslie was in actually doing her job at that moment. But Daisy was just a big question mark for much of the afternoon. She came and went like Faith. I knew that there would be moments where we couldn't keep track of people because there were only so many people taking videos. This was an exercise in elimination and not a way of finding who actually did kill Carl. We couldn't eliminate Daisy.
Nor could we eliminate Aries and Apollo. They were absent for huge chunks of the video. If we added all their time together, they couldn't be seen for more than forty-six collective minutes of the two hours in question. They had more than enough time to kill their father, either alone or together. There wasn't a point they were on camera that they weren't together, but that didn't mean they weren't separated when they couldn't be seen. We just couldn't say for sure.
In the end, my favorite suspects, fervent Robert and scheming Jackson, were eliminated, though to be entirely fair, Jackson had less than five minutes where he could have acted. I wasn't putting any stock in that though. It was technically enough time, but I couldn't see him running across a parking lot, automatically aware that Carl was hanging out in Aodhagan's car, killing him, and running back to the activities in three minutes without breaking a sweat.
We really only had a few options. Vi, Daisy, Apollo and Aries, Leslie, and Faith. We turned off the video, and I rubbed my grainy eyes. "The only suspects left are women and children," I pointed out.
Aodhagan nodded. "The two groups most likely to have been victimized by Carl. Ever regret having to solve a murder?"
I shrugged. "I haven't had that many chances either way. But if any murder victim ever deserved to get his comeuppance, it was probably Carl."
Aodhagan looked at his watch. "Let's head over to the town square and see if we can find Jackson or the boys. I'd hate to have to go over to the house to find them. The second most likely place they'd be is downtown."
I thought downtown was an enthusiastic way to describe the half a dozen businesses that made up Birdwell's business district, but I didn't say anything. Because dinnertime was coming, the area was hopping by Birdwell standards. I watched half a dozen rough-looking men having a conversation on the curb, and I wondered how many of them had interviewed with Crowe today. I wasn't a fan of the family, but I couldn't help but feel a little soft toward them anyway, given what their presence would bring to the town. I still wasn't going to sell them my house, though.
"No teens, but Jackson is in the diner," Aodhagan pointed out as we bounded across the rural route that constituted Main Street in Birdwell.
We stepped inside the diner, bell tinkling above the door. Cindy Lou hollered a greeting from the kitchen, and I waved her way. Jackson was thankfully by himself, using a back corner booth as a makeshift office, a laptop set up on the aged Formica. We slid into the other side of the booth without waiting for an invitation. Jackson didn't seem surprised to see us. He also didn't look happy or bothered. If anything, he looked vaguely aggravated, but it seemed just as likely it was a slight annoyance at being interrupted and not about our position as the so-called law enforcement.
"Can I help you with something?" he requested blandly.
Aodhagan shrugged. "Just a couple of questions. About Carl and the business and everything."
Shaking his head, he sighed. "I didn't kill Carl, if that's what you're here to ask."
Aodhagan's eyebrows arched. "Well, it wasn't, but good to know. Can you tell if any members of your crew happen to carry a pocketknife?"
Jackson seemed amused by the question. "All of us do. Carl gave them to us for Christmas last year. All engraved. He said they'd be better to stab him in the back with. Ironic, no?"
I did not think that word meant what he thought it meant. It also didn't help clear anything up. We knew that the killer had used something small like a pocketknife. We also now knew that Carl had given every one of our suspects a pocketknife.
"Who do you think killed Carl?" I asked.
Jackson's perfect mouth pressed. "If I had to guess, I'd say Faith."
I was surprised. "I thought Faith was your girlfriend."
A smile played at the corners of his lips. "Not exactly. But in a way, yeah, I guess you could say that. But that still doesn't mean that she didn't kill her dad."
I felt compelled to point out the obvious. "If Faith is arrested, you won't be able to marry her and get a controlling share of the company."
To my surprise, he laughed. Not a fake laugh, but like a deep belly laugh. "Joke's on that whole family. I will marry Faith, if given the opportunity. But Carl loved me. It's Faith he had nothing but disdain for. Carl has been giving me money for years. And he recently altered his will to leave a chunk of his shares to me."
"Were you and Carl involved?" Aodhagan asked.
"Involved?" He laughed again. "I guess you could say that. Carl did enjoy his playthings. And I enjoy mine. I was Carl's toy, and he gave me mine. It was a satisfactory exchange. For both of us. But you should know that it wasn't nearly as reciprocal with a lot of Carl's partners. I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did. He did whatever he wanted with impunity. Most people just don't like that."
I absorbed the information and considered it. "Why do you think Faith might have killed him?"
"He wouldn't give her what she wanted. Not ever. He thought she was weak. Carl loved Daisy's inventions. He stole several from her. She's hooked on Faith. And she gave some of her best ideas to Faith. She set everything up for Faith to start her own business, and I do mean everything. All she would have had to do was pull it together enough to leave Crowe Appliances. Instead, Faith just gave all the plans Daisy gave her to Carl."
"Why?" I couldn't imagine what Faith was thinking.
Jackson shrugged. "She just wanted his love and respect, but she was never going to get it. He was a user. He never would have stopped. So I think she stopped him herself."
"But you'd still marry her?" Aodhagan requested.
Jackson leveled us with a look. "Tomorrow. I'd be stupid not to. And whatever else I am, I'm not an idiot. Talk to Faith. Maybe she has something interesting to say—maybe she doesn't. Either way, I still win."
"Where is she now?" Aodhagan asked.
He shrugged. "Last I heard, she was up at the site. I'm not sure if she still is. Good luck figuring out who killed Carl. Whoever it was, it's one less person I have to fight against to take over the company."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We were almost to the site when I spotted the Escalade being driven by one of the Greek Gods. I slapped Aodhagan on the arm, and he made a quick U-turn, putting the temp siren he had onto the roof above his window and flipping it on. I was actually a little surprised that the kids actually pulled over without a fuss onto the dirt shoulder. We got out
and approached the passenger side. Birdwell didn't get much traffic, but I still had no desire to end my life by being run down on a farm road in front of a couple of douche larvae.
It was the older son who was driving, of course. He rolled down the passenger window and leaned over. "Hello, Officer." He put on a winning smile and then noticed who we were. "Oh, it's you."
That was the second greeting of that nature we'd gotten from the Crowe crew. We were clearly so impressive. Aodhagan leaned against the door. "I just haven't had a chance to talk to either of you. How are you handling everything that's happened to you the last couple of days? I'm sure it seems like a lot. But it will get easier."
I thought from context of previous conversations that it was possible the older boy was Apollo and the younger was Aries, though I wasn't one hundred percent certain. I decided to take a chance. "How about you, Apollo?" I ducked my head so I could see him better. "It must seem like a lot of responsibility."
He shrugged, and if he wasn't Apollo, neither of them bothered to tell me. He didn't answer me or Aodhagan.
Finally Aries spoke up. "It's okay, I guess. People are kind of freaking out, but Daisy says we'll be fine."
"You will be," Aodhagan agreed. "But it's okay to not be fine right now."
Apollo flashed us all, even Aries, a sharp look. "We're fine."
I respected that he didn't want to share his feelings, no matter what they were. I could relate. I was the same. I tried a different tactic. "How about everyone else? How are they faring?"
Apollo and Aries both rolled their eyes in unison. "No one is sad, if that's what you're asking. James and Faith are a little because they don't know how else to be. But no one else is." Aries's words were frank.
"It might help if you keep a journal," Aodhagan offered, and I wondered if it was real advice or just an attempt to figure out who the electronic-journal-detailing-father-hatred belonged to. It could be either.
"Journals are for girls," Aries said flatly.
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