“It doesn’t seem likely,” I agreed, “but someone else could have done it. The opening doesn’t have to come out in the cells.”
“Well, until you find one, we haven’t got much to go on. We have no idea who killed Freddy or why.”
“I think I have a new suspect.”
“Really?” he asked. “Who is it?”
“It’s Artie Gordon. The sheriff took him in for questioning about the faulty cell locks. Artie’s been in and out of the jail on petty charges. He could have known, and I saw him hunting through the trashcans around the green. He was looking for the Anubis statue. I know he was.”
“That’s a little far-fetched, don’t you think?” he countered. “The statue has been returned to the museum. He would have heard about that along with everybody else in town.”
“How else do you explain him going through all the trashcans, especially the one in front of the station where I found the statue? Besides, he lives outside of town. He may not have heard the news. He was still looking for it where Freddy dropped it off for him.”
“But Freddy didn’t drop it off in the trashcan,” Levi argued. “You know that as well as I do. He dropped it off in the toolshed behind the greenhouse at the inn. That’s what he said. Why would Artie look for it in the trash outside the sheriff’s station?”
“How should I know?” I countered. “Someone obviously moved it from the toolshed to the garbage can, and that’s where I found it. That’s where Artie was looking for it, so he must have had something to do with the robbery. That’s why he killed Freddy—to stop Freddy fingering him for the heist.”
Levi shook his head. “Sorry. You’re stretching again. Okay. I’ll go with you that someone moved the statue from the toolshed to the garbage can. They would have to if you found it there. That doesn’t mean Artie was looking for it. He probably accidentally threw away his change when he bought a hamburger.”
I had to laugh. “Okay. You got me there.”
“You can’t just draw a line from the statue to Artie to Freddy. You need evidence.”
“Yes, Sir,” I mumbled under my breath.
He put his arm around my shoulder. “You’re a great investigator. You’re just a little overly enthusiastic sometimes. Take it slow, and you’ll find it.”
“I’m glad you still have faith in my abilities.”
“You found that statue. You’re bound to find the evidence you need. Just don’t overdo it. Take baby steps.”
“Is that the way you do it in the big city?”
“Well,” he replied, “that’s the way I used to do it. I don’t do it anymore. Just remember what your assertions will look like in front of a judge with nothing to back them up. Just remember your suspect’s defense attorney will pull out all the stops to make your evidence look like the rat bait it is. Whatever evidence you bring out better be solid if you ever expect the case to see the light of day.”
“I should have thought of that. I suppose that’s why I’m not a big-shot detective like you.”
“That’s what I’m here for. I’m here to keep you honest so your case does see the light of day.”
“Thanks. I’m glad I’ve got the best to learn from.”
He stopped to face me once again. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about the case anymore.”
“Oh? What do you want to talk about?”
“Nothing.” He drew close to me and put his arms the rest of the way around me. He kissed me slow and sweet, and I melted into his arms.
I pulled back just a little bit. “Aren’t you the least bit tempted to do that work again?”
“Not when I see you doing it for me.”
I swatted his shoulder. “Cut it out. You know what I mean.”
“You do a good enough job for both of us. I get to live vicariously through you. I get all the reward of helping you solve the case without the hassle of solving it myself. You do all the legwork and all the real investigation so I don’t have to.”
I laughed, and we set off hand in hand toward the inn glowing in the sinking sun. We made it all the way back to the garden behind the inn before Levi stopped again. He hugged me close. “Listen, sweetie. I want you to promise me something.”
“What is it now? I thought you wanted me investigating so you didn’t have to.”
“It’s not that. I want you to promise me you won’t go near Artie Gordon. You’ve got a reputation around this town now. Even if he’s not the killer, if he found out you were investigating him, he could do something nasty to stop you. He’s done a few nasty things in his time.”
“That’s what Eliza said. She said he was bad news.”
“She’s right. Just keep away from him. Don’t follow him or go near him or anything that could antagonize him.”
I hesitated. “I think it might already be too late.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I might have already gone near him without meaning to.”
He frowned. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. I mean, I didn’t mean to. I was just looking around, but he didn’t see me. I mean, he might have seen me see him looking in the trashcans, but he couldn’t know I’m the one who found the statue. He might also know I’m the one who told the sheriff that he was…. What? What’s the matter?”
He shook his head and turned away. “I just don’t know what I’m gonna do with you. Just tell me you’re not going to follow him.”
I stood still. “Umm…”
“What did you do? Did you follow him?”
I pointed toward the ruin. “I… sort of did. I saw him over by the old house. I tried to follow him, but I didn’t find him. I… that’s when I found the entrance to the other tunnel system I told you about.”
“Well, don’t do it again. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Okay. I won’t.”
He turned toward the inn, but he didn’t look like he really wanted me doing his investigating for him anymore.
Chapter 15
Levi headed up the lawn toward the inn when his phone went off. He stopped and held it to his ear. “Oh, hello, Sheriff. How’s it going?”
A tinny noise came out of the speaker. Levi poked his screen, and the phone broadcast the conversation loud enough for me to hear. “I just got word from the Potters. They won’t press charges against Smitty. The most I can charge him with is accessory to theft.”
“Looks like you’ll have to let him go,” Levi remarked.
“I can’t let him go,” Sheriff Mills wailed. “He could be in the same danger as Freddy.”
“What makes you think that?” Levi asked. “Whoever killed Freddy would have no reason to go after Smitty.”
“They were accomplices in the museum heist,” Sheriff Mills replied. “Smitty supplied Freddy with the keys to break into the museum.”
“What difference does that make?” Levi asked. “The killer would have bumped off Freddy to stop him identifying him. Smitty wouldn’t be able to do that.”
“Don’t confuse me with details, man,” the sheriff shouted. “Smitty is already in fear of his life. He doesn’t want to come back to town for fear he’ll be the next victim.”
“Then tell him not to return to town. Tell him to go stay with relatives somewhere else. You could also warn his parents, but I don’t really see him being in any danger.”
Sheriff Mills sighed. “All right. I guess we can do that. In the meantime, what am I supposed to do about Laura Lane?”
“I don’t know. What are you supposed to do with Laura Lane? What’s the problem with her?”
“She might have a motive with that stolen bracelet, but there’s no evidence connecting her to the murder.”
“What about her being able to get out of her cell without anybody knowing about it?” Levi asked. “She’s the one who told Allie the cell doors could be rigged.”
“I know,” Sheriff Mills replied, “but now she’s claiming she knew about it but didn’t know how exactly to do it. Besides, do
n’t you think it’s a little odd she would say that if she was the murderer?”
Levi stared down at his phone. Then he shook his head. “You know what, Sheriff? That is the best insight you’ve come up with all day. You’re right. She wouldn’t have.”
“So, what am I supposed to do with her? I find it hard to believe she killed Freddy over a bracelet. She’s not even a crook. She’s just a wannabe. She could never actually go through with a robbery, let alone a crime as serious as murder.”
“I agree. Why don’t you let her go?”
“I can’t do that,” Sheriff Mills replied. “She might be the murderer.”
“Even if she is,” Levi pointed out, “you don’t have enough evidence to hold her. Let her go. If you find something on her later, you can always pick her up again.”
“What if she flees?” Sheriff Mills asked.
“She’s not a flight risk. She lives to get picked up by the police. She won’t go anywhere. She’ll probably be waiting for you to come around suspecting her again.”
“What if she’s lying about the cell door? What if she really can get it open?”
I broke in on the conversation. “I have an idea, Sheriff. Why don’t you test her to see if she can get the door open?”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you could make her think there’s an emergency or something,”
A long silence sounded down the phone. “Hmm. I guess we could do that.”
“Just to see if she knows how to open the door.”
“It does seem odd that she would know about it without being able to open the door,” Levi remarked.
“She may have seen other prisoners do it,” the sheriff suggested.
“That’s true,” Levi replied. “She could have seen Lincoln do it on his way to the party. She said you had to lift the door, but maybe she’s not strong enough to lift it enough to pop the lock.”
“That’s all the more reason we should test her,” I replied. “It wouldn’t work to just ask her to do it. She could pretend not to be able to so as to cast suspicion somewhere else. We would have to give her a compelling reason to do it.”
“All right,” Sheriff Mills called out. “You two come down to the station in the morning and we’ll do it then.”
“There’s only one more problem,” I told him.
“What is it now?”
“You’ll have to take the handcuffs off her cell door so she can open it. You’ll have to give her some reason why you’re doing that so she doesn’t realize you’re testing her.”
“This whole test thing is your idea. What should I tell her?”
“Tell her the locksmith is coming over. Tell her you’ll move her to another cell while he fixes that one. Then, while she’s standing around waiting, pull the fake emergency. Then we’ll know if she can open the door or not.”
“Good deal. See you in the morning.”
Levi hung up and slipped his phone back in his pocket. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“How else will we determine if she knows how to get out of the cells or not?” I asked. “Not only would she have to know how to get out of her own cell, she would have to know how to open Freddy’s cell, close it after her after she killed him, then go back to her cell, and shut herself in again. She would have had to do all those things without leaving any sign of what she’d done. That’s asking an awful lot, don’t you think? If she couldn’t do even one of those things, she couldn’t be the killer.”
“I’m not saying she’s the killer,” Levi replied. “It just seems like a drastic step to take, to stage an emergency.”
“What do you suggest? If there’s no other way to prove she knew how to do it, then we’ll never find out whether she’s guilty.”
“I can’t believe she’s guilty,” he replied. “Why would she deliberately incriminate herself by telling you about the locks?”
“I can think of one compelling reason she would incriminate herself. She wants attention. She copped to the robbery when she had nothing to do with it.”
“If that’s the case, she should be trying to get the sheriff to believe she did know how to open the locks,” Levi pointed out. “If she wants to get herself convicted of capital murder, she should be trying to convince everybody she killed Freddy instead of trying to prove she didn’t.”
I laughed. “You’re right. Maybe she realized getting convicted of a murder isn’t nearly in the same league as getting convicted of robbing a museum. Maybe she suddenly decided she doesn’t want that kind of attention.”
“Well, ultimately, the sheriff is the one responsible for the prisoners. If he thinks this is a good idea, we might as well go along with it.”
“We?” I asked. “We might as well go along with it? Are you going along with it, then?”
“I might as well,” he sighed. “I might as well go along and see your grand performance. This could be one for the record books.”
I drew near him and nuzzled into his neck. “Hey.”
“Hey, what?”
“We don’t have anywhere to be or anything to do until morning.”
He scooped me around the back. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to say how about coming up to the inn and having dinner with me. You took me out to Cooker’s Shack for dinner. Let me take you out here.”
He chortled with glee. “You want to take me out to a place where we both live and work? Is that your idea of inviting me on a date?”
I seized his hand. “Oh, stop arguing, will you? Come on. This could be the first night we’ve had to ourselves in a long time.”
He followed me up the rest of the way up the lawn and into the inn. “What you really mean is, now that Artie Gordon is at large, you’re not going down into the tunnels. That’s why you’re free.”
I kissed him and towed him to the dining room. “Hey, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I’m taking you to dinner, and that’s final.”
Chapter 16
Levi and I rendezvoused with Sheriff Mills and Deputy Leonard in the office at the sheriff’s station. “All right,” Sheriff Mills began. “It’s all set up. The fire alarm will go off, and Rufus and I will start running around like two chickens with our heads cut off. We’ll start unlocking the cells and taking the prisoners out. We’ll start yelling to everyone to get out as fast as they can, and we’ll tell all the prisoners, including Laura, that we’re getting them out to safety.”
“Where will you put them after you take them out of the building?” I asked.
He pointed to a white truck parked at the curb. “There’s a paddy wagon right over there. We’ll park them in there under armed guard for the duration of the experiment. We’ll start at the very back of the jail and work our way forward so Laura sees us taking people out. We’ll just keep telling her to sit tight, that we’ll get to her in good time. All the time, the fire alarm will be blaring away, and Rufus and I will get more and more panicked the longer it goes on so she thinks the fire is getting close.”
I suppressed a giggle. “Gosh, this is a really cruel trick!”
“You’re the one who came up with this whole idea,” Sheriff Mills returned. “By the time it’s over, she’ll be so terrified she would have to break out of the cell if she could possibly do it. That way we’ll know if she’s capable of it or not.”
I nodded. “Sounds like a sure-fire way to tell.”
Sheriff Mills looked back and forth between me and Levi. “You two keep out of the way. Just stay here in the office so you don’t get in me and Rufus’s way. Unless I miss my guess, it’s gonna be chaos down there once the alarm starts going off. You can keep an eye on Laura on that closed-circuit monitor right there.”
He pointed to his computer screen. A dozen small squares covered the screen. Each picture showed a prisoner in the cells down the hall. From here, I could see the handcuffs no longer held Laura’s cell door closed. If she could unhitch the lock, there was
nothing stopping her.
Levi and I drew back behind Sheriff Mills’ desk. Sheriff Mills exchanged a few quiet words with Rufus Leonard. The deputy got more and more agitated the more they talked. He wrung his hands and sweat broke out on his forehead. He started to race away, stopped, discussed something with the sheriff, started away one more time, and came back to check one last detail. This was probably the most excitement Rufus Leonard had experienced in his life.
My pulse raced. This experiment sounded all well and good when I’d suggested it to the sheriff over the phone. Now it was really happening. I wanted to run for the hills, too, and I knew it wasn’t real. What if something went wrong? What if it didn’t work? What if Laura didn’t buy it?
The sheriff trembled, too. Only Levi remained calm and impassive. He hitched one thumb in his jeans pocket and watched the screen with Laura displayed on it. He never took his eyes off her.
Sheriff Mills and Deputy Leonard disappeared somewhere. When the alarm went off, I jumped out of my skin. A deafening shriek of a siren blasted through the station. I jammed my fingers in my ears against the onslaught.
Levi never moved a muscle. He was expecting this. He stood there like he couldn’t hear a thing. He trained his eagle eyes on Laura and watched.
Sheriff Mills and Deputy Leonard did indeed start running around like chickens with their heads cut off. If I wasn’t assigned to the office with Levi standing right next to me, I probably would have done the same thing. The two men scurried up and down the hall past the cells. I couldn’t hear them over the siren, but they shouted into each cell as they passed.
All the prisoners rushed to the bars. Most shook the bars and yelled at the sheriff and his deputy to get them out. I could see their mouths moving, and anybody could tell what they were saying.
Sheriff Mills rushed past the camera with the first prisoner. The next moment, he appeared in the office leading the man to the paddy wagon. Then came Deputy Leonard with another prisoner. Back and forth they went. We watched them on the screen while they removed one person at a time from the scene of the make-believe disaster.
They inched toward Laura’s cell. The closer they got, the more agitated she became. Their shouted assurances that they would get her out did their job. She shook the bars and screamed at them to hurry. I really started to feel sorry for the poor woman. The sheriff and deputy put on a very convincing act, and she believed she was in mortal danger from the fire.
Inside Out: A Heather's Forge Cozy Mystery, Book 5 Page 10
