Traffic was stop and go all the way down Highway 101, the frequent pedestrian crossings adding to the mess. Businesses lining the street had put goods on the sidewalk with big “sale” signs to lure shoppers. It was a town-wide festival and rummage sale.
My heart lurched. Was that Ryder’s truck turning out of traffic and down a side road? The light changed before I could get a better look, but my heart still raced.
Ryder Bailey was the last thing I wanted to deal with today, or ever. My plan was to ignore our night together, ignore our friendship, and ignore he existed until it no longer hurt to think about him.
You dumped me while I was recovering from a gunshot wound.
Jerk.
What was it with men dumping me when I was at my lowest?
I turned into the station and strode to the door. The sign on the door said: Closed. We kept the office locked up on festival days, since we usually pulled double shifts with crowd control. I keyed in the code and flipped on the office lights. The door
snicked
shut behind me. I didn’t lock it. I was in. If someone came by looking for the police, I’d be here.
But first, Dan.
I walked down the other hallway and keyed in the code for that locked door, which opened into our two-cell holding area.
Dan sat on the edge of a small cot behind bars, his arms resting on his legs, his head hanging, fingers worrying at a hangnail. He was muttering quietly to himself—Pearl was right, he really did talk a lot—but stopped when he heard the door open.
“Delaney!” He jumped up to his feet and grabbed the bars.
My hand shot instinctively down to where my gun would be if I were carrying.
Maybe Pearl was right. I wasn’t steady yet, still too jumpy from the last few days. I took a deep breath and tucked my hand into my pocket to hide how much it was shaking.
“Hey, Dan.” I leaned against the wall farthest from him, my other arm across my ribs protectively. “We need to talk.”
“I’m so sorry, Delaney,” he blurted. “I didn’t know! I don’t know how the bullets got there. I just wanted to scare you. That’s all. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
He was babbling. I watched him plead with me. He might be faking it, his panic nothing more than realization that he had made a mistake and he was going to pay for it for a very long time.
I didn’t want to believe him. Dan Perkin was a pain in the neck on pretty much all levels. He had no real friends in town, and I didn’t think anyone would feel the least bit of remorse if he were locked up for life.
But my job was to look at the facts objectively.
And I was damn good at my job.
“I need you to calm down,” I said in the tone of voice I used when trying to talk Kressler and Wallery out of their garbage barrel battle. “Can you do that for me?”
He scowled like he was about to go off on a rant, but then he looked me up and down and slumped, pressing his forehead against the bars.
“Yeah,” he said. “I can be calm. Am I gonna need my lawyer here? Because I think she’s running the tie-dye booth.”
“No, you won’t need your lawyer. I’m not trying to trap you. I just want to ask you a couple things.”
He nodded, his forehead rubbing on the bar.
“Did you buy dynamite and blow up your garden?”
“I…” He licked his lips, his gaze skittering. “Yes,” he whispered.
“Were you having thoughts about blowing up Chris’s beer vats?”
He nodded.
Okay, two for two. Pearl had been right.
“Did you try to blow up Chris’s beer vats?”
He shook his head, miserable, though I didn’t know if it was because he hadn’t had a chance to blow up the beer or because I’d asked him about it.
“Did you kill Heim?”
He jerked away from the bars. “What? No! Why would I do that?”
“He was a judge in the contest, Dan.”
“I’d never!” he sputtered. “Never! Kill someone? I wouldn’t. I can’t believe you would accuse me.”
“You pointed a gun at me, Dan,” I said quietly. “And you pulled the trigger.”
“I…I didn’t know it was loaded. I don’t know how that happened, Delaney. You have to believe me. I didn’t load that gun.”
“If you didn’t, who did? Who had access to it? Who have you let handle it?”
“No one. No one.” He shook his head and gripped the bars again.
I waited, trying to decide if I believed him. I sighed. Even though I didn’t like it, I thought he was telling the truth.
“Okay, so you were waving around an empty gun—not the smartest move, Dan.”
He opened his mouth to argue, then, to my surprise, nodded. “I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted…wanted you to pay attention to me.”
“You have my full attention. I need you to really think about this: who do you know that hates you enough to frame you for shooting me?”
“I told you no one touched my gun.”
“I believe you.”
He was halfway into a syllable before he snapped his mouth shut. “You do?” He narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
I nodded. “So if you didn’t put bullets in your gun, and if no one else did, then there had to be another gun with bullets on the scene. Who knew you were angry at me? Who knew you would go to my house with a gun? Who would want you blamed for shooting a police officer?”
He shook his head, his eyes open with a kind of wonder. “I don’t know. So many people hate me, it’s hard to say.”
I smiled sadly. He wasn’t wrong.
“Have you seen anyone around your place who isn’t usually there? Someone in the vacation home down the street? A car you’re not used to seeing around parking near your house?”
He lowered his eyebrows, thinking. “No. I don’t think so, no. Well, those sisters are renting down the street.”
“Sisters?”
“Lila Carson and the blonde, Margie or Maggie, or—”
“Margot.” I swallowed as a chill washed over me. “Margot Lapointe. How long have they been there?”
“How should I know? I don’t keep track of every little thing in my neighborhood.”
I just stared at him. Waited.
He blushed. “Maybe a couple weeks? The blonde moved in first, I think. Then the other one. See them around everywhere. Well, the blonde. I think she was following me. Spying on me for that Chris Lagon. I have rights, you know. Rights to privacy.”
I was listening with half an ear. I hadn’t even checked to see where the sisters were staying while they settled their business in town. I’d assumed they rented a hotel room.
Still, renting a house near Dan didn’t exactly make them culpable in the shooting. It was a small town. Everyone lived near everyone.
I rubbed at my forehead. “Okay. That might be helpful. I’m glad we had this talk.”
“Wait,” he said. “Are you leaving me? You’re not leaving me here, are you? You can’t leave me.”
“I can’t drop the charges yet, so yes, you are staying here until I can check your gun and see if a bullet was fired from it recently and whether or not that does anything to clear your name.”
“You’d do that for me?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“If you’re innocent, I’ll do everything I can to make sure that you’re released. That’s how the law works.”
I punched in the code and gripped the door handle to pull it open.
“Delaney?”
I paused, but didn’t twist back to look at him, since I was pretty sure that would make my wound bleed.
“I saw Walt, Heim’s deck hand, the night before Heim drowned. He…he was drunk. He’d been at Jump off Jack’s and was talking about making money that had nothing to do with fishing. I don’t know what he was talking about. Didn’t care. Still don’t care. But…well, he left town the next day and Heim shows up dead. Think that’s anything?”
I let go of the door and turned all the way to face him again. “Was he with anyone?”
“Who?”
“Walt. Did you see him talking to anyone else in the bar that night?”
“Chris was there.”
“Chris is always there. Someone else?”
“Yes!” he said triumphantly, as if it had just occurred to him. “The blonde. She was there. Sat at the table with Walt. I know she did. Left before he got chatty. Is that helpful? Does that help?”
Margot was in Dan’s neighborhood. She would have been aware of his comings and goings. She might have seen the gun he kept in his car. But how would she know he intended to shoot at me?
“Delaney,” he repeated. “Does it help?”
“Not yet. But if it does, I’ll let you know.” I left the room and walked back to my desk. I picked up the desk phone and called Myra’s cell.
“Officer Reed,” Myra answered crisply.
“Hey, Myra. Don’t be mad at Pearl.”
“Where are you?” she growled.
“At the station. I’m fine. She made me happy-face oatmeal and gave me my meds.”
“Delaney…” She reined her voice in to keep the anger down. She was really frustrated. “You need to turn around and drive back to my place and park yourself on my couch. Now.”
“Wow. You sounded a little like Dad right then. So I talked to Dan and Pearl. Turns out Dan blew up his own rhubarb patch.”
“Okay. Why do I care about this?”
“He says he didn’t have any bullets in his gun.”
“Yeah, I heard him yelling that all day yesterday.”
“I believe him.”
Myra paused and the crowd noise around her grew louder. Children laughing and squealing, people talking, and in the background, a voice I recognized as Thor crooning out a rock-n-roll ballad. He had a good voice.
“You believe Dan Perkin—who was standing right in front of you and pulled the trigger—didn’t shoot you,” she said. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Did you find the bullet casings?”
“Yes.”
“Did you check to make sure they were the correct bullets for Dan’s gun?”
“We’re processing the evidence.”
I waited.
“Not yet,” she said. “You were shot, Delaney. In surgery. Jean and I stayed with you after we locked up Dan. Then you ran away to a
bar
. That morning I’d had to run dawn crowd control for the regatta blessing. We haven’t had time to do anything else, and as far as I care, Dan can sit and stew.”
“How was the blessing?” I asked, realizing Myra probably hadn’t gotten any sleep in the last twenty-four hours.
“Poseidon almost drowned himself.”
Of course he did.
“So, pretty much like normal?” I couldn’t keep the smile out of my voice.
“It’s not funny, Del.”
“It’s kind of funny.”
“All right.” She huffed out a breath. “Let’s say Dan is innocent. Then who the hell shot you? That wound was not made by an imaginary bullet.”
“I think there was someone else out there.”
“I hate that idea.”
“Me too.”
“Do you have a lead on who might want you shot and Dan in jail?”
“Not really. But Dan said he talked to Walt, the night before Heim washed up.”
“Not following you on this.”
“Heim’s drowning.”
“Yes?”
“Dan makes a great fall guy. No one likes him. No one would miss him if he were locked away for murder. No one would argue that he was capable of being angry enough to pull a trigger on a judge over a rhubarb contest.”
“No one would have to argue that because he did pull the trigger.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. But if he’s telling the truth and there were no bullets in his gun, then he should be up on aggravated menacing charges of pointing a gun at a police officer instead of attempted murder.”
She sighed.
“How does Walt fit in with all this?”
“Dan saw him drinking at Chris’s bar the night before Heim died. He was bragging about making money. Earlier that night, Walt had been sitting with Margot Lapointe.”
“So?”
“Margot and Lila recently moved into a rental in Dan’s neighborhood.”
“Hold on.” The phone was muffled as she pulled it away. I heard her sharp whistle, then: “Down from there. Don’t lick the jellyfish!”
I grinned and wandered over to start a pot of coffee.
“Okay,” she said a couple seconds later. “Walt was talking to Margot. No crime in that. How does that link her or Dan to Heim’s death?”
“I don’t know yet. But outside my house I found something.”
“You went back to your house? Alone?”
“To get my car. Pearl dropped me off.”
“Why did I think you’d actually listen to her and stay put?”
“I have no idea. You know how I hate being sick on the couch.”
“Since when?”
“So I was looking through the bushes.”
“Delaney.”
“I found a feather.”
“That’s important because?”
“Lila and Margot have feathers in their hair.”
“Birds shed feathers all the time.”
“Not purple feathers.”
“You think Lila and Margot were in your driveway, with a gun, at the same time as Dan, waiting for him to pretend-shoot you, so they could for real shoot you and frame him for the crime? That’s a complicated and unlikely plan.”
“But not impossible.”
“Almost impossible. Which you’d realize if you weren’t high on Percocet.”
“I’m not high. Just…floaty.”
“One feather doesn’t implicate Lila or Margot.”
“I know. We need to talk to Walt. See if he let anyone get on that boat with Heim.”
“We will handle that tomorrow,” she said firmly. “Not today. And by we, I mean Jean and me. You are going to go home and sleep before that wound gets infected.”
“Sleeping won’t stop an infection.”
“Delaney. This is me, telling you that if you don’t drop this murder case for at least one day, I am personally going to drive over there and tie you down to a cot.”
“Sounds kinky.”
“Well, if you want kinky, I can send Ryder your way. Jean told me about you two.”
What did Jean know? That we were dating? Well, that wasn’t even remotely true now.
“Hey,” I said, avoiding that conversation. “Have you seen him?” There was maybe a little too much worry in my voice.
“Ryder?” She paused. “Earlier today. Why?”
“No reason.”
Because he broke up with me in the hospital. Because no matter how sad I feel, I’m starting to feel something else: angry.
“What happened with Ryder?” she asked. “Did he hurt you?”
“No. We…he…uh…we’re done.”