By the Book (The Last Picks #7)

Chapter 12

We were at the sheriff’s station for hours: hard wooden chairs, the smell of economy-price floor cleaner, fluorescent lights that felt like the beginning of a migraine.

Bobby wasn’t there.

Bobby was out. Working.

Which was worse, somehow, because waiting to see him, to talk to him, to apologize, meant being suspended in an eternal moment of anxiety. My heart couldn’t seem to slow down. I felt dizzy. My thoughts made big, swooping loops—everything I’d done wrong, all the ways I’d screwed up, imagined snatches of me trying to explain and Bobby’s hurt and disappointment.

Everyone seemed to feel the tension. Salk smiled at me, but he couldn’t meet my gaze as he walked around the station, doing whatever he was doing. Paperwork, it seemed like. So much paperwork. And when Jaklin Ruiz, who was on dispatch, took her break, she patted me on my shoulder like I was sitting on death row. Which, maybe I was. Even my parents were subdued—my dad hadn’t even protested when they’d taken his guns.

“Mr. Dane.”

Sheriff Acosta’s summons jarred me out of my daze. She looked like she always did: composed, professional, and with zero tolerance for, uh, guff. She was a stocky woman with warm brown skin and a little scar near her hairline that most of the time you couldn’t see unless you knew it was there. Because, for example, you’d been in a number of conversations with her—loud, expressive conversations—and you’d found it difficult, at various times, to look her in the eye. She motioned for me to follow her into an interview room, so I did.

It was bare. It was utilitarian. The ballast in the light overhead made me feel like I was grinding my teeth. When the sheriff pulled out her chair, the legs screeched across the linoleum. She didn’t say anything for what felt like a long time.

“Are you going to arrest us?” I asked.

In a surprisingly dry voice, the sheriff said, “Why would I arrest you? Your parents heard someone calling for help.”

I had no words. Zero words. And then, somehow, I managed to say, “Hold on, that actually works?”

Sheriff Acosta didn’t roll her eyes, but it looked like it was sheer force of will. “Since you’ve been helping with this investigation, I wanted to let you know that we’re going to arrest Joan Wilkinson for the mayor’s murder.”

“You are? Oh wow. Okay. Did she confess?”

“Not yet.” Acosta sighed and rubbed her face, and for the first time, she looked tired. “It may not end up being a murder charge, if I’m being honest. The medical examiner hasn’t officially determined cause of death, but it appears to have been a heart attack. From what Colleen—Joan—told me, I think it was brought on by an argument. A defense attorney won’t have a hard time muddying the waters. My guess is that she’ll cut a deal for a lesser charge.”

“But what about all the evidence? I mean, she had all those playbills from the mayor’s house. And there’s got to be fingerprints that you can match. And what about George? Is he supposed to have had an argument too?”

Sheriff Acosta nodded, but she said, “That’s certainly a possibility. George Chin was killed by a blow to the head, and his body was dumped. An argument gone wrong is one explanation. But I’m not sure she had anything to do with that.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, because she was locked in a closet when it happened, for one thing. The medical examiner puts George Chin’s time of death within a couple hours of when you found Ms. Wilkinson.” I opened my mouth to explain all the ways Joan/Colleen could have engineered that situation (I actually had no idea, but I felt the need to argue the point), but the sheriff continued, “For another reason, she tells a pretty convincing story about this other woman, Wanda.”

“What?”

“Well, once Ms. Wilkinson started talking, it all came out. Apparently this wasn’t the first time George Chin tried to make some money by forging rare books. According to Ms. Wilkinson, she’d helped him by playing a similar role in other scams—you saw that she’s an actor?”

“A community theater actor.”

For some reason, that made the sheriff’s lips twitch, but she sounded serious as she said, “Yes, well, the last time Mr. Chin tried this stunt, it came back to bite him. He sold a forged Civil War autograph album to a very dangerous man—and before you ask, Ms. Wilkinson is scared enough that she won’t tell me his name. What she did tell me, though, was that when this man found out, he wanted his money back. He sent one of his enforcers, this woman Wanda, to make sure Mr. Chin paid up. Mr. Chin didn’t have the money by that point.”

I remembered George’s stiff movements, the impression he’d given me on our first meeting of slowly healing injuries. I’d suspected a car crash, probably because being beaten up by a crime lord’s enforcer didn’t exactly spring to mind. “So he had to get the money quickly,” I said. “That’s why they approached Mrs. Shufflebottom. And that’s why they didn’t run after the diary was stolen.”

“According to Ms. Wilkinson, they couldn’t run. This woman Wanda had them on a pretty tight leash.”

“She could be making her up.”

“She could be,” Sheriff Acosta agreed.

Then she pulled out her phone and showed me a picture. The woman on the screen was solidly built, her graying hair in a sloppy bob, in a white tank top that exposed intimidatingly developed biceps. I’d seen her before, once at Hemlock House, and again outside the library, when I’d had the strange sense that she’d been following me.

“I’ve seen her,” I said. I explained about seeing her at the library, and then I said, “I think she might have been following us the night the diary was stolen, too. I only saw her in the dark, but I think the profile might be right.”

The sheriff nodded. “Ms. Wilkinson said that Wanda did follow you. She also said that Wanda is the one who locked you in that room at the library and searched your house. According to Mr. Chin, there was a copy of an extremely valuable book at Hemlock House, and their backup plan was to steal it so that Mr. Chin could pay off his debt.”

“Let me guess,” I said. It was only a hunch, but it felt right. “The book is called Astor’s Arcadia .”

The sheriff’s eyebrows went up, and I explained about seeing the title in George’s emails.

“Our best guess is that when Wanda didn’t find the book, she decided to cut her losses. She put Ms. Wilkinson in the closet, killed George, and left.”

I waited, but nothing more came. “Why didn’t she kill Colleen or Joan or whatever her name is?”

“I don’t know.”

“He hadn’t paid back the money. He definitely can’t pay it back if he’s dead.”

“Maybe George’s time ran out, and it was more important to send a message.”

I shook my head. Some internal alarm was going off; there was something about all of this that wasn’t right. We were missing something, or we’d misinterpreted something, or—I didn’t know. But all I could say was “What about the diary?”

“We’re still looking for it.”

“It’s a fake, but somebody still stole it. That means somebody else is out there. And I don’t think they’ve got what they wanted yet.”

The sheriff didn’t say anything.

“We’re overlooking something,” I said. “There’s something else, something we’re not seeing.”

“Maybe,” the sheriff said. “But all I can do is work with what I’ve got.”

That roused me from the fog of my thoughts. “So, what? Colleen gets charged, even though you say she’ll plead down. George is dead. Wanda is gone. And that’s the end of it?”

“Of course not. We’ll lift Wanda’s fingerprints from the rental property. We’ll distribute as much information as we can about her. We’re still processing the site where George Chin’s body was found, and we’ll follow up on whatever that investigation turns up.”

The words went through my head like white noise. It was over. And nobody was going to pay for the deaths of two people. I grasped at the one good thing that seemed to have come out of this. “Mrs. Shufflebottom is cleared, then? You’re going to let her go?”

“I never arrested her,” the sheriff said with surprising gentleness. “She came in for questioning, that’s all. And even though it’s a moot point, she wasn’t a suspect anymore. I have no idea why she didn’t want to tell us where she went after leaving Hemlock House—or, for that matter, why she left in such a hurry—but we got security camera footage of her at the library from the other night. She went straight there after leaving Hemlock House, which means she didn’t have time to be involved in the mayor’s death.”

Nodding, I got to my feet. That was good. That was the only good thing about the whole night, it seemed.

“Thank you for your help,” the sheriff said. “You did a good job, Dash.”

And that was strange, I thought through my exhaustion as I let her lead me out of the interview room. Because it felt like I’d done a very bad one.