Chapter Forty-Six
I tumbled out enough words for him to get the gist — good thing he’s a champion gist-getter.
“Where?”
“Zepke’s. In the store. Treats aisle.”
One from Leo, saying he’d gone into the alley to check a noise, was locked out, and thought the store was being robbed.
One from Oscar, who spotted Pammy and Zoley through Zepke’s front window. Instead of driving off, he stayed in his car, watching. When he saw Pammy pull out something he thought was a gun, he called 911.
He kept saying he couldn’t be sure and maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe it was a phone, not a gun, and he was making a mountain out of a molehill . . .
The man might have taken too many anger management classes.
The sheriff’s department was responding, with Teague — hearing the location was Zepke’s — leading the charge, when my call reached him.
I gave Teague an overview of what we knew and what we suspected at the scene.
That Pammy funneled the money Damon swindled to foreign accounts.
That she despised her husband.
That she hated Zoley.
Had hated her from the start. Maneuvered her way out of being the new-girl target of Zoley and her fellow mean girls.
Then learned to use her puppet, from getting out of the small college she’d felt limited her prospects to cutting her out with Damon as a likely source of money to directing her through the murder plot.
All Pammy’s secrets . . .
Secrets weary of their tyranny.
Pammy’s whiny, “Those animals bit me,” was ignored as deputies witnessed Gracie’s and LuLu’s ongoing licking, not attacking.
Zoley had other things to say.
“She shot Damon. She did. I hate guns. Ask anybody. She shot him. I was just there.”
Pammy’s puppet had a voice. A loud voice.
* * * *
“. . . and I saw Sheila had it figured out,” Clara told Teague later that night, at my house, with dogs, snacks, and wine in the living room.
He’d have more questioning and investigating to do, along with a lot more report-writing. But he was off until morning.
“Pammy holding a gun on you might have been a clue,” he said dryly.
“Before that,” Clara said indignantly. “Sheila got pieces of it way, way before. Including the bruise — or non-bruise.”
We explained about Linda seeing Pammy in the drug store, buying a concealer kit, eight days before Zoley’s excessive makeup and Damon’s murder.
“How did Pammy know Zoley would need it?” Clara asked rhetorically.
“She couldn’t. Even if you say Damon — or Bryon — had hit her before Pammy bought the wheel and the bruise didn’t show yet, but she knew it would .
. . then it wouldn’t have still shown enough a week later for Zoley to need thick makeup. ”
“She could have run out, from using it other times. But in that case—” Yes, I barely finished one thought before I argued against myself. “—she would have had practice concealing bruises and she wouldn’t have slathered makeup on the way she did.”
“So the bruise didn’t exist. What made you think she was using Zoley?” Teague asked me.
I dug back through impressions.
“There was a moment when Zoley was talking and Pammy had this expression . . . smug self-satisfied. It fit with Zoley saying things she’d been directed to say.”
“Saying Bryon was possessive, volatile. She trotted those out for you, too.” Teague neither confirmed nor denied Clara’s certainty. “Did it to give Bryon motive.”
“There was something about their relationship . . .” I ran out of words — never good for a writer.
Clara picked up for me. “Zoley pulled a mean girl on Pammy in high school. Sheila listened carefully enough to hear the echoes of that. It didn’t click for me until afterward.”
“It only occurred to me as we walked out of training,” I said, “that instead of killing each other’s husbands, she decided to get rid of both men by killing one and setting up the other. To make herself rich and free. To make Zoley poor and miserable.
“In the end, Pammy’s need to reveal her ascendancy over Zoley overtook her caution, even her self-preservation.”
Teague tipped his head. “Say that’s a given, how did you get to the end?”
Clara said, “She had dreams last night and put pieces together.”
His brows rose. “Dreams?”
“There was a map. I think it was to a treasure chest. Anyway, there was a map and there was a treasure chest.
“The map made sense, with the basic question of why Damon went to Gallows Path, but not to where his truck wouldn’t be seen. Why there? was something we kept asking, along with why now?”
“Sheila’s questions,” Clara said with pride.
“Why now? fit with a big calendar in my dream, with people weaving in and out of it, which is what brought me to the idea of people with motives not just being suspects. They created the timeline. They were the answer to why now?”
He frowned slightly, but said, “Go back to the treasure chest.”
“That circled around Damon having treasure — money he scammed or otherwise took from other people, especially the suspects. We heard Pammy was really good at finances. Yet she claimed to have no knowledge of Damon’s business.
Possible. Say, if she had an idea of what he was up to and was uncomfortable about it. ”
“But . . .?” Clara’s grin invited me to keep going.
“Damon wasn’t known as a financial whiz, yet William Alsup’s lawyers discovered sophisticated foreign accounts. Damon told Oscar his money was just gone, like it fell in a black hole. Part of the scam? Certainly could be. But what if that was true?
“Bryon said Damon said he was missing money. A lie? Sure could have been. Bryon connected it to Damon saying Willow was in his office. But what if it wasn’t and what if it wasn’t a lie?
“That got me thinking about layers. And then the elephant.”
“Elephant?” Teague asked.
“Only see a small part, don’t realize there are other parts, you think it’s all like that one small part,” Clara recapped succinctly.
“I was looking at people as suspects—”
“That is usually how it works,” Teague murmured.
I gave him a warning look.
“—then tried looking at them as motives to answer the why now? question.”
His eyes sparked. “And that led to Pammy.”
“Of course it did,” Clara said, loyally.
I grinned. “Oscar’s scuffle with Damon brought attention from the sheriff’s department—”
“Hensen,” he said.
“—William Alsup’s lawyers were poking into Damon’s business, and Zoley was losing her hold on Damon.
“Even the dogs were a why now? factor. Lucifer got in the house and Willow said Pammy was apoplectic — she didn’t use that word.
Pammy was behind the couples going to training together to establish evidence of animosity between the men.
A longer timeline would have been more subtle, but she wanted Lucifer gone after he jumped on her white couch. ”
I felt Clara’s mood darken. I quickly continued, “She knew Damon was losing interest in Zoley. She needed at least a shred of that connection to get him out to Gallows Path. All those answered why now.”
“And left only Pammy as the one to benefit,” Clara concluded. “Though how she thought she could get away with it, especially if she’d shot Zoley and us . . .”
Teague’s turn to answer. “She had a flight leaving tonight to a non-extradition country. She’d had a reservation for a few weeks from now as part of her overall plan, but moved it up yesterday — after talking to you two.”
“Overall plan?”
“Foreign accounts, identities, safe houses — we’ll be unraveling it for a while. One thing we can say is she’s made no plans for a funeral for Damon.”
“That’s awful,” Clara said.
“Comes in a distant second to murdering him,” Teague said.
With her usual fairness she said, “Good point.”