Chapter Twenty
“All right, so we’re looking at everything again.” I opened Courtney’s car door before she had the chance. “Back to the beginning.”
“Good morning to you too.” She let me tug her out and lead her outside past the gaggle of workmen. “Installing a new security system?”
“A super sensitive one that flips out over everything—even shifty squirrels. Lantana’s no-violent-crime streak has officially hit the fan. We’re not taking any more chances.”
“Smart. Honestly, I’m doing the same thing.” She paused by the coatrack to shrug hers off and toe off her shoes. “Tay and I have moved back in with Mom. Her security system is ten times better than the shop’s, and right now I just need to know my daughter is safe.”
“Is the shop still closed? Are you going to be okay for money?”
She gave me that don’t ask me silly questions even though they make me love you look. “I’ll be fine. I’m closed for the morning, but I’ll reopen in the afternoon. Catch a little bit off of that lunchtime rush.
“Despite what Detective Dumbass and Dumbshit implied.” She was calling Balogun and Kaplan that too. “I’m not broke or struggling. My bakery is the only shop in Lantana that serves upscale confections at Green Mart prices. All of the charity cliques hire me to do their desserts. I’m rolling in it.”
“Oooh, yeah, baby.” I wiggled, puckering my lips at her. “Shake that ass when you brag next time, put some more sexy on that sexy.”
Courtney doubled over, laughing so hard she tripped over her feet and wheezed at my feet. “You’re nuts! But I love it.”
“And you’re my partner.” I helped her up, sobering up quickly. “I can’t quit, but Alex was right about one thing last night. I’ve been reckless. It was idiocy in the extreme to confront Mrs. Finley alone. If Alex hadn’t gotten out of the car and checked on me when he did, I’d be dead.
“We’re in this together now, and we have to start by going over everything—checking to see what I missed.” Pulling out my phone, I showed her the app, and all of its saved recordings. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
That’s how we found ourselves half an hour later, sitting over a rough sketch of the manor’s floorplan in Sue’s room.
“Goodness, this is like Clue,” Courtney muttered.
She was adorable in a pair of purple overalls with a purple bandana tying her hair up.
You wouldn’t have known she was locked in a holding cell only a couple days before.
“Colonel Rhodes in the office. Master Layton in the library. Sir Spencer in the guest wing.” She traced her finger across the floors.
“If only we knew for sure where all the cops were, not just where they claimed they were.”
“I know.” I chewed my lip, wishing something would jump out at me. “Hard to be trusting after confirming one of them did let a wannabe murderer right up the stairs.”
She tapped the page. “What about Nurse Agassi in the garden? Rhodes sounded pretty confident on the recording, claiming he saw your mom’s nurse in the garden that night, but Agassi has pics of him in the bar with his friends an hour away, so who do we believe?”
“Hmm. Good question.” I moved to my window. “Reynard made a good point that from the third floor, you’d be looking down at the top of a head. Rhodes could’ve seen someone with a similar haircut and thought it was Agassi.”
“But you made a good point too,” she shot back, tapping my phone.
“With no lights in the garden, you’d need more than a piddly burning cigarette to make out anyone.
We know the killer turned on the light when they went into your mother’s room, why didn’t they draw the drapes?
Why risk someone noticing the light was on in your mother’s room when it shouldn’t be, and going to investigate? ”
“All great questions.” I peered out the window, thinking. “This is going to sound ghoulish, but I think we should recreate what happened that night. Try to see it from everyone’s perspective.”
She looked at me steadily. “I’m glad you said it first because I was thinking the same thing. I was also thinking... we need to start in your mother’s room.”
Courtney said it, and I agreed with it, but even though I left the room and followed her to Omma’s, I didn’t make it past the threshold.
I halted under the doorframe—flashes of that night assaulting me. The bloody walls. The overturned nightstand. My mother...
A gentle hand touched my shoulder. “I can do this if you don’t want to.”
I just nodded.
“All right.” Courtney squared her shoulders, stepping inside.
Everything had been cleaned and all the items relevant to the investigation had been taken away, so there was nothing to see but an empty bedframe and bare night tables, but still, being in this space felt wrong.
“I’m the killer,” Courtney began. “I come in with a weapon I concealed because even the dimmest-lit cop would’ve noticed someone skipping down the hall with a massive knife.”
“That— That’s true,” I croaked, finding my voice. Do this for Omma. Focus and do this for Omma.
The urging got me to take one step inside, but just one step. “Also the... the cop guarding the main hall into the east wing would’ve noted a woman holding a bag large enough to conceal a knife. Women don’t overlook stuff like that.”
“Also true,” Courtney agreed, sweeping the space. “Makes me think the killer had to be a man wearing a suit with pockets on pockets. Or even a knife hostler covered by a nice thick suit jacket.”
“Yes, yes.” Falling into the cold, hard facts of it helped pull me out of the trauma.
“But we can’t discount the fact that they could’ve stashed the knife and change of clothes somewhere beforehand, so that they could walk past the cops without raising suspicion, and then retrieve them when they were ready to act. ”
“But that still narrows things down,” Courtney pounced.
“Because they couldn’t have retrieved it before they entered the east wing, so they had to grab it after, and then hide it in the same place so they could rejoin the party.
How many hiding places between the guards and your mother’s room could there be? ”
That sent us running back into the hall, marking where all the guards were, where all the entrances into my mother’s part of the east wing were, and all the rooms where someone could’ve hidden something to grab later.
“Unless this, this, or this guard was working with the killer, or are the killer, they would’ve flat-out said that someone walked past them into the hallway that led to your mother’s room,” Courtney said, pointing them out on our revised floorplan.
“Absolutely, and if that happened, the cops would not have spent all night compiling that list of everyone who went upstairs. They would’ve solely focused on the person who walked straight up to my mother’s door.
No,” I said firmly. “I’m sure the only people the guards noted walking into this hallway that night were me and my entourage.
And obviously I didn’t do it with a cop and a nervous jeweler shadowing me. ”
“And there are no secret passageways or servant entrances to this part of the wing?”
I tensed. “No secret passageways,” I forced out. “Not to this part of the manor. There is a servants’ entrance, but it’s not a secret. It goes from the wine cellar to the third floor.” I tapped the door in front of me. “And it lets you out into the second-floor east wing right here.”
Courtney swept left to right. “We’re in a complete blind spot. No one would’ve seen someone enter the hallway here.”
“And if they were careful,” I said, moving down to where the hallway connected the main one leading out. “They could’ve run past to my mother’s room while the cop standing there had their back turned.”
“Can you enter this staircase through the wine cellar?”
I shook my head. “It’s locked and bolted. Expensive glass bottles and little curious six-year-olds don’t mix.”
“What about the ground floor?”
“Also no. There’s an entire entertainment center in front of the door. Someone definitely would’ve noticed, or heard, if that was moved,” I said. “The only way into this staircase is from the second or third floor.”
“So it does have to be someone who went upstairs,” Courtney said mostly to herself. “At least the lazy dumbasses got that much right.”
“It also means the killer could’ve stashed what they needed on the third or second floor with more than enough hiding places to choose from.
” I went to her side, leaning over her shoulder to trace the map.
“They could’ve walked up to the third floor, gotten what they needed, slipped down there undetected, and then returned to the third floor and skipped past the cops without anyone knowing something went down. ”
“Anyone including Mrs. Finley?” she asked, brow cocked.
“No, not her.” I showed her. “Finley was here by the guest rooms in the west wing. She’d have had to walk past three different cops to get to this back staircase in the east. I doubt that all three of those cops were her nephews.”
She hummed, agreeing. “So, who was in the right place to get to these stairs without anyone seeing?”
“Unless someone’s lying about where they were—and I can’t confirm or deny that because Officer Davis refuses to give me the detailed charts of everyone’s movements—that leaves Mr. Layton with a clear shot from the library to the stairs—”
“The same man who was just murdered,” she burst out. “Murdered for a reason.”
“No question. He did something or he saw something—we know that for sure now.”
“Well, if he did it, going and stabbing himself in the spine for it is a weird fucking thing to do,” Courtney said. “So that leaves him seeing something he shouldn’t have. Who could he have seen at that time?”
“No one,” I cried, throwing my hands up. “The only ones there were a bunch of cops and R—” I broke off, realization catching up and strangling my wayward tongue.
But it couldn’t stop Courtney’s.