Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Emma’s phone buzzed as they returned to their hotel room to regroup. She dropped the key card on the countertop and checked the caller ID. Her doctor’s office. She assumed they wanted to confirm she’d be there on Thursday.
Instead, the receptionist told her, “We need to reschedule your appointment. The doctor was called out of town on a family emergency.”
Emma immediately felt torn.
“Can you make it on Monday at one o’clock?”
Monday meant she wouldn’t be cleared to go back to work for another week. On the other hand, it gave her more time to focus on Eric and Nell. “That would be fine.”
After disconnecting, Emma shared the conversation with Matthias, who was stretched out on the hotel bed, his fingers interlaced behind his head.
“I need to call Laurie,” she added. Emma had played a variation of the conversation in her head a dozen times already.
Telling Laurie that she wasn’t returning until next week, if then.
Laurie firing her. Emma with no job. No income.
Going back to doing freelance work. Selling framed photos at local businesses.
Her campsite was only paid for through the end of the season, which was less than two months away.
Her relationship with Matthias was too new for her to be comfortable asking to move in with him.
And she didn’t want him to feel obligated into extending an invitation solely to keep her from being homeless.
“Do you want me to talk to her?” Matthias said.
“No.” Emma shook off her imagined joblessness. Laurie wasn’t an ogre. She couldn’t hold Emma’s medical situation against her. She picked up the phone and tapped Laurie Kassim’s number.
“Emma,” she answered, “what’s going on? Where are you?”
“I’m still in Washington.”
“Really? How’s your sister?”
“She ran away. Again. Now she and my friend Eric are suspects in a homicide.”
After a pause, Laurie asked, “Whose homicide?”
“The land developer who wanted to buy my farm.”
“Oh.”
Emma could almost hear Laurie thinking. If this had been happening 150 miles to the north, Laurie would be assigning Emma to get photos.
However, a Washington County murder was of no interest to Erie readers.
When the silence rolled on, Emma finally broke it.
“My doctor’s office called.” She explained about the family emergency and the delayed appointment.
After several endless moments of dead air, Laurie said, “Isn’t there anyone else in the office who could see you in his absence?”
“They’re all booked solid.” It might not be a lie. Emma hadn’t thought to ask.
“I guess there’s nothing we can do about it then. I will see you next Tuesday morning. Right?”
“Absolutely.” Emma prayed a week would be enough.
“Good.” The tone in Laurie’s voice as she ended the call left no room for debate. A week would have to be enough.
Emma pocketed her phone and faced Matthias with a forced smile. “We should be able to solve this case by the end of the weekend. Right?”
The smile he returned wasn’t entirely convincing. “Absolutely.” He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. “We need to track down Patrick Winslow.”
“Do you think he might be back at the construction site by now?”
Matthias appeared to weigh the options. “Let’s swing by North Star’s office first. It’s closer. If he’s there, great. If not, we’ll have to convince Tina Neidermeyer to give us his phone number.”
* * *
Matthias had just started the Jeep’s engine when his phone buzzed. He checked the screen. “It’s Cassie,” he told Emma before accepting the call and putting it on speaker.
“How are things going there?” his partner asked.
Emma grunted.
“That good, huh?” Cassie said.
Matthias told her about Eric’s trip to the ER, then updated her on the uncertain future of North Star Developing.
“Sounds promising. Follow the money.”
“We are.”
“You need to find out who Jones’s attorney is.”
“It’s on my list, but I’m out of my jurisdiction, which means no court order.”
“Unless you go through Fergusson.”
Matthias choked a laugh. “Right.”
“Well, I have no jurisdiction there either, but I still managed to get some information you might find useful.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“First, Fergusson has put out a BOLO for Nell. I was visiting the guys at Major Crimes when I spotted it.”
Be On the Lookout. Emma sat up straighter. “Any response to it?”
“Not yet. At least nothing that I saw. I asked Roth to keep me posted.”
Detective Roth—another of the detectives with the Major Crimes unit.
“Good,” Matthias said. “At least the part about Roth keeping tabs on it.”
“Second,” Cassie continued, “do you remember Lydia Pruse?”
Matthias rolled the name over in his memory. “Is that your friend who works in the coroner’s office?”
“She used to work in our coroner’s office. She moved about six months ago and now works in Washington County.”
“For the coroner?”
“Convenient, huh? So, I called her just to chat. After we caught up, I asked if they’d had any interesting cases come through the morgue down there, and she said, ‘As a matter of fact, yes. There was this guy who was stabbed by a chunk of glass.’”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re sneaky?”
“All the time. Anyway, she told me it was determined the victim didn’t go through the glass. The killer apparently used a sharp piece and stabbed him with it.”
“Fergusson already told me that much.”
“Did he tell you there wasn’t any other blood on the rest of the glass they found in the trash bag?”
“No.”
“Let’s think about this. You want to use a piece of glass as a murder weapon. A sharp piece of glass. Sharp enough to kill. How do you think that would work out for you?”
He realized where she was going with this. “You would probably cut your hand in the process.”
“But only the victim’s blood is on the shard used to kill him.”
“The killer wore gloves.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Cassie said. “According to Lydia, the portion of the shard the killer would have gripped had been bleached. Not merely wiped clean, but disinfected. You wouldn’t need to do that if you were wearing gloves.”
“The killer cut himself.” Matthias’s mind spiraled. “Why would he only disinfect part of it? If he wanted to destroy the evidence, why not bleach the entire thing?”
“Interesting question.”
“He didn’t want to destroy all the evidence,” Matthias mused out loud, answering his own question. “Only what implicates himself. The only reason I can think of for doing that is he intended to plant the evidence and frame someone else for the crime.”
Emma let out a groan. “Eric, for example.”
“But wait.” Cassie launched into a television huckster’s voice. “There’s more.”
“Such as?”
“The forensic investigators tried to put the broken glass together like a jigsaw puzzle, hoping to figure out what it was. Problem is, like so many puzzles you pick up secondhand, there were too many pieces missing.”
Matthias shot a glance at Emma, who was scowling in thought. “Not all of it was in that bag?” he asked Cassie.
“Correct.”
“Now, why would a person clean up a broken… whatever… and only pitch part of it?”
“You find the answer to that, you might have your murderer.”
Matthias thanked her and disconnected. He made no move to put the Jeep in gear. Instead, he stared through the windshield, digesting Cassie’s news.
“What are you thinking?” Emma asked.
“The killer used a broken piece of glass as the murder weapon.”
“We already knew that.”
Matthias ignored the comment. “He didn’t wear gloves. If he had, there would’ve been no need to bleach the part of the glass he held.”
“Eric doesn’t have any cuts. Or at least he didn’t until he got beat up in jail.”
Matthias continued to muse out loud. “Jones’s homicide was not premeditated. The glass was a weapon of opportunity. The killer didn’t have a plan. He was making it up as he went.”
“You keep saying ‘he.’ You believe it was a man.”
“Not necessarily.” Although he very much wanted to speak with the missing foreman. “But now I definitely want another look at the Powell farm construction site.”
“To look for Winslow?”
“Building materials,” Matthias said. “Specifically, something made of plate glass.”
Emma settled back in her seat. “Are we going there next?”
He shifted the Jeep into drive. “No. Let’s stick with our original plan. North Star Developing and Tina Neidermeyer first. What we do after that depends on what we find out.”
Besides, he wanted his visit to the construction site to be under the cover of darkness.