She wasn’t going to tell me.
“I hope you understand,” she whispered, “but I can’t.”
I could understand. She still had her job. That was more than could be said about nearly half the Fair Haven police force at this point. And it might not even be about her job. It might be an ethical thing for her. She might simply not feel right about sharing information with me about an active case. Lawyer or not, I was also Mark’s fiancé. Anderson was the one on record as Mark’s lawyer, not me.
None of that rationalizing took the sting out of it, though.
“You’ll be in my thoughts,” Sheila said. Her voice went up on the end, as if she expected that to make her refusal easier to bear.
Being in someone’s thoughts was about as useful as owning a pair of shoes you never wore.
And then she hung up on me before I could pressure her. Which was probably a smart move on her part. Despite her plea for me to understand, I would have pushed her to give me some sort of direction at least.
Now I was back to trying to find the phone numbers of the other three dispatchers on my own.
Fair Haven still produced an old-fashioned physical phone book—I’d seen it back when I stayed at The Sunburnt Arms. Elise should have a copy. If she didn’t, I’d try searching online, but an online search could yield so many results that I’d have to make a lot of wrong number calls before actually finding the people I wanted.
Her copy of the phone book turned out to be underneath the base for her house phone. It was also five years old, so she either threw the new one out by accident or Fair Haven changed so little they didn’t feel the need to produce a new phone book more than every five years. Given what I knew of the town, my guess was the latter.
I took it with me to the kitchen table. Only two of the remaining dispatchers were listed. The first one I called wasn’t on duty the night Troy died. He had heard about Mark, though, and he made sure to tell me he didn’t believe he’d done it.
It gave me a much-needed boost before I called the next dispatcher. Case Hammond was friends with Grady Scherwin. While Grady seemed to respect Mark, I’d stepped on his toes one time too many. I’d even gotten him replaced with Troy when my dogs were kidnapped because I didn’t trust him to do a thorough job investigating. Case had surely heard all about it, including some choice terms for me.
I dialed his number anyway. I didn’t have a choice. Our only lead at present was whoever called in the false accident.
A man answered without giving his name.
Without asking, I could only assume I had the right person. I certainly wasn’t going to jump into my request without being sure.
“Is this Case Hammond?”
“Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any.”
The call dropped.
He must have thought I was a telemarketer. I clearly needed to work on my professional phone voice if I sounded like a scam artist.
I redialed. This time he didn’t answer. Lovely. He recognized my number from before and was taking the ignore-the-call tactic I often took when I got repeat calls from a number I knew was trying to sell me something or swindle me.
I hung up and grabbed Elise’s house phone. I dialed again.
“Hello,” the same male voice said.
I was going to assume it was Case since he hadn’t said no when I asked for him before. Had it been the wrong number, he would have told me so rather than basically telling me to shove off.
“This is…” Maybe I shouldn’t tell him my name. He might be more willing to help me if he thought I was working with Mark’s lawyer. It wasn’t a lie, either. Anderson and I were partners. “I’m with Anderson Taylor’s law office. We’re representing Mark Cavanaugh. I’m trying to reach the dispatcher who was on duty the night Troy Summoner was killed. Am I speaking to the right person?”
There’d been music in the background before, like he’d been listening to the radio. The sound cut in half. “Sorry, say that again.”
I repeated it, leaving out my name and praying that he wouldn’t notice.
“I wasn’t on that night.”
His tone suggested Mark didn’t have a chance if we were his lawyers and didn’t even know how to contact the right person.
I grabbed up the phone book and ruffled the pages near the phone so it would sound like I was looking through papers. “Are you sure? The information we got from the police lists your name. Case Hammond.”
“I was on the day shift.” Now he sounded a bit like he wasn’t sure whether he was the one I was looking for or not. “But I didn’t talk to Cavanaugh. I think he probably called 911, and that goes to a central county dispatch. I answer calls that come into the Fair Haven police station.”
That was all information I already knew, except that Case had been working the day shift that day.
But maybe I could get the other piece of information I needed. I hadn’t had much interaction with Case, but I had with Grady, and people tended to befriend others like themselves. Grady was hyper-macho, like he belonged in a past era. Maybe sounding a little flustered would trigger a rescue the damsel in distress feeling in Case. If he assumed the police gave me his name and number, he shouldn’t see anything wrong with giving me Henry McCloud’s number.
“I’m so sorry. Your name and number were the ones I was given.” I added a little extra fluff to my voice, trying to imitate an airhead secretary from old black-and-white TV shows. “Do you know who was working that night? My boss is going to be angry if I don’t get the information he wanted.”
By process of elimination, I already knew who was working. But what I didn’t have and couldn’t get without his help was the phone number.
Be the hero, I silently urged him.
The music in the background vanished. Case had either turned it off or left the room. “Everyone wants to see Cavanaugh found innocent of this, and it sounds like you made an innocent mistake. I was working the day they investigated the murder. Makes sense they gave you my name by accident. Let me get you the number for Henry. He’s the one I replaced when I came in.”
I wrote down the number as he read it off, dutifully repeating it back. I wouldn’t get another chance if I wrote it down wrong.
After he hung up, I set Elise’s phone down on the table and stared at it. Other than hanging up when he thought I was a telemarketer, Case had actually seemed nice. Whether he would have been as helpful had I been honest with him about my identity was up for debate, but he’d wanted to make sure Mark got the best chance at a good defense by helping his lawyer’s office with the right information.
The man still had abysmal taste in friends, but no one was perfect.
Now I had to pray that Henry would be less reticent to share information than Sheila had been. He didn’t have to tell me anything.
