“You didn’t mention to the police earlier that you and Bruce Vilsack played on the same baseball team,” I said.
Tim shrugged. It looked too casual for the situation. Most people, when interviewed by the police, even if they were completely innocent, had some degree of nervousness. Tim’s shrug looked like he’d practiced hiding his true reactions before.
“I didn’t know it mattered. There’s only one team in town, so anyone who plays, plays with us.”
I gave Elise a pointed look, and she handed me the photo of the bat from the file she’d brought along.
I offered the photo to Tim. “Do you recognize this?”
The dim overhead lights stretched shadows down his face and washed out his skin to a sickly yellow. He could try to claim that he couldn’t see it well enough in this lighting.
Instead he said, “It looks like mine.”
If my mom were here, she’d say it was a smart answer because he didn’t say the bat was his. He only said it looked like his.
Which meant I wasn’t going to confirm his obvious suspicion that this was the murder weapon yet. “This bat was found at The Sunburnt Arms. If it is yours, how do you think it got there?”
He flattened his hands against his thighs. “I always bring my bat and glove with me to work after the Wednesday night game so I can clean them when there’s nothing else for me to do. Once the laundry’s done, the night shift gets pretty quiet.”
Elise shifted in her seat. She’d caught it too. Tim regularly did the laundry at The Sunburnt Arms. That meant he’d know how to work the machines, and he’d know that, with Vilsack dead, no one else would be checking in on the laundry until morning. By then, the evidence would be long destroyed.
It was still all circumstantial though.
Elise dug through the file. I knew there wouldn’t be a record of whether or not there’d been a mitt at The Sunburnt Arms. It would have only been logged into evidence if it had blood or some other evidence on it. It could be in some of the photos, but those were all digital except for the bat, which we printed off to bring with us. We’d have to spend hours manually searching each image.
I knew all that, but Tim didn’t.
Take the gamble, I silently urged Elise.
Elise ran her finger down a page and stopped it halfway. She skewered Tim with her gaze. “If you brought both the bat and your mitt, why didn’t we find a glove at The Sunburnt Arms?”
“It was a busier night than I expected. Mandy left me an extra-long list, and I fielded a lot of phone calls. I cleaned my mitt and left my bat there to work on over the weekend.”
He’d answered quickly. He’d either had that answer ready or he was telling the truth. Though that didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t killed Vilsack. It only meant he knew the bat would be there and knew that he could use it.
Using his own bat wouldn’t say much for his intelligence. Perhaps that was the plan. It felt a lot like how Vilsack’s body wasn’t well-hidden on the Schmitkes’ land.
I leaned my shoulder into the seat and waited to see if he’d add anything, but he didn’t.
As his defense attorney, I’d have had to show that the real killer could have known the bat was there to use. As someone building a case against him, I had to prove that no one but Tim could have known. “Where did you leave the bat?”
“Behind the front desk.”
The answer was quick again, but it was also the answer I’d expect if he killed Vilsack. He wouldn’t claim to have left his bat somewhere no one else could have found it.
For a second, I wished my mom was here. We could bounce the questions that needed to be asked back and forth so Tim would feel surrounded and pressured.
I smiled sweetly at him. Innocently. “It seems like you value your bat. Cleaning it off each time you use it must be time-intensive.”
I had no idea if that were true or not, but it didn’t matter.
“Not that much time,” Tim said. “But yes, good bats are expensive.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a movement from Elise. I didn’t look at her to give it away, but hopefully she knew where I was going now. This type of questioning worked better tag-teamed. I’d give her a chance.
Elise peered around the edge of the seat. “It certainly doesn’t look that way. Why leave a valuable and treasured item where anyone could snatch it?”
“Susan didn’t like me leaving a dirty bat in the kitchen, and it got battered around when Mandy or Becky needed something when I used to leave it in the closet. Besides, our front desk is supposed to always be staffed.”
There was an edge to his voice—angry and worried, not that different from a parent calling a teenager who was supposed to be home an hour ago.
Now was the time to push a little harder. At this point, he’d either make a mistake or ask for his lawyer.
I leaned forward enough to make it feel like I was invading his personal space in the confined area. “You weren’t too upset at Bruce’s death.”
“I have an alibi,” he said, the words rapid-fire.
“You don’t even know when Vilsack died,” Elise said at the same time as I thought it.
“I was with her from the middle of the afternoon, from around three, until the next morning. We were together the whole time.”
He the way he emphasized whole time made it clear that what he really meant was we were sleeping together.
The declaration felt off to me, but I couldn’t figure out why. “We’ll need her name, address, and phone number. And you’re not to contact her to warn her we’re coming. We’ll be able to check the phone records.”
A small lie. We couldn’t check his phone records or hers without a warrant, but it should be enough to keep him from calling her, and Mandy would tell me if he left work early. If we had a full police force, we might have put a tail on him, but as it was, hopefully my empty threat would scare him enough.
“Text records too.” Elise handed him a pen and notepad. “Put her information here.”
