“I can’t be your lawyer,” I said to Mandy, “but let me see what I can do. I have an idea, okay?”
It took me another minute of convincing her before she hung up the phone.
Mark slid back into the truck. “Tony says Mandy called him a week or two ago because her car wouldn’t start. He was going to have it towed back here so he could look at it, but she called back the next day to say it was working after all.”
That fit Mandy’s story. Whoever had committed these crimes had done a lot of planning to deflect suspicion and keep from getting caught, but it would be a stretch to say that Mandy had pretended her car didn’t work, even went so far as to call a mechanic, on the off chance that she might later have to claim she couldn’t have been involved in pushing us into a lake. She wasn’t psychic. She’d have had no way of knowing she’d need that excuse.
Mark was watching me with raised eyebrows. “How about you tell me what’s going through your head?”
I explained the pieces that were coming together. He started nodding halfway through, letting me know that my logic was still sound despite my bruised brain.
“And wouldn’t Mandy have at least tried to scrub the blood out of her trunk if she knew it was there?” I said. “It’s like someone wanted us to find it, just like they wanted us to find Tim’s baseball bat and Vilsack’s body on Susan Schmitke’s land.”
“Let me play devil’s advocate, because you know what Chief McTavish will say when we bring this to him.”
I snorted. Chief McTavish might have hired me to consult on this case, but that didn’t mean he’d like it when I showed up claiming that the easy solution wasn’t the right one. “Sure.”
“Where’s the motive? Why try to kill you and Alice? Why would Becky kill Vilsack in the first place?”
I couldn’t answer the question of motive for Vilsack’s murder yet, but I had a pretty good idea about why Alice and I ended up in the lake. “I think the attack today might have been more misdirection. I kept investigating Vilsack and the B&B employees. Whoever did this wanted to put the focus back on Alice as the intended target and Bruce as collateral damage. And it worked.”
“Now,” Mark said, “how do we prove it?”
20
Mark drove us in circles around Fair Haven. We couldn’t go to Chief McTavish when all I had were theories, but I didn’t want to go home. My dad would say I was naïve for believing Mandy, even with Tony’s confirmation of her story. Maybe I was. But I didn’t think so, and she was sitting somewhere, sick to her stomach and scared because she thought she was going to prison for something she didn’t do. I couldn’t leave a friend that way any longer than I absolutely had to.
We hit the pothole in the street outside of Nacho Bizness, the one restaurant we hadn’t been to because I didn’t like Mexican food. The bump flared my headache. It would be a lot easier to think if my head didn’t feel like it was trying to pump all my brains out through my ears. “What we need is the motive.”
Mark hit his signaler again. If the police saw us, they’d assume we were on something for driving in circles like this. “Could it have been an accident, and then she took the watch to try to cover up what she’d done? You thought it might have been an accident when we originally suspected her.”
That was before she shoved the car I was in into a lake. That definitely hadn’t been accidental. “I can’t think of an accidental way she hit him with the baseball bat in a bedroom she shouldn’t have been in with him at all.”
That was the crux of it. Vilsack and Becky didn’t have a relationship that we knew of. She didn’t work nights at The Sunburnt Arms, so it wasn’t like he sneaked up on her the way I had, and she grabbed the first thing available—even if we could explain why Tim’s bat was in a guest room.
Given her history, it wasn’t likely she would have gone to the room with him unless he’d given her a good reason or they were dating and planned to use a guest room that they knew would be empty for the night. I couldn’t see Becky dating a man like Vilsack, who seemed to want only one thing from his relationships. Rape victims usually struggled with intimacy even in stable, loving, long-term relationships after their assault.
I borrowed Mark’s phone and logged in to my Facebook account. Becky had accepted my friend request a few days ago, so I now had access to her timeline and photos.
I scrolled through them. Family shots from a child’s birthday party. Becky with her arms around Penny and another woman. Sunsets over the lake. Becky and her dad building a deck.
Becky seemed to like to memorialize things in photos, but there weren’t any of her with Bruce Vilsack…or any other man who wasn’t obviously a family member, for that matter.
I clicked away. “It’s a long shot, but we could show her picture to Vilsack’s roommate. He didn’t know many names, but Elise said he might recognize faces of the woman Vilsack dated.”
“I don’t have any better suggestions,” Mark said.
I called Elise and explained my theory.
“The chief is going to call you a troublemaker.” She sounded almost gleeful at the idea. “I’ll text you the address for his job. But you’re not going alone. Not even with Mark. I’ll meet you there.”
A few seconds after we disconnected, Mark’s phone pinged with a text from Elise with the address for Lakeside Realty. Mark glanced at it. He changed directions.
One of the benefits of being a long-time resident. I still often needed my GPS to get around, but Mark knew where to go without external help.
Elise beat us there. She was already waiting on the sidewalk out front when Mark and I pulled up.
Elise introduced me as a consultant. She didn’t introduce Mark, and he stood behind me like he was my bodyguard rather than the county medical examiner.
I logged back in to my Facebook account and brought up Becky’s pictures.
The man glanced at my forehead before taking the phone from me. I couldn’t blame him. The mirror on the truck’s visor had shown me that my forehead looked like it belonged to Frankenstein’s monster. He was probably also wondering why it took three of us to show him a picture.
He pinched and spread his fingers on the screen like he was enlarging one of the photos. He shook his head. “Sorry. If Bruce was with her, I didn’t see them together.”
If he was looking at the photos of Becky at the birthday party, none of them were clear images of her face. I held out my hand for the phone, and he returned it. I quickly scrolled through to the one of her with Penny. It was from the waist up, and Becky faced the camera straight on.
I pointed. “What about this one?”
The man shook his head again. “I don’t know her.” He squinted and pinched the screen again. “But I do know her.”
At first I thought he was pointing at Penny, but his finger hovered over the face of the other woman in the photo.
My grab for the phone might have been a little abrupt. I tapped the woman’s face, and my browser opened her profile—Julia Herndon.
Julia, the co-founder of the PTSD support group, had dated Bruce Vilsack. Julia, who was also “out sick” from the group meeting the night Penny’s abusive husband had died.
“Thanks,” I said to Vilsack’s roommate.
