I gave him a quick rundown on Charlotte snooping in the Volunteer Aid Program records and then we ended our call, Gilroy telling me he’d be home late.

As I turned to readying coffee cups and plating the shortbread cookies I’d intended for the station, I again puzzled over who was blackmailing Mary. She hadn’t given in and published an article on Brodie or Isak. Julia subscribed to that rag of a paper and would’ve told me if she had. Anyway, Brodie would never reveal his Idaho secret, and the paper’s owner, liking Brodie, probably wouldn’t have allowed it.

But I’d mentioned Brodie’s DUI to Shasta. Brodie Keegan’s DUI in Idaho. With that, I’d given her all the information she needed to look it up on her own, and she’d been intrigued. I’d mentioned Brodie to several people, in fact. And I’d brought up Isak’s assault charge in Minnesota and Shasta and Dalton’s affair.

Before long, everyone would know about Isak and Brodie and Shasta’s affair. Targets, all of them. The only benign item in Mary’s packet was the first page of her home’s second mortgage. No one cared about that, and Mary herself had complained about it to Shasta and, probably, others.

Who benefited from the blackmail? No one had asked for money, so money was never the point. That raised two more questions: Who had been targeted, and to what purpose?

And asking myself the latter of those two questions, I realized the purpose had already been accomplished. Newspaper articles weren’t necessary when wagging tongues, my own included, would work.

Mary’s blackmail was meant to destroy enemies. Not just people like Brodie, the young drunk and forward-looking pup who didn’t deserve to lord it over his subordinates, but entities too. Like that despised art gallery, which threatened to bring the Blackwells and Karlsens financial ruin.

Gilroy was fond of saying that past behavior was the best predictor of future behavior. The concept had served him well as a detective in Fort Collins and a police chief in Juniper Grove. And Mary had proven she had no problem lying to me.

I phoned Charlotte Wynn and demanded an answer to the two questions I was about to ask. If she wasn’t straight with me, I’d tell Roche and White what she’d been up to in the Records Section.

“Did you locate Brodie’s DUI police report and Isak Karlsen’s Minnesota lawsuit?”

“Me?” she asked in a masquerade of innocence.

“Or have someone help you locate them,” I said. “Don’t play word games with me—you know what I’m asking.”

The line went quiet. Then, “I told people in Idaho and Minnesota that my firm needed them. They emailed PDFs.”

Though I’d expected her answer, I was gobsmacked. If she’d do that to Brodie, someone she was fond of, what would she not do? “You were paid?”

“Not as much as I should have for the risk I took.”

“Paid by Mary Blackwell?”

“How did you know?”

CHAPTER 18

Holly, Julia, and Royce listened to me rant for several minutes. They drank their coffees while I paced my office, not an easy feat considering its tight confines. I caught them up on everything to do with the case, showed them the Dumont painting on my phone, then sat behind my desk and said, “I’ll never speak to Mary Blackwell again.”

I meant it. I was angrier than I’d been in years, and rightly so.

“Are you sure Mary paid Charlotte for that information?” Royce quite sensibly asked. “What if Charlotte is the blackmailer?”

He had a point.

There was one way to find out. I grabbed my phone from my desk and hit Mary’s number.

Aghast, Holly said, “You’re not going to ask her.”

“Mary spills it when she’s directly confronted,” I replied. “That’s something I’ve learned about her.”

Mary answered on the third ring. Phone preliminaries were a waste of everyone’s time, so I discarded politeness. “Mary, tell me the truth. Don’t waste my time. Are you the source of all this supposed blackmail?”

At first she was silent. Then she started to blubber.

I looked at Holly and nodded. Confirmation. Blubbering confirmation.

“That gallery is bankrupting us,” she sobbed. “I had to find a way.”

“And you came up this?”

“Isak’s reputation with that Minnesota school was going to get out one way or another and then destroy Clay’s reputation—don’t you see that?”

“You pretended you were worried about that, and all the time you wanted word to spread. Does Clay know about Isak?”

“No, and I wonder now if he’d have believed it.”

“Why didn’t you—”

“I tried to get Clay to see what a gamble the gallery is. When he wouldn’t listen, I thought if I could destroy his faith in Isak without him knowing I was part of it, maybe . . .”

“You paid Charlotte to dig up information.”

“Brodie got the job I needed! It should have been mine, Rachel. People started talking about downsizing subscriptions and marketing—and you don’t get it, I can tell.”

“Where’d you get the photo of Shasta and Dalton?”

“Brodie showed it to me. That was his photo, not mine. He said someone put it in an envelope and left it on his desk.”

“What did he want you to do with it?”

“Tell Isak, I’m sure. Brodie hated Dalton.”

“Did you tell Isak?”

“I didn’t show it to him.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“I told Charlotte, without showing her the photo.”

“You knew she’d get word to Isak.”

“I’m sorry. Rachel . . .”

“You used our friendship. You made me part of your lie—of Charlotte’s and Brodie’s and everyone’s lies.”

She said nothing.