“Please, Sheriff, keep this to yourself? I don’t want to hurt Carl…”
“I’ll do everything I can. I promise.”
She nodded, knowing that was the best she was going to get. Spenser walked out of the coffee shop surprised that she now had not one but two viable suspects. It was thin, but it was more than she had when she walked in. It wasn’t a lot, but it wasn’t nothing either.
“She was sleeping with our victim? Oh, that’s just scandalous,” Amanda gasped, though she was clearly delighted by the gossip.
“It also gives us two suspects,” Spenser replied.
“Two?” Jacob asked.
“Two,” she repeated.
“The second suspect is Carl Edelstein himself,” Amanda stated. “If he found out about the affair, he could have been so upset that he took it out on the man who was shtupping his wife.”
“Very good, Amanda.”
“Ahh. That makes sense, but Carl? Seriously? He’s like a pillar of the community,” Jacob said. “He’s part of my gaming group and I’ve known him for a long time. I went to school with the guy, and I can tell you he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. To be honest, he’s kind of… vanilla. Bland.”
“That’s why Dina said she started sleeping with Seth in the first place. She needed a little excitement,” Spenser said.
“Isn’t that always the reason?” Amanda said dryly.
“Usually. And in the right circumstances, even the blandest, most vanilla person among us can commit the most horrible atrocities,” Spenser added.
“Finding out your wife was being shtupped by her trainer might have been enough to push milquetoast Carl over the edge,” Amanda said.
“Also, given the fact that he’s a pharmacist, he’d be familiar with the toxic and lethal effects of tetrahydrozoline,” Spenser added.
Jacob pulled a face and shook his head. “I think you guys are barking up the wrong tree with Carl. Like I said, he’s a really good guy.”
“Maybe we are,” Spenser said. “But at the moment, he’s a viable suspect so we have to do our due diligence on both him and his wife.”
Jacob didn’t say anything further, but the furrowed brow and look on his face as he turned back to his computer and went back to work, told Spenser he didn’t agree.
“Neither Carl nor Dina have a record,” Jacob reported. “They’re both clean. Carl runs the Emporium, and Dina works at Beans and is going to school to be a dental hygienist. They pay their taxes, have very little debt, and are charitable. Like I said, pillar of the community types.”
“What is Dina’s alibi?” Amanda asked.
“Says she was running errands on the fourteenth, then went home, made dinner, and they watched TV all night,” Spenser said.
Jacob tapped on his keyboard, still looking glum that he was digging into somebody he obviously considered a friend.
“Financials show she made a few purchases around town,” he said. “The last purchase she made was the grocery store.”
“Shopping for dinner,” Amanda said.
“Likely. But we need to account for her day,” Spenser said. “We need to figure out where she was and where she stopped on the fourteenth.”
Jacob finally looked up, his expression lightening. He gave her an apologetic look as if silently saying he understood they had a job to do no matter who or what was involved and that he was sorry for snapping. She gave him a small nod, silently telling him it was all right.
“I took a little initiative since I know how much you hate reconstructing a person’s movements and accessed Hamill’s cell phone data for the fourteenth and fifteenth.”
“What did you find?”
He tapped out a few more commands on his computer then gestured to the monitor. A map of the city appeared with a series of blue dots then a series of red dots popping up at various points around town.
“Okay, the blue dots represent Hamill’s movements on the fourteenth,” Jacob said. “And the red dots represent his movements on the fifteenth.”
“He wasn’t home much on the fourteenth,” Amanda noted.
“Plenty of time for somebody to slip in and lace his steroids.”
Jacob tapped out another set of commands and another set of dots, these ones green, popped up on the map. Spenser studied them and saw most of the green dots were mostly centered in one location—in the Little Paris section of town.
“These are Bo Graham’s cell points?” she asked.
“Yep. It looks like he was telling the truth about locking himself away in his place for those couple of days,” Jacob said.
“Or he was smart enough to know his phone could be used to do exactly what you’re doing now and left it at home when he went out,” Amanda offered.
Spenser looked at the map and the dots. She folded her arms over her chest and stepped closer to the monitor and scrutinized it for a minute before turning back to Jacob.
“Can you do the same for Dina and Carl Edelstein?” she asked.
