He glanced at Spenser with a wry expression. “The question you should be asking is if there’s anything I can’t do.”
“Oh boy,” Amanda chirped with a roll of her eyes.
“I want to see where they were on the fourteenth—”
“Or where their phones were anyway,” Amanda said.
“Give me just a few minutes to work my magic,” Jacob said.
He bent his head down and started typing and clicking furiously. True to his word, a couple of minutes later, two sets of dots, these ones yellow and brown, popped up on the screen.
“Yellow is for Carl and brown is for Dina,” he said.
The yellow dots were all centered in three locations—the Emporium, the diner down the street from the Emporium, and the Edelstein home.
“He doesn’t really go anywhere, does he?” Amanda asked.
“According to the data I’m seeing, no, not really,” Jacob replied. “His routine is predictable and… well… routine. He keeps to a schedule. When he’s not at work, he’s usually at home—except on our monthly game nights.”
The brown dots, on the other hand, were scattered all over town. Dina obviously liked to get out and about. On the fourteenth, she was in a dozen different places.
“Dina’s financials seem to line up with her cell phone data,” Jacob said. “It looks like she was running errands all around town.”
Spenser frowned as the first holes in her theory opened up. “And it doesn’t look like she was anywhere near Hamill’s house on the fourteenth.”
“Unless she wasn’t with her phone,” Amanda offered. “She could have left it in her car at any one of those points, slipped over to Hamill’s place, done the deed, then went back and picked up her phone again like nothing happened.”
“That seems like a pretty complex plan,” Jacob said.
“Lacing somebody’s steroids rather than just shooting them in the face is a pretty complex plan, too,” Amanda countered.
As she considered the possibilities, she knew what they were going to have to do. It was going to be a tedious, laborious, and painstaking process, but there didn’t seem to be any way around it. She hated it, but it had to be done.
“Yeah, maybe. It’s possible. Which means we need to confirm the movements of all three—Dina, Carl, and Bo,” Spenser said with a groan.
“That’s going to be time-consuming,” Amanda said.
“It is. But if we want to get an accurate picture that lets us either include or exclude those three from our suspect pool, we need a minute-by-minute accounting of their movements. It’s why I was hoping something or somebody more obvious would present itself. But right now, these three are our best suspects.”
“Our only suspects,” Amanda said.
“Right.”
“What about the girlfriend?” Jacob asked. “Layla, was it?”
“I haven’t crossed her off the list but I’m having a hard time finding a motive,” Spenser said.
“What if she found out about Dina?” Amanda offered.
“She didn’t give any indication to me that she knew Hamill was being unfaithful.”
“If she was smart, and you said she is, she probably wouldn’t since she’d have to assume it would vault her straight to the top of the suspect board,” Amanda responded.
Spenser pursed her lips and folded her arms over her chest as she started to pace the room again. She had to admit it was an oversight in her thinking. And a glaring one at that. In her defense, she hadn’t known about Hamill’s cheating when she’d talked to Layla. But it probably should have been one of the first things that popped into her mind the moment she found out. She wanted to slap herself upside the head for missing it.
“That’s a good observation, Amanda. Really good,” she said then turned to Jacob.
“Already on it,” he said before she could speak.
A set of orange dots appeared on the map Jacob still had up on the monitor. Unlike the others though, Layla had just a few dots. She hadn’t gone very far that day but of those places she did go, she never got close to Hamill’s house. Which meant, one of their three viable suspects was smart enough to separate themselves from their phones long enough to get into Hamill’s house to lace the steroids and back to where they’d come from. Either that, or they were barking up the wrong tree—three wrong trees—and they actually had nothing. As far into their investigation as they were, it was something Spenser didn’t want to contemplate.
“Okay, so apparently, nobody was at Hamill’s house the day we think his steroids were laced,” Amanda said.
“So they’d have us believe,” Spenser said.
“Or maybe we’re missing somebody,” Amanda offered.
“Maybe. Or maybe—”
Jacob’s computer chimed, and he hit a couple of keys. As he looked at the screen, a look of surprise dawned on his face.
“What is it?” Spenser asked.
He raised his eyes to her. “My program finally broke through Hamill’s security firewalls.”
“And?”
“And I think our suspect pool just got wider, boss. A lot wider.”
