LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Three

      “Why would someone steal the rock?” Lacy folded her arms over her chest and took a step back from Travis. He had shown up at her house this morning—supposedly to “check on” her and her family. But then he had come out with this crazy story about someone taking the rock that had been thrown through her window. “Do you think I took it or something?”

      “No!” He put up his hands, as if he wanted to reach for her, then put them down. “I wanted you to know because you’re the victim in this case, and you have a right to know what’s going on.”

      She unfolded her arms, relaxing a little. She had insisted on talking with him on the front porch—mainly so her parents wouldn’t overhear. Her mom and dad meant well, but they tended to hover now that she was back home. “So someone just opened the door of your sheriff’s department vehicle and took the evidence box?” she asked. “How does that happen? Wasn’t your door locked?”

      “No one locks their car doors around here.” He looked sheepish—an endearing expression, really—and she didn’t want to feel anything like that for him. “Besides, it’s a cop car. Who breaks into a cop car? And to steal a rock?”

      “Maybe they didn’t know what was in the box?” she said. “Or maybe somebody is pranking you—wants to give you a hard time.”

      “Maybe.” He put one booted foot up on a metal footlocker her mom used as a side table on the porch, and she tried not to notice the way the khaki fabric stretched over his muscular thigh. She didn’t like being around Travis, but apparently her body couldn’t ignore the fact that he was the sexiest guy she’d been near in three years. “Or maybe whoever threw the rock took it because they thought I could use it somehow to link them to the crime,” he added.

      She forced her mind away from ogling the sheriff’s hot body to what was surely a more important matter. “Can you do that?” she asked. “Would a rock have fingerprints on it or something?”

      “The surface was too rough to give good latent prints, and it looked like a common enough rock.”

      “What about DNA?” she asked.

      He laughed. “No offense, but no one does DNA testing for an act of vandalism. It’s expensive, and the results take a while to come back.”

      She lowered herself to the cushioned rattan love seat. Her mother had made the cushions out of flowered chintz, faded now by the summer sun, but all the more comfortable and homey for it. “If the person who threw the rock stole it out of your SUV, that means they knew you had it. They must have been watching and seen you come to the house to get it.”

      Travis sat beside her, the cushion dipping under his weight. She caught the scent of soap and starch and clean man, and fought to keep from leaning toward him. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe they knew your family would call my office to report the threat, they saw my SUV and decided to take a look inside.”

      “Either way, I’m completely creeped out.” She gripped the edge of the love seat. She had thought when she walked out of prison that she would feel free again, but she still felt trapped. Watched.

      “I talked to Brenda Stenson yesterday,” Travis said. “She’s okay with us going through Andy’s files.”

      Lacy nodded. “I’m not looking forward to that, you know.”

      “I understand. But I’m hoping coming at the files cold after a few years away, you’ll spot something or remember something that didn’t seem relevant before.”

      “What about the other evidence from the crime scene?” she asked. “Wasn’t there anything that pointed to someone besides me as the murderer? Or did you conveniently overlook that?” She didn’t even try to keep the sharp edge from her voice.

      “I guess I deserved that,” Travis said. “But no—there wasn’t anything. Wade Tomlinson reported seeing a woman who looked like you near the office shortly before Andy would have died. Obviously, that wasn’t you. It might help if we could find this woman, but we don’t have much to go on—Wade admitted he only saw her from the back, and only for a few seconds, before she entered the office. I’ll question him again, but I doubt he’ll have anything useful to add.”

      “Right. Who remembers anything very clearly that happened three years ago?” Lacy sighed.

      “I think Andy’s files are the best place for us to start,” Travis said.

      “Andy hadn’t been in practice very long,” Lacy said. “Still, he had a couple of big cabinets full of files. Everything was backed up on the computer, too, but he had been trained by a man who liked to keep paper copies of everything, and Andy was the same way. It will take a while to go through everything.”

      “We can do a couple of boxes at a time. You could even bring them back here to look through.”

      “Do you trust me to look through them by myself?” she asked.

      “It would look better in court if we went through them together,” Travis said. “Otherwise, a good defense attorney would point out that you had a strong motive to make people believe someone else murdered Andy. They could suggest you planted evidence in the files.”

      She fought against her inclination to bristle at what sounded to her ears like an accusation. After all, she knew all too well how attorneys could twist the most mundane events to make someone look guilty to a jury. “I guess you’re right,” she admitted. She stretched her legs out in front of her. “So how do you want to do this?”

      “I’ll get together with Brenda this afternoon and go over to the storage unit with her. I’ll select a couple of boxes to go through first, seal them in her presence, get her to sign off on them, then bring them here. We’ll open them together and start going through the contents. Maybe I’ll even video everything, just in case there’s any question.”

      “You’re very thorough.”

      “I’m determined not to make any mistakes this time.”

      And I’m determined not to let you, she thought.

      * * *

      ANDY STENSON’S STORAGE unit was located in a long metal shed at the end of Fireline Road on the edge of town. Weedy fields extended beyond the chain-link fence that surrounded the shed on all sides, the land sloping upward from there toward Dakota Ridge and the mountains beyond. With no traffic and no neighbors, the location was peaceful, even beautiful, with the first summer wildflowers blooming in the fields and a china blue sky arching overhead. But there wasn’t anything beautiful about Travis’s errand here today.

      Brenda agreed to meet him, and when he pulled into the rutted drive, he found her waiting at the far end, key in hand. “You open it,” she said, pushing the key at him. “I haven’t been in here since before Andy died. I paid a cleaning company to move all his stuff out here.”

      “Are you okay being here now?” Travis asked, studying her face. Tension lines fanned out from her mouth, but she didn’t look on the verge of a breakdown.

      “I’m okay,” she said. “I just want to get this over with.”

      He unfastened the padlock and rolled up the metal door of the unit. Sunlight illuminated jumbled stacks of file

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