I had no time to place the key card in the exact location I’d taken it from. It made sense, therefore, to slip it into my pocket. With the jumble of papers, folders, and notes on his desk, he wouldn’t miss it. Not right away at least. I could always sneak it back later.
“Hey, Aunt Gerry, you’re late,” Skip said when he entered his cubicle. He looked at his watch. “I expected you over an hour ago, right after we hung up.”
Very funny. “I had to take Maddie to lunch,” I said.
“And you brought me…?”
I handed over the rest of the ginger cookies. I could have sworn he stared at the spot on his desk where the key card had been. I had to concentrate, swallowing hard, distracting myself from looking there myself. I remembered a thriller I’d seen where the suspect revealed his guilt merely by looking at a spot on the wall where the bullet had penetrated, something he couldn’t have known unless he’d put it there. I held fast, but I was sure I saw out of the corner of my eye a red glow where once the key belonging to the LPPD had been.
“I thought you might want to share more with me. About why you were looking for Rosie Norman?”
He chewed slowly on a ginger cookie. “Mmm,” came out of his mouth instead of information. “Still the best, Aunt Gerry.” He picked up my paperback, which had fallen to the floor. “This is your snooping cover, right? I don’t see a bookmark.”
My nephew was so annoying when he was right. “Skip? You called me, remember? I just want to know what in the world makes you think Rosie murdered David Bridges?”
“Did I say that?” he asked.
“Not in so many words. Do you deny that you think she might be involved?”
“Not exactly.”
My heart sank, my last miniature amount of hope flitting away. I clung to his qualified answer. He hadn’t given me an outright “no.” “Can you at least tell me where his body was found?”
“A group of teenagers found him when they went to Joshua Speed Woods for some early morning necking. We don’t know if that was the actual scene of the crime, though the last word was yes, probably he was killed right there. The kids’ statement says that the trophy was next to the body. They picked it up to see whose it was. I have a feeling every one of them handled it, so we’re still sorting out whose fingerprints are recoverable.”
Up to now, when I’d had occasion to pass by or talk about the wooded area to the west of the main part of town, I imagined the look on the face of one of Lincoln’s closest friends, Kentuckian Joshua Speed-if he could have known that his namesake woods were used mostly as a lovers’ lane. Now, for a long time, I’d remember it as a murder scene.
The worst realization at the moment, however, was that Rosie lived on Joshua Speed Lane, which bordered the woods.
I felt the strangest regret that I hadn’t listened more closely to Rosie when she described her long-ago relationship to David. All the times she’d gone on and on at the crafts table, and most of us absorbed less than half of what she said, I guessed. She’d mentioned one “date gone bad” as I recalled. I didn’t care at the time, but now I wished I knew precisely how badly it had gone.
Skip bent down to the floor on the side of his desk and picked up a brown paper bag. Too large for lunch. Big enough for evidence.
I was on pins and needles as he reached into the bag. What he pulled out was one of the last things I would have guessed, right before “a flock of seagulls.”
Skip took his time. Rosie’s locker room scene emerged from the bag, one tiny, gray locker at a time. I couldn’t blame Skip for playing out the drama.
I didn’t remember so much red in the décor. I looked more closely. The scene had been trashed. I hate David had been written in red paint across three or four adjacent lockers. The tiny jersey with David’s old number thirty-six had been torn to shreds. There was “trash” everywhere, in the form of bits of cloth and paper and a deflated football.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“Can you identify the item?”
I gulped. I felt as though I were in a witness box. Or on trial myself.
“It’s Rosie’s,” I said. “I mean it looks like Rosie’s. What do you think it means?”
“My question exactly.” He placed the room box on his desk. “Look carefully. It’s been dusted, as much as we could, considering where we found it, but you still shouldn’t touch it.”
The most I could ever hope for from my nephew was that he would answer half the questions I asked. I didn’t push the issue, lest I inadvertently give away something that incriminated Rosie.
I squinted at the ravaged scene. I reached into my tote for the magnifier I always carry and held it close. It took a great effort not to run my finger across the red paint. I grimaced as if it were real blood.
I saw what had impressed Skip. The most striking addition to the scene was a bottle of poison. It seemed Rosie had taken a piece of white filter paper from the coffee system that every hotel room has these days and fashioned a small cylinder to resemble a bottle. She’d used the plastic packaging from a coffee pouch to shape a bottle top. Not too many people would have been able to identify this clever use of found objects, but it happened to be my specialty. The work had been done in a hurry (or in a state of torment) but was what my crafters group would have declared “cute.”
Except for what was written on the bottle. Rosie-or someone else, I reminded myself-had drawn the shape of a label, with a skull and crossbones and the word poison.
Lavana Rollins had been right when she called it a strange piece of evidence that I’d find “very interesting.”
“Well?” Skip said. “What’s it supposed to be? Something other than a clue to her state of mind? And, by the way, there’s more potential evidence that I can’t tell you about right now.”
I felt it necessary to explain the craft group’s Alasita project to Skip, hoping the context would work in Rosie’s favor. “Before the vandalism, it was like a prayer for a happy meeting between Rosie and David,” I said.
“I’ve heard of that.”
“You have?”
“When June and I went to Mexico we saw a version of Alasita. They had parades and dancing and all, but the miniatures were nothing as fancy as this. They were more likely to do something rough or just buy a little key chain if they wanted a car or a house.” He rummaged around the back of his desk and extracted a wooden owl. “June got me this. To bring me wisdom.”
“You said there was something else. More potential evidence? Not that this is evidence.”
“Yeah, well, never mind that right now.”
“But David wasn’t poisoned. Doesn’t that count?”
“Gotta go, Aunt Gerry.”
I managed a few more Q-and-As before he got serious about my leaving. The gentle pressure on my arm as he led me from his cubicle told me that it was time.
If I ever needed an owl, it was now.
I drove north on Springfield Boulevard toward my neighborhood, and it so happened, Henry’s also. Since this was the main street for markets and shops, there was medium-to-heavy traffic this Saturday afternoon. Not usually an impatient driver, right now I couldn’t wait to see how Maddie was faring.
Skip had been as forthcoming as he was going to be. It was neither surprising nor unusual that he’d gotten more from me than I’d gotten from him. After all, he was highly trained in investigative and interviewing techniques. I didn’t know whether to be ashamed or proud of myself for getting away with the hotel key card.
I’d given Skip a watered-down version of Rosie’s behavior of late, trying to make her out to be less a stalker than she was. It couldn’t hurt to act as a character witness to balance out her miniature crime scene. I told him the truth about my temporary roommate, that I’d seen her leave David’s doorway about ten thirty last night and then saw her again in her bed when I woke up this morning.