“He’s being so helpful. What’s his motivation?”
“He could be our killer, looking for Connor to take the fall.”
“He left town; why not just keep going?”
“Probably figures it’s only a matter of time until he makes a mistake and someone spots him and calls it in. I put out an all-points bulletin for surrounding states the day of the murder.”
“You have the name of the motel; what will you do now?”
“A year ago I’d have taken a drive down there and asked to see the register and security footage. By law they have to keep ninety days of records. But there’s a recent change in the law that makes it more difficult. Not impossible. But I do need a warrant showing reasonable cause. It’s on my to-do list. Here’s the interesting thing, though: the Spring Grove Motel is owned by Val Campion.”
“His name keeps coming up.”
“He’s a shady guy with fingers in a lot of dirty business. It would be an honor to take him down, but right now I’m not seeing a way he connects to Stacey other than through Kelly and Swailes.”
“Do you think Swailes could be holed up at the Spring Grove?” I asked. “Probably not, he’d be stupid to give up the name.”
He looked at me and picked up his phone. Within minutes, he was on the line with the sheriff’s department in Salt Lake. They agreed to send someone undercover to the Spring Grove Motel to see if there was any sign of Swailes. If not, they’d set up a watch for the next forty-eight hours. If he showed, they’d take him into custody. If not, they’d reevaluate the situation.
Antelope was shaking his head when he got off the phone. “I’m going to spend some time figuring out how I missed that, Doc.”
“It’s Kelly Ryan,” I said, shooting him a wicked smile. “She gets you off track. You said it yourself: sexual chemistry short circuits the brain.”
CHAPTER 31
Back at the county building, Antelope stopped in to see Scruggs before his meeting with Connor Collins. The sheriff was at his desk with a bowl of taco salad and a sweet tea in front of him.
“I hate funerals, and this one didn’t do anything to change my mind,” he said. “Pull up a chair and fill me in on the latest.”
“I’ve got the Connor Collins interview in five minutes.”
“Somehow this got routed to me by mistake,” Scruggs said, rummaging through a stack of papers.
“You’re still the man in charge.”
“I don’t need to be bogged down in details. Where is the damn thing now?” Scruggs slapped the desk. “Ahh, I can’t find it. It’s a note from Forensics saying they’ll have the DNA back on the cigarette butts from Cedar Street soon. Not exactly earth-shaking. Why don’t they stop wasting time documenting stuff they’re going to do and do it? Might get us what we need to do our jobs.”
“I can’t disagree.”
“But you’re not gonna get worked up about it, either. Probably why my heart needed some new hardware. I sweat the small stuff too much. Did Toni offer anything useful?”
“She said Max Hart, Connor Collins, and Timothy Ryan were all sexually abused as altar boys by Father Gerard Kroll. He’s the guy Bellamy replaced. Whether that has any bearing on current circumstances, I don’t know. Toni says he knew about it, and he kept it secret from the nuns who taught at the school and from the parishioners. I don’t know enough about church policies on these matters. Is it suspicious, or is it standard operating procedure? He was chosen to create a new culture and heal the wounds with the affected families. He seems to have fulfilled the expectations.”
“These churchgoers are real sheep, aren’t they?” Scruggs wrinkled his forehead. “How’d they keep the families quiet?”
“Financial settlement, with the condition they don’t speak about the incidents.”
“As if money can fix perversions. I know how I’d react.” Scruggs’s voice was growing louder by the second. “I’d tell the perverts where they could stick their cash and be on every talk radio and television station that would have me. The church be damned. What good is a church that allows this kind of evil to go on?”
“Like I said,” Antelope said calmly, “I’m not seeing the connection, but the fact that the sister of one of the victims was murdered makes me want to look a little deeper. It’s too much coincidence for someone who doesn’t believe in coincidence.”
Scruggs nodded. “Find out how much the payout was—and what they did with the money.”
CHAPTER 32
Connor parked under a cottonwood tree in the lot beside the Sweet-water County Building. He hated getting into a hot car. The yellow brick building, adjacent to the county cemetery, looked haunted, like something out of a horror movie.
Behind the building, the headstones of the cemetery, rows and rows of white granite, stretched as far as he could see. Stacey was in the ground at the far corner, unthinkable. Earlier, in the back of the grotesque hearse, the thought had struck him that as her fiancé, it was wrong to leave her.
Always weak when it counts. He couldn’t face the truth of her death.
Nor would he visit the grave—no point, and his thoughts would go to a bad place.
Exhaustion fell over him like a sudden onset of the flu; his limbs were heavy and aching. Sleep eluded him, though he’d tried with every trick he knew to knock himself out for the last couple of nights. His face in the mirror showed the strain of grief and sleep deprivation: dark circles under his eyes and a lifeless, blank stare. He finished off the water bottle he was holding. Hydration might help. One thought brought relief: After today, there would be no one watching, and he could do it his way. With the funeral and the public grieving over, he planned to drink himself into oblivion tonight.
Too many bad associations to the cemetery caused him to avoid going there—his parents, Tim. He couldn’t forget what had happened; the memory followed him like a shadow.
He sat for a minute in the cool of the air-conditioned car, not wanting to face the next hour or however long the detective would keep him, haranguing him with the same questions. He knew the drill, could practically write the script. For the first time, he wondered if he’d made the wrong decision choosing law as a profession.
The last few days had showed him another view of the legal system. His position as assistant prosecutor offered no protection. His boss had called as soon as he heard about the murder and said all the right things. But as far as he could tell, the Sheriff’s Department was treating him like any other significant other—boyfriend, fiancé, or husband—of a murder victim. The crime statistics pointed law enforcement in the direction of the one closest to the victim.
He got out of the car and immediately felt like he’d stepped into an oven. He worked up a sweat on the short walk from the parking lot. Before walking through the front door, he wiped his face and neck with a monogrammed handkerchief—a Christmas gift from Stacey.
When he entered the old building, he immediately wanted to flee. An insane idea, bordering on cruel, Detective Antelope’s push for a meeting the same day as Stacey’s funeral. But he had agreed to it—reluctantly, and only to show cooperation and avoid a pissing contest with an overzealous homicide detective.
The first floor housed the county jail and a security checkpoint to get to the Sheriff’s Department offices on the third floor. He set off the security alarm before being cleared to enter. The guard instructed him to remove his watch and ring for the security screening. Connor argued—unsuccessfully—that as a member of the court, he shouldn’t have to remove the items. He recognized the futility of the request, but his protest gave him a chance to let off some steam with the guards and defuse whatever attitude he might bring into the interview upstairs, where keeping his cool mattered.
He took the elevator to the third floor and presented himself to the Sheriff’s Department secretary. Before he turned away to sit down, Detective Antelope appeared and nodded for him to follow. They went to a small office: a desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet. The one win
dow faced west and looked out at the front lawn of the building, which was still in shadow.
The detective motioned for him to take the only available chair. “Good morning, Mr. Collins. I appreciate you coming in. It can’t be easy after the shock of the last few days. But I’m sure you know from your training and practice as an attorney, the sooner we pick up the trail, the more likely it is we’ll solve this. You must want that as much as we do. That being said, I’ll be making a video and audio recording of our conversation this afternoon.”
“With all due respect, your request to meet today, especially here, surprised me,” Connor said. “I thought our meeting at my home on Saturday indicated my strong motivation to work with you. The formality of the setting is off-putting, to say the least. But, of course, whatever you need to do to move forward with the investigation, you can count on my continued cooperation with the process.”
“Glad to hear you understand. It’s a matter of documenting progress in the case. Have a seat and we can get started.”
The detective turned on the recording devices and entered the identifying information. “In an interview on Saturday, June 21, you stated you believe Jack Swailes, the contractor hired to renovate your home, murdered your fiancée, Stacey Hart. Please state for the record the reasons behind your conclusion.”
“Motive and opportunity,” Connor said firmly. “He worked at the house every day and met with Stacey every day to review the progress of his work. As I expressed to you on Saturday, I observed his manner of conversation, which I described as flirtatious. After discussion with me, Stacey planned to terminate his work on the house. It’s my opinion that the termination resulted in feelings of rejection and in that state of mind, Swailes became angry and aggressive and attacked her. As I’m sure you are now aware, he has a history of violence. I have access to the same criminal database as the Sheriff’s Department; his record shows two prior domestic assault charges.”
“You own the house on Cedar Street?”
“Yes, I inherited it from my parents. I rented through the years and the income paid for my living expenses in college and law school. When Stacey and I got engaged at Christmas, she indicated that she wanted to live there. I had planned to sell it, but once she brought it up, it started to seem like a sound financial idea. After six years of tenants, it needed a lot of work. Stacey took on the job of getting estimates for the work. It took about a month, and we hired Swailes at the end of January. I only learned after the fact that she hadn’t made the decision in the most thorough way. Other than that one lapse in judgment, we were a team. I had all the funds and she did all the work on the project.”
“Did Stacey supervise the work or did the two of you do it together?”
“It was all Stacey, and she was great at it. Most women would be intimidated supervising the work of men, especially the kind of men who work in construction.”
“You didn’t have any concerns about Stacey spending a lot of time alone with a man in an empty house?”
“Not at first, but as I said, I started to pick up something not right about Swailes—the way he looked at her, talked to her, set up these private jokes between them.”
“When did you notice it?”
“A few months ago, I can’t give you an exact date. It’s been going on for a while. At first I hoped it would stop. Some balls on him; the cocky bastard did it right in front of me, like an animal acting on instinct, some inborn primate thing, trying to attract the female though she belonged to someone else. Stacey didn’t see it the same way. We argued about it, and like I said, on Friday I put my foot down and told her he had to go.”
“Stacey didn’t see his behavior in the same way you did?”
“Clueless.” Connor threw up his hands. “She loved his work, how they worked together, his dependability. True, as far as it went, he did quality work. No way would I have kept paying him otherwise. The guy showed up when he said and I get it, most of the time it doesn’t work like that. She felt she could count on him. After a while, though, I began to put it together. Of course he’s there doing everything he can to make her happy. He wanted her—all part of the plan.”
“But you let it go on for months?”
“I trusted Stacey after all our years together. You didn’t know her, but she happened to be a gorgeous woman; everywhere we went, men looked at her. I’d dealt with the situation for years. I felt confident if Swailes made a move on her, Stacey would have no problem putting him in his place and ending the whole thing, job and all, immediately. I never micromanaged her relationship with me, ever.”
“You told her to fire Swailes. You thought it was best she handle it? Why not meet with the man and do it yourself?”
“Not so easy to do with my fiancée. Any hint of me taking control away from her got to be a problem. She lived with a control freak for a mother her whole life. I understood that, she helped me see control could be a big issue for her. But we argued on Friday. I was adamant I wanted him gone, out of our house and our life. In the end, Stacey respected my feelings and accepted the decision. She wanted to do it herself. Now I see the problem with the plan. I wish I had thought to check his criminal history before. I’m kicking myself for not doing it.”
“Did you know she planned to meet him at the Cedar Street house on Saturday?”
“Just as I didn’t micromanage her relationships, I also did not micromanage her schedule. We didn’t talk about it. So no, I didn’t know about her plans to meet him Saturday morning. Why do you ask?”
“I’m trying to understand how things worked in your relationship with Stacey. Other than the issue with Swailes, was there anything else you argued about?”
“No, nothing. We had a perfect relationship with excellent communication, apart from the problem with him.”
“I have a message here from the property room. They received a request from Chase’s Funeral Home; they called on your behalf requesting the release of Stacey’s engagement ring.”
“It’s an expensive ring. I followed the recommendations in these matters and spent two months’ salary on it, only the best for Stacey. I’m sure you can understand why I didn’t want it buried with her. But Chase never received it, and they told me to follow up here. When can you release it to me?”
Antelope opened the top drawer of his desk, removed a photo, and slid it toward Connor.
Connor leaned forward to see. It was a shot of Stacey’s left hand, clearly taken at the crime scene.
Antelope pointed to the ring finger. “As you can see in this photograph, taken at the crime scene on Saturday morning, there is no engagement ring.”
“The motherfucker stole her ring? What are you doing to find him?”
“It’s possible, I suppose. But why would he throw away a valuable ring?”
Antelope opened the drawer again and removed another item. He placed a plastic envelope on the desk and pointed to the time and date stamp. “Can you identify this as the engagement ring you purchased and gave to Stacey Hart?”
Connor wanted to grab the bag out of his hand. Six thousand dollars, a perfect two-carat diamond, caked with dried mud. “Yes,” he croaked. “That’s Stacey’s ring.”
“This ring was found in the front garden of the Cedar Street house on Saturday evening, and was officially entered into evidence on June 21,” Antelope said. “Perhaps Swailes put it there. Another possibility is Stacey took it off and threw it there herself. It’s the kind of thing a woman does in extreme anger. I asked about other things the two of you fought about. What would make her mad enough to break off your engagement?”
Connor wondered how much he could disclose and still maintain control of the situation. The detective would interview other people who might say things that would put him in a bad light. He took a deep breath and decided to go for it. Nobody could prove anything.
“Let me preface this by saying this is not easy for me to talk about. Both Stacey and I were intensely private about our relationship. I don’t know
why, but she thought I’d cheated on her. She claimed someone told her I had hooked up with someone else. I vote for Swailes here—guessing he was trying to make himself look good. I guess it’s possible she took off her ring, but I swear to you, she didn’t break off the engagement. If she was still alive, this ring would be on her finger.”
CHAPTER 33
Todd returned to the rectory after the funeral service, where he removed his clerical collar and the black shirt and pants, heavy garments for a summer day. Exhaustion, emotional rather than physical, had sapped his energy, and he knew the remedy.
Ten minutes later, in khakis and sneakers, his swim trunks and goggles in a gym bag, he headed to the pool at the Preserve for a swim. Typically, the upscale complex didn’t give out guest passes, but Connor had used his influence and powers of persuasion and gotten one for him. Of course, his status as a member of the clergy had undoubtedly worked to his advantage as well.
When he first moved to Rock Springs as a young priest, he’d been wary about showing his true self to the conservative community. Comfortable in his body, he enjoyed challenging himself physically every day. Most of the other seminarians he trained with lived in their minds; they were cerebral and intellectual types, some of them nerds, all of them naturally book smart, while he had to push himself to get the grades that came so easily his friends. In the end, though, he got those grades. He wasn’t an intellectual and he wasn’t going to feel bad about it.
He changed into his swimsuit, slicked back his hair, and slid on his bathing cap. When he looked at his body in the mirror, he liked what he saw. At forty-two years old, he was in the best shape of his life, if he did say so himself.
But he didn’t have to rely on his own assessment. He saw the way women and men looked at him at the pool when he worked out. It pleased him to think he could have anyone he wanted, though he would never act on it. According to the church, a prideful act, his enjoyment of others’ attraction to him, but he gave in to the guilty pleasure. In a world full of evil, his minor sin counted for small change, not worthy of his concern.
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