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Fate and Fortune

Page 22

by Olivia Jaymes

“All right.” Finn closed the notebook. “I’ll reach out today. Hopefully, I can connect with him right away.”

“When you talk to him,” Sam said, “tell him the firm is covering the funeral. Whatever he wants, wherever he wants it. She was killed on the premises. She gave us thirty years. It’s the least we can do.”

“I’ll tell him.”

Finn left to continue the search for the actual crime scene, leaving Sam and Alli alone again in the office. It was just… There were a few details bugging her about the whole thing, and it must have shown on her face.

“You look like you have a bee in your bonnet,” Sam observed.

“I guess I do,” she admitted reluctantly. “It’s just that some of this doesn’t make sense to me.”

“You’re the news reporter. What doesn’t make sense?”

So, he had read her resume. And he’d still hired her.

“Leigh was killed somewhere else, according to the sheriff. Then moved to the car after the fact. How would someone robbing her even know which car was hers? It’s a big garage. There were what, a hundred cars in there this morning?”

Sam scratched at his chin, pondering her observation.

“Key fob, maybe,” Sam said. “You press the button, lights flash, horn might chirp depending on the model. The car tells you where it is. If someone took her keys off her at the point of the attack, they could’ve gone down to the garage after, walked the rows, found her car in under a minute.”

“And put her in it.”

“And put her in it,” he echoed.

“Why? Why did he do that? And I use the word ‘he’ because it would be difficult for a woman to carry a dead body around. But why do it in the first place? If it’s a robbery, why does it matter where the body is found?”

“Maybe they wanted to delay it as long as possible? Or they didn’t want the body in plain sight?”

“Okay, but then I get back to the why of it all. Why do they want to delay the discovery? Why don’t they want the body in plain sight? People do things because they’re motivated. What was this person’s motivation? You’ve got cameras around this building, right? At least, I assume you do. Why take the chance of being seen?”

“You make some good points, but I will say that if I accidentally killed someone during a robbery, I’d want to hide the body long enough to get the hell out of town.”

“I get what you’re saying, and I’m not arguing it at all. Crime and the psychology behind it fascinates me, I guess. I have questions.”

“And most of them are why?”

“There’s also how, when, and where, too.”

“That’s a lot of questions.”

“It was my job.”

His phone rang, letting her wonder what his response would have been. He listened for a few minutes before saying thank you and ending the call.

“They found it. It looks like Leigh was killed in the gazebo.”

“Gazebo?”

“It was built when the building went no-smoking,” he explained. “We wanted to make sure the employees had a place to smoke, but that it was protected from the elements. It’s against the east wall, tucked behind the loading dock. You can’t see it from most of the building. It’s covered, three-sided, with bench seats. The only people who use it are the handful of smokers we’ve got left on staff. Most have quit smoking, thanks to an incentive plan we put in place about eight years ago. But, of course, we still have it. In winter, we put portable heaters out there. Summer, it’s just box fans and citronella.”

“Was Leigh a smoker?”

“No, she wasn’t. I’m not sure why she would have been out there. She didn’t even like the smell of it on people’s coats.”

“But she was there,” Alli pointed out. “We just don’t know why.”

“We?”