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“You’ve never been a police officer, right?” I asked.
“You mean me?” Bobby asked.
“Everyone else in the room is a police officer, so yeah, you.”
“Sorry, yes. It’s just you all asking questions from all over the room is sort of disorienting.”
I filed that thought away for future interrogations and asked, “So you don’t know how to do our jobs, right?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then why don’t you stop deciding what will and won’t help us figure out whodunit, and just tell us everything you know so we can try to do the crime-busting part of our jobs?”
“I thought crime busting was your jobs.” He smiled as he spoke as if I’d said something to amuse him.
“Only part,” I said.
“What’s the other part?”
“Executing people,” I said.
“Killing people,” Edward said.
“Killing,” Olaf said.
Bobby looked around the room at all of us one at a time. “You’re trying to scare me.”
“If that will get you to talk, sure, but that last part wasn’t planned. It’s just the truth,” I said.
Bobby turned back to Newman, who was the only one of us who hadn’t said that particular truth. “Don’t you want to scare me, too?”
“No, I want to save your life and find out who killed Ray and framed you for it, because if they’ll do all that, then they are a danger to everyone else in our town.”
“I don’t know who killed Uncle Ray. I just know I didn’t do it.”
“Then tell us what you know, Bobby, please. Once you die for this crime, the investigation is over, and there will still be a double murderer free in our town to kill again.”
“Double murderer? Only Uncle Ray died, right, no one else?” He was scared now, worried for other people.
I’d have let him sweat and asked whom he was worried about, but Newman was lead marshal and he didn’t ask my opinion. “You’re the second murder victim, Bobby.”
“But I’m alive, Win. I’m right here.”
“Not for much longer, Bobby, not unless you help us.”
Bobby’s emotions went across his face like clouds across a windy sky, too fast for me to catch them, but the shadows of them chased across his face as he fought through them all. Whatever he was hiding was important to him and came with an emotional price tag.
“Troy is one of the biggest gossips in town. I couldn’t talk with him right there. I still don’t feel right about it. I gave my word.”
“Bobby, it’s just us now, and I swear to you that anything you tell us won’t leave this room unless it directly relates to the murder,” Newman said.
Bobby looked at him and then at all of us in turn. “Do you promise?”
We all promised. He was so earnest, I half expected him to ask us to pinkie swear.
“Jocelyn and I grew up together. Her mother married Uncle Ray when she was five and I was eight.”
That didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything, but I was betting who the “she” might be.
