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Pat sighed and sat back in his chair. “I’ve been working evenings at Boyd Foley’s chicken houses for extra money.”
That was the problem. “Under the table?”
Pat nodded. “I needed some extra cash and he offered to let me come work in the evenings after my shift at the Piggly Wiggly. I couldn’t be peeking in women’s windows because I was out at Boyd’s farm shoveling chicken shit.”
“Boyd wouldn’t have any record of you being out there, would he?”
“I don’t reckon so. He wouldn’t write it down if he wasn’t putting it on the books. It was a cash transaction and no one knew about it but the two of us.”
Logan’s forehead planted into the palm of his hand. Of course. “Let me ask you one more question then, Pat. If you were out at Boyd’s farm working, why did they find your boot print at one of the crime scenes?”
At that, Pat could only shake his head. “I have no idea. That’s the part that gets me. When the cops asked me about the boots, they were in my closet just where I’d left them. I don’t even know the young lady whose window had my shoeprints. I wasn’t anywhere near that place that night. I was out at Boyd’s.”
“You weren’t wearing those boots out at the farm?”
“No. Those are my good boots. I wear my old, worn-out pair for mucking. Those boots should’ve been in my closet all the nights in question.”
That bothered Logan. The cops were after Pat because of that boot print and that meant they had a pretty good match on the tread pattern. If Pat wasn’t outside that window, how could his boots have gotten there? Could someone be trying to set him up by deliberately planting his footprint there?
“You’re not going to tell my wife, are you, Mr. Anthony? I don’t want her to know what I’ve been doing. She thinks I’ve been working late at the grocery store.”
He gathered from his meeting with Jeanette that she didn’t believe his lie, but couldn’t surmise what she thought he was doing instead. Either way, it wasn’t helping things when the suspect’s wife didn’t know where her husband was. “No, I’m not going to tell her, but you need to be honest with your wife. If you were honest about what was going on, you might not be here with the police breathing down your neck.”
Pat nodded and winced, reaching under the table to rub his leg.
“Are you okay?” Logan asked.
“My knee is just acting up. It’s an old track injury from high school. It put an end to my running career and now it just aches from time to time.”
Logan stored that information away. He knew at least one of the police reports involved seeing the peeper run from the scene. If Pat couldn’t run, he couldn’t be the peeper.
“So what do we tell Sheriff Todd when he comes back?”
“We’re going to tell him you’ve been helping your buddy Boyd out on evenings and leave it at that. The rest of the story is the IRS’s concern.”
“And what about my boots?”
Logan shook his head. That was a good damn question. “I have no idea.”
“Hey, Logan.” Pepper stepped out of the salon onto the sidewalk and noticed her brother standing outside. Sarah was still inside closing up.
“Hey, Pepper. Are you free for dinner tonight? I’ve had a pretty wild day.”
“A day you can’t talk about,” she noted. She had no doubt her brother was filled with interesting information, but lawyer-client privilege kept most of it under wraps.
He nodded in dismay. “That’s true. We don’t have much of an outlet in the legal world. That’s why we drink.”
“Are you really wanting dinner, or do you want to just skip the pretense and head straight to Woody’s?”
“I should eat,” Logan admitted. “I was at the police station for so long, I missed lunch.”
Pepper nodded. Although he couldn’t officially talk about what happened today, she already knew all about it. Someone saw Sheriff Todd escort Pat Kincaid into the police station and Logan go in sometime after that. It didn’t take long for the information to spread to the salon.
“That’s okay, we can get dinner. I know the general idea, anyway. I heard they hauled Pat Kincaid into the police station today. I figure he’s a suspect in the peeper case.”
“They did bring him in, but thankfully they’re not charging him,” he said with a sigh of relief.
“Really?” She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or not. Pepper didn’t like to think that someone like Mr. Kincaid was a pervert, but he was one of the people she told about her new window the night the peeper struck her house again. If it wasn’t him, then who was it?
