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“As Adam says, none of our cases are as important, yet we need to face reality,” Connors said diplomatically. "We’re at a dead end, and I, for one, don’t see any leads we can expect to go anywhere. This can’t be completely open-ended. There has to be hope of progress. Sorry, Greta, but can you honestly say you expect us to learn more if we continue?”
She sighed. “I know. It just galls me that a murderer gets away with it. Are we sure we’ve exhausted every angle? There has to be something we missed.”
“Like what?” Tomasek blurted out.
Silence.
“See what I mean?” said a sympathetic Connors.
“They’re right, Greta,” added Boylan. “I hate to drop it, too, but what else is there to do?”
“So, what happens now?” she asked. “Do we announce the case is closed?”
“Christ, no!” exclaimed Tomasek. “Are you crazy? The media and the bleeding hearts would have a field day. There’d be articles and complaints for months about police incompetence and their inability to protect citizens, on and on.”
Connors made a hushing motion at Tomasek. “We make no announcement. When asked, our departments will only say that ‘The case is still open, but the effort is scaled back, due to other duties. As new information is gathered, the case will stay open until solved.’”
“Are we absolutely sure we’ve done everything we can?” she persisted.
Tomasek pursed his lips.
“We’ve questioned everyone we could get hold of with any possible connection to Toompas,” Connors said. “There’s no evidence from lab examination of the body, his trailer, or his car that leads anywhere. All we can do now is finish contacting the few people left on the list.”
“What if it wasn’t someone he knew who killed him? A transient or a stranger to the county that he only recently met.”
Tomasek rolled his eyes, and Boylan shook his head.
“Listen to yourself, Greta,” Connors said. “A stranger that no one knows? How would we identify this person and connect him to Toompas? Even if it was, it could be someone passing through and long gone, or someone in the county with whom he never had previous contact. That’s every person in the county minus those we questioned. There’s nowhere to go.”
Connors’s voice indicated frustration, though whether with her or the dead end, she couldn’t tell. Maybe both.
She surrendered with a hands open-and-out gesture. “I know, I know. Just galls me, and I understand. Sheriff Wallace has been on my ass the last week, too. Not that he’s noticed whether I’m doing the rest of my job. I think he wants the case to go away so there’s no taint of a homicide associated with Tillamook County. After all, he’s got an election to run.”
Tomasek laughed and gave Greta a look of approval for perhaps the first time since they’d met at the start of the investigation.
“There. You see? You’re getting the same pressure. Let’s admit to ourselves that despite all the work we put in, it’s just not going anywhere.”
All the work we put in? she thought. I doubt you did one-tenth the total work! If that! I wonder if any of your interviews were worth anything. Shit! I don’t know for sure that you even did the interviews.
The last thought unnerved her. What if Tomasek had botched his interviews? For that matter, how did she know Connors and Boylan had pressed hard enough or asked the right questions?
Her unconscious assumption was that she had done both right. Fortunately, she didn’t utter the thought out loud. She had no reason to harbor those suspicions about her colleagues, and even if true, what then?
“All right. I understand. The case will be officially open, yet no coor
dinated investigation ongoing. I may still be thinking about it, though.”
Connors frowned. “Think all you want, Greta, but that’s it. If you continue questioning people, it will give the impression you’re the only one on the case and that somehow the Lincoln County law enforcement has given up.”
“Which would be the truth,” she shot back.
Connors’s normal demeanor toward her vanished in an angry second. “Obviously, you’re still learning your job,” he ground out. “Whether in rural areas like ours, where different departments overlap and have to cooperate, or big cities where it’s one department, everyone still needs to work together. I guarantee that if you go off on your own crusade with this, any future cooperation from Lincoln County is gone. And Sheriff Wallace, even if he is a prick, won’t stand for it. A woman hire or not, you’ll be out on your ass before you know it.”
Greta stood frozen for several moments, her mind swirling from the threat and from the statement implying that she was hired only because of her gender. Not that she didn’t know it was true. Connors had been professional with her, but his statement made her wonder if it had merely been political correctness and he didn’t think much of her. She wasn’t sure whether she should be mad or depressed.
She looked at Boylan. He glanced her way and shook his head.
She knew Connors’s concern about her continuing on her own had validity, but she couldn’t let it go.
