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“And fifty percent conserving his energy for when he finds something worth being less chill about?”
“Pretty much.” I pull my legs up under me. “So Pierre wanted to go home?”
“He did.”
“And that only started when he went under house arrest?”
She thinks back and then says, “Yes. Now that I think about it, he was on the undecided list for early departures. You have your carpenter coming in tomorrow and your doctor is already here. We offered Pierre the option of staying through to the end or leaving early, and he was fine with either.”
“Which was yesterday, after Bruno was dead but before Nanette accused him of killing Penny.”
“Yes.”
That swings the pendulum farther in favor of his innocence, while not entirely exonerating him. He will remain a suspect until we know the identity of Bruno’s partner.
“Did anyone else ask to use the sat phone since Bruno died? Or suddenly have a reason to want to leave?”
She hesitates.
“Yolanda…?”
“Kendra asked to use the phone yesterday. But it was…” She shrugs. “It was a Kendra kind of request.Hey, do you think there’s any way I could use your phone, and if not, that’s cool, I was just checking.It was her niece’s birthday, and she hated not calling.”
“So did you let her use it?”
Another pause.
“That’d be a yes. Did you overhear any of the conversation?”
Yolanda sighs. “No, and letting her use it was against the rules, but it’s Kendra. Nice people are hard to say no to when they make a reasonable request.”
“I’ll need to check your phone and have someone run the number she called.”
“Sure.”
“No one else asked to use it? Or suddenly wanted to leave?”
“No.”
I pause as a thought forms. My first reaction is that it doesn’t work because it’s backward—the opposite of what I would expect from Bruno’s partner.
Unless it’s not.
Unless his partner isn’t eager to make that application. Not just yet.
I push that aside for a moment and ask the reverse question. “You mentioned Pierre having the option to leave or stay?”
“Right.”
“Did anyone who was due to stay ask to leave instead?”
“A couple of people, yes. They saw the chance to get out earlier.” She gives two names that aren’t even on my list of remote possibilities. “Then, after the trouble with Pierre, Nanette asked to leave. She was uncomfortable being in a place where we might have had a murderous stalker. She suggests there’s… history there, which made me promise we’d get her out if we could.”
She means Nanette suffered at the hands of a stalker or a partner, and would understandably want to go. Or so Nanette claimed as her explanation for wanting to leave early, and it’s the kind of excuse that would have most women doing exactly what Yolanda did—understanding the context and promising to help if they could.
Could Nanette have lied? Yes. But there’s another possibility I want to pursue first. I’m presuming that Bruno’s partner wanted to leave ASAP, just like Bruno did. Bruno might not have been angling for an early release, but he absolutely didn’t want to stay longer than necessary.
How much of that was wanting to make the claim application?
