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“I don’t know.”
She huffed and puffed, then said, “The five eyewitnesses whose names we wanted to keep tightly under wraps?”
“Yes?”
“Your girlfriend broadcast them. Thanks to her, one has already received a death threat.”
Conniption fits are being had all over…
This morning, Shauna Calloway became the town crier.
Via local and national news programs, millions of people learned from her that there had been a breakthrough in the Fairground shooting investigation.
She didn’t specify what that breakthrough was, which means she doesn’t know. If she did, she would have reported it. However, even without that crucial detail, she was so hyper, she’d barely taken a breath. Basically, she conveyed that this was a Big Deal.
To everyone else, maybe. But this development doesn’t worry me in the slightest. If it was that substantial a breakthrough, I would be in manacles and wearing orange right now.
The upshot of Calloway’s story was that “five key witnesses” had met separately with investigators yesterday. It was sheer speculation on her part, although she made it sound like fact (you know how they do) that these witnesses, either singly or collectively, had provided a clue that had “injected energy into what had become a lethargic investigation.”
What shocked me was that she actually named names! She identified those five key witnesses. That can’t have gone over well with the sheriff’s department and state agencies who’re desperate to capture me. As if that weren’t already a daunting commission—doomed to fail—now they have key witnesses to protect.
It tickles me that Calder Hudson is one of them, when Shauna Calloway has made the public well aware of her “close personal relationship” with the hero of the shooting. What is he thinking about the story she broke this morning? She made him a target for dangerous and deranged me.
I wonder… Did she blow the whistle on him and Elle Portman because she found out that they’ve been sneaking around together?
Maybe I’m reading too much into what I saw. Maybe all they discussed inside that quaint tavern was what they’d experienced since that day at the fairground. Did he lend a sympathetic ear as she reminisced about her little boy? Maybe he begged her forgiveness for being unable to save him. Does she fault him for not dying in place of her child?
A thought-provoking question, isn’t it?
She has actually endeared herself to the public by shirking the spotlight. It’s become common knowledge that she’s the author of a popular children’s book. Shauna Calloway showed a copy of it in her report this morning. Ms. Portman could be capitalizing on that exposure. She isn’t, which I believe is part of her allure. She’s avoided public exposure and, by doing so, has become everyone’s tragic sweetheart of the Fairground shooting.
What I wonder is: Has she become Calder Hudson’s sweetheart?
I suppose stranger things have happened.
But nothing stranger springs to mind right offhand.
It does concern me a bit that they had their heads together two days ago. Then the very next day, yesterday, each spoke privately with the lead detectives. Now, suddenly, after two months of nothing, there’s a breakthrough.
Of course, one incident may have nothing to do with the other. Still, it’s worth a worry. I haven’t reached this point by being careless. Knowledge is power, and knowing what’s up with them could be useful to me.
What I do know, because I saw it with my own two eyes, is that the goodbye hug they gave each other outside that bar didn’t look strictly platonic.
So, to be on the safe side, whether or not their secret partnership is romantic in nature, I probably should interrupt it. Permanently.
Now that Shauna Calloway has blabbed their names, the sheriff’s office will no doubt circle the wagons and make my interference more of a challenge than it would be otherwise.
Unfortunately for them, I love a challenge.
Chapter 20
The upstairs room of the house to which Calder had been transported by the taciturn deputies was butt ugly and overheated.
He’d spent the past five minutes in it with Compton and Perkins, explaining to them why he was no longer at the address to which they’d been about to send those deputies to collect him. They had been diverted to his temporary living quarters and had arrived within the specified fifteen minutes. Max.
He’d been ready. He’d showered and dressed quickly, then had had to sort through the contents of his suitcases and pack what he thought he might need into the smaller of the two.
The deputies had asked that he turn over his cell phone and laptop to them. “Why?”
