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“Sometimes you get new information when you keep asking the same question over and over, because people recall more.”
“I don’t want to talk abouthim. What you said before gave me the creeps.”
The rest of the drive went by in silence.
CHAPTER
71
THE SURGERY HAD GONE WELL,they were told, and Dak was awake and alert when they came into his room.
Alex sat next to him and gripped his hand while Devine stood behind her.
“Are you in much pain?” she asked.
“Probably, but the morphine, or whatever it is, is doing the job.” He looked at Devine. “I can’t believe this happened. I can’t believe Hal is dead. Do they know any more? Have they found whoever shot us?”
“No, but it was the same type casing that was discovered near where your sister’s body was found.”
“Harper told me the bullet that hit me then struck Hal and killed him.”
“That’s right.”
“Shit.” Dak shook his head and his eyes glimmered.
“Harper tell you anything else?” asked Devine. He was not in Alex’s line of sight so he added raised eyebrows to the question to let Dak know what he was referring to.
“Uh, yeah, he said he’d get back to me on what he decides.”
“What are you two talking about?” said Alex.
“Nothing important,” said Dak quickly. “How are you doing, Alex? Hanging in okay?”
“Not if stuff like this keeps happening,” she said with a glare. It was clear that she did not like being left out of whatever was going on between her brother and Devine.
“How well do you know Benjamin Bing?” asked Devine.
“Benjamin Bing?” said Dak curiously. “What’s he got to do with anything?”
“I think he has a great deal to do with everything that’s been happening.”
Alex turned to scowl at him. “I’m going to get some crappy hospital coffee, which will still be preferable to listening to this.”
She rose and left.
“What is going on?” exclaimed Dak.
Devine sat in the chair Alex had vacated and said, “Let me postulate a theory for you.”
“Okay,” said Dak nervously.
Devine proceeded to tell Dak his ideas about Benjamin Bing being the one who had attacked Alex all those years ago, and then how he believed the Palmers had seen him leaving the area, so they had to die, too.
“The Palmers were in tough financial straits back then, Annie told me. So I think they saw Bing, and after they found Alex they put it all together. They tried to blackmail him. The family is rolling in money. Only Bing doesn’t play that game. So their house goes up in flames.”
Devine didn’t mention that Françoise Guillaume had performed the autopsies on the Palmers, because he wasn’t sure whether she had any culpability. Bing could have poisoned them or otherwise incapacitated them, and Devine now knew that Maine did not do full autopsies on people who died in fires that looked purely accidental. Whether that was the procedure fifteen years ago, though, he didn’t know.
“Your sister told your mother that she came up here to take care of some unfinished business.” He explained about her use of the satellite footage. “She figured out that it was Bing.”
