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“This is Sheriff Bree O’Neal,” she verified when the call came through.
“Dr. Jesse Myers,” the man said. “You need to know upfront that I can’t give you specific medical info on my patient. This is a skimming-the-surface update since your deputies keep calling about it.”
“I understand,” Bree assured him. “I’ll take what you can give me.” Hopefully, that would be enough to help make sense of what had happened.
“My patient is still mildly sedated and is responsive. I’ll be able to start some tests soon that might give answers as to why she ended up here. According to your deputies, Mrs. McCray tried to shoot you, is that right?”
“Yes,” Bree verified. “And during the gunfire, she was shouting that I killed her husband. I didn’t,” she added in a preemptive strike. “Her husband was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the head while I was here in Canyon Ridge. There was a suicide note, but I believe SAPD is investigating it as a suspicious death.”
She hoped they were anyway. Bree was certainly suspicious, though she didn’t want to get into speculation that Buckner or one of his goons had been the one to put the bullet in Gavin.
“I just got a report from SAPD about that,” the doctor said. “I skimmed it, but I’ll go through it in more detail in case there’s something in it I can use to connect with Mrs. McCray.”
“Connect?” Bree questioned.
The doctor took his time answering. “Again, skimming the surface, but I believe my patient has had some kind of break in her normal mental processing.”
Bree refrained from a snarky “you think?” but that seemed obvious to her. Before Gavin’s death, Patricia had seemingly been stable and raising her children. Afterward, she’d taken a gun and come after Bree.
What was key was learning what’d happened right before that.
“Judging from what I saw and heard while Mrs. McCray was shooting at me, “Bree said. “She believed I was responsible for her husband’s death. She was adamant about it. Why?”
“That’s the main reason I’m calling,” the doctor replied. “Once the sedation began to wear off, Mrs. McCray started talking about a visitor she got. A man who knew what’d happened to her husband. And apparently, he’s the one who told her you’d murdered Gavin.”
“What man?” Bree demanded.
“Let me check my notes. I wrote it down because I knew you’d want to know…ah, here it is. She said the man’s name is Davy Warner.”
----- ??? -----
Chapter Eleven
Rafe was fighting off another wave of fatigue with yet more coffee. Something he’d been doing for about nine hours now since this day had begun. This time, the double espresso had come from a drive-thru where Bree and he had made a pit stop during their marathon of errands and interviews.
A marathon that would hopefully end once they spoke to Sandy Lynn’s mother, Nancy Franklin.
He doubted that would be easy. Then again, no part of this day had qualified as easy. It’d started with Buckner’s visit, two chats with Wade, a phone conversation with Patricia’s doctor.
And an intense in person talk with Davy.
Of course, Davy had denied going to Patricia and telling the grieving woman that Bree had murdered Gavin. It’d been the exact response Rafe had expected. Simply put, there was no motive for Davy to do something like that.
Unless Davy was a killer trying to muddy the waters and cover his tracks.
Since Rafe knew that most people were capable of doing some really bad things, and Bree had agreed, they’d decided to keep an eye out for any possible evidence that might prove Davy had indeed made that visit to Patricia. After all, Davy had known Tessa well and had admitted to having a one-off with her. If things had turned ugly between them, he could have killed her.
But that didn’t explain why Tessa’s half-sister was dead.
And why Dani had been murdered, too.
Yeah, there were a lot of unanswered questions about this investigation, and so far, they weren’t getting the right answers. Not from Davy. Not from Dani’s stepfather, Barney Salvetti, either.
They’d done the death notification, but the man had had no idea who or why someone would want to murder Dani. Then, he’d admitted he hadn’t seen or heard from her in months. So, a bust.
Also, in the bust department was the chat with Honey Bear, AKA Craig Merkins, who had been decidedly more upset with news of Dani’s death than her stepfather. The man had broken down into sobs.
But at the mention of “murder,” Honey Bear had gone very pale and had gotten more cautious with his answers. He hadn’t offered a single suggestion as to who might have killed her. So, maybe there was something, some kind of suspicion on Honey Bear’s part, but the man wasn’t offering up anything.
