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“That would mean you’d need to get down on your hands and knees to get to the stuff at the end,” I said. “Maybe I should do that part.”
“Nope,” he replied cheerfully. “I’m not having my pregnant wife crawling around on this crummy carpet. I’ll do it.”
Well, I had to admit the carpet had definitely seen better days. It was that close-pile stuff that seemed to be confined to commercial use, and maybe once had been dark beige but was now a muddy sand color.
“If it’ll make you feel better.”
He shot me a grin and lowered himself to the floor. Good thing he was wearing jeans and not his khaki uniform slacks, or the Goddess only knows what kind of stains he might have picked up down there.
I continued to “N” and started rifling through the files. Once again, I found nothing noteworthy, and progressed on to “O.”
“Wait a minute,” Calvin said, and I paused, fingers resting on a manila file.
“Did you find something?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
He pulled out a manila file folder identical to the one I was currently touching, then pushed himself up to his feet — no easy task for someone who was almost six and a half feet tall. Then he handed the folder to me.
“Take a look at this,” he said.
Inside the folder was a set of paperwork I quickly identified as final divorce papers, with an accompanying child and spousal support decree.
“Jeffrey Sellers had a child?” I said, flabbergasted. Everything Sara had just told me about him made it seem as if he didn’t have any real family at all.
“Sure looks that way,” Calvin said. The genial light I’d seen in his dark eyes only a moment earlier had disappeared, and he now looked uncharacteristically grim. “And there’s this.”
He pulled out a sheaf of papers, one that seemed to be a stack of letters from his ex’s lawyer, getting progressively more strident as time went on and the unpaid support bills piled up.
“So…he skipped out on them,” I said, and Calvin nodded.
“Looks that way,” he replied. “Maybe he thought escaping to Arizona would be enough to keep them from coming after him.”
“You think his ex-wife might have killed him in retaliation?” I asked, knowing I needed to ask the question, even though I hated the very idea of it.
Calvin’s shoulders lifted. “I don’t know. It wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened. Maybe his ex felt as if she had no other choice.”
My head was spinning. I stepped away from the file cabinet and sat down in one of the shabby swivel chairs, hoping that would combat the dizziness. “But how would Jeffrey Sellers’ ex even know he was trying to blackmail Archie and Victoria, let alone gain access to Victoria’s studio so she could poison the creamer?”
Or the coffee itself, I supposed. I still hadn’t heard anything about exactly what had killed the man, so I didn’t know what means had been used to deliver the toxin.
Calvin came over and sat in the other chair, turning it so he faced me directly. “It’s hard to say. Maybe his ex confronted him, and he told her he had a plan to get his hands on some money, fast. That could explain how she would have known where he was.”
I supposed that theory made some sense, but…. “If she was expecting a payout from Jeffrey, why kill him?”
It seemed Calvin had already thought this through, because he replied at once, “It’s possible she wanted to take all the money for herself, or maybe she thought he was going to cheat her out of it, just like he’d cheated her out of years of child support.”
None of this still felt exactly right, but because I didn’t have any better theories, I just nodded.
“Anyway,” my husband went on, “this paperwork has her full name — NancyAnne Nielsen — and her social, so it won’t be too hard to track her down, find out where she is. I can get one of my deputies on it.”
I didn’t bother to protest that this technically wasn’t his investigation, and if Henry Lewis found out that Calvin had been using his own officers to work on the problem, he might not be too thrilled about it. My husband was a grown man and a smart one, and he could do his own risk analysis of the situation and determine the best way to proceed.
“But let me take a quick look at the rest of the files, just so I can see if there’s anything else that might be promising,” he said. “You rest.”
That sounded like a great idea. The dizzy sensation had passed, but I didn’t much like the idea of hunching over those files and thumbing through them. I was just fine with letting Calvin handle that task.
However, he didn’t find anything more, nothing that would have told us someone else had a grudge against Jeffrey Sellers, so we locked up and headed outside. Walking out the door felt awfully conspicuous, and I halfway expected Henry Lewis to pounce and demand to know what we were up to.
