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Of course, that made me circle back to exactly why Sara Tilden would have wanted to kill Jeffrey Sellers. She’d claimed they weren’t romantically involved, but she could have been lying. How would I have even known whether or not she was telling the truth, now that my auras had deserted me?
I tried to tell myself I shouldn’t be overly dramatic. All right, I didn’t have those auras to work with right now, but they’d never been one-hundred percent reliable in the first place. Despite everything, I wanted to think my gut instincts about people were still pretty good, and I honestly couldn’t see Sara as a cold-blooded killer, no matter how hard I tried.
Yeah, that and four bucks would get me a latte. A feeling about a person certainly wasn’t enough to ensure their guilt or innocence.
Well, I’d have to hash that out later…and try to decide whether I should attempt a follow-up interview with Sara, or whether I should take my suspicions to Henry and see what he thought. He’d probably laugh me out of his office, but at least I would have tried.
Speaking of the police chief….
“If Henry Lewis doesn’t think Victoria is the killer, why won’t he drop the charges against her?” I demanded. “There’s no point in having this hanging over hers and Archie’s heads if she’s not a suspect.”
“Probably because it’s really in the D.A.’s hands now,” Calvin responded. “Also, just because Henry has a feeling about something doesn’t mean he plans to change course. It’s entirely possible the D.A. will also decide Victoria couldn’t be the culprit now that the cause of death has at least a preliminary determination, but that’s his call to make, not Henry’s. And I know the guy — Alan Crocker likes his conviction rate, and he’s not the kind of person who backs down easily.”
Which was probably why he’d become a district attorney in the first place, but that particular piece of information didn’t make me feel any better about the situation.
Actually, it made me feel a whole lot worse. I didn’t want some legal bulldog deciding my friend’s fate, not when his judgment might be based on wanting to maintain a sterling track record and not because he’d hadn’t actually looked at the facts of the case and judged them on their own merits.
The news did make me feel just a teeny bit better, though. Maybe the D.A. would still insist on sending the case to trial, but I had to believe a jury would look at the evidence and realize Victoria couldn’t get her hands on a bunch of atropine any more than she could dig her way into Fort Knox and load up a wheelbarrow with gold bars. She’d still miss out on her honeymoon, but at least she wouldn’t be in prison.
I didn’t like that scenario, though. Victoria and Archie shouldn’t be denied their wedding trip just because someone had done a pretty handy job of framing her.
Before I could say anything else, Melanie returned, and I said hastily, “I’ll talk to you more tonight, sweetie. Have a good rest of your day!”
Calvin chuckled. “Did your assistant just come in?”
“Something like that.”
“Then here’s a kiss to hold you over until tonight.” He made a smooching sound into the phone, and we ended the call there.
“Was it busy over at Cloud Coffee?” I asked Melanie. She’d been gone long enough that it looked as though she must have eaten at the coffee shop, or maybe sat in the park to have her sandwich, since she was now only carrying her ubiquitous go-cup of iced tea. “I haven’t had a chance to eat yet.”
“No, it was pretty quiet, since it’s mostly after lunch,” she replied. “But please go eat. I would have waited for you if I’d known you hadn’t stopped for lunch while you were out.”
I smiled at her worried expression and hoped she wasn’t beating herself up for having her own midday meal before her pregnant boss. “It’s okay. But thanks for covering for me just a little longer.”
With that handled, I retrieved my purse from under the counter and headed out, my pace brisk. It wasn’t just that I was hungry; with the hour inching past two-thirty, I knew I had a limited amount of time to get to Cloud Coffee before they closed at three. Worst-case scenario, I could always walk a little farther and head over to Olamendi’s for some takeout, but grabbing a sandwich seemed a lot easier.
As I walked, I couldn’t help brooding over the news Calvin had just given me. Why atropine? That seemed like a pretty specific drug to give someone, the kind of compound the killer must have known could be administered orally and would act fast, even if it was usually given intravenously. Once again, that pointed to someone with a background in the healthcare industry, someone who would have both the knowledge and means to use a toxin that most people wouldn’t have even heard of. There were plenty of herbal compounds that could have had the same effect and been much easier to procure.
Come to think of it, you could whip up a pretty decent batch of cyanide if you had the patience to process a bunch of apricot pits to extract the necessary elements.
But even putting aside the poison used and how it had been administered, I kept wondering what exactly Jeffrey Sellers had done to make someone think it was a good idea to poison him. I had enough experience with murders carried out in all sorts of circumstances to know that, contrary to the public’s worries about random violence, these sorts of acts tended to be deeply personal. Sometimes, like in poor Danny Ortega’s case, it wasn’t really murder at all, but a horrible mix-up made by someone who shouldn’t have been dabbling in love potions and had brewed him an elixir filled with deadly foxglove rather than ordinary campanula. Still, it wasn’t a stranger who’d dipped the fatal love potion into his drink at that Halloween party, but a woman he’d worked with and who harbored an unrequited fascination for the man.
And that told me something else just as personal was at work here, even if I couldn’t yet guess what had tipped the murderer over the edge. NancyAnne Nielsen definitely had a motive for wanting Jeffrey dead, but….
But…did she? After all, he’d promised her he was going to pay off her back child support. Why would she kill a man who was going to make a whole lot of her problems go away?
Except for the way it sounded like he lied about pretty much everything? I asked myself. Maybe she figured out he was just blowing hot air and snapped.
That didn’t feel right, though. A person “snapped” and shot the person who’d wronged them, or maybe pushed them down the stairs in a fit of fury. Securing that atropine and slipping it into the creamer in Victoria’s studio fridge seemed to be the actions of someone who was cool and calculating, who could keep their head whether they were stealing drugs from a locked cabinet in a hospital or sneaking in to Victoria’s studio to doctor that creamer.
NancyAnne Nielsen had appeared brittle, like a woman teetering on the edge of her breaking point. I honestly couldn’t see her doing any of those things…or at least, doing them and not getting caught.
The same for Sara Tilden, although I thought it might still be a good idea to try talking to her once again, if only to satisfy myself that she was no more a cold-blooded killer than I was. It would have to be after work, though, because I’d already taken enough time away from the shop this week.
I could only hope that Calvin would be all right with us taking a return trip to Gilbert….
Because my husband was a mensch of the first order, he didn’t argue with my plan, and only asked me if I thought I was stretching myself a little too thin. I assured him I wasn’t, and he just said it was fine to go back to Gilbert if I thought it would do any good.
