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“Sergeant Shelton, you know Brenda Mankin. She observed something that you need to hear about immediately. Brenda—?”
“Wait,” Richard Alvaro said. “I want you to be aware I’m recording this, Ms. Mankin.”
“No skin off my nose.”
Shelton grunted.
Brenda didn’t need any further urging.
In almost the same words as she’d told us, she related how Randall Kenyon came out of Keefer Dobey’s cabin yesterday after Diana and I had left.
“Diana’s photos before, mine after,” Tom said quietly. The man was a diplomat not mentioning me. Diana’s showed no sign of the paper visible behind the painting in Tom’s photos.
That earned a laser glare. But Shelton didn’t waste much time on it, because he grasped the possibility immediately.
Richard wasn’t far behind, judging by the way he jerked his head from Brenda to Shelton to check if he got the implication.
“How long?” Shelton rasped at her.
“...with no cause or right to — How long? What kind of fool question—”
She’d kept on with her tale, so it took a moment for the interruption to halt her.
I parted my lips to straighten out the miscommunication, but Diana put a hand on my arm. She was right. Better to stay out of the line of fire. Besides, she also handed me a cookie.
“—is that? I knew right off when I saw him. That’s the stupidest—”
“How long was he in there?” Shelton’s dentist was going to make a fortune off this case judging by how he was grinding his teeth.
“I don’t know. I—”
“So he could have just been standing at the door and you only thought he was coming out.”
The red of anger suffused Brenda’s wrinkles. “No. I haven’t lost my mind or my eyesight, Wayne Shelton. I came out of my cabin and started across toward Keefe’s with a bowl of food for Suzie Q. Not that she ever eats it, but I’ve been trying since the day I found him. And that’s what I was doing — taking the bowl I’d filled up in my kitchen over to where she was on the porch.
“First thing I saw was the back end of that rental truck Randall Kenyon’s got peeking out from behind the barn. Like it was parked so nobody in the main house could see it. I got closer to Keefe’s cabin, the door opened and there was Randall Kenyon himself looking out. Thought he was going to bolt back inside for a second and I bet he did, too. Then he decided to try to bluff it out. Before I can get out much more than What the hell—?, he jumps in with Did you see ‘em? Course I say, See who? And he starts in with all this bull about seeing someone inside the cabin and that’s why he went in and he thinks they went out the back before he could spot them good enough to ID—”
And there we had Randall Kenyon’s line of defense for denying he planted the letter implicating Wendy Barlow. But if he printed it out at the B&B...
Shelton’s jaw bulged out in another likely tooth-on-tooth assault.
“—but he said I must’ve seen them, because they ran across the back toward my cabin. Which was bull of the first order, because I looked later on and we’d had that snow and footprints would have shown back there. But if what he saw weren’t critters no bigger’n a possum, he was lying just the way I knew he was.”
“What did he say to that?” I asked.
I got warning looks from Tom, Diana, and Richard, but Shelton didn’t blink. Even better, Brenda answered. “Didn’t give me time to check. When I said I hadn’t seen anything, he switched like a leaf caught in the wind and said maybe he’d been mistaken, maybe it had just been shadow and light playing tricks on him and he had to get going and — poof! — he was gone.”
“Did you see anything he did in the cabin?” Shelton asked.
“I would’ve said if I had, wouldn’t I? I told you what I saw, what I said, what he said, what he did.”
I could think of a number of questions, but Shelton appeared to have slipped into a reverie, which did not abate the warning looks sent my way from Tom and Diana.
Richard shifted his weight. Without looking around at the young deputy, Shelton lowered his chin.
I wouldn’t have taken it as more than a twitch in the back of his neck, because Shelton rarely nodded at me. But Richard being his protégé created a different context.
Richard asked, “Can anything help you narrow down the amount of time he could have been in there?”
