Dead Wrong

She flipped back through her notes. “Do you know a Gavin, who seems to be a friend of Travis’s?”

Bronwen pursed her lips. “Gavin. You mean Huseby? He kind of hung around Will. I never paid any attention to him. I know he’s around again.”

Bronwen supplied a few new names of people in Amy’s circle. At the end, she asked, “Do you think this guy killed Amy in particular? Or was she just…”

“Convenient?”

“That sounds awful, but…” She fidgeted. “Yeah. I mean, should single women be scared?”

“At this point, we simply don’t know the motive. It wouldn’t hurt to use extra caution.”

“Okay.” Bronwen gave a wry smile. “Thanks, Trina. Wow. Business is slow, anyway. Maybe I’ll close. Or maybe not.” She shivered. “I don’t want to go home alone. I could call around. Some of us could get together and have a kind of wake.”

“That might help all of you.” Trina nodded. “I appreciate your assistance.”

She was at the door when Bronwen called, “Trina? That employee discount? I meant it, you know. Come back someday.”

“I just might.” Trina nodded and left, the bell tinkling as she let the door shut behind her.

She started her Explorer to get the heat cranking, but didn’t pull away from the curb immediately. Instead, she thought about Amy Owen as her friends described her.

On the surface, a party girl. An easy victim, because she’d bar-hopped, lowered her guard by drinking and been sexually promiscuous enough to end her evening with any man who appealed. Yet, it was clear from what her parents, Marcie and Bronwen had said that Amy wanted something different. That she was filling time until she found the white-picket-fence ending she craved. As much as she liked to party, she also possessed a quality of sweetness that drew people. She had a huge circle of friends. Trina had two best friends, a couple more casual ones and a few other people who might invite her to Christmas gatherings. She thought she was more the norm than Amy Owen.

An amazing number of those friendships dated from high school. In fact, it seemed every conversation today had twisted back to the halls of Elk Springs High School. Maybe that was natural in a small town. But given that they’d all graduated ten years ago, wouldn’t you think the group would include more newcomers, and that more of the high school crowd would have left town? The jocks were still the only desirable guys for the popular girls, who still clustered to flip their shiny hair and giggle at jokes no one else would get.

Not fair. Trina grimaced. They had lives. She was the one directing the conversations, asking them to dredge up memories.

Anyway, who was she to talk? She could have gone anywhere, but had chosen to come home to Elk Springs even though her childhood wasn’t what you’d call happy. And didn’t she still nurse a little bit of a crush on Will Patton, Homecoming King?

Besides—chances were none of this had anything whatsoever to do with Amy Owen’s murder. She’d likely been chosen at random, because she was available: sitting alone at a table in a pub or walking out to her car in a dark parking lot by herself. The odds, Trina thought, finally switching on her turn signal, were against Amy having been raped and murdered by a friend or even acquaintance.

BETH HAD GONE TO WORK, the girls to school. Will had intended to hunt for an apartment today. He wanted to buy, but was finding little for sale at this time of year. Absentee owners could rent by the week at astronomical rates. Spring, when the out-of-towners melted away with the snow, was when houses appeared on the market, according to the real estate agent who was helping him look.

The guy had called that morning. His income was probably zip at this time of year, and he was trying like hell to find something Will would buy.

When Will had walked into the real estate office last week, he’d been startled to recognize Jimmy McCartin from high school. The guy had been a hanger-on to Will’s group, too little and scrawny to play sports, but around all the time because he was manager for the football and baseball teams. Will hadn’t liked to crush the guy, but he never seemed to notice when he wasn’t welcome.

Heck, maybe that made him the salesman of the century. Successful real estate agents had to be damn pushy.

Jimmy was still scrawny and still able to make Will uncomfortable by doing things like slinging an arm around his shoulder when he introduced him to people and implying that they’d been best friends in high school.

“Hey,” he said. “Did you hear about Amy? I saw Travis this morning. He told me.”

Will had been hoping the caller was his mother with news.

After he and Jimmy hashed over the news for a couple of minutes, with Will pretending he didn’t know any more than anyone else did, McCartin asked, “Did you think any more about that house at Crescent Ridge? If you buy now, you could pick your own tile, paint colors, maybe upgrade some fixtures.”

The new development he was talking about was maybe half a mile from Will’s mother’s place, just off the mountain loop highway on the way up to Juanita Butte. The handful of houses that had been framed in so far were going to be beauties. Different builders were working there, which avoided the cookie-cutter effect, too. There was a shingled one at the top of the ridge that Will had liked.

“It’s just too big,” he said. “What was it, thirty-five hundred square feet? I don’t have any use for a place that size.”

“You could think about buying a lot and getting one custom built,” McCartin suggested.

“Yeah, but then I’d be looking at next fall before I had a place to live.” He got cream out of the refrigerator and poured some into his coffee, cell phone to his ear. “I don’t know. I’ll keep the house in mind, Jimmy, but I’m thinking I’ll wait a couple of months before I commit.”

“You know I’ll call you the minute I see any new listings,” McCartin assured him. “Hey, you planning to go to J.R.’s this weekend?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Will said, because he didn’t want to be rude.

“Great! I’ll see you there, then.”

Will shook his head as he hit End.

He hadn’t slept much last night, so at noon he was on his third cup of coffee and still trying to summon some motivation to get going. When the phone rang, he snatched it up.

“Pattons’ residence.”

“Will?” His father’s deep voice was unmistakable. “I just talked to Meg.”

“Are you coming home early?”

“I’m giving the keynote address at the banquet tomorrow night. I can’t. Besides, what can I do that your mother can’t?” Still, the growl in his voice betrayed his frustration. This was his county, his command. He wanted to be there, not exchanging tips of the trade with other law enforcement personnel in Seattle.

He wasn’t coming home early. Then what was this phone call about? Will waited.

“You know we’re going to have to consider the possibility that Mendoza was wrongly convicted.”

“Bullshit!” Will exploded. “You had DNA! How much more solid can you get?”

“We had proof he’d had intercourse with Gillian,” Jack Murray corrected. “In the absence of semen or hairs from another man, it was enough. But he’s been saying since the day we picked him up that he had sex with her, and that was all.”

“Bullshit!” Will said again. Intensely agitated, he paced the kitchen, wheeling each time he reached a wall. “Gilly wouldn’t have gone out and screwed some stranger! You knew her better than that.”

“What I know is that she was mad as hell. People do stupid things when they’re drunk, and her blood alcohol level was sky-high.” His voice softened. “She might have done it to punish you.”

The raging pain tore into Will’s gut, as it so often did. He stopped in his pacing and bent over as if he’d struck across the belly with a two-by-four.

Whatever Gilly had or hadn’t intended, he had been punished a thousand times over. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe that Gilly would have been that careless with herself. That cruel to him.

“No,” he said. “No. He did it. He raped her and killed her.”

“Will…”

“Copycat crimes happen. We both know they do. What if he talked some buddy into it so he could walk?”

“Goddamn it, Will, you know we’ll consider every possibility. One of those possibilities is that we convicted the wrong man.”

“You’re back to defending him, aren’t you? Still can’t believe you could have been wrong about him? That he was using you?”