I turned away from the barn and the memories I didn’t need right now. “Agreed. Odds are strong against a chance meeting out here. Someone knew she was going to the barn on Friday night.”
“You don’t like Tommy as a suspect.” Jake said, watching the water.
“He’s all we got at this point and he admitted a fight besides.”
“You don’t like him for the killer,” he said again.
“Mmm.”
A yell came off the lake and Shel waved wildly at the monitors. I waited motionless, hoping for the knife, while he hauled up his find and motored back to the launch. It was a purse instead, found about twenty yards from shore and one-third of the way down the trail from the barn. A quick check revealed Hattie’s license and school ID inside, which told us the killer probably tossed it as he left through one of the parking lots.
“You want to call off the field search?” Jake asked as we cataloged the contents on the cruiser’s hood.
“After today. Keep them tracking along the main field paths until sundown, just to see if anything else turns up.” There was no sense wasting the borrowed manpower I had from Olmsted County.
We bagged and tagged everything in Hattie’s purse, from her waterlogged phone down to the empty Lifesaver wrappers that littered every pocket, and after ten minutes of methodical examination there was only one thing that interested me.
“This guy.”
I held up the bag with a business card we’d found in Hattie’s wallet. It was black on one side, white on the other, and some fancy writing said Gerald Jones with a website underneath. On the white side someone had written a phone number.
“I want to know who this is and why Hattie had his card. Check the number. Find out where he is.”
Jake nodded while he fiddled with another evidence bag. “I think the phone’s completely toast. Too bad.”
“Suppose we’ll have to do our police work the old-fashioned way.”
Jake slid right into our standing argument as he gathered up the purse evidence and we got back into the cruiser.
“Del, the old-fashioned way is antiquated. You want to know about this Gerald Jones? If the phone had worked I could’ve just looked him up in her address book and seen when she last talked to him.”
“So you have to get a warrant for some phone records. You’re breaking my heart.”
We argued until we got back to Pine Valley and then Jake went to pick up some Dairy Queen while I had Nancy finalize the press release. Neither one of them seemed to think about going home on a Sunday night. Usually if Jake had to work overtime, he would’ve started complaining by now, but I didn’t hear a word out of him. Nothing about some date with legs up to there or the beers he was missing with his buddies. There was a silent understanding that we were all in this case together, to whatever end.
I talked to the field teams while we ate. Shel hadn’t turned anything else up in the lake and the dogs were coming up empty. If we couldn’t find the murder weapon, our hard evidence depended completely on the autopsy results and the forensics report on the items they’d found in the lagoon. We needed some prints or some DNA, badly.
“Man, you won’t believe this stuff, Del. Listen to what I found.”
Jake brought his laptop into my office and started reading aloud. Nancy hovered at the door.
“The curse is one of the most widely held superstitions in theater, dating back centuries. It’s rumored that Shakespeare wrote actual witches’ spells into his play, which angered the real witches living during that time. Every performance of Macbeth, or ‘The Scottish Play’ as generations of frightened actors refer to it, is considered dangerous and ripe for accidents and foul play.”
“What curse?” Nancy asked.
“What are you looking up that shit for?” I balled up my sandwich wrapper and threw it away.
“You’re the one who asked Tommy about it.”
“Then you weren’t listening too well.” I left the two of them and found some leftover coffee in the pot, smelled it, and put the whole thing in the microwave. By the time I’d gotten back it seemed like Jake had filled Nancy in. I glared at her big, frightened eyes.
“I didn’t ask Tommy about the curse. I asked a murder suspect if he wanted to deflect some suspicion somewhere else. And he didn’t.”
“So what does that tell us?”
“Either he killed her and he didn’t know about the curse, or he didn’t kill her and someone else did. Someone who isn’t some goddamn ghost story.”
“Witch’s spell,” Nancy corrected.
“Witches’ spells, my ass.” The microwave beeped and I went out and poured the sludge into a cup.
“Listen to this,” Jake said when I came back again.
“Laurence Olivier nearly died several times while he was performing Macbeth. Three people died in a London performance in 1942. In Manchester in 1947, the actor playing Macbeth said he didn’t believe in the curse. He was stabbed during a swordfight in rehearsal and died.”
“So some guy didn’t like him and thought it was a good opportunity to off him.”
Jake wasn’t paying attention to me. “When Charlton Heston played Macbeth, he was severely burned.”
“That’s what happens when you stand too close to a fire.”
They were both sucked into it now. Nancy read over his shoulder as Jake clicked through web page after web page.