Page 64 of Dead Girl Running

She jotted down each detail about each person.

Then she checked vacations. She knew when Jessica had been killed, so she looked for the employees who had been gone in January. Which was just about everybody except her, who wanted to hunker down here, and Birdie, who didn’t want to go home to Detroit. Oh, and Carson Lennex had been in Machu Picchu, a fact that hadn’t mattered before and now seemed grossly ominous. She weeded out a few names, but—the Librarian ran a big operation at multiple sites. What size was the Librarian’s organization?

Oh. And a large number of the Yearning Sands staff were still on vacation. What if Nils was wrong and the Librarian wasn’t currently here?

So many questions, and none of them easily answered.

Kellen tore off the paper and shrugged into her oversize coat, then headed down to employee dining. It was late; she needed something to eat.

There she found Temo digging through the freezer and loading ready-made dinners into a Yearning Sands Resort insulated tote bag.

“You’re back!” she said. “How was LA? Did you find friends to hire?”

“No.” He was brief to the point of being curt.

“Did you clear up the family situation?”

“Sí.Yes. Everything is fine.” He didn’t look as if everything was fine. He looked tired, he had two days’ growth of dark beard on his chin and his scowl brought his forehead down over his eyes.

More problems in the Iglasias family, she guessed. “How’s your mom and your sister?”

He looked back into the depths of the freezer, grabbed another couple of meals without looking and dropped them into the bag. “Fine. Good! Well, my mom’s in prison, but other than that—”

“That’s something different, isn’t it?”

“First time for federal prison,sí, but no.” He had a bitter set to his mouth. “I’ve bailed her out of jail more than once.”

“Is your sister okay?”

“She is now.” He shut the freezer a little too hard. “I placed her with relatives.”

“She’s okay now? You’re glad you went?”

“Sí. Sí.”He edged away.

“I could talk to Annie, ask if you could bring your sister to live with you.”

He froze.

“You know how kind she is. She would probably say yes.” Kellen’s mind leaped ahead. “School would be very different for her, and you’d have to cut back on your hours, but—”

“Look, I just got back. I have to go to my cottage. I have, um, things I…”

She caught his arm. “Temo, before you unpack and do some wash, I have to ask—did you see Lloyd Magnuson put that corpse into his car?”

Temo looked at Kellen’s hand, then into her face. “I loaded it into that policeman’s toy car.”

“Toy car?”

“He had a toy car, a Smart car. It looks like one of our golf carts, only smaller. I put the plastic box in the back.”

“Then he headed toward Virtue Falls?”

Temo pointed north.

“He didn’t get there. The body never got taken to the coroner. No one has seen Lloyd Magnuson.”

Temo stood with his mouth half-open. Then, “He wrecked his toy car?”

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