Page 56 of Secret Stalker

“Max? Something wrong?”

He slowly shook his head. “No. I need to make a phone call. Hang on a sec.” He grabbed his phone and punched in a number. A few moments later he said, “Hey, Colby, yeah, it’s me. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. I figured he’d be ticked. That’s why I ignored his earlier calls. Nothing I can do about that right now, but I’m still working the case. I need to ask you something. Remember when Mrs. Caldwell was being treated for cancer, where did she go for that? Uh-huh. And Mr. Caldwell, he’s been going through chemo at the hospital. But I never asked which one. I just assumed Maryville. But where...” His gaze shot to Bex as he nodded. “Right. Got it. That’s what I was thinking. Did Blake make any headway with his contacts? What about your interviews?”

Several minutes later, he hung up the phone.

“Well,” she asked, “do I have to beg you to tell me what that was all about?”

He smiled. “That was Colby, one of the other SWAT guys who’s also a detective like me.”

“I know who Colby is.”

“Right. Well, he reinterviewed two of the gunmen at the hospital. One of them, a guy named Lenny, finally admitted that he’d seen the guy who hired them to go after you. He worked with an artist to do a rendering of the guy.”

“It can’t be Robert Caldwell if he’s in a wheelchair. He couldn’t drive.”

“It wasn’t. But close.”

“Deacon? He’s such a nice guy.”

“No, it wasn’t Deacon. The picture is the spitting image of one of the security guys Caldwell senior keeps at his farm. Even more importantly, the new guy on our team, Blake, was able to link that car to that security guy. It sure looks like he was the one in Knoxville who hired those thugs to go after you. And it’s not like he had that kind of money, or a motive. Only his employer had that. Even better, Mr. Caldwell—the father, not Deacon—was quite familiar with Knoxville, since he and his wife were both there most of this year for cancer treatments.”

“Okay, sounds like he’s probably the one behind going after me. At least now we know who it is.”

His confidence seemed to take a tumble. “Well, I’m not sure about that. Yes, he’s the one who hired the gunmen, through his personal security guy. We should be able to prove that after we get a warrant for his bank records and follow the money. But what’s his motive? He believes you killed his son and he wants you to confess. He wants you to go to prison because he thinks you’re a murderer. That’s problematic.”

“I really hate that I see where you’re going with this,” she grumbled. “Your point is that the current bad business between Mr. Caldwell and me makes it seem highly unlikely that he’s also the one who killed his son. Because if he’d done that, he wouldn’t dredge all of this back up right now and shine light onto it.”

“Exactly. Now you’re thinking like a cop.”

“Lord help us all.”

He laughed, but quickly sobered. “Who does that leave us, suspectwise? I’m thinking we’re back to Marcia Knolls.”

“Marcia? But she was in love with Bobby. She wouldn’t want to kill him.”

“He wasn’t in love with her. He treated her like an insect he wanted to brush off his shoe. You said yourself that you saw her in the store that night with Bobby. Maybe she followed you and you didn’t know it. And after you ran out of the cabin, holding your clothes, she thought you’d actually been his lover and were running home, maybe to make curfew. I can see her justifying it that way, and being angry and hurt and going into the cabin to confront Bobby. When she found him lying there, unconscious, assuming he was naked—”

“He was.” Her voice was so tight she could barely speak.

“Okay. He was naked, and she thought he was cheating on her, at least in her mind. So she grabs whatever is handy. Cabin like that, on the edge of the woods, there’s bound to be stuff in there, maybe in a closet. A bat or something like it. She could have hit him with it while he was still unconscious, so that even if he woke up while she was hitting him, he’d already be too hurt to put up much of a fight.” He pulled out his phone. “The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced she’s the only one who makes sense for Bobby’s murder. I’ll get Colby to bring her in for questioning.”

A few minutes later, he hung up the call and pitched his phone onto the coffee table. “Okay, I put everything into motion that I could. Hopefully the guys will come through for us and get proof and wrap it all up.”

She eyed him with dread as he picked up the legal pad and pen again. “I thought we just solved the case. Marcia killed Bobby. And Caldwell senior had one of his men hire the thugs to get me to confess. Why are you getting your torture devices out again?”

He rolled his eyes. “Because I still want to review the two weeks you were in town after Thornton let you go. I want to know who all you spoke to, and what they said. Who you might have seen skulking around. Until Colby tells me that he has Marcia’s confession, I’m not letting down my guard. We need to see if anyone else around town did anything odd those two weeks that might make them rise to the top of my suspect list for having killed Bobby.”

She groaned and collapsed back onto the pillow.

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