Page 37 of Hunting the Crossbow Killer

Once Collier was diving into his food and surfing the web as an apparent lunchtime diversion, Grace quickly swallowed down the bite she’d just taken and took a sip from her water bottle before setting it aside.

“How are you holding up, Aidan?” She kept her voice low so it wouldn’t carry through the glass.

He smiled. “I figured this wasn’t about a reinterview. Don’t worry about me. I’ve been through far worse.”

“Well, of course I worry about you. You’ve been through so much hardship. It’s not right that some nut has his sights set on making life even more difficult for you. My boss is threatening to pull me off this case if I can’t prove a link to the Crossbow Killer soon. But that’s not going to stop me from working on this investigation. I’ll do it on my own time. I’m going to prove you had nothing to do with this, or anything else.”

He stared at her in silence, his brows drawn down in a frown. Then he slowly shook his head, his expression a mix between confusion and something else. Anger? Fear? What?

“Malone—”

“You’ve had your tongue down my throat and vice versa. You can call me Grace.”

He laughed, but quickly sobered. “Fair enough. I can understand why I’m attracted to you. You’re smart, funny and beautiful for starters. But I can’t even begin to understand why a special agent with the FBI would not only be attracted to me, but also seems to trust me. Why are you so determined to look into my case? Why do you insist on trying to prove that I didn’t commit a crime to which I confessed and spent ten years in prison? I didn’t appeal or try to have my sentence reduced. If I’m not trying to prove I’m innocent, why are you?”

“Well, first, thanks for saying I’m smart, funny and beautiful. You left out sexy, by the way, but I’ll forgive you.”

He choked on another laugh and shook his head.

“Second, the reason I’m so convinced you’re innocent of any crime is precisely because I’m an FBI agent and a former cop. I’m experienced in reading people and facts. Your actions speak to your character. You’ve done nothing but help people from the moment we met, even the police who haven’t exactly been nice to you since you came here. But it’s what I’ve found and haven’t found when looking into your past as part of trying to figure out who is trying to frame you for the crimes here in Mystic Lake that raise so many questions as to make it seem ludicrous that you could have killed your wife.”

After another long silence, he crossed his arms. “All right. I’ll bite. What makes it seem impossible to you that I’m actually guilty of murder?”

Excited that he was finally at least willing to listen to her about his case, and hopeful that she could get him to discuss it, shethumbed through a stack of manila folders and then pulled out the thinnest one from the middle. She slid it across the table toward him.

He picked it up, but hesitated without opening it. “What is this?”

“A printout of Nashville PD’s complete investigation into the death of Elly O’Brien.”

He dropped the folder onto the table as if it had burned his hand. “I don’t need to read that. I know what happened.”

“Care to share that knowledge with me?”

“Didn’t we already have this conversation at my cabin, the day you were at my workshop admiring the table I was building? I told you about what happened the day…the day Elly passed.”

“You told me what you told the police years ago. But I’m not convinced that’s the truth, or at least not the whole truth.” She picked up the folder and flipped it open. “There are a total of twenty-five pages in here. And that includes the eight-page autopsy report.”

He winced, then cleared his throat. “Your point?”

“The police didn’t even try to corroborate your so-called confession. I’ve never, not once, seen a file this incomplete for an investigation of any kind, let alone an alleged murder. Which led me to wonder whether you were threatened by the police and framed—”

“No to both.”

“Okay. I’ll accept that answer for now. Then the question becomes why would the police be so quick to take your confession and not look deeper, and of course the other glaring question of why would you confess to something you didn’t do?”

“Grace—”

“The answer to the first is obvious once you look really closely at the file. There’s an obscure handwritten note that I didn’t notice right away because it’s on a printout of a copy to beginwith. It’s not very clear and part of it was chopped off in the margin.” She flipped through the file and pulled out a single page and pointed to the right edge. “See that?”

He eyed the page as if it were a snake. “Not really, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

Sighing, she pointed to some grainy handwriting. “I actually had to borrow a magnifying glass from Fletcher to read it myself. It says, ‘Parents of deceased request speedy end to case so family can move on and heal. Prosecutor agrees.’”

He shrugged.

“Come on, Aidan. You know where I’m going with this. The odds of a DA agreeing to halt an investigation without corroborating your confession are about zero. They must have had pressure from both the parentsand the defense. Your attorney had to have been consulted about this. If not, he could have argued to the court that the investigation was rushed and insufficient and requested that your case be dismissed. Heck, he could have easily argued that if you really did unplug your wife’s ventilator that you weren’t in your right mind, that you did it to show her mercy. Without a criminal record and this being your first offense, he could have brought forth witnesses to talk about your relationship with Elly and how madly in love you were. But he didn’t, even though everyone I’ve called and spoken to says exactly that, how close you were. Your attorney could have said you were in despair seeing her in pain, paralyzed, unable to breathe on her own, and that it clouded your judgment. Even I could have probably gotten you a reduced sentence and I’m not an attorney. Yours didn’t call one single witness at your sentencing, which happened just a few days after that report was written up with that note in the margin.”

She waited, but when he didn’t say anything, she continued. “As you pointed out earlier, you never submitted any appeals even though you had a strong case for one based on insufficientevidence. That all leads me to believe that you probably colluded with your wife’s parents to bring the case to an end prematurely.”

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