Page 22 of Claimed By the Deputies

“A bit?”

“Okay, a full-on photographic memory,” she admits with a sigh. “Tim calls me a walking, talking computer. Anyway, point is, Isee things most people don’t usually pay attention to. It’s kept me out of trouble for most of my life.”

“Until it didn’t,” I reply.

“That’s a different story.”

“One you don’t want to talk about.”

“Not my favorite chapter, Sheriff.”

“Let’s start over for now. You noticed the cufflink didn’t belong with the charms on the bracelet.”

“Yes, and I tagged it separately. I also flagged it for Gary.”

“You said that. But he never came down to check it out.”

“No.” Tassia shrugs lightly. “I did add a note in the email about it, though maybe I should’ve set it up with a read receipt or a follow-up alert. My bad.”

“Not at all. You did your part. I’ll take this and have Gary go over it,” I say, picking up the bagged cufflink. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I pause to glance over my shoulder as I turn to go with my new lead in my jacket pocket. “You and I are going to talk about this later, Tassia.”

“I didn’t tamper with evidence!” she almost shouts.

With a small grin I let her stew as I head upstairs to deal with Gary and his many unanswered emails.

“You’ve gotto be kidding me,” Tyler says as we meet outside the Hamilton drugstore on 5th Street two hours later. “Gary’s been sitting on a potential lead for the past week?”

“In his defense, the email system failed to flag Tassia’s request as a priority, and the man has been overwhelmed since long before Tanya Burrow’s death,” Mitch says.

I check the intel on my phone once again before we go in. “At least we made it here eventually.”

“Which is where, exactly?” Tyler scoffs. “One of the mayor’s drugstores? That’ll play really well with the local press.”

“The cufflink delivered a partial print for William Jade, an employee of this particular store,” I reply.

“They are in the drug business,” Mitch shrugs.

“Legaldrug business,” Tyler retorts.

And then it hits me. I’ve had these thoughts for a while, truth be told, tiny suspicions worming their way to the surface, then burrowing deeper into the back of my head over the past few months. Connections I couldn’t quite make in the absence of any tangible proof.

This could be it. The missing link.

“We go in clean,” I tell my deputies, the two men I trust most in the world. “We’ll ask some basic questions and see how Jade reacts.”

“CCTV footage from the street corner showed both Tanya Burrow and Dina Kellogg making repeated visits to this drugstore,” Mitch says. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

“No, it can’t,” I reply and lead the way.

The Hamilton pharmacy chain is a market leader all over the state of New York, owned by the mayor. Frost Valley alone has two of his drugstores, and there are another five spanning over three neighboring towns.

“Good afternoon,” William Jade greets us from behind the glass counter. He’s dressed in the Hamilton-signature shirt and pants—white with the Hamilton logo embroidered onto the shirt’s chest pocket. “How can I help you today, Sheriff? Deputies?”

He doesn’t seem happy to see us, proving my theory already.

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