In the Clearing (Tracy Crosswhite #3)(100)

“Maybe,” Kins said. “I guess we’ll find out.” Faz had his jacket on. “You on your way home?”

“Not for a while. Husky game tonight. Traffic in the U District will be a killer until seven. I was going to take a walk up to Palomino and watch the first half there.”

“You mind making it a working night?” Kins asked. “I’d like to talk some things through.” A flat-screen TV hung over the adjacent B Team’s bull pen.

“You’re staying?”

“Might as well,” Kins said. “Shannah’s got book club, and the boys are with friends. I agreed to pick them up on my way home.”

“I’ll call the Palomino and have it delivered,” Faz said.




An hour and a half later, Faz and Kins sat in the A Team’s bull pen talking through the potential various scenarios. Empty boxes of takeout littered the center table—not a spare piece of pasta, bread, or even a shred of lettuce to be found. In the background, they could hear announcers giving the play-by-play of the Husky football game, and from the bits and pieces Kins had caught, it didn’t sound pretty. Stanford was up 21–0 nearing the end of the first half.

“Okay, so the father comes storming in, ranting and raving,” Faz said. “He picks up the crystal sculpture and starts beating on her. The kid intervenes, and he smacks the kid.”

“So then why does he go to the back bedroom?”

“That’s where the wife has gone.”

“When?”

“When he beats on the kid.”

“Why does he drop the sculpture? Why doesn’t he take it with him?”

“He’s done with it,” Faz said. “He’s already dropped it before he kicks her a few times in the ribs.”

“Tell me how she gets to the bedroom if he’s whaling on her.”

“Connor said he stepped in to stop him, and his father hit him,” Faz said. “That gives Angela enough time to get down the hall. The husband goes after her, Connor grabs his leg, trying to stop him, and that’s how the fingerprint ends up on the father’s shoe. He kicks Connor off of him and goes down the hall. Connor gets up and goes for the gun.”

Kins thought it through a minute. “Okay, and if Angela shot him?”

“Then it’s like she said; the husband is whaling on her, and Connor is cowering in the back bedroom. When the husband gets finished, he drops the sculpture and goes to the back room to get Connor, except Connor is upset and doesn’t want to go with him, so the father smacks him. Meanwhile, Angela has gotten the gun, comes down the hall and shoots him.”

Kins mulled over that scenario. “So then what is she doing for twenty-one minutes?”

“That’s where I think the evidence points to Connor as the shooter,” Faz said, sitting up and leaning forward. “She’s trying to clean up his mess. She trying to protect the kid, so she’s taking the time to get their stories straight. She tells him that she’ll confess, that she’ll tell the police she shot him. She’s grown up the daughter of a criminal defense attorney, right? It’s like Tracy said, they probably had sit-down dinners where Berkshire regaled them with all his war stories. She probably grew up thinking about things like Miranda rights and self-defense. She uses the time to calm the kid and get him on board, and makes him rehearse his story until she’s satisfied he’s got it straight.”

“So why does she wipe down the sculpture? If she’s thinking about fingerprints, Tim Collins’s prints on it would help prove he used it to hit her.”

“That, my friend, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Faz said.

“That and why would Connor come in and confess if his mother agreed to take the fall?”

“Two thoughts. Either he feels guilty and doesn’t want anything to happen to his mom for something he did, or it was all part of her plan to get them both off.”

“And Berkshire withdraws why?” Kins asked.

“Don’t know,” Faz said, sounding and looking tired.

Kins tossed an empty can into the wastebasket. Faz stretched his neck and checked his watch. They’d reached the same dead end again.

“Getting late,” Faz said. “I think we both could use a good night’s sleep. We can get a fresh start Monday morning. Come on. Let’s head out.”

“You go,” Kins said. “Kids asked to stay an hour later at their friends’.”

Faz got up from his chair and grabbed his sport coat from the hanger dangling over the corner of his cubicle. “Don’t stay too late.”

“I won’t.” Kins sat back, frustrated. They were doing something wrong. He knew it. He knew he was missing something, something that would help make sense of the evidence. In his mind, Angela had shot Tim. Not only did she have the financial incentive, but the evidence indicated that she was cashing out, trying to milk as much money out of her husband to dump into a home she knew she was going to sell. If Tim wasn’t in the picture, she stood to take 100 percent of the proceeds and control over the entire estate—all because Tim hadn’t finalized his new will yet. And Kins just didn’t see Connor having the guts to pull the trigger—at least not without something more.

Kins opened the case binder and thought of Tracy’s trick of laying out the evidence in one place. He grabbed the file and the Bekins box and carried it into the conference room. There he dismantled the file and began laying out the witness statements, the photographs, the reports, the sculpture, and the other evidence in plastic evidence bags.