Hidden Summit (Virgin River #17)(55)

Still, if they were together at the end of the day, they were usually still together first thing in the morning.

“One of these days, we’re going to take the next step,” Leslie told him. “The sheets on the bed in that little cabin aren’t getting much of a workout.”

For the time being, they spent at least a couple of nights a week on their own. On one such night, Conner sat at his laptop in his cabin and worked on an email.

Dear Samantha, I saw the last letter you sent. It’s the first one since our parting of the ways—I shredded the previous ones. Maybe I was afraid to read them, I don’t know. I’d like to share where I am in life right now, so we can both put this behind us. First of all, I’ve moved on. I’m happy in ways I was never happy before, and that has nothing to do with any failing of yours. Second, I don’t have any hard feelings toward you. True, I did for a long time, but I really feel free of that now, free enough to tell you I wish you all the best. And third, now that we’ve both had that chance to clear the air, to forgive and forget, to get things off our chests, I’d like to move on without the baggage, without further explanations or contact from you, without reminders of everything that went on before. I want to think of you as a woman I was once close to, a woman who has moved on to a new life that doesn’t include me. And if I could ask one favor, I’d like you to remember me as a man who once cared about you, and who did the best he could with a difficult set of circumstances. Believe me, I know that’s asking a lot; I know it can’t seem like I tried, but I did the best I could at the time.

I’m letting go of it now, Samantha. No grudges, no obsessive remembering, no self-pity.

Good luck to you. Be well.

Danny

When he was done and mostly satisfied, he created a new, free email account and sent his email to her email address. He waited a little while to see if the email bounced back as undeliverable and was not surprised when it didn’t. She was keeping things the same in case he ever succumbed to the urge to reach out to her. He didn’t give it much time—an hour or so. When it didn’t bounce back, he closed and canceled that email account.

Done.

The very next morning, it began. He was not prepared, though he should’ve been. The pretrial jury selection started a rush of press about the crime he’d witnessed and speculation about the trial.

Conner spent a lot of time reading the news online before he went to work. He was working with Dan Brady on a kitchen renovation. He kept his ears sharp all day, but the news of a murder trial in Sacramento didn’t seem to spark any interest in Virgin River. He even stopped by the bar before heading over to Leslie’s house just to see if anyone was talking about it.

He had to give the press some credit—there was speculation about witnesses and even some curiosity about whether the prosecution’s witness might have any connection to the hardware store where the crime was committed, the hardware store that had burned to the ground. But unless there were articles he was unaware of, they were not putting names to their speculation. He didn’t see his name in any press, yet they would have known it was him—his name had appeared as probable cause on the search warrant that was used to search Mathis’s car and home and arrest him.

A name he did see quite a bit of was Dickie Randolph, the victim. Randolph had been pretty well-known for dabbling in the underworld of drugs and prostitution.

Yet there was more—Randolph had invested in some of Mathis’s condo properties, and it was speculated that Mathis could be a silent partner in some of Randolph’s businesses. And of course a sleazeball like Dickie Randolph had a lot of ancillary characters involved in his businesses, as well.

Motive? The press hadn’t uncovered one yet, unless there had been some sort of bad blood between the two that had gone unnoticed thus far. In fact, if Conner hadn’t seen Mathis do the shooting, there would have been many other individuals who would have been suspect.

As the police had told Conner a long time ago—everyone in this case was dirty. But as far as what they could prove in a court of law, only Regis Mathis had committed murder.

Conner was a little uncertain how to handle the flood of news where Leslie was concerned. In the end he told her to get out her laptop and log on so they could look at some of it together, while he was still in town to help her understand the details and what he knew about the stories. They sat at her kitchen table, and he ran the search, bringing up pictures and articles from the Sacramento newspaper.

Most of the pictures that would be used as evidence, such as the blood splatters in the car that were illuminated by the luminol the police used, were not available to the press, but there were photos they couldn’t control. The Dumpster where the body had been dumped, for example, with the long streak of blood running down the side and the yellow crime-scene tape stretching across the area. The covered body on the gurney that was being loaded in to the ambulance.

“Where were you?” Leslie asked.

“I had just walked out the back door of the store,” he said. “I heard the car door, noticed a man walking around the front of the car to the passenger side. He was pulling a gun out of his pocket at the same time he opened the passenger door and he shot him in the head. I ducked behind the Dumpster. It was fast and brutal. Over, body dumped and car backing out of the alley, in a couple of minutes or less. I looked in the Dumpster first—the man’s hands and feet were bound with duct tape, a strip across his mouth.”