“Want to come inside with me for a moment?” I said to the cat when we pulled in to the driveway at the Hall house.
“Merow,” he answered, leaning sideways to look around me. I picked him up, pulled my keys out of my pocket. Across the street Paul Duvall and Alyssa were playing hockey on their front lawn with a large neon orange ball and plastic hockey sticks. There was a makeshift net at one end of the grass made with a tarp and wooden stakes stuck in the ground. I waved and then Elvis and I headed for the back door.
Very quickly I realized that there was no way I could search for the missing bottles by myself. There were just too many boxes to check.
Elvis followed me from the living room back to the kitchen. He immediately began prowling around the stack of boxes. “There aren’t any answers there,” I said to him. He tipped his head to one side, seemed to consider my words and then went back to what he’d been doing.
I walked over and stood in the doorway. I looked across the floor and tried to picture Ronan Quinn’s dead body, hoping somehow I’d remember something I hadn’t thought of before. But there were no answers lurking in my memory. I felt my stomach turn over as I thought about Quinn’s body. He couldn’t have been in the house more than a few minutes when he was killed; he’d still been wearing his jacket. There had been something dark on the collar that I realized now must have been dried blood. The white mark on his left pant leg had come from the whitewashed back porch, I knew now. I’d brushed the same mark off my own pants. And the bits of black asphalt that were stuck to the sole of his shoes had most likely been deposited in the driveway outside by the tires of his car when he drove over the partially paved road and then picked up on his shoes when he walked around his car to take his briefcase from the backseat.
I crouched down and put one hand on the floor, concentrating on the image of Ronan Quinn’s shoes. Elvis padded over and nudged my hand with his head. “Murp?” he asked.
I looked at him. “The person who had the best chance to take those missing bottles was Ethan. How do we even know he came from the hospital that morning? How do we know he was even there at all?” Elvis gave me a blank look.
“Exactly,” I said.
I remembered the drive out to the house the morning we’d found Quinn’s body. Tiny clumps of asphalt had stuck to the tires of the SUV and Elvis had made a fuss over the tar smell in the car. I reached over and stroked his fur. “If Ethan was here before we were the day of the murder, he would have parked in the garage to hide his car,” I said. “He couldn’t chance anyone seeing it. And if he drove over that same stretch of road that we did, there should be bits of asphalt on the floor in there.”
“Mrrr,” the cat said.
“Let’s go look,” I said.
I picked him up and went out to the garage. The sky had clouded over and it looked as though rain was close.
The key to the side door was on the ring Stella had given me. The inside of the building was dark and it took a minute for my eyes to adjust. No so for Elvis. Almost as though he knew what I was looking for, he started across the floor, sniffing the wide planks, but I was the one who found the bits of asphalt on the battered wooden floor.
Elvis made his way over to me, sniffed the tarry black bits and sneezed twice. There wasn’t any doubt what we’d found.
A drop of water landed on the top of my head, followed by another and another. Obviously the rain had started and just as obviously the roof leaked. A drop of water landed on Elvis’s paw. He lifted his foot, shook it and glared at me.
I straightened up and picked him up as well. “It’s just a shower,” I said. “The house is closer. We’ll just wait it out.” We sprinted to the back door. I set the cat on the kitchen floor and he shook himself and made a sour face.
I leaned against the counter and pulled out my cell phone. “We need to know if there was any other paving going on in this area either before or since,” I said. “Otherwise those bits of asphalt we just found don’t mean much.”
“Hello, Sarah,” Mr. P. said.
“Hi,” I said. “This is probably going to sound crazy, but is there any way to find out where the town has been paving in the past two weeks?”
“Public Works would have a schedule,” he said. “Would you like me to check it for you?”
“Please,” I said. At my feet Elvis suddenly lifted his head and looked around. Was someone outside? It was probably Paul. “I’ll call you back,” I said.
“All right, my dear,” Mr. P. said, sounding a little distracted, which told me he was already on his computer. “It should only take me about five minutes.”
I looked down at Elvis at my feet. His green eyes were narrowed and his tail was twitching.
I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck almost as though a faint breeze had blown through the old building. I turned around slowly.
Ethan Hall was standing in the doorway.
Chapter 19
“Hi,” I said, hoping nothing in my face gave me away. I held up my phone. “I was just making a list of what we’re going to take back to the shop.”
Ethan reached over and took my cell from my hand. My heart began to pound in my chest. “I’m not finished, but hang on a sec and I’ll find it for you,” I said, reaching out to get the phone back.
Ethan glanced at the screen and dropped it into his pocket. “Nice try, Sarah,” he said. “But we both know you’ve figured out that I killed Ronan Quinn.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets. “Paul called you.”
Ethan shrugged and gave me a smile that reminded me of nothing so much as a crocodile. “He lets me know what’s going on over here and if he wants to come over when his kid’s asleep and have a cigarette or a beer, I figure it makes us even.”
I thought of Paul and Alyssa outside playing hockey on the lawn. “You and Paul played hockey together.”
Ethan nodded. “For a couple of years. He wasn’t as good as I was.”
“Why did you do it?” I asked. Keep him talking, I told myself. Build a rapport. Stall. Look for a way to gain an advantage.
“Oh, c’mon,” he said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t figured that part out yet?” He glanced in the direction of the wine bottles.
“Those missing bottles,” I said slowly. “You sold them, didn’t you? You passed them off as the real thing and sold them.”
Ethan didn’t say anything, but one eyebrow went up and he gave me a sly smile. “They belonged to me. And if people are too stupid to do their due diligence, well, that’s hardly my fault.”
I brushed a strand of hair away from my face and shot a quick glance to the left to see if there was anything I could use as a weapon. There wasn’t. “Did Thorne Logan really approach you about buying one of those bottles, or were you just trying to steer us in his direction?”
“Both, actually,” he said.
Elvis pressed against my leg, watching Ethan intently. The warmth of his small body helped keep my legs from shaking. “Quinn found out what you were doing.”
Ethan sighed. “It wasn’t any of his business. I hired him to tell me what those bottles were worth. That’s it. He started talking about lawsuits and I thought I might get some of my money back. Then I found out the chances of that happening were pretty slim.”
“The day before he was killed, that afternoon you were here, he noticed the missing bottles, didn’t he?” I could see the back door out of the corner of my eye, but there was no way I could get to it.
“I’d paid him. I thought he was leaving town.” An ugly expression flashed across his face. “Then he wants to come out here to check on the glue that was used for the labels.”