Cass began gathering the toys in preparation for settling the dogs in for the night. “I guess you did have a busy day. I ran into Lettie, and she told me about the interview the two of you had this morning. She was impressed by the questions you asked and thought you were going to make a wonderful addition to the newspaper staff. In fact…” He was interrupted by his cell. He looked at the caller ID and answered. It sounded as if he was speaking with Gwen. After a minute, he hung up and turned to me. “I need to stop by the office. Gwen is there working on the burnt documents. She said she found something.”
“Okay. Should we skip dinner?”
“No. I don’t think it will take long to see what Gwen has. You can come with me, and we’ll head to dinner from there.”
Gwen wasn’t going to be happy about the fact that I was coming along. She’d made it clear that she considered Cass to be her territory, and I was nothing more than an interloper. I supposed I understood that she saw me as competition for his affections, but the reality was he wasn’t interested in her in the way she hoped he would be, and my being out of the picture wouldn’t change that.
“You found something?” Cass asked Gwen after we arrived at the station.
She shot me an angry look and then turned her focus on Cass. “I might have. I was putting together the pieces of paper the way you showed me to, and I found this.” She handed him a piece of paper that had huge holes in it but had been taped together. He looked at it, raising his brows slightly as he read.
“Good job, Gwen,” he praised.
She smiled.
Then he looked in my direction. “Apparently, Dale had been meeting with Mayor White in an official capacity.”
“So Dale was counseling Mayor White. About what?”
Cass hesitated. “I’m not really sure. I don’t have enough to definitively say what the sessions pertained to yet, but now that I know the two met in an official capacity, it occurs to me that the conversations shared between the two might very well have contained subject matter that Mayor White might possibly be motivated to keep secret.”
“So if he felt threatened by Dale in some way…” I jumped onto the thought train.
“Then he might go to certain extremes to make sure any documents Dale might have relating to the matters discussed be destroyed,” Cass finished.
Chapter 8
Friday
By the time Friday arrived, things had settled into somewhat of a regular pattern. Cass still hadn’t found the answers he’d been seeking that would definitively explain what occurred on the day Dale Conover died, but he had narrowed things down a bit. After a lot of searching, he’d finally figured out the name of the colleague Dale had been consulting with. After a long discussion with the man, he concluded that the patient with aggressive tendencies was probably not the person who killed him. The colleague refused to give Cass the name of the patient, due to confidentiality issues, but he did assure Cass that the specific behavior pattern most often exhibited by individuals similar to Dale’s patient were, more often than not, more bark than bite. Cass hadn’t completely removed the man from the suspect list, but he had moved him down to the bottom of the list along with someone associated with Clay Barrow.
Cass had also spoken to Lissa again, who assured him that her relationship with Dale was alive and well before his death. When asked about the fact that she had called him more often than he’d called her, she assured him that had more to do with his busy schedule than anything else. Cass admitted to me that while she seemed sincere when they spoke, he still hadn’t completely eliminated her as a suspect.
The fire marshal had submitted his report, stating that the fire had started in the office not far from where Dale’s remains were found and that an accelerant had been used to ensure that the fire would burn hot and spread rapidly. Cass had initially suspected a small explosion of some sort as the igniting event, but the fire marshal had not found evidence to support that theory.
Cass still hadn’t been able to access Dale’s computer, although he was still trying. The tablet had been unlocked successfully, but the password used to unlock the tablet failed to work on the computer. In terms of information gained from the tablet, there wasn’t a whole lot. Cass was able to access the contact list, but the list was one kept for personal reasons and not for business. There was a link to his personal email as well, which Cass had been looking through the last time I spoke to him, and there was a calendar with all his appointments. It appeared that Dale last met with someone named Tolley. Cass and I both suspected that Tolley was the last name rather than a first name, but so far, he’d been unable to find any corresponding paperwork relating to a patient with that last name. Of course, he hadn’t given up trying.
As far as I knew, Cass still had no idea why Dale’s car had been left in the back parking lot of the ski resort or how it had gotten there. The crime scene guys had dusted for prints, but the only prints to be identified were Dale’s and Lissa’s, so no surprises there.
As for the phone records, the blocked number had been disconnected, and there didn’t appear to be any other red flags to look into. Gwen was still working on assembling the burnt documents. There were a lot of holes that made many of the documents completely useless, but there were small pieces of information that needed to be followed up on, which left Cass scrambling. I’d spoken to him a few times since I’d last seen him on Tuesday, but he’d been too busy to get together for dinner or any other social event, so I hadn’t been able to have an in-depth conversation with him. Tonight was our shift at the animal shelter, so perhaps I could catch up with him then.
In the meantime, I had a story to file and a meeting with Dex about that story, so I supposed I should get up and get going. I felt like the second installment of the Ms. Cupid Caper was an engaging one. I’d interviewed several of her success stories during the week, which led me to the conclusion I’d reached at the beginning of this journey — Ms. Cupid seemed to employ some kind of Cupid magic that allowed for such a phenomenal success rate. So far, every single one of the clients Ms. Cupid had taken on had reported that the man or woman they’d been matched with really had been the perfect match for them, even Kim, who hadn’t actually been looking for a match.
“Morning, all,” I greeted Aunt Gracie, Tom, and Alastair after heading downstairs and into the dining area where they were sharing a large platter of pancakes. “Those look good.”
“There’s plenty if you’re hungry,” Gracie said.
I poured myself a mug of coffee. “I might have a couple. I have to meet with Dex this morning, but I have a little time before I need to leave.”
“How’d your column turn out this week?” Gracie asked. By this point, she knew Friday was my submission deadline.
“I think it turned out just fine. I still don’t have a clue who Ms. Cupid might be, but I’ve interviewed quite a few of the Ms. Cupid matches, and I think I have a handle on how the whole thing works.”
“Do you still think Ms. Cupid is someone living in Foxtail Lake?” Tom asked.
“Has to be,” I answered as I poured syrup on two pancakes. “The questions asked during the application interview are telling, but unless Ms. Cupid personally knows the people being matched, there is no way she’d be able to tell who would get along with whom from the answers, and she certainly wouldn’t be able to set up the seemingly perfect dates.”
“So why even ask the questions if she doesn’t use the answers to make matches?” Tom asked.
I frowned. “I’m not sure. I suppose the questions must have a purpose of some sort, but I simply can’t believe there isn’t more going into the matches than the answers to the questions. When I went through the application with Gabby, the questions were really random.”