Page 54 of The Graveyard Girls (Detective Ellie Reeves #11)

FIFTY-THREE

Brambletown Police Department

In order to speed up the investigation, Ellie and Derrick decided to divide up.

She called ahead to verify that Sheriff Wallace was in his office so she could question him, and Derrick drove her Jeep to visit Clint’s father, Chester, who’d handled Ruth’s case.

Ellie found Clint Wallace in his office studying something on his computer.

“Thanks for seeing me,” Ellie said.

“Did I have a choice?”

Why some smalltown sheriffs resented working with outside law enforcement baffled her. Two heads were always better than one.

“Did you see the press conference about the other girls’ murders?”

“I did. I was making notes on the information you shared.” He leaned back in his chair, and she sank into the one facing his desk.

“We have to consider that Ruth may have been this unsub’s first victim. Oftentimes, a serial offender’s first kill is someone they know personally, someone they have a grudge against or who hurt them in some way.”

His gray eyes fastened on her. “If you’ve read the file my father put together, you can see he was thorough and questioned everyone in town.”

“Including you?” Ellie asked with an eyebrow raise.

“He questioned all the kids at school who knew Ruth.”

“You were what, sixteen at the time?”

“Seventeen,” he responded. “I was a couple years ahead of Ruth.”

“And popular, I heard.” Ellie offered him a smile, stroking his ego.

He gave a little shrug, but his chest seemed to puff up. “Girls go for the jocks.”

Ellie wanted to roll her eyes. “How long had you and Ruth been dating?”

“About four months I guess.”

Ellie maintained a neutral tone. “Things were going well?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought she’d just broken up with you.”

Unease flickered in his eyes. “We may have argued the day before but things were okay.”

“What did you argue about?”

“She was jealous, you know. Wanted all my attention and accused me of flirting with other girls.”

Ellie imagined him as a flirt, especially at seventeen. “So you didn’t break up?”

“We just took a couple of days to cool off. I figured she’d come back once she did.”

What a narcissist. “And you had plenty of other girls crushing on you.”

Irritation tightened his mouth. “Where are you going with this, Detective?”

“It’s on record that Ruth snuck out of the house that night to meet someone. Was she meeting you?”

He shook his head no. “I hung out with the guys,” he said. “If you’re asking for my alibi, it’s in the report. Besides, I would never have hurt Ruth. The reason I became sheriff was because of what happened to her.”

Hmm. Ellie wondered if that was true. Or if perhaps he chose law enforcement to keep the truth from being revealed. “If you weren’t meeting her, do you know who she might have been going to see? Was another guy interested in her?”

“All the guys thought she was hot, but they knew she was mine and was off limits.”

Ellie contemplated that. “Would she have hooked up with someone else to make you jealous?”

“If she did, I sure as hell didn’t know about it,” he said bluntly.

His defensive tone held a hint of anger. At her or at Ruth because he had suspected her of cheating? Or had he been bitter that she broke up with him?