Page 107 of Thick as Thieves

“Rusty makes it his business to know everybody.”

“Yes. I sensed that today. He plays the role of hail-fellow-well-met.”

“Right.”

“Did you know Foster?”

“Not well. I’d met him. Couple of times.”

“At the store?”

On the edge of quicksand here, he made a motion with his shoulder that indicated a semi yes. “Welch’s was the kind of place where every time you’d go in, you’d bump into a dozen people you knew or recognized.”

“Why did it go out of business?”

“The kids and grandkids didn’t have the competitive spirit of old man Welch. When he died, so did the store. It happened while I was overseas.”

“My dad wouldn’t have had much of a future there even if circumstances had been different.”

“Guess not.”

“What was Brian Foster like?”

“He was a nerd. Timid. The anti-Rusty. Which I’m sure is why Rusty picked on him.” He soothed his conscience by asserting that none of what he’d told her was an outright lie. She was thinking it over. He hoped her frown was one of concentration, not doubt.

He continued. “I don’t how, or to what extent, Rusty was instrumental in Foster’s death. I can’t prove anything. But on the night Foster died a grisly death, Rusty, the walking wounded, showed up at Crystal’s house in more urgent need of an alibi than emergency medical treatment.”

“It’s broadly circumstantial, Ledge.”

“So is everything they had on your dad.”

“All right, but circling back to motive, I understand Rusty being a bully who picked on a nerd for fun. But what would have provoked Rusty to kill him?”

Damn it. She’d given him another perfect opening to tell her why. But if she had knowledge of the burglary, and Rusty’s motive to get rid of Foster, she would pose a real threat to Rusty. Bad things happened to people whom Rusty perceived as a threat. “Maybe Foster got sick of his bullying and fought back. Or, knowing Rusty as I do, he wouldn’t have needed a motive. He would kill somebody just to see if he could get away with it.”

“Based on the way he struck me today, I can almost believe that. Almost.” As she looked out across the watery landscape, she blindly reached for Ledge’s flashlight, and he relinquished it. She moved the beam across the panorama of the wetland. “The monotony of it has always frightened me. It all looks the same. How does one find his way? But Dad was never lost on the lake. He always knew exactly where he was.”

Ledge didn’t say anything.

“He had a boat. He also had a motive. Half a million of them, in fact.”

Her extended arm dropped to her side as though the flashlight had become weighted. Slowly, Ledge took it from her listless hand. She turned and started walking quickly back toward the truck, stumbling over natural obstacles.

“Arden.” He followed and reached for her, but she shook off his hand and kept walking.

He outdistanced her and arrived at the pickup first. He opened the passenger door. She reached for the handhold above the door, but he splayed his hand over her bottom and boosted her up. He went around, and, as soon as he slid into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine, she said, “Please take me back to my car.”

He turned the truck around and headed back toward the highway. “Don’t jump to a wrong conclusion, Arden.”

“Then why did you bring me out here? To see for myself how logical it is that my father killed that man? I would rather you have continued

to delude, evade, and invent.”

“Invent?”

“That crap about the district attorney.”

“It’s not crap. You saw the medical chart.”