Page 75 of Wasted

“We don’t know the time of death.” Victoria looked at Robert. “I found him in the morning, but he had likely been killed overnight.”

“Between eleven p.m. and one a.m.” Treese inserted the strangely precise information.

“How do you know that?”

She smiled at Victoria. “Your lawyer.”

“Why is it everyone knows more information than I do, when I’m the one they suspect of committing the crime?”

Her siblings laughed, and Cillian chuckled beside her.

“That wasn’t actually meant to be a joke.”

“Sorry, sis.” Hank sent her a loving grin. “You just aren’t a very good criminal.”

A smile tugged at her mouth. “Thank you.”

“Though I can’t get directly involved in this case,” Torin wrapped his arm around Spring’s shoulders from behind as he addressed the group, “I can run background checks on all the suspects.”

“That’d be great.” Cillian looked at the sergeant. “Can you check out the staff, too?”

“The staff?” Victoria hadn’t considered them suspects.

Cillian turned his head toward her, accelerating her pulse from the nearness of his dark eyes. “Yeah. He had a cook or something, right?”

“Mrs. Kline was his housekeeper and cook, yes.”

“Any other staff?” Torin lowered his arm to pull the miniature notepad from his pocket that he had used when he had first interviewed Spring at the rehab center.

“The groundskeeper, Ned Parker.” Victoria tried to imagine either of them wanting to harm Thomas. She couldn’t. “They’ve both worked for Thomas for decades. I believe Mrs. Kline was with him thirty years, at least. I can’t believe they would want to hurt him.”

Torin met her gaze with a grim one. “Sadly, I’ve learned you can never really know what people are capable of. Like Robert said, the right motivation can turn anyone into a criminal. Even into a killer.”

Exactly as he, Spring, and Victoria had experienced firsthand four months ago.

Victoria nodded. “You’re right, of course.”

Cillian squeezed her shoulders, his arm making full contact. “Glad you said that.”

She could hardly pay attention to his words or his grin as her senses flew into overdrive at the touch of his muscled arm, a tender embrace around her.

“I’m thinking you and I can talk to the housekeeper. Try to feel out what she knows and check for an alibi.”

Victoria rotated her head away. She couldn’t articulate her instinctive dislike of trying to trick Mrs. Kline while electricity sparked through her limbs and pumped her heart at an alarming rate.

Honestly. She was a grown woman, not an inexperienced girl of fifteen. She would not be swept away by emotion and hormones into mindless foolishness again.

If only his arm around her shoulders didn’t feel so strengthening, so comforting, giving her support she didn’t know she needed.

What if God had sent Cillian into her life again for such a time as this to help her, not to be a hindrance or temptation?

The possibility shifted something within her, as if a door had swung open, allowing tension and stress to escape as calm and optimism took their place.

So she found her voice and met Cillian’s gaze. “Yes, let’s do that.”

How much more God wanted them to do together now and in the future was a question she would have to give serious consideration. After she was no longer the number one suspect in her friend’s murder.

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