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I waited a few minutes then peeked around the building. The cop was placing a ticket on the car next to my Jeep.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I’ll bet you were ready to wet your pants, Jake.” Bo
“I wouldn’t go that far, but I did say a prayer.”
“A prayer?”
“Yes, I promised God if he got me out of this one that I’d go to church every Sunday.”
“And you’ve already broken your promise. Do you want to go to hell? You can’t do that, Jake. You don’t want to fool with the Lord.”
“I’ll start next week, Bon, I promise. Just as soon as I find a church that allows pets.”
“Jake!”
“Okay. How about I join the church of C and E?”
“I never heard of that. Is it Christian?”
“Christmas and Easter, of course it’s Christian.”
Bo
“You win, Bon. Wake me next Sunday and I’ll go with you. I wouldn’t want to spend eternity in hell when Julie’s in heaven. I just hope Saint Peter lets Fred in, too.”
Bo
I had told her how Fred found her kit, and about my paranoia about seeing the cop by my Jeep, but I never mentioned the conversation with Bill and June. I didn’t want to upset her with beauty parlor gossip. It could have been from before Appleton confessed, for all I knew, and telling Bo
“We need to tell them, Bon, or we will be guilty of withholding evidence. The fact that it was wrapped in Appleton’s shirt should prove you had nothing to do with the murder.”
Bo
“What if there are prints they can trace to the killer?”
“Oh my God! I never thought of that. Can they get prints off of glass?”
“Glass?” I asked, wondering what she was talking about.
“The file, Jake. It’s glass.” She stopped long enough to roll her eyes. “And my name, now that I think of it.”
Suddenly her eyes lit up like one of those new LED light bulbs. “That means it wasn’t my nail file that killed Shelia. My name is on the plastic handle. Margot had it ordered special for my sixty-ninth birthday. If it were my file, they would have arrested me by now.”
Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. I needed to tell the cops about the shirt before someone cleaned the garbage from the kids’ yard and destroyed crucial evidence. It was against my better judgment, but I didn’t have the heart to say no.
“Okay, I’ll call in an anonymous tip telling them where to find the shirt, but I think we’re making a big mistake by not telling them about the manicure kit.”
“You left the shirt?”
“Of course I left the shirt. They would never believe I found it there otherwise.”
She seemed to consider my statement before she spoke again. “I would have never thought of that. Are you sure you weren’t a crook in a different life?”
When I only smiled and didn’t say anything, she continued. “But why tell them anything? I don’t see how that shirt proves anything.”
“Remember when I thought Craig had an accomplice who must have picked him up from Three Sisters after he left Appleton there?”
“So?”
“There’s a very good chance Cory was that accomplice. He practically lives next door to Craig, so they must have known each other. I’m sure forensics will match the blood on the tee-shirt to that on Appleton’s deck.”
I took a breath and drank my coffee before continuing. “That is, if Fred didn’t contaminate the evidence when he rolled in all the garbage. There was some really stinky stuff in there.”
Fred looked up, then laid his head back between his outstretched paws when I didn’t acknowledge him.
Bo
I wanted to tell her about Je
Bo
I couldn’t argue with her logic, and realized Je
Bo
“I suppose it won’t hurt to drive by. We could stop on the way back from giving our statements.”
“Do we have to, Jake?”
“It’s already Tuesday; White isn’t going to wait much longer.”
“Let’s go after we check out the oil spot. If we find one then maybe you can tell him about the shirt.”
She had a point. There’s no such thing as an anonymous tip since public phone booths went the way of Superman. All other phones can be traced. “No, not the shirt. I’ll have to think of some other way they can discover it. Like I said they will think I planted it to cover our tracks at the cabin. I might as well walk in and sign a confession in triplicate.”
***
We were almost to Conifer when I began to have my doubts; sooner or later the cops would be searching Appleton’s cabin and asking his neighbors questions. We got lucky the first time we went there. The only person other than Margot who knew we were at the cabin was the author Paul Wilson, and he seemed to have bought my story.
I was driving Bo
“I already took care of that, Jake. Why do you think my Cherokee is so dirty?”
“Because you went four wheeling yesterday?”
“No, silly. Because I made it look dirty. I’ll finish the job just before we get there with a bucket of mud I brought along to complete the subterfuge. It’s a trick Greg used to do, back when we were young and poor. He covered his plates with mud so the cops wouldn’t see they were expired.”
I had to smile. “My dad told me stories about doing the same thing, only it backfired on him. The cop who pulled him over said the mud was a red flag, and he would have never noticed the expired plate otherwise. It’s the oldest trick in the book.”
Bo
“What do you think, Fred? Think the mud on the plate ploy will work?” Fred’s head had been turning like a spectator at a te