Baby made a face. “Because it didn’t seem to make any sense that someone would do that to her. But now...”
Gavin studied him and was obviously still taking his points seriously.
“Somebody made sure you had that police report not long after she made it to town. Even you said that was weird.”
Gavin nodded. “Highly unusual.”
“She was accused of stealing at Harvard, but never actually charged because the footage they had resembled her but didn’t have enough detail to prove anything. How much are you willing to bet that whatever footage has been found at TSC ends up being the same sort of thing?”
“You think someone has manipulated the footage?”
“I would believe that a thousand times before I would believe that Quinn broke into a campus building to steal computer equipment. How the hell is she going to offload that?”
Gavin nodded. “And someone could have put her prints on the paint can that we found. Walking over to throw it away in Mr. Wallace’s trash can never quite made sense to me.”
“I know it seems far-fetched and a little ridiculous, but I think someone has been undermining her since the stuff started back at Harvard. Hell, even this morning. How many times do we have state troopers stopping by? Maybe once a year? But that Trooper just happened to be there today. And he happened to recognize Quinn sitting with me while her back was to him.” Baby raised an eyebrow. The more he talked this through, the more he was convinced he was right.
“Someone tipped him off.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Hell, Gavin, nobody could have as much bad luck as Quinn.”
Gavin walked over to study what was left of the curtains. He turned to look at something on the counter more closely. “You know, you didn’t argue that the fire was part of the sabotage.”
That sick feeling pulled at his gut again when he thought of how dangerous the situation could’ve been for Quinn if Grizzly hadn’t woken her up. “That, I do believe, just happened to be shit luck.”
Gavin reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a rubber glove. “Don’t touch anything. We need to get the crime scene techs in here again.”
“What? Why?”
Using the glove as a barrier, he reached down and picked up something small.
“What is that?” Baby asked.
“I was around explosives enough in Special Forces to recognize an incendiary device when I see one. This wasn’t a simple case of bad luck; someone set fire to the curtains with a timing device. See this plastic right here under where the curtains would hang?
Baby got close enough to see the small piece. “Yeah.”
“That’s what’s left over from a tiny vial of acid. Once it burned through the plastic and was exposed to air, it caught fire and sent the curtains up in flames. If someone didn’t know to look for this, the candle would be the prime suspect.”
“Shit, Gavin,” Baby breathed.
“I think you got your proof.”
Baby’s phone buzzed in his pocket. Kendrick was already talking before Baby got his entire greeting out. “You need to get over here.”
“Blaze, I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
“I’m sure that middle of something has got to do with Quinn being arrested.”
“What do you know?”
“As soon as I heard about it, because of course everybody in this town is already talking about it, I started digging into it. They’re saying she broke into the computer lab at TSC.”
“I know. I’m about to call Riley so we can get a lawyer and get her out as soon as possible. She didn’t do it.”
Kendrick gave a high-pitched laugh. “Of course, she didn’t do it. Like she didn’t do any of those things she was accused of back at Harvard. Just get over here so I can show you. I’ve got to call Gavin and get him over here too.”
“Don’t bother. He’s here with me. We’ll be right there.”
Like Quinn, Kendrick Foster was a recent transplant to Oak Creek. He’d showed up with Gabriel Collingwood when his sister, Violet, had been kidnapped last year, and the Linear Tactical team had helped get her out. Like Gabe, Kendrick had never left.
Baby wasn’t exactly sure what the man did for a living, but he knew it had to do with the computers he was a near genius at.
The number of times Kendrick had saved everyone’s asses was starting to get pretty high. If something could be found on a computer, Kendrick was the one to do it.