Cut and Run (Lucy Kincaid #16) - Allison Brennan Page 0,106
for the open house the next day. He had an alibi—he was in Bandera appraising a massive ranch. The owner of the property verified that he arrived at four that Friday afternoon and stayed for dinner, leaving around ten thirty.
Impossible to get all the way to Alamo Heights by eleven unless he was practically flying. It was nearly sixty miles, and some roads you couldn’t go sixty, let alone a hundred.
She’d also interviewed Stanley Grant. He’d had dinner with his sister that night, left at nine, and gone home. No real alibi, but he had a security system on his house. It would have been easy enough to check—which no one did. Still, many systems could be bypassed or cheated. He could reprogram it to show he was in when he was out and vice versa. But in her initial notes, Reed didn’t think Grant was guilty.
She’d interviewed Victoria’s family, including her brother, Simon, and only one comment from him was interesting:
“Victoria believed someone was following her. She didn’t know who, and she was more angry than scared. Because that was her.”
Lucy thought about the two black SUVs that had followed her and Nate and the sedan that had followed Max and Sean when they left Harrison Monroe’s office.
The notes about the alleged stalker were vague, and it didn’t appear that Reed followed up on it, other than to ask Mitch and Stan about it—they both said that Victoria mentioned a “damn SUV” that she thought she saw more than once, but it was more than a month before she was killed and they didn’t think much of it because she didn’t mention it again.
No interview of Harrison Monroe, no mention of him at all in the report. Two men had been interviewed and let go—a known sex offender who lived in the neighborhood with his sister. She said they watched a movie and were asleep by eleven thirty and her brother didn’t leave the house. Didn’t mean he didn’t but based on forensics, it’s clear that Victoria wasn’t sexually assaulted and, again, Lucy believed she knew her killer. Reed thought so as well—she’d mentioned it at least three times in different areas of the report.
The other person who was interviewed—twice—was the rear neighbor. Robert Clemson, fifty. Divorced, lived alone on the half-acre property. He acted squirrelly, according to Reed’s notes, so she asked him to come in. The second interview was because he lied about a fact in his first interview—he initially said that he was home all night but didn’t hear anything, but later the other neighbors, the dog walkers, said that they saw him drive away from his house at ten thirty that night.
In the second interview he told Reed that he had been flustered. He knew Victoria and had literally forgotten that he’d left to meet a friend for drinks. The friend, Melissa Randolph, had confirmed his alibi. But there wasn’t a note anywhere about where they had met or why so late. All Reed wrote was: Melissa Randolph, San Antonio, met Clemson for drinks 10:45–midnight. Her contact information and driver’s license number were both listed.
Was that a real alibi? Who was Clemson? Who forgot that they left their house at night especially after their neighbor was murdered? He wasn’t interviewed until Monday … it was possible he forgot, thought it was a different night.
But Lucy wanted to talk to him herself.
Reed may have followed up again with him and Melissa Randolph if Stanley Grant hadn’t confessed.
There was one interesting piece of evidence suggesting that the killer drove to the house and parked behind Victoria’s white Mercedes coupe. Two drops of blood were found on the brick drive. Forensics concluded they belonged to Victoria. They were located where the passenger door of another vehicle may have been. No tire marks, no other indication of who had been driving the second vehicle. But someone had driven the killer.
Or picked him up.
From everything she heard about Victoria, Lucy didn’t think she would be irresponsible enough to show a house at night to a stranger. Not in this day and age when there were so many reports of real estate agents being attacked.
She looked through the reports again because something was missing … and then she realized what it was. There was absolutely no blood found in the house. The killer didn’t exit through the house. He left quickly—that was Lucy’s educated guess—rinsed his knife and hands in the pool and walked out through the side gate.