around. Bare floors and walls. Not a stick of furniture in sight. But it was indeed clean. Sarah and Rudy had obviously taken their maintenance duties seriously.
“The furnishings were sold years ago,” Joelle explained, “and the bulk of the records were moved to Austin when the place shut down, but there are still storage sheds. And Webb’s office.”
“Anything in there?” he asked.
“Plenty. It had been sealed off since the closure, and even Rudy and Sarah weren’t given keys to the lock. It still has some of Webb’s personal files, and it’s where I spent most of my time when I first started the inquiry.”
Dallas had no doubt she’d done a thorough job, too. “Anything left there to find?”
She lifted her shoulder and headed for the stairs. “Maybe you’ll see something I missed. Then we can walk over to Sarah Webb’s cottage and talk to her. Rudy lives in a trailer near the creek.”
They went up the steps that Dallas had walked hundreds of time, and while his mind should have been solely on this visit, it wasn’t. Damn his body. Certain parts of it, anyway. Those parts wouldn’t let him forget this blasted attraction for Joelle.
“I need to apologize for what happened last night,” he said.
She stopped in front of Webb’s office and proceeded to open a padlock on yet another bar lock across the door. “Nothing happened.”
He lifted his eyebrow.
“Nothing we can’t ignore,” she amended.
He wasn’t so sure of that. There was something else he couldn’t ignore, either. “I never have thanked you for trying to help Kirby and me.”
“No need for thanks. I was helping myself, too. Or so I thought.” She paused. “If I can’t stop Owen, we’re going to jail.”
“It’s not over until it’s over.” He hadn’t meant that to sound, well, sexual, but it did. Or maybe that was just his blasted imagination.
Nope.
The slight quiver of Joelle’s mouth let him know she was having similar thoughts, and that made both of them stupid.
She threw open the door, and though Dallas had thought he was prepared to see his old nemesis’s office, he wasn’t. A jolt of a different kind.
Webb had beaten him in this office.
Not just hours before Webb’s disappearance but plenty of other times, too. And not just him but Declan and Harlan. Hell, the man had even slapped Joelle, and it didn’t matter how many years had passed, that still put some acid in his gut.
Joelle shuddered again, maybe reliving the same memory. He saw the steel return to her eyes, and she plopped her bag on Webb’s desk.
“I have a portable scanner,” she explained, “and I copied things that I thought might be important.” She pulled a handful of files from the desk drawer she’d unlocked, put them on the desk and unlocked the other drawers. “Like Webb’s personal notes about the kids.”
That grabbed his attention, and Dallas dropped down in the chair to have a better look. “He kept files on all of us?” He looked at the sheer number of folders that she was pulling from the drawers.
“Most of us.” She plucked one from the stash and handed it to him. It was his file. “I went through all of them, looking for a motive for Webb’s murder.”
Dallas thumbed through his file and saw exactly what he’d expected to see. Webb labeled him a troublemaker and there were plenty of notes about the fights. But zero notes about Webb’s beatings.
“We all had motive,” Dallas mumbled. He tore his gaze from the folder and looked at her. “But did anyone other than us stand out?”
“Maybe.” She opened her laptop and turned it on. “I used these notes and the timeline I created. As I said, you have a short window of opportunity. But some others didn’t.”
“Like Declan. He didn’t do this.” Dallas hoped not, anyway. “Besides, it might not have been one of the boys. Some of the girls had reason to hate Webb, too.”
Joelle nodded. “Caitlyn Barnes. Remember, she and your brother Harlan were together.”
Yeah, he remembered. Even though they were supervised, the teenage hormones had prevailed, and some of them had found ways to be together.
“You think Caitlyn could have killed Webb?” Dallas asked.
“Not really.” Joelle huffed and sat down on the edge of the desk. “And that’s the problem. Webb wrote some negative things about her, even labeled her antisocial because she had all those piercings, crazy colored hair and wore black lipstick. But she wasn’t a large girl. I can’t see her overpowering a man like Webb.