much of a chance. Killing with a bow and arrow didn’t require close proximity. That was kind of the point, wasn’t it? The killer hadn’t had to move much farther than the doorway where he’d entered by picking the flimsy lock while the woman slept.
Mark opened a dresser drawer. Nothing. She had a duffel bag holding several items of clothing, and there was toothpaste on the sink, but it appeared she hadn’t intended on a long trip. Or, the woman didn’t own much.
There was a stack of books on the nightstand and Mark picked up the one on top. The Giver. He placed it aside and looked at the next three: Ender’s Game, The Maze Runner, and The Lightning Thief. Mark’s brows lowered. He didn’t know anything about the victim, but the titles seemed like odd choices for an adult woman the ME had estimated to be in her mid to late thirties. Mark recognized them as books geared toward young adults.
Mark spotted something on the spine of The Giver and upon closer inspection, it appeared that a yellow sticker had been there but had been peeled off recently. Some of the remaining glue was still sticky. A price tag? Although . . . the books on the nightstand were well used. Maybe they’d come from a used bookstore. He inspected the other books and found visible traces of glue as well, and small pieces of yellow sticker on the spines of those ones as well. Huh. So, they’d probably all come from the same place. Somewhere in town that might remember this woman? He opened the book covers one by one and saw that the first page of each one had been torn out. Weird. They could very well be books the woman had owned for years, old favorites she’d brought along to re-read. Still . . . they felt out of place and that nagged at him. He snapped a couple of quick pictures of the pile of books on the nightstand.
“Sir? Agent Gallagher?” The woman standing in the doorway wringing a dishtowel in her hands was small and thin, in her late sixties he estimated, with a blonde bob that ended at her jaw. She was wearing an apron, a smear of something bright red on the skirt. In the midst of a bloody crime scene, the vision was decidedly unsettling.
He smiled. “Mrs. Wilcox?”
The woman he knew to be the owner of the Larkspur Bed & Breakfast/Restaurant nodded, glancing nervously around the room and then taking a step back. He led her into the hallway and closed the door behind him. “Terrible what happened here.”
She bobbed her head, swallowing, her hands still wringing the towel. “Oh, I can hardly sleep for thinking about it. Right under my own roof too.” She grimaced. “Do they know anything about that poor woman yet?”
“Not yet, ma’am. I was wondering if you could tell me anything about her that might have stood out to you?”
She looked to the side and frowned in concentration. “Mostly the fact that she was staying here at all. We don’t get many guests in the winter. We only have the three rooms. The restaurant is our main business through all the seasons, but especially the cold ones. We get the occasional person passing through town that needs a place to stay for the night, or someone visiting relatives who wants a space of their own, but it’s rare. So, I was surprised when she rang the bell last Wednesday and said she wanted to rent a room for the week.”
He jotted that down in the notebook he kept in his jacket pocket. A week.
“She didn’t mention she was visiting anyone then?”
“No, and I asked. ‘What brings you to Helena Springs?’ I’d said. She got this faraway look on her face and then told me she was here to try to right a wrong. Well, I didn’t know exactly what to say to that, but she changed the subject anyway, asking about the restaurant hours.”
Here to right a wrong. Mark wrote that down as well, tapping the pen on the pad for a second before he asked, “She paid in cash?”
“She did. I asked for ID of course, per protocol, but she told me her wallet had been stolen recently, so she didn’t have any. Well, not having ID made me hesitate to rent the room to her, but she was paying up front, and it was so very cold out. It wouldn’t have been Christian of