“I guess whoever killed that woman wore a lab coat,” I said. I hadn’t been able to stop speculating about that lab coat, the one used to prop the rolling chair in place. “Was it the nurse’s?” There was a staff nurse who did drug testing.
She appeared not to hear me. “Did you pass around any kind of sign-up sheet?” Her glasses magnified her dark eyes, which were large and almond shaped. Right now, they were fixed on me in a take-no-prisoners stare.
“No, we were supposed to have the illusion of confidentiality.”
“Illusion?”
“How could we remain secret from each other in this own?”
“True enough. Has Ms. Lynd ever said anything to you about her own history?”
I shook my head. “Well, not directly.” My inner thermostat seemed to have gone haywire. I took a tissue from the box on the desk and patted my face with it.
“What do you mean?”
“We saw the squirrel that was killed at her place. And I was there in the office when she got a phone call that seemed to upset her pretty badly.”
Of course I had to go over both incidents with the detective, but I’d expected that.
“So you had already formed the idea that Ms. Lynd was being stalked?”
“Yes.”
“Did you report that to the police?”
“No.”
Detective Stokes looked at me almost archly, which was an unnerving sight. “Why not? Wouldn’t that have been the logical thing to do?”
“No.”
“Why not? You don’t trust the police to help citizens?”
I was baffled by her manner. “It would have been logical for Tamsin or her husband to call the police themselves. It was their business.” I shifted around in the chair, trying to get comfortable.
“Did you ever think that if you had called us, that woman might not be dead?”
I was in imminent danger of losing my temper. That would be very, very bad in this situation. “If I had called here yesterday, and said that someone had killed a squirrel and hung it in a tree, what would you have done? Realistically?”
“I would have checked it out,” Alicia Stokes said, leaning forward to make sure I got her point. “I would have warned Ms. Lynd not to go anywhere by herself. I would have begun asking questions.”
I was figuring out things myself. “You already knew, too,” I said, thinking it through as I went. “You knew someone was stalking Tamsin Lynd. What did you do about it?”
For a long moment, I thought Stokes was going to lean across the desk and whop me. Then she collected herself and lied. “How could we possibly know anything like that?” she asked.
“Huh,” I said, putting a lot of disgust into it. If Alicia Stokes was playing some kind of hide-and-seek, she could do it on her own damn time.
“She did look like Tamsin, didn’t she?”
Detective Stokes laid her pen down on top of her yellow tablet. “Just what do you mean, Miss Bard?”
“You know what I mean. The dead woman. She looked like Tamsin.”
“Who mentioned that to you?” Her interest was keen now.
“No one. I’m not blind. She was pale, she was plump, she was brunette. She looked like Tamsin.”
I had no idea what the detective was thinking as she regarded me.
“But as you know, I was told by…” she checked a note on the tablet, “Melanie Kleinhoff that the dead woman was her sister-in-law, that is, the wife of her husband’s brother.”
“Melanie did say that,” I admitted. “Saralynn, wasn’t that her name?”
“And yet you told me last night you didn’t know the name of the dead woman.”
“No, I told you I hadn’t known her. You asked me if the others had recognized her, and I told you to ask them.” Splitting hairs, but I had technically told her the truth. “I don’t like repeating what other people tell me, when I don’t know it for myself.”
Detective Stokes’s face told me what she thought of that, and for once I wondered if I wasn’t just being balky, like a stubborn mule.
“So where is Saralynn’s husband, the one who raped Melanie?” I asked. “I guess he raped Saralynn, too, since she was going to join our group?”
“Tom Kleinhoff’s in jail,” Detective Stokes said, not confirming and not denying my assumption. “He didn’t make bail on the rape charge, because he already had other charges pending.”
It would have been good if he had been the guilty one. That would have been simple, direct, and over.
“Too bad it wasn’t him, isn’t it?” said Stokes, echoing my thoughts. I guess that wasn’t too great a leap to take.
I nodded.
“So let me just ask you, Miss Bard. Since your boyfriend, I understand, is a private eye.” The distaste in her voice told me she knew all about the circumstances of Jack’s becoming a private eye; he’d left the police force in Memphis under a black cloud. “If you think the dead woman was killed in mistake for Tamsin Lynd… why? Was that supposed to send a message to Tamsin Lynd herself, that a woman resembling her was killed in her office? Was it a genuine mistake-the killer finds a dark-haired fat woman in the right place so he’s sure he has the right victim? Or was the message for your group?”
I hadn’t speculated that far, wasn’t sure if that was a conclusion I’d have reached.
“Hadn’t thought about that? Well, maybe you’d better.” Alicia Stokes’s expression was definitely on the cold and hard side. “Someone thinks they’ve killed the woman supposed to be helping five rape victims, you’ve got to ask yourself why.”
She was so far ahead of me all I could do was gape at her.
“How does your boyfriend feel about you being in this group?” she asked, pounding on down the track.
“He was the one who wanted me to go to it.”
“You sure he doesn’t resent you giving such a big part of your time to a group of women? Maybe he doesn’t like some of the advice Tamsin gave you? Maybe Tamsin told you to stand up to him? How long has he lived here?”
Scrabbling for the most recent question, I said, “He’s lived here in Shakespeare for only a few weeks. He lived in Little Rock for a few years.”
Angry with myself for babbling, I realized just how battered I felt.
Then I began feeling angry.
Even as I tried to remember all the other questions she’d asked so I could begin to respond, I thought, Why bother? I got up.
“You sit your butt back down in that chair,” Alicia Stokes told me.
I fixed my eyes on her face.
“Before I make you,” she added.
Rage hit me like fireball. “You can’t make me do shit,” I said, slow and low. “I came in to give a statement. I gave it. Unless you arrest me, I don’t have to sit here and answer any questions.”
Stokes loomed over me, leaning across her desk, her knuckles resting on its surface. A patrolman I’d never met, a wiry freckled man, peered in the entrance to the cubicle, went wide eyed, and backed away.
“This looks like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” Claude’s voice said behind me.
I let out my breath in a long gust. I speculated on what could’ve happened if the new patrolman hadn’t fetched him- would Stokes have launched herself across her desk at me? Would I have hit a police officer?
“I was just leaving,” I told Claude. I edged past him and strode out the front door, picking my way through the desks and chairs and a few assorted people with my eyes fixed on the floor. The freckled patrolman held open the front door for me. His nametag read “G. McClanahan.” I made a mental note that I owed G. McClanahan a free house cleaning. Right now, getting in the car and driving away appeared to be my best move.
I wondered if Claude would have a talk with Stokes now, and what that talk would be like. I knew she would have no cause to like me any better afterward, that was for sure, and I didn’t know if I’d care or not. What was more certain was the fact that as fast as I could think, the detective could think faster, and I added that to the list of her sins, as I was sure her fellow officers would. Stokes was northern, black, a woman, aggressive, very tall (and I’d bet strong), and smart as hell. She would have to perform like a one-woman band to be popular, or even tolerated.