Free 1 Death Comes to Town by K.J. Emrick Page A

up to his phone. She pressed play to listen to his voicemails. She was disappointed to find that of the two he had saved, one was from the bank and the other was from his brother. Both sounded mundane. There was nothing of interest there.
    She went into his bedroom but came up empty after another fruitless search. She had never felt so dirty as she had after rifling through his underwear drawer. His taste in clothing hadn’t changed one bit. She came out of the bedroom and froze in her tracks. Jeff was standing there in the doorway.
     

Chapter Thirteen
     
    “What the hell are doing in my apartment, Darcy!” Jeff was red in the face and Darcy shrank back away from him, just a little scared. She had only seen him this angry once before. It had been a bad night for everyone involved.
    She thought about lying, of making up some excuse. She sighed and decided that it was probably best to be totally honest with him. Especially after her tirade when she caught him in her house. She told him all about the recording that Jon had played for her. She left out the part about going through his boxers.
    “Yeah, so?” he said to her, his anger only defrosting a little. “Did you hear the whole thing? I was calling Anna about the pictures you had in your basement. I’m sure that you still have some of them and I wanted Anna to talk to you for me.”
    Darcy realized then that Jon must have turned off the recording before the end. Why would he have done something like that? Was it to throw suspicion onto Jeff? Or her?
    As long as she was on a roll she decided to throw all her cards on the table. “The coroner got the time of death wrong, Jeff. It was an hour later than what he said.”
    He blinked. “How do you know that?”
    “That’s not really the point. What matters is that not only might Jon be the new person in town that you think you heard Anna talking about, but maybe he played that voicemail for me to get me off his scent.” She looked at Jeff sadly and said, “He must have done it.”
    “Off his scent?” Jeff sneered. “Do you even hear yourself?”
    “Yes, I hear myself, you big idiot. Now you listen to me, please. Jon must be the one who did this. You know I sense things. I know things that are true. So stop being dense and listen. Based on what you know, and what I know, I’m telling you that Jon must be the one who killed Anna.”
    Jeff’s face slowly changed from angry to stunned. His eyes went off to the side for a moment before they came back to her. “So now what?”
    ***
    Darcy and Jeff were sitting at his kitchen table trying to work out a possible next move. 
    “Okay, Darcy. So let’s say you’re right about this Jon fellow being the one who killed Anna. I can’t argue with you. It all makes sense.” Jeff was biting his thumbnail like he always did when he got excited about anything.
    Darcy was at odds with herself. Now that she’d convinced Jeff of her theory, her gut was telling her that something wasn’t right about all of this. “It all fits. But why? What motive would he have had to kill her? As far as I know, he didn’t even know her.” She was frantically twirling the ring around her finger now. She saw herself doing it, and didn’t even try to stop herself.
    “I have no idea why he would have done it. Does it matter? We don’t need to know the why. Maybe he’s unstable. Maybe he didn’t like Anna. Maybe he’s just plain crazy. I don’t know, and I don’t care. We have to tell the police what we know.”
    Darcy was shocked. “How can we tell the police? He is the police!”
    He looked at her like she was the stupidest person in the world. “So’s your sister.”
    Darcy conceded that he was right. “Okay. We’ll tell Grace.”
    She really didn’t like the idea of involving her sister. But Grace was a police officer, after all. It was her job. And she knew, at least, that in this whole town of potential suspects she could trust her sister. Maybe she couldn’t trust