Free Collared For Murder by Annie Knox Page A

love Sean as one of my oldest and dearest friends, so I didn’t want him to suffer. But his apparent ability to blow it off was a bit of a hit to my ego.
    “Well,” Sean said, picking his bowl back up, “I’ve been retained by Pris Olson. So far she’s been charged only for the theft, but Jerry in the county attorney’s office made it clear they were looking hard at her for the murder, too.” He took a bite of his ice cream, and his eyes fluttered shut as he slipped the spoon from between his lips. “Dang. That hits the spot. Anyway,it took all day, but Hal Olson finally convinced Judge Rancik to arraign Pris after hours and set her bail so she could go home tonight. I feel like I’ve been at the courthouse for a week rather than a single day.”
    “You must be exhausted.”
    “Yeah, but I still wanted to see you. Pris is so wound up about the arrest and the indignity of spending hours in a holding cell that she couldn’t think straight. The only information I got, I got from the cops and the prosecutors; talking to Pris was like talking to a wall. But I want to do some damage control on this ASAP. I want to point the police in a different direction before they get around to indicting my client for murder. So I wanted to talk to someone who was actually there today, actually at the scene of the crime.”
    “I don’t know what I can tell you. Denford must have been killed sometime before everyone arrived this morning. I mean, his body was in the middle of a crowded room. But the jewels were on display before the lights went out. I’d been admiring Jolly’s handiwork not fifteen minutes earlier. It was only after the lights came back on that I noticed they were missing . . . and no one else reported seeing anything amiss before then, either.”
    “That’s helpful. So the murder and the theft weren’t committed at the same time. Maybe not even by the same people.”
    “No one will believe that,” I said. “The two crimeswere committed in such physical and temporal proximity, everyone will assume that there’s only one perpetrator.”
    He leaned back against the counter, ankles crossed, and stared into the middle distance for a while. “What about Pris?”
    “What about her?”
    “Well, was she acting funny this morning?”
    “She had some sort of blowout with Phillip yesterday afternoon, but I didn’t see her in the ballroom at all this morning. At least, not until the lights came back on. I was a few minutes late to the opening of the show. Rena said she saw Pris before I got there, but by the time I arrived, I couldn’t find her anywhere. And I was looking for her, because we had business to discuss. If she was in the ballroom at all before the blackout, she’d left by the time I got there.”
    “Really? She insists she was in the room, at her station, the whole morning.”
    “Well, that’s weird. Why would she insist she was at the scene of the crime—a statement that makes her look guilty—when I’m mighty sure she was gone?”
    “Her being gone when you got to the ballroom doesn’t exactly get her off the hook, especially if Phillip was killed before the masses started showing up this morning. But still, you’re right that she’d want to distance herself as much as possible from the location, if only to provide an alibi for the theft of the dangle.”
    “I feel like I know Pris pretty well, but I don’t always understand why she does the things she does. The woman moves in mysterious ways.”
    “Well, you certainly know Pris a lot better than I do. Is she capable of these crimes?”
    “Rena made a pretty good case at dinner that the crimes aren’t Pris’s style. She’s more subtle. She would have found a way to embezzle money from someone, or helped Hal with one of his many scams, rather than steal an actual thing out from under everyone’s noses. But Pris has been under pressure lately, and so who knows?”
    “But does she have it in her to break the law? Ignoring how the