Free The Probability of Murder by Ada Madison Page B

asked. My effort to catch him off guard and answer a question hadn’t worked.
    “Charlotte dropped it off in my office on Wednesday afternoon.”
    “And you didn’t open it?”
    “I didn’t even touch it before last night.” No reason to sound defensive, I realized. “I figured it was her gym clothes and that she’d collect them sooner or later.”
    “Has anyone else handled the bag since it’s been in your possession?”
    I thought for a minute. “Bruce. He carried it to my car yesterday evening. But he has no idea what’s in it. He just plopped it in my den.”
    “And left for the hills.”
    “Right.” Though Bruce drew a great distinction between the hills and the mountains. I pointed to the bag, now dominating the small table. “I haven’t told him what’s in there.I don’t want him to have any distractions while he’s hanging by a thread.”
    “I hear you. That’s it? No one else touched the bag?”
    Ariana popped into my mind. Had she actually touched the bag? Yes, I remembered her sifting through the bills, awestruck, invoking the mother of God. How dumb of me not to keep my friend from contaminating the evidence. Or myself. But at the time the forensics implications hadn’t sunk in.
    “Ariana,” I confessed, clearing my throat. “She may have touched the bills.”
    Virgil knew Ariana, so he’d have no reason to suspect her of pocketing a few hundreds, if that was his concern. Still, he blew out a breath and said, “That’s unfortunate.”
    “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
    He spread Charlotte’s notes in front of me. I could have sworn they were warm to the touch from their stint on the copy machine. I’d had the urge to trim the left-hand edges, messy from being ripped from a short spiral binding. “I don’t suppose you know anything about these notes?” Virgil asked.
    Other than that one of them referred to a kid she hired to play her nephew as she scoped out an escape route. And that copies of all seven sheets now resided in my purse.
    “Nothing I can think of.”
    A pang of guilt shot through me, but once the sort-of lie was out, I couldn’t take it back. I had no idea why I was reluctant to tell Virgil the story of Charlotte’s ruse at the airfield. I chalked it up to an inexplicable need to keep my snooping to myself and not to add to the bad marks against Charlotte’s good name.
    I felt I was falling into a trap Charlotte had set, and one that would get more tangled before it cleared up.
    I was more anxious driving away from the police station than I’d been on the way in. A bad sign that said a lot about my spirit of honesty and cooperation with the Henley PD. Why hadn’t I given the Henley PD every scrap of informationI could to help them solve this case? Did I really think I was better off on my own, calling Charlotte’s contacts?
    I realized that Virgil or someone on his investigative team would soon be calling Noah/Jeff. I wondered if the young college student would be savvy—dishonest?—enough not to mention that I’d called him and learned about Charlotte’s scheme. I considered calling Jeff and persuading him to omit any mention of our conversation. It would be to his advantage, I’d remind him. After all, he’d been withholding information by not contacting the police immediately when he found out his employer had been murdered. Unless he already had called them.
    I decided that calling Jeff wasn’t a good idea. If I was found out, it could seem like I was tampering with a witness, the only charge I knew that came close to the offense.
    I never thought I’d be the guilty party when I had to memorize Sir Walter Scott in high school English.
Oh what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive.
    One thing for sure, I had to get busy myself and try to make sense of the notes I’d found in Charlotte’s loaded duffel bag. Since I’d gone to the trouble of copying them, I might as well use them.
    First, I had to get rid of Ariana.
    I clicked