“It did,” she said simply.
“You found yourself in a dilemma, though,” Joe said. “Bud was in it with you, but he couldn’t perform. And you couldn’t risk him talking about it, either. So you told him you’d let him set you up with the sheriff and you’d have it done as long as he’d wait until the trial to take the rap. He agreed to that, but you could never be absolutely sure he’d follow through when crunch time came. In the back of your mind, you must have worried that Bud might screw you the way you screwed him. That must have made for some sleepless nights.”
She didn’t react, but stared at Joe with ice-cold eyes.
“In the middle of your discussions with Bud, you both realized that you’d tried to contact Nate to work for you along the same lines, but Nate refused. Which meant there was another person out there who knew what you were capable of. You urged Bud to tell that woman Laurie Talich where Nate lived to get Nate out of the picture. It almost worked, too. But Alisha Whiteplume was killed instead of Nate. I hope that’s on your conscience, too. If you have one.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” she spat back. “Bud did that on his own. He thought it would please me, I guess.”
Joe shrugged. He said, “Nate would have never talked, so what you did was pointless. And right now, he is at my house. He still wants revenge.”
Her eyes got large. “But . . .”
“All I have to do is tell him,” Joe said. “Unlike the court, he has no rules about double jeopardy.”
“Please don’t,” she said. “Think about what I’ve offered you.”
“I don’t want your blood money,” Joe said, dismissing her. “Back to where we left off. You drove right up to your husband and shot him in the heart. Then you drove his body to the wind turbine. I tested the hoist system today with my dog and found out how easy it is to crank a body up to the top. I figured it would require a lot more upper body strength, but it’s easy. Easy enough for you. So why did you hang him up there, anyway? Out of spite, or to throw everyone off?”
She sighed and looked away, apparently deciding it wasn’t worth it to pretend any longer.
Joe said, “The one thing I can’t quite wrap my mind around is how you hung the body from the blade. Earl was heavy.”
She pursed her lips. “I admit nothing,” she said, “but I can tell you when you’re a small person all of your life, you learn how to use leverage to get what you want. You learn to use the power of objects to work in your favor and to use people’s superior strength against them.”
Joe whistled and shook his head. “So you looped the chain around the body and threw the loose end over the blade while it was turning. You let the spinning blade lift him out of the nacelle.”
Missy arched her eyebrows, acknowledging Joe’s theory. “I suppose it could work like that,” she said coyly.
“But why the wind turbine at all?”
She said, “Admitting nothing, one might have thought the sheriff or Miss Schalk would pursue the wind angle. One would assume Marcus would go that direction and come to find out about Earl’s dealings with unsavory people and his fraud. Once that information was out, there would be people on the jury Marcus could convince. But it couldn’t come from me—that would have been too obvious.”
Joe shook his head. He said, “So you set yourself up. You made it plain and simple. So simple, that people like your daughter and me would automatically assume there was more to it. That you’d been framed.”
She was quiet, because there was no need to say anything.
“Hand’s investigators learned there had been a contract put out on Earl in Chicago,” Joe said. “That’s what they told him in the courtroom yesterday. If you’d just waited, it would have all been taken care of without you even getting involved.”
She said, “That came as a surprise, but what if they’d botched it?” She looked squarely at Joe. “I don’t count on people to take care of me, I never have. I’m the only one who will take care of me, Joe, and I trust no one but me. If my daughter had learned that lesson, maybe she wouldn’t be what she is today: a part-time librarian in a crappy little town with you as a husband.”
“I know,” he said. “And against my better judgment, I was burning up the miles and my reputation trying to get you off.”
Nodding, she said, “I knew I could count on you, Joe. I knew you’d dig into the wind farm scheme and lead Marcus to it. So even if Bud died or forgot about our agreement or went back on it, I was covered. There would have been reasonable doubt.”
She paused and looked at her hand, assessing the shade of red on her painted fingernails. She said, “I’ve spent my life working simple men like you and Bud.”
Joe reached over and wrapped his hand around the shotgun and pulled it up.
She looked at him with disbelief. “You’ll never do it.”
“I might surprise you,” Joe said through clenched teeth.
“The offer still stands,” she said, suddenly shaken. “If you do this, you get nothing. Your family gets nothing.” Then: “Does Marybeth know?”
“Not yet. But we talk to each other. Imagine
“So you’ll tell her?” Missy said. “You’d tell her that her mother is a murderer after all? You’d tell my granddaughters?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” he said. “It depends on you.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, tears in her eyes. “What do I have to do?”
