“Good point,” Diane said.
“Maybe she was shot because they had found what they had been looking for, or she had been shot because they didn’t find what they were looking for.”
“Why ‘they’? What makes you think there was more than one?”
I knew why, from what Felix had told me, but I wasn’t going there quite yet. I said, “I don’t know. Just made some sense to me. Intruder number one with a shotgun, intruder number two talking to Maggie, going through the filing cabinets.”
“Not bad,” she said.
“Speaking of shotgun, any forensic evidence from that?”
Diane shook her head. “Always a pisser, trying to do that where there’s a scene involving a shotgun. We’ve got a number of shotgun pellets recovered from Maggie and the rear wall and a painting that was hanging up there, but you know the rule. It’s not like recovering a bullet with the barrel marks and scrapes so you can match it to another bullet or a pistol barrel. With shotguns, no joy.”
I focused on the filing cabinet. “The intruders were in a hurry,” I said. “They wanted what was in that cabinet. Maggie either didn’t have the key or couldn’t get to it in time. So they took a hammer or something, pounded on the cabinet, broke the lock, dug out the files.”
“It was a crowbar,” Diane said. “No prints, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “Did you determine if anything was taken from the cabinet?”
“Who could tell,” she said.
“What was in there?”
“A lot of nothing,” she said.
“Diane …”
She sat back against the couch. “A mess. One file folder had planning board minutes from twenty years ago. Another had a collection of blueprints for old homes and town buildings from a hundred years ago. Then a collection of letters to the water precinct commissioner from businesses on Fourth Street at the beach from 1952. Stuff like that.”
“Any chance there was another copy of the Declaration of Independence stuffed back there?”
“That’s what we first thought, a robbery gone bad, but you’ve been there, seen the mess the place is. She could have Martha Washington’s recipe for apple pie in her own handwriting, and how would we know it was missing?”
“Then you have the packet of heroin left on the floor.”
“Yeah, funny thing, that. Another theory is that robbers came in, looking for a quick score—gold coins, jewelry, stuff like that—and when it went bad on them, with Maggie telling them to go to hell, she was shot.”
“But that doesn’t explain one opened filing cabinet, filled with old papers. Or …”
I glanced back at the crime scene photo, at Maggie’s bloody and stiff remains, and I looked away.
“Give it up. Or what?”
“Maggie was in her chair. Why was she in her chair? If she was being robbed, and maybe executed, would you shoot a woman in the face while she’s looking right at you? Or would you shoot her from behind? It’s like … she was placed there. Like the robber or robbers were having a conversation with her, one that ended badly.”
We sat there in silence for a few seconds, and Diane said, “We done here?”
“Huh? Sure. I don’t need to see the photos anymore.”
“Good.” Diane closed out the photo viewing program, and her laptop went back to a screensaver shot of Tyler Harbor. “I know you and others have a vision of me, Diane the ice princess who can go anywhere, investigate anything, and do so without feelings …”
I reached over, gave her hand a squeeze. “Thanks for coming over. And you’re no ice princess.”
“Thanks.”
“Maybe a frost queen, but definitely not an ice princess.”
And that got me a kick in the shin.
A few minutes later I walked her to my door and I said, “Had a little power outage here last night, gave me a few sleepless moments.”
“Why’s that?”
I sensed she was running behind so I didn’t want to get into a lengthy discussion of my late-night visitors. “It’s okay when the lights go off,” I said. “But if you’re sleeping when the lights come back on, well, the smoke detectors here are hardwired so they set off an unholy screech when they come back on, as well as all the lights you forgot to switch off.”
“Yeah, I saw something about that in this morning’s police log. Looked like vandalism.”
“Somebody cut the power line to my house?” I asked.
“Nothing as simple as that,” Diane said. “I don’t know what you know about power lines, but up on the street, there’s something called a step-down transformer, which leads to a cable heading to your house. Somebody took a pot shot at the transformer, blew it out of service, and then cast you back into the nineteenth century.”
I took that in and she said, “Hey, you got any enemies out there?”
“More than I can recall.”
“Yeah, well, be careful.”
“Always,” I said.
Just as she got through the open door, I said, “Hey, when you ran into Paula the other day, did you really say that if she did anything to hurt me, that you’d kill her and make it look like an accident?”
Diane kissed me on the cheek. “Silly girl, she must have misheard what I said. I told her that I was thrilled for her, and that seeing you with a woman like her was a happy accident. That’s all.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The rest of my afternoon just dribbled away, with another long time spent in phone purgatory, pressing numbers here and there, only to find out that my biopsies were still lost somewhere in California. I removed eight books from a cardboard box, which I declared a major victory before celebrating with a late-afternoon nap.
The ringing phone got me up twice. The first call was from Mia Harrison, who told me she’d gotten hold of her aunt, the ex-newspaper reporter.
“Oh, thanks,” I said, reclining on my couch, looking at the late-afternoon light play against some of the clouds out there
