I eye her. “I would bet someone knew which buttons to push to get him to do that.”
Molly looks away. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I kiss her head, and she blushes. I look over and raise my coffee to Frank. “Thank you for all of this.”
Frank nods. “We don’t take kindly to people harassing our residents.”
After breakfast is eaten and cleared, people go about their daily jobs, and I sit with Tinsley. She’s in the zone and coding away.
She looks up at me. “Do we need to go upstairs for another therapy session?”
God, I love this woman. “Yes,” I say immediately. But it’s not a good idea. “No. I want to, but I don’t want anyone to interrupt us.”
“Is there anything else I can do?” Tinsley comes over and sits in my lap, putting her arms around me.
“This is perfect,” I whisper.
My cell phone pings.
Jason: He’s left the hotel.
We stand and let Fiona and Molly know.
“My brother has a cruiser watching him,” Molly assures me.
The landline phone rings a few minutes later. Molly answers it and has a short conversation.
“Robards blew past a speed trap, and they’ve pulled him over on a county road,” she reports. “Scotty’s guys are not letting it slide.”
Fiona chuckles. “He’s going to be pissed by the time he gets here.”
Molly makes us a nice lunch, and not too long after that, she’s started prepping a dinner that smells fantastic.
At one point she comes in to report the update from her brother. “Robards admitted he was coming to the ranch, and my brother won’t allow it until he talks to his boss in San Francisco, who isn’t in today.”
Frank snickers. “I learned the hard way not to piss Scotty off.” He looks at Molly lovingly. “So, he won’t be here today.”
“Is he going to be so pissed when he finally gets here that I take the brunt of it?” I ask.
Fiona shrugs. “Hard to say, really. Right now, the sheriff and his office are trying to irritate him, and I imagine it’s working. That may be to our advantage. He’ll be mad at them, not at you.”
“It’ll be hard to dismiss Scotty as a backwater, small-town cop since before he was sheriff, he was a captain in the Dallas Police Department,” Molly says.
“Why didn’t I know that?” I look at Molly. “I thought you were from here.”
“We are. Scotty went to Texas to play football and then joined the police force and worked himself up the ladder. When he retired, he moved back here and was talked into running for sheriff. He grouses about it, but he loves it. Even the FBI likes him.”
“Wow. I’m impressed,” Fiona says.
With the pressure off for today, I want to stretch my legs. “You up for a mountain-bike ride up the river trail?” I ask Tinsley.
“Sure.”
It takes three days before Detective Robards finally gets it worked out to be on his way here, and he’s also had to assure Sheriff Lambert that this upstanding citizen (me) will not be arrested and extradited out of this jurisdiction without his knowledge.
“That’s excellent news,” Fiona assures us.
When Robards finally gets to the front gate, Frank allows him entry, and when he arrives at the house, Fiona greets him at the door.
“Detective Robards. What brings you to Montana?” she asks.
“I’d like to speak with Peter Landon Walsh, please.”
“I’m his lawyer. What can I help you with?”
“That’s why the sheriff slowed me down. He wanted to wait for you to arrive,” he snipes.
She shakes her head. “I’ve been here for four days—ever since you announced on the San Francisco news that you were making Mr. Walsh the prime suspect in your missing-person case.”
“Getting all the lies lined up, I see.”
Fiona shows him into her living room office, and we can hear everything, but we can’t see or be seen. “May I get you something to drink?” she asks. “Coffee? Tea? Water?”
“I’m fine.”
“What can I help you with?”
“I’d like to speak to your client.”
“I tell you what, you tell me what you want to know, and I’ll answer your questions.”
“If he doesn’t want to talk to me himself, I’ll arrest him, and he’ll be forced to talk to me.”
There’s a pause, and I know that Fiona is letting him think he has her.
“Really?” she says. “You’ll arrest him?”
Another break and I hear her boots scuff across the carpet over the wooden floor. “I don’t see the sheriff with you. Do you have permission from your captain for that?”
“Look, I flew all the way here to speak to him. It’s either here, or I can do so at the precinct in San Francisco.”
“Well, before you decide to go there, I have a few ideas for you to consider. I’ll release everything I’m giving you to the press, so you may want to see what it is before you make demands that will make you look like a fool.”
Tinsley looks at me with a giant, goofy smile, and I have the strongest urge to kiss it off her right now.
“On the weekend Heather McCoy claimed she was with my client, he was actually in Las Vegas. Here’s a list of twelve prominent Bay Area residents who were with him. You might want to note the top affidavit from the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California. Walker Clifton would not lie for his own mother.”
“These could all be falsified.”
“You can check them. That’s fine. This is the time-stamped footage of my client’s comings and goings while he stayed in Las Vegas at the Shangri-la.”
“This can be faked,” Robards counters.
“You can subpoena the footage from the Shangri-la directly, if you’d like.
