Nick beamed at her. “Oh, so you do listen when I talk forensics with you. I’m so proud, Mad.” He lavishly kissed her wrist, causing those around the table to snicker before turning serious.
“So, we’re dealing with a woman,” Hannah mused. “That honestly doesn’t do us much good if we can’t narrow down a motive.”
“Especially since Velma had so many enemies,” Cooper offered, his arm going over the back of her chair so he could rub her back. “We need to know what the most horrible thing Velma ever did was. To me, that seems like it’s going to be our best option, because Hannah is right, without motive we’re flying blind.”
“I’ve got my men going through that enemies list,” Boone supplied. “They’ve been calling the people on it. The good thing is that we’ve been able to mark people off the list because it’s easy enough to confirm alibis ... especially if these people are in Texas or California.”
“What about the ones you haven’t been able to get on the phone, though?” Maddie queried. “I mean ... that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re guilty, just because they don’t pick up or anything. Some of them might be here, though.”
Boone nodded in agreement. “They could be here. The problem is, if I were going to kill someone, I wouldn’t register for a conference under my real name. No identification was required when you signed up for this shindig, right?” He turned to Maddie for confirmation.
“All we had to do was fill in the information online,” Maddie offered. “I mean ... I had to register under a credit card, but I remember there being an option for PayPal or even sending in a check.”
“A legal name would have to be required for both those things, though,” Hannah argued. “What we need is a master list from the event organizer. Alicia, right? I can call her.”
“You can, and we’ll definitely want that list,” Boone said. “The thing is, you can open a PayPal account under a corporate name ... or a nickname. Your real name isn’t automatically listed. You can open a checking account under a corporate name, too.”
“Yes, but you still have to show identification when you open those accounts,” Hannah persisted. “I worked for a law office. You can’t just hide behind anonymity when it comes to banking.”
Boone focused on her, thoughtful. “That’s true,” he said finally. “The problem is, it takes time to secure warrants and walk through the red tape of a banking institution. By the time we manage to check everybody off the list, the event will be over and the participants will have scattered far and wide. Once that happens ... .” He left the statement hanging, but everyone understood the repercussions.
“We need to find the guilty party while everybody is still here,” Maddie surmised. “Our odds go way down after that.”
“Pretty much,” Cooper confirmed. “It’s not going to be easy. As far as I can tell, anybody who ever met Velma hated her. Only a handful of people genuinely liked her, and I’m not even sure it can be said that her daughter liked her. She loved her, but that doesn’t mean she liked her.”
“So, where do we go from here?” Maddie queried. “I mean, there has to be a direction to look.”
“There’s always a direction to look,” Boone reassured her. “What that direction is right now for us, though, I couldn’t say. There’s one other thing I found of interest when I ran Velma’s financials. It seems she came into a lot of money a few weeks ago ... and when I say a lot, I mean a lot. A seven-figure sum was deposited in her account about six weeks ago.”
“As in a million dollars?” Hannah’s eyebrows hopped. “Where did it come from?”
“I don’t know. We’re trying to track back the money. We don’t have definitive answers just yet, though.”
“Well, there’s your motive,” Cooper noted. “I’m guessing that money will be left to the daughter. Maybe we should be looking harder at her.”
“That’s certainly an option,” Boone agreed. “I haven’t received a copy of her will yet, though. I would prefer not pushing a potentially bereaved daughter if I don’t have to. I want to wait.”
“Besides,” Hannah added, “there’s every possibility that Velma didn’t leave her daughter that money. She sounds like the sort of person who would prefer watching her loved ones suffer rather than give them something for nothing. I mean, does anyone think she wasn’t the ‘tough love’ type?”
“That’s another good point,” Boone confirmed. “The money is a solid clue. We need to find out where it came from, because it could point to motive. We also need to find out who was set to benefit most from Velma’s death. Those are our two biggest priorities right now.”
“And what happens if both of those avenues turn out to be dead ends?” Maddie asked. “Where will you look after that?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
10
Ten
Maddie helped Hannah clean up the saloon after lunch, something the witch argued wasn’t necessary. Maddie insisted, though.
“There has to be a way to separate the frauds from the real deal,” Nick noted as he watched the hoopla on the street from the window. The psychics had returned almost twenty minutes before and they seemed to be whooping and hollering it up in the middle of the town. “That would help us narrow things down.”
Hannah found she was intrigued by the statement. “What do you mean? Why does it matter who is the real deal and who isn’t?”
“Hmm?” Nick stirred from his reverie and shot a look over his shoulder. “Oh, sorry. I was just talking out loud.”
“He has a habit
