My throat was dry and scratchy, my thoughts cloudy and uncertain. A dull headache gripped the base of my skull. Nerves were eating at me, despite my best efforts to remain cool and appear unconcerned. Waiting in the silence of a cinderblock interrogation room was unsettling. There was nothing to look at except bare green walls, fluorescent ceiling lights, and my own reflection in the two-way mirror. In the next room, the sheriff and her staff might have been debating where they would let me sleep tonight — my Victorian house overlooking the bay or the Chester County Detention Center.
The odds were against Sheriff Tompkins allowing me to rummage through the Kostas file, but there was a slim chance that I had convinced her to let me help with the investigation.
On the other hand, her plans might not have been at all what I wanted. She was probably not going to book me this afternoon, even if she still suspected that I was involved in the death of Richard Kostas. No credible evidence warranted my immediate arrest, but she might have been impetuous enough to make a collar and let the prosecutors and judges sort it out later.
Then I started to think more clearly. She would not file charging documents against me. Instead, the State’s Attorney would present a murder case to a grand jury after the coroner confirmed how Kostas had died. If I had to place a bet, Sheriff Tompkins would just let me go for now and keep her true intentions hidden, so all the uncertainties could slowly simmer in my imagination.
I stood up and tried the doorknob to the interrogation room. It was locked.
I sat back down and waited.
My phone vibrated in my blazer pocket. The screen displayed the caller. Glenn Bernthal was trying to reach me, but there was no way I could talk with him while stuck in this interrogation room. I let his call go to voicemail. If the sheriff was watching me from behind the mirror, then speaking with Glenn or sending a reply text might have sparked a new line of questions. I slid my phone back into my blazer pocket.
The bolt to the door swiveled with a clank, and Sheriff Tompkins returned with a manila envelope that she placed face down on the table. She took the seat across from me. The envelope was too small to hold an investigation file. Something inside the envelope formed a thin lump at one end.
“So you decided to come back,” I said.
“Yeah, sorry about that. Took a phone call. You know how that goes.”
“No problem. What about my proposal?”
She shook her head. “We don’t share our investigation files with anyone outside the department. That’s not going to happen.”
“You got a better chance at figuring out what happened to Richard Kostas if we work together.”
She nodded pensively. “You never met Mr. Kostas, right?”
“Yeah, never in person.”
The sheriff picked up the manila envelope, opened the flap, and carefully removed a photograph so that the other contents remained inside. She handed me the photo. “That’s Richard Kostas.”
The man in the picture was middle-aged and paunchy. His curly, salt-and-pepper hair was receding and enlarged his forehead. Dark circles framed the bottom of his brown eyes and told of many late nights at work or possibly somewhere else less admirable. He reminded me of a tired college professor with a rebellious streak, but his tight necktie revealed a life trapped in the corporate world. A five o’clock shadow covered his jowly cheeks. He appeared to be no stranger to the all-you-can-eat buffets along Ocean Highway.
“Where’d you get this photo?” I asked. “Not the National Portrait Gallery, I suppose.”
“Motor Vehicle Administration. Nobody takes a good picture there. Printed from digital archives.”
“Funny how Richard Kostas had been just a name and a voice on the phone, but that’s him, huh?”
Sheriff Tompkins said solemnly, “That was him.” She reached inside the manila envelope. “You wanted to see his pocket calendar, the one that had your business card in it.”
“Right. The calendar that was nice enough to lead you to me. There’s got to be some answers in there.”
Her poker face offered no reaction. “I’ll let you see his calendar, as long as you tell me what you learn from it. Okay?”
“Deal.”
She slid the black pocket calendar out of the manila envelope and gave me rubber gloves before putting it in my hand. I paged through each week of January, but the entire month was blank. The same was true for all weeks until late July, where Richard Kostas had scrawled in the words “Sporting Clays” in ballpoint pen followed by the number fifty. The number fifty followed the same words about a week later. A total of six handwritten entries of “Sporting Clays” randomly filled the calendar, most on workdays at 6:30 a.m. The night on which Kostas disappeared was the only entry not at sunrise. He wrote “Sporting Clays” next to 8:00 p.m. followed by the number seven hundred. Richard Kostas had affixed my business card with a paperclip to the following day and circled 3:00 p.m. in blue ink. The remainder of the calendar was as blank as the day it was printed.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s it,” the sheriff said. “His hobby, I guess. You know what sporting clays are, right?”
“Sure. Everybody on the Eastern Shore does. It’s like skeet. Shooting clay pigeons.”
“Golf with shotguns,” she said. “That’s what they call it.”
“I tried it once. A lot of fun. You walk around and shoot from a dozen or so locations, all different elevations and angles.”
Sheriff Tompkins rubbed her temple with her index finger. “So apparently Mr. Kostas liked to go to a shooting range and blast clay pigeons out of the air. One way to blow off stress.”
“And the numbers after each entry?”
“What’s your guess, Mr. Seagraves?”
“Maybe his scores or the number of shells he fired. Not sure.”
I flipped through the entire calendar again, hoping to glean some
