Johanna took a deep breath and decided to go full-on with her theory. “I don’t believe that the man killed himself. I think he was killed—by the man who I saw strangle the girl. I think there has to be a link between these deaths and the police. No one else could have gotten to him so quickly.”
The man stood still and didn’t speak. Johanna thought he might be in shock after today. “We have cams outside the cells. We can see who went in and out of the cell when he was left there. No one else stopped at his cell. Where do you get these ideas?”
“Then why confess? You don’t have any witnesses to the crime that can place him there. In fact, you came by the house through the car that was the scene of another crime. He could have walked yesterday. Sure, he’d have been under surveillance, but he wouldn’t have been in jail.”
Dempsey scoffed. “We suspected him by way of the house. His fingerprints were all over the place, inside and out—including some of the locks that were mentioned by the news. We didn’t have any other prints that we could match. That was a good reason to arrest him. He was there and touched the locks in question. So we only needed the how.”
Johanna paused and thought about this. The case was so convoluted, with each crime linking itself to another person and another offense. The pathway, by itself, was confusing and getting more twisted every day. She wondered if an investigator could take one of the crimes and focus on it to exclude the others—or would the entire pattern have to be studied to find the answer.
As if to answer her question, Dempsey said, “As far as the local PD goes, the house mystery is over. We found our guy, and we’re sorry that he’s gone. We’ll keep the strangling in the park as a different case, and it will remain open, but I have to be honest with you. Unless we find a clue—or a body—to corroborate your story, we won’t be able to solve the case—or even come up with a credible suspect.”
Johanna nodded. She had nothing more she could say about that murder. She’d seen it. She could identify the victim and the killer, but there was no way to narrow that down to the man and woman involved in a city of this size.
“I’m sorry about today,” he said. Johanna was surprised by the change in his tone and tenor. “It’s rough anytime there are deaths, and you’ve had more than your share lately.”
She opened her mouth to answer, but Marnie appeared and looked at her watch. “I think it’s about time for me to get a chance to talk to my friend.” She sat down in a chair, as though she owned the place.
The detective left without another word. Johanna waited until he had pulled the door closed to speak. “That was really weird. He came to explain the cases and their statuses. I mean, it was nice to hear from him about what had happened and why that man was arrested. Still, I didn’t think the police were quite so considerate in sharing information with the public.”
Marnie laughed. “Come on. He’s cute. You’re cute. You don’t need to be a sleuth to determine what that’s about. He’s helpful so he can come and visit you again.”
Johanna frowned. “You think it’s as simple as that?” she asked. “After all, he practically said that the locked house mystery was closed. It felt almost like he was prompting me to look into the matter.”
“That’s a man I’d like to meet—one who can admit that he’s wrong and needs help from a woman,” Marnie laughed. “Does he have a brother?”
“You can ask him yourself after we take a look at that house.”
Chapter 5
Johanna looked up at the house. She’d had no trouble finding it again. After all, she’d been there to see the corpse being removed from the scene. She’d been asked to identify the woman, which she could not.
Detective Dempsey was correct about one thing. The scene of that murder had been closed. The tape was gone. No policemen were guarding it. In fact, she could see no signs of security at all.
Yet, she knew that the house would be locked up. Wasn’t that the whole reason that the case was so confusing? No one could lock the home tight unless they had keys to do so—and also stayed inside the house. She sighed, knowing that the answer would not come quickly or easily, and it might put her in danger. If someone had worked that hard to make the old woman’s death an unsolvable murder, he—or she—would probably work just as hard to keep it a secret.
Marnie had been assigned the role of photographer, and she was walking around the house, taking pictures on her phone of all the doors and windows. She seemed content with that job, and it allowed Johanna time to think, something she hadn’t been able to do in the last few days. She’d been chased, spent the night in the forest, and then learned that the police had arrested someone who didn’t match her description at all. Then, before she could reveal those discrepancies, he was dead, and the police had closed the case. Phew. No wonder she was tired.
Johanna had no idea where to start with a home like this. The locked house issue had to be a ruse, a misdirection: something to take the police’s minds off the fact that a murder had been committed here. The problem would be just that, like
