Threads of Suspicion(115)

“He may be the last person to have seen Jenna alive. Jim walked her home from the coffee shop, watched her walk into her apartment building at twelve-fifty a.m.”

“The original lie of omission. That is indeed a very interesting wrinkle.”

“Jenna was trying to make mischief between Lynne and Jim, cause some turmoil on the day of Lynne’s joyful meeting with Maggie, only it didn’t go as planned. The audio is now in your account, so you can listen to the flow of it.”

“Does what Jim said help us any?”

“When it comes down to it, only on the margins. Jenna’s late-night walk is confirmed, but it was already on the theory list. She made a habit of stealing other girls’ boyfriends—again, already known. The girl in this instance who would have motive to get even—Lynne—is cleared by her own conduct, her mother’s comments, Jim’s report on the timeline. Lynne simply hadn’t realized what was going on. We now have Jim’s word Jenna was alive at her apartment building an hour later than previously thought. That’s about the substance.”

“Did Jim kill Jenna? Take a crack at her to put a stop to this?”

“He easily could have. Lose his temper, strike out, Jenna’s no more a problem. He’s a local who could hide her body around here without it being discovered. He says she walked into the coffee shop at just minutes before midnight, and he walked her home, saw her enter her apartment at twelve-fifty in the morning. The first part of the statement could be true, the second part a lie if he’s killed her and hid the body. Assume the confrontation takes place in the coffee shop, he’s got hours to clean up the crime scene, make the evidence disappear. Everything he would need for a good cleaning job is in the janitor’s closet. He’s with Lynne and someone named Laura Pip at four a.m.”

“Four hours is a decent enough murder window.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen it done well in forty minutes, but that was with premeditation. Four hours when you didn’t plan to kill someone, panic, ‘What do I do now?’ come up with a plan, then execute it—he would have been hustling. And from what I heard about her, I very much doubt Lynne would have noticed if Jim showed up at four a.m. unusually distracted. She was talking a mile a minute about the concert and Maggie’s method of writing songs.”

“Bottom-line it for me. Where are you, Evie?”

“I want him to be innocent. Jim and Lynne are like a hopeful love story that still might work out. But he’s not innocent. He withheld information from the authorities when Jenna disappeared. It doesn’t mean he caused Jenna’s death, but we’re going to have to find a way to clear him in order to take his name off the top of the list.”

“Does he travel?”

“The conversation didn’t get that far. He’s not a Triple M fan beyond living in the shadow of someone who is. I doubt he recognized you in the brief glance he cast in your direction. He seems to be a homebody from what I picked up. If he snapped with Jenna, it was for a personal reason. So, no, I’m all but certain he didn’t head out to smother those other three girls.” She lifted a hand to put an asterisk on that. “Jim’s smart enough to do other crimes in an attempt to mask Jenna’s murder. But since he didn’t get on the investigation’s radar in the months after Jenna, he wouldn’t have risked another crime when he was getting away with this one. So, again, no. Jim would be lying low—not doing something else that might catch a cop’s attention.”

“I agree with that logic,” David said. “If Jenna is tied by the missing driver’s license to those other three women, it’s likely Jim is in the clear. Did he say anything that might be helpful about someone else? The last person to see Jenna will also be the best witness for the scene that night.”

“Jim didn’t notice anything out of place. We’ll have to push there again. Someone had to have been around if we’ve got the correct window for the crime.”

“Murder is easier at night, but nothing says Jenna wasn’t killed at, say, eight in the morning,” David said.

“Exactly. That possibility is also on the theory list. It’s something to come back to and reconsider. This could have been a Saturday crime.”

David glanced over. “Let me ask you the hard question. Replay this for me. You sit down with Jim. You tell him we’ve just spoken with Lynne, with her mom.”

“Yes?”

“Is Jim telling a fabricated story now to protect Lynne?”

Evie smiled. “I like working with you, David. That was my first reaction when Jim dropped the news he saw Jenna that night and he didn’t tell the cops before. He’s had nine years to work out a cover story that will protect Lynne. And that I could easily see him trying to do. Given how he told this story, it tells me five things are possibly true if Lynne was involved.