“I don’t imagine it was in one of those fancy office buildings you used to work in. He looks more like a construction worker than a programmer,” Bonnie paused long enough to pour some whiskey into her coffee. “Want a shot, Jake?”

“Tempting after what I’ve been through today, but no thanks. I need to go into town for a new door in a bit. It’d be my luck I’d get stopped by a cop.”

She gave me her Elvis look again. “One little drink won’t get you drunk,” she said before her phone started ringing.

Bonnie looked at the caller ID before answering it. “Margot, I’ve been meaning to call you. Did you hear about Shelia?”

Margot is Bonnie’s twin sister, and I knew she would be on the phone for some time. It was my chance to leave, so I whispered for Bonnie to let herself out and I’d catch her later.

***

The drive to the building supply store on the other side of town gave me time to reflect on my life and my decision to turn down a good-paying programming job. I thought that was all behind me until Bonnie had brought it up with her remark about Sleeveless. After I married Julie, I managed to find work at as a web developer and my soon to be manager agreed to let me work at home, which would allow me to take care of Julie who was recovering from Hodgkin’s. But then the company reorganized before I could start work. My new boss, who wasn’t much older than my daughter, was too much of a micro-manager to allow anyone to telecommute. I quit the job before it even began, and told him where he could put his new MBA.

I met Julie the previous summer when she had been investigating a rash of bear and elk poaching in the hills behind my home. She was so cute with her red ponytail sticking out the back of her warden’s cap that I fell for her before she even spoke. She saved me from being arrested that day when she and her team found a planted compound-bow in my motor home. Julie noticed I was left-handed, and the bow was made for a right-handed person. My vision still gets blurry whenever I think of her.

Fred tired of catching bugs, or whatever it is dogs do when they stick their head out of an open car window, and put his head on my lap. I didn’t have the heart to push him away, even though he would soon be drooling on my leg. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was thinking of Julie too, when my cell phone rang. It was all I could do to get Fred off my lap and pull the phone out of my pocket; I nearly sideswiped the car next to me.

The other driver honked her horn and showed me her middle finger before I finally managed to turn on my phone. It was Bonnie.

“Jake! Thank God I got you. The cops are here asking a bunch of questions.”

“They came anyway?” I asked, waving to the girl who had just saluted me. “The nine-eleven operator acted like I was bothering her.”

“No! Not the sheriff, Jake. It’s a couple homicide detectives.”

I made a quick U-turn and headed back home.

***

“So where are they?” I asked as I jumped out of my Jeep after parking it in her driveway.

Bonnie was sitting in one of the rocking chairs on her front porch that I had made a few years back, during my craftsman phase. Even from a distance I could see she had been crying. With the way her makeup had stained her face, she looked like an ad for a zombie movie. “You’re too late, Jake,” she answered before starting to cry again. “They think I killed her. I thought they were going to arrest me.”

Suspecting Bonnie of killing Shelia was no big surprise. Shelia’s boyfriend, Craig, had said as much on live TV, and Bonnie did have a motive. I know I wouldn’t think twice about lethal injection if someone killed my daughter.

I sat down in the rocker next to her. “It’s okay, Bon. You have an alibi for the night of the murder. Me and Fred will vouch for you.”

Fred looked up and barked at the mention of his name. He knew Bonnie was upset and laid down by her feet with his head on his paws.

“Would you do that for me, Freddie?” She asked, with the hint of a smile.

“You can bet your next pension check on it,” I answered for my speech impaired dog, silently praying it didn’t come to that. I wasn’t in the habit of perjuring myself, nor was Fred.

Her smile had become a certified grin.“My, what a strange voice you have, Fred.”

It made me smile too. “I guess I deserved that, but tell me what the cops said to you. We may have to find you a lawyer, muy pronto.”

Although Fred and I were on the wagon, Bonnie wasn’t. We ended up going to her kitchen where she kept her stock of whiskey. Her memory wasn’t very clear by the time she finished a half-full fifth of Jack Daniels, but she did manage to tell me the story as best as she could remember.

The detectives played the good-cop, bad-cop routine on her in an effort to get her to confess to Shelia’s murder. The cops weren’t buying the sweet, old-lady routine; not after Craig had told them how Bonnie had tried to murder Shelia’s husband last year with peanut oil when she thought he was the hit-and-run driver. It was all the detectives needed to hear, even though spraying someone allergic to peanuts with Bactine mixed with peanut oil on a burn had as much effect as trying to kill ants with a water hose. They knew she was capable of murder, as did everyone else. But they didn’t take into account that Shelia had met a violent death. She had been stabbed, which wasn’t Bonnie’s style. Bonnie would have used poison, or something that didn’t involve blood.

She tried to tell the cops about how Craig beat Shelia, and that he should be their number-one suspect, but they weren’t interested. They didn’t quit badgering her until she’d said she needed a lawyer.

I waited for her to regain her composure with the help of Mr. Daniels. “I don’t think it was Craig anyway, Bon.”

“Of course it was him. Who else could it be?”

“Think about it, Bon. Craig told the television reporter he had been watching the CU game with a friend, and found Shelia dead on his return home. Craig is a mean SOB, but he doesn’t strike me as dumb. He must know the cops will check out his alibi, so it only follows that someone else killed Shelia. My guess is she was killed for her copy of the book, and when it failed to be the key copy, the murderer went looking for another — mine.”

The evening sun illuminated every wrinkle in her sixty-nine-year-old face. “The bald guy with tattoos and no sleeves? The guy who broke into your house?”

***

That was when I decided to find Shelia’s killer. It was bad enough the guy stole my copy of Tom Sawyer and trashed my house, but I couldn’t let them pin a murder on this old widow. I had to get him before the district attorney decided to go after her.

CHAPTER THREE

Between Bonnie’s television and Fred barking at the top of the stairs whenever he thought he heard a critter in the lower level, I had a hard time concentrating on how to find Sleeveless. I should have closed the windows to silence her television, but air conditioning isn’t necessary this high up and I needed the cool night air to cool the house or it would be too warm the next day.

It wasn’t until the next morning that my plan started to come together. We were on our way to the building-supply store again before a family of skunks, or some other unwelcome visitors, decided the downstairs busted door was an open invitation to make themselves at home. What little traffic we encountered was in the opposite direction, weekend tourists headed to the lake, which gave me time to think without exercising the defensive driving skills required in Denver.

The plan was simple. On Monday, I would stop at the bookstore on my way home from the job in Bailey and try to get a list of the people who had been at the reading. I remember signing a guest register of sorts, so I could only hope Sleeveless did too. It wouldn’t be easy, but once I eliminated the feminine names and everyone I knew, I should narrow the list down to less than a half dozen. But checking even five or six names could be tedious.