“It had to have been planted. I mean, how else would it get there?” he asked, just as stumped as I was.
“Okay, can you give me a quick rundown of what happened?”
Luckily, I’d stopped at Staples along the way. I pulled out my new notepad, the exact same kind Garrett and Uncle Bob used. Plain. Nondescript. Unassuming. I jotted down anything I thought could be pertinent.
“Wait a minute,” I said, stopping him at one point. “The lady testified that the kid had been staying with you?”
“Yes, but she’d seen my nephew. He stayed with me for about a month before all of this happened. Now the cops think I killed him, too.”
I blinked in surprise. “He’s dead?”
“Not that I know of. But he is missing. And the cops have convinced my sister I had something to do with his disappearance.”
This could be the connection I’d been looking for. I had no idea what that connection might be, but I’d worked with less.
“When did he disappear?”
He glanced down and to the right, which meant he was remembering instead of inventing. Another sign of his innocence, not that I needed it. “Teddy stayed with me about a month. His mom had kicked him out. They didn’t get along.”
“She’s your sister?”
“Yes. Then she’d talked him into moving back home with her despite their constant bickering. That was the last time I saw him. I was arrested about two weeks later. No one told me he was missing until after the arrest.”
“What did the prosecution say was your motive?” I asked.
His expression morphed into one of disgust. “Drugs.”
“Ah,” I said in understanding. “The one-size-fits-all motive.”
“Ask him more about his sister.”
I turned to see Barber standing behind me, arms crossed and head bowed in thought.
“I had to have missed something.”
“Can you tell me more about your sister?” I asked Mr. Weir, who was busy looking past me to check out what I was looking at.
After a moment, he said, “She’s not the best mom, but not the worst. She’s been in trouble here and there. Drugs, and not just pot. Some shoplifting. You know, the usual.”
The usual. Interesting defense.
“What about recently?” Barber asked. I passed the question along.
“I haven’t seen her in a year. I have no idea how she’s doing.”
I wondered if she’d ever been questioned about the deceased kid. “What about—?”
“Could she have gotten involved in anything more serious?”
I slid an annoyed glance to Barber for interrupting me—lawyers—then relayed his question to Mr. Weir. Barber didn’t notice my glare. Mr. Weir did.
“With Janie,” he said, becoming more leery of me, “anything is possible.”
“Would you say—?”
“I mean, could she have become indebted to someone? Someone with enough malevolence to kidnap—”
“That’s it,” I whispered through my teeth. “No one asks questions but me.” I was doing my best ventriloquist impersonation, as though Mr. Weir couldn’t hear me because of my lack of facial movement. Or see me pretending not to talk to anyone.
Barber looked at me, bemused. “I’m sorry,” he said, sobering. “I just keep thinking I missed something. Something that was right there in front of me the whole time.”
Great, now I felt guilty. “No, I’m sorry,” I said, feeling bad but having to keep the stupid grin on my face so I wouldn’t move my lips. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”
“No, no, you’re right. My fault entirely.”
I turned back to Mr. Weir. “Sorry about that. It’s a voices-in-my-head thing.”
His expression changed, but not as I would’ve expected. He suddenly looked … hopeful again. “Can you really do what they say you can?”
Since I wasn’t sure what he was talking about—who they were and what they said I could do—my brows raised in question. “And they would be…”
He leaned in, as if that would help me hear him better through the glass. “I heard the guards talking. They were surprised you’d come to see me.”
“Why?” I asked, surprised myself.
“They said you solve crimes nobody else can solve. That you even solved a decades-old cold case.”
I rolled my eyes. “That was one time, for heaven’s sake. I got lucky.”
A woman who’d been murdered in the fifties had come to me. I’d convinced Uncle Bob to help, and we closed her case together. I couldn’t have done it without him. Or all the new technology law enforcement had on their side. Of course, it helped that she knew exactly who murdered her and exactly where to find the murder weapon. That poor woman’d had one mean stepson.
“That’s not what they said,” Mr. Weir continued. “They said you knew things, things that no one could know.”
Oh. “Um, who said that?”
“One of our guards is married to a cop.”
“Well, then, that explains it. Cops don’t really think—”
“I don’t care what cops think, Ms. Davidson. I just want to know if you can do what they say.”
A dismal sigh slipped through my lips. “I don’t want to get your hopes up.”
“Ms. Davidson, your mere presence is giving me hope. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.”