“The phony addresses, the absence of public records?” Dawson said.
“All suspicious, but not a smoking gun.” Headly turned to Amelia. “I don’t suppose you have a picture of Bernie.”
“No.”
“Figured that. Carl wouldn’t have let himself be photographed. The SO is going to have one of those computer programs age the picture from Carl’s Wanted poster, see if it resembles your seventy-something neighbor, but for right now, they’re soft on him. Additionally—”
“Jesus. There’s an additionally?” Dawson left his chair and made an aimless circuit of the kitchen.
“Additionally, Tucker’s wrestling with Jeremy’s motive for killing Miss DeMarco. And if you believe that he wielded the murder weapon thinking he was killing her, then I allow that there’s a problem with it.”
“But he didn’t think he was killing Stef. He thought it was Amelia.”
“Tucker’s not sold on that, and he’s got some strong arguments.”
“Like what?” Dawson asked.
“Like how Jeremy could have planned it. How would he have known that Amelia would be in the village that night?”
“He couldn’t have known,” she said.
“Right. That’s the hangup. Even Knutz, who’s on my side, winces when I assert that it was a crime of opportunity. My take? Jeremy tied up at Saint Nelda’s dock to ride out the storm. He saw Miss DeMarco, mistook her for you, and seized the opportunity.”
Wryly Dawson said, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
“To them my theory sounds just that clichéd. Homicide detectives deal in facts and hard evidence. We’re short on those.”
“Except for the fingerprint,” Amelia said.
“If it’s a recent print—which is being argued—it places Jeremy there.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Dawson asked.
“I say again, motive. Murder is quite a leap from spooking Amelia with a busted beach ball. If Jeremy is only trying to mess with her mind, when he spotted her running through the rain, why didn’t he just jump out of the bushes and shout boo?”
“Tucker didn’t actually say that, did he?”
“It was almost that inane. But here’s their refrain,” Headly said, going back to Amelia. “Why would Jeremy want to kill you? Now, to me, his motive is obvious.”
“The children,” she replied.
“Ultimately. Hear me out,” he said, holding up both hands before she could say more. “What I think, Jeremy and Carl were too cautious to act before Willard Strong’s trial ended. They’d been impatiently biding their time until Willard was residing on death row and the dust had settled. They were almost there, days away from completion, the end was in sight when…a strapping, good-looking lad appears on the scene.”
He tilted his head toward Dawson, who realized they’d come back to the disconcerting topic of him and Amelia.
“He shows up out of nowhere,” Headly said, “and you start spending time with him. The children also seem gaga, which wouldn’t have set well with their father. To Jeremy, the new man in your life was a catalytic event.”
She looked at Dawson uneasily. “He’s hardly in my life.”
“And they wouldn’t want him to be.”
“But we’d just met.”
“Sometimes that’s all it takes.” After a short but awkward silence, he continued. “A romance between you two at least appeared to be blossoming. Jeremy had to stop it.”
“This means that Stef died because of me.” Shooting a glance at Dawson, she added, “Because of us.”
“No.” Headly propped his elbow on the table and shook his index finger at her. “Listen to me. Your perceived attraction to Dawson was only an excuse for Jeremy to act sooner rather than later. Eventually, no matter what, whether or not you’d ever met Dawson, he would have killed you. If not Jeremy, then his father would have. Because—and make no mistake about this, Amelia—the man is evil.