Page 90 of Defend Me

Noah chuckles and presses his cheek against my palm. Just as I crouch to pick up the fallen logbook, Grayson arrives back with a bun and a drink.

“Any revelations while I’ve been gone?” he asks.

“Sadly no,” Noah says as I grab the fallen book, which has opened to a random page. I see the date at the top and my heart falls into my stomach.

“Holy shit,” I say, landing back in my chair with a hard thud. “This is it.”

“What?” Noah says, as he and Grayson crowd around me. The top of the page is the right year. The first entry is for June seventeenth.

“Oh my god,” Grayson says as I flip through the pages, from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth…and there it is. June twenty-first. The day before my mother was killed. I run my finger down the list of names, my skin feverish, my heart pounding. This could be it. A real clue. It would be someone who Stan trusted, someone who came into the range around closing time.

And then I see it. The very last entry on that day, at 4:21pm.

“Wait….what?” Noah says.

What indeed. We all stare at the name in shock.

Sheriff John Briggs.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

NOAH

I feel like I’m falling down a very deep well.

“The sheriff killed Marion?” I say, more to myself than anyone else. Like I need to hear the words out loud. “But…he’s law enforcement.”

The space around me expands and contracts as I stare at the sheriff’s name, printed there in black and white.

“I hate to break it to you, honey,” Grayson says, “but cops have committed crimes before.”

But not inmytown. The sheriff trained me, for god’s sake. But even as I feel surrounded by the abyss, things begin to click into place. Why the investigation was so shoddy. Why he was so quick to arrest me. Why the judge and the prosecutor seem hell bent on conviction.

“Let’s all slow down a minute,” Von says. “This doesn’t prove anything.”

“Oh come on,” I say. “You said yourself that someone, coming to the range at the end of the day, could have secreted my gun outof there.” I point. “The sheriff is the last person signed into the range that day!”

“A theory isn’t evidence,” Von says. “And you’re both missing the point.”

“What’s the point?” I shoot back.

She runs her finger over the list of names signed in that day. “Yourname isn’t on here.”

She’s right.

“If we are going to accuse the sheriff, we’d need much more evidence. But this will reinforce our stance that you did not have your gun at the time of the shooting.”

“There has to be something that Marion kept, someone she told, some thread that will link him to her murder,” I say, my mind churning. I hate how easily I can believe the sheriff is a killer, but in my cop’s brain, it’s the only thing that makes sense. He’s certainly more age-appropriate to be writing love letters to Marion. He was at the estate often, and would know about the garden entrance, and Marion’s shed. He could have covered his tracks at the murder scene well. He’d know how to commit a crime and not leave evidence. He was even one of the first on the scene—maybe he never even left the scene at all! No one would suspect him getting there so quickly. They’d just think it was good police work.

“I was the perfect patsy, just in case,” I continue. “No wonder he wasn’t keen on letting Caden keep the investigation open over the summer. And when that casing was finally found, he pounced to arrest me. Divert attention. Get this resolved quickly.”

“But if he wanted to frame you,” Von points out gently, “why not do a better job of it? Why not leave your gun at the scene? Or find the shell casing right then and there, the morning of that initial search? He worked alongside you foryearsafter Mom’s death, Noah. Why? What, was he just biding his time?”

She makes some good points, but I refuse to be daunted. “Maybe he figured it was easier for the case to go cold,” I say. “Maybe he really couldn’t find the casing to prove it was me—Isla only barely saw it when she looked under that bookshelf. Maybe that was part of his plan that went wrong.”

Von doesn’t look convinced.

“The most important thing is to get your name cleared,” she says. “Grayson, get the rest of these boxes back to Stan, but tell him we need to keep this one for the trial.”

---