Page 117 of Nobody's Fool

I notice that Polly already has her laptop out. She sets it on that food table tray with the PowerPoint up.

“I guess not.” I look up at their expectant faces. “What have you got?”

“We are working on various prongs involving both cases you asked us about. For the sake of simplicity, we will call one case the Victoria Belmond Case and the other the Tad Grayson Case.”

“I wanted us to call it the Nicole Brett Case,” Lenny says. “Because that way we are naming the cases for the victims, not the perps.”

“Except,” Polly says, “there may be two victims now. Nicole Brett and—”

“Calling it the Tad Grayson Case is fine,” I say. “Let’s not get mired in semantics. What do you want to show me?”

“We are still tracking down the man who was following your wife, the one you refer to as Scraggly Dude. We have a theory now, based on what you told us, and have engaged Detective Marty McGreggor in helping us with this.”

“My old partner?”

“Former,” Polly says in her teacher voice. “Not old.”

I bit back the sigh. “How did you meet Marty?”

“Downstairs that day you were shot. He was visiting too. We were in the lobby.”

“Good-looking guy,” Lenny says.

“You guys came the day I was shot?”

“Of course.”

I look at them. “I should be touched,” I say, “but oddly, I’m not.”

Gary spreads his hands. “None of us has much of a life, so…”

“Speak for yourself,” Polly snaps but she’s smiling as she does. She clears her throat and puts on the business voice. “We are coordinating with Jennifer Schultz and her Radiant Allure agency database. But nothing so far. Our theory right now is that the woman Victoria Belmond used the agency as a cover story, but you never know.”

That theory is wrong, but I let it go for now. “Okay,” I say.

“Get to it,” Gary says with a sigh. “This is what she does. She draws everything out like she’s the final chapter of an Agatha Christie novel.”

“I do not,” Polly says. “Everything is in context.”

“Just tell him already.”

“Fine.” Polly sighs. “We tried to create a list of Victoria Belmond’s high school friends who might have been at the party. We got six names from the FBI files via Detective Marty McGreggor. None of them would talk to us. But we were able to get school records and yearbooks. We cross-checked through them to see possible attendees. For example, Victoria Belmond was in the French club and on the field hockey team. So anybody who was on both of those were likely to have been at the New Year’s Eve party. Using a pretty simple software program, we could figure out who would have been Victoria’s close friends and likely to have gone to that party.”

They all look at me.

“Okay.”

“We also—I don’t know how to put this or even why we did this.It was Debbie’s idea. But we also put into the equation your cases from your time on the police force.”

I frown. “My cases?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Debbie says, “Because you’re linked into this, Kierce.”

I look over at her.

---