Page 31 of Colton's Second Chance
Noelle moved from the counter where she’d been leaning, listening, and said quietly, “It could be worse than that.”
Both men lifted their eyes to her.
She wet her lips. “I think you should consider the possibility that Scottisthe Fiancée Killer.”
Noelle watched the color drain from Eli’s face, then, in the next moment, his blue eyes turned flinty. “You’re right. All options have to be on the table.”
Asher balled and flexed his fist on the tabletop, clearly struggling with a fresh wave of rage. “Right under our noses,” he muttered before rising from the table to stalk the floor.
“So what is our next move?” Eli asked.
“Call him on it.” Asher braced his hands on his hips, and his nostrils flared as he stared back at his partner. “We show up at his house tonight with a warrant to search his place for evidence.”
“Is what we have here, the discrepancies in his work, enough for a judge to issue a warrant?” Noelle asked. “I offered theworst scenario only to keep all the possibilities open. But we can’t dismiss the possibility he just made some uniform errors or something threw off his calculations or—” She raised her shoulders and shook her head.
“So we gather more evidence against him,” Asher said flatly. “Where do we start?”
“Well,” Noelle said, moving to her laptop and scrolling through the open files and charts. She bit her fingernail as she mulled over what they knew and turned it to look at different angles in her mind. “The thrust of the misinformation has to do with the time of death, the amount of time the bodies had been left to decompose. Why would he focus on that?”
Eli drew a slow breath as he scrubbed hands over his face. “Alibi.”
Noelle cut a sharp look at him. “What?”
“The time of death helps us in several ways, but a key factor in regard to eliminating suspects is whether they can provide an alibi for the time the crime was committed.”
She considered this, a niggling sense they were on the verge of breakthrough teasing her brain, dancing just out of reach. “But we don’t have precise times for the women’s deaths,” Noelle said. “Just estimates, give or takedays. Evenweeksfor the first victims.”
Asher joined them at the small kitchen table again, his eyes bright with determination. “DoesMontgomery have an alibi? Where was he for the days or weeks when we believe the women were killed, based on the adjusted estimates the Seattle experts derived?”
Eli shook his head slowly, his frown dark and troubled. “I don’t know, but we need to figure that out.”
“How?” Noelle asked. If her own gut was twisting in knots and adrenaline spiking her pulse, she couldn’t imagine how Eli and Asher felt.
Frustrated? Edgy? Betrayed? Guilt pinched her for having dumped this seismic information on them. But if it was the break they needed, if it led them to catching Allison’s killer, if it meant other women’s lives were spared, she couldn’t regret it.
Squaring her shoulders, she asked, “In order to get to the remote areas where the bodies were found and commit the murders without leaving any evidence that connected him to the crime, the killer would need more than a few hours. That takes planning and time for execution.” She grimaced. “Sorry poor word choice. I mean, time to commit the murder without leaving key evidence behind.”
The men exchanged a look, and Eli nodded. “She’s right.”
“So who at your office would have a record of when Scott took leaves of absence from work or called in sick? He’d have to have an excuse for being gone for several days at a time without raising questions. Wouldn’t he?”
Eli’s face brightened. “He would.” He checked his phone. “It’s pretty late. Do you think we can get Joetta from HR down to the office now to show us Scott’s personnel file?”
“Not without a court order,” Asher replied.
“Well, then, let’s get busy. Wake a judge or two.”
Three hours later, the groggy and disgruntled human resources manager handed Eli the file with Scott Montgomery’s personnel information. “Can I ask what this is about?”
“You can ask, but I can’t answer.”
The HR manager rolled her eyes. “I don’t see why it couldn’t have waited until morning.”
“Sorry to have disturbed your sleep, Joetta, but this is urgent,” Asher said, looking over Eli’s shoulder as Eli thumbed through the file. The men thanked her again and took the file upstairs to their office where Noelle was waiting.
“Well?” Noelle asked.
Eli waved the file and took a seat behind his desk to spread the pages out for examination. “Let’s see. Vacation time requests… Here we go.” Eli read out the dates of Scott’s past vacation days while Asher cross-checked the times with the new information about the murders Noelle’s work had derived. One after another, the dates synced with the newly adjusted timeline for the women’s murders.
