Page 125 of Proof of Guilt

And that the killer had taken the watch—probably as some kind of sick trophy.

The watch hadn’t been found on Theo’s father, though. For that matter, neither had the knife that’d murdered Sherman and his wife.

“It’s a lab report,” Gabriel said. He didn’t touch the paper next to the envelope, but he pointed to it. “Someone claims to have had prints and trace run on the watch.” He paused, his forehead bunching up. “There’s a small amount of blood. A DNA match to Dad.”

Ivy didn’t gasp again, but she made a soft, strangling sound, groped around for the chair that was behind her and sank down onto it. “Where’s it been this whole time?”

Gabriel shook his head. “The lab report doesn’t mention that. Of course, my theory was that Travis had hidden it somewhere. Or ditched it like he did the knife. And maybe he did.”

Someone had found the knife, though, hidden it away and then tried to use it to kill Jodi. That’d happened only a month earlier. But the person who’d done that was dead and couldn’t have been the one to send the watch.

“I’ll have it tested, of course,” Gabriel continued a moment later. “Not just for blood but also to verify the partial prints that this report says were on the watch band.”

“Prints?” Ivy repeated. “Whose?”

Theo figured it was Travis’s prints. Since Sherman’s blood had been found on Travis’s shirt, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for the prints to belong to his father, as well.

Apparently they didn’t, though.

“They’re Lacey’s,” Gabriel said.

Oh, man. That explained why Gabriel had wanted Ivy’s stepdaughter brought in, but that was about all it explained.

“Lacey was twenty when our parents were killed,” Ivy pointed out. “And she didn’t know them. She didn’t even live close to Blue River when the murders happened.”

“That’s exactly why I want to talk to her,” Gabriel continued. “If those are really her prints, then she must have touched the watch at some point—either at the time of the murder or afterward.”

“Afterward could mean someone is setting her up,” Theo pointed out. But then there was a problem with that. “Who had the watch to be able to do something like that, and why set up Lacey this way? If someone wanted to tie her to the attacks, there would have been an easier way to do that by just creating a fake money trail.”

Obviously, neither Gabriel nor Ivy had answers for that, and if it was a setup, Lacey might not know it, either. But it could mean she’d come in contact with someone who’d been present at the murders. Could.

Theo hoped Ivy didn’t take this the wrong way, but he had to ask. “Is it possible that your late husband knew your parents?”

She shook her head. But then she paused. “I honestly never asked him. All of that was still so raw and painful when I met Chad, and he seemed to sense that I didn’t want to talk about it.”

Theo looked at Gabriel, who was already taking out his phone. “I’ll see if Chad’s name came up at any point during the investigation or the check of the old police records.”

That brought Ivy to her feet. “You can’t think Chad killed them.” She didn’t seem to have any doubts about that. “Because he was a gentle man. He definitely wasn’t a killer.”

Theo took her hand and had her sit again. “I believe you, but it’s possible he had some connection to my father. He might have known him, might have sympathized with the feud that was going on between the Becketts and the Cantons. Yeah, it’s a long shot,” he quickly added, “but we’re working with nothing but long shots here.”

And that meant Theo might have to talk to Travis after all. Not to have him meet Nathan. Not a chance. But rather to start ruling out any association he could have possibly had with Chad.

“How’d you meet Chad?” Gabriel asked the moment he ended his call.

She narrowed her eyes a little at her brother. Obviously, she wasn’t pleased that her late husband was coming into question. Probably because it was too hard to wrap her mind around the fact that she might have been living with the man who’d had some part in her parents’ death. And maybe he didn’t. Again, this was a long shot.

“I met him at a livestock auction near Houston,” Ivy finally answered. “I’d just bought a small place and wanted to buy a horse. Chad sat next to me, and when Nathan started fussing, he started making funny faces at him and got him to stop.”

For reasons Theo didn’t want to explore, hearing that caused him to scowl. He figured what he was feeling was some old-fashioned jealousy, but hell, it was hard to hear of any man having that kind of interaction with his son when he hadn’t had the chance to even see the baby.

Hard to hear about Ivy being with another man, too.

That kiss was responsible for him feeling that. And in this case, the jealousy didn’t make a lick of sense. He’d been with other women since Ivy, but then, he hadn’t married any of them. In fact, he hadn’t even gotten past the casual sex stage. Theo had always blamed that on his job, but after that kiss with Ivy, he knew that his feelings for her were still there, and they had probably been playing into it even after all these years.

Ivy pushed her hair from her face, looked away. “After we met at the auction, Chad asked me out for coffee, and eventually I went…four months later.”

So Ivy hadn’t exactly jumped at the chance to be with another man. Not that Theo believed she had. Nathan had been nearly a year old when she’d married Chad, and that meant by then Theo had been out of her life for almost two years. She’d moved on. But she’d moved on with a man who could have some connection to the Beckett murders.

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