Page 17 of The Girl He Crowned

“What business isit of yours?” Wright asked, his tone still combative.

Christopherstepped in then, his tone blunter than Paige’s careful reasonableness. “Let’sput it another way, Mr. Wright: Debbie Danton was killed in the period when youdisappeared from your job. Do you have an alibi for the time of Debbie Danton’smurder?”

Wright seemed tobe mulling that over. Paige guessed, if he was still coming down from his high,then the importance of the situation might be taking a moment or two topercolate through to the rest of his brain.

She decided to gooff on a different tack for a moment or two, to give him some more time tothink, and also to show him that there really was evidence that might connecthim to the crime. That they weren’t just making it up.

“A pendulum wasfound at each of the murder scenes,” Paige said. “The one found underneath thebridge was identified as being made from brass parts that you would have workedon.”

She showed him thesame picture of the pendulum that she’d shown to his boss. He stared at it forseveral seconds.

“I never madethat,” he said. “Anyone could have made that.”

“Anyone?”Christopher sounded doubtful. “Anyone could have gotten access to parts thatwere specifically associated with the bridge? That were kept on one buildingsite? I imagine that you lock up the site when you’re not working on it? Thatyou try to make sure that people don’t steal from it?”

Wright snortedthen. “Sure, that’s what’smeantto happen at the end of the day, butwith a site like that, it’s hard to really keep it secure, you know? Thescaffolding extends most of the way down to the ground, so if you know whatyou’re doing, you could clamber up all the way into the site to just take whatyou want. There’s meant to be a security guy, but he just watches the front.Things go missing all the time.”

“And nobodynotices?” Paige asked. “If you were working on the brass fittings, wouldn’tyounotice if they started to go missing? Did you report any missing to yourboss?”

“Or did you justtake some to make a pendulum to hang above one of the women you killed?”Christopher finished, still playing the bad cop, putting pressure on Wright.

Wright hunched indefensively, and for a second, Paige thought that he might stop talkingcompletely, but then he seemed to open up again, throwing back his shouldersand squaring up to the two of them, a look of anger on his face as he jabbedhis finger down onto the table.

“I keep tellingyou that I never killed anyone. And I wasn’t going to tell that asshole Willisabout anything missing from his site because… well, because he’s an asshole.Wants to watch over everything, thinks people are out to get him. I hated workingon that job, hated every minute of it. That’s why…”

“That’s why what,Tom?” Paige asked, not letting him get away with trailing off like that again.

“That’s why Istarted up my own business on the side with my girlfriend, ok? Partycoordinators, you know? A town like this, there’s a lot of money around, but ifyou want some of it, you’ve got to have an angle. There are plenty of peopleout there with money who want to party. We’d set up the parties, arrange theentertainment… people would pay us plenty for it. Enough that I was going toquit my job.”

So that was why hewas being cagey about where he’d been and when: he’d mostly been organizingwild parties, probably arranging for most of the drugs that had been there atthe one Paige and Christopher had crashed.

“So yesterday evening,where were you when you disappeared from work?” Paige asked. She still neededto establish if Wright had an alibi.

“I was meeting aguy, getting everything we’d need for the party.”

“The drugs?”Christopher asked.

“I wasn’t about tolet my girlfriend do that alone. It could have been dangerous.” Wright made itsound as if he’d been the height of chivalry, rather than being in the middleof a drug deal. “She can confirm it. She rode in the car.”

She probablywouldn’t be very happy that Wright had just put her at the scene of a drugdeal, but if she confirmed it, then it meant that he had an alibi for the timeof the murder.

Notmuchofan alibi, admittedly. It was possible that his girlfriend would lie for him,and it wasn’t as if their dealer was likely to come forward to corroborate thestory. If they could get some physical evidence to tie Wright to the scene,then it was still possible that this was their guy, and he was just lying tothem to cover for it.

Except that a partof Paige had a hard time believing it. The more she talked to Tom Wright, theless he seemed like the super organized killer they were hunting. He didn’tseem to have the deep well of anger that killer would have either, just ageneral low level resentment towards authority that didn’t feel the samesomehow.

A tap came on theone way glass. Sheriff May obviously wanted to get their attention.

Paige andChristopher stepped out, both to see what it was and to see if giving Wrightsome more time would get anything further out of him.

“We found Wright’swork gloves,” Sheriff May said. “There’s only one problem: they’re of acompletely different type than the fibers the coroner found. Those fibers wereleather, but Wright’s gloves are a synthetic with a Kevlar weave forprotection. Worse, I checked, and they’re standard issue gloves on that site.”

“And there weren’tany other gloves around Wright’s home?” Christopher asked.

The sheriff shookher head.

Paige could feel avery familiar sense of disappointment rising in her at that. It was thedisappointment that came when a lead didn’t pan out, the frustration of havingspent time chasing something that looked promising, only for it to leadnowhere. They’d taken time to speak to Mr. Willis, then to track down TomWright, and hadn’t found their killer.

That meant thatthe real killer was still out there, possibly getting ready to murder anotherwoman underneath a pendulum, and Paige had no idea how to stop it fromhappening.

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