Again, I digress.
Presently, Jackson hemmed and hawed, heaved a giant sigh, and finally answered my question. “I didn’t see much. We heard them coming out of the bakery’s front door when that bell jingled again. Boone was around the side of the building from where I was, but he wasn’t near the entrance. We took off, running like hell for the front door, but it was too late. We saw two figures enter the north forest line and we gave chase. But that’s when we found Elena.”
“Elena was—”
“Wait—” I lifted my hand to interrupt Billy. “Wait, before we get to Elena, are you sure you saw two people?”
“There were definitely two of them, Boone will back me up on that. A woman and a man.”
“Is that why you and Boone were on high alert when you came into the kitchen?”
Jackson gave me a tight-lipped—some might even call it apologetic—smile. “Yeah, sorry about that. You kinda fit the description of what we could see. A woman and a man, about y’all’s height and build.”
I lifted my chin, both acknowledging and absorbing this information. Damn.
“May I ask about Elena now?” Billy looked to me. I shrugged, having no idea of Elena’s whereabouts when she was found. “So Elena was the body in the woods?”
“Yep. She was unconscious. I tripped over her, went flying, tore my suit.” Jackson laughed lightly. “Anyway, important part is, whoever ran out of the bakery, they got away from us. Boone didn’t know what had happened when I tripped, thought I’d done myself harm, so he came back, and they were long gone. I then called my dad, let him know about Elena.”
“I think I was with your dad then, in the parking lot.” Billy pointed at me with his thumb. “Right after you hung up with me, delaying the sheriff from meeting Jackson and Boone in the woods. He heard my call with Cletus. After that, he left me with—uh—with Kip’s car and went to find you in the forest.”
Good thing Billy hadn’t been asked to accompany the sheriff into the forest, he’d likely still be in there wandering around, seeing as how he could get lost in a rose garden with three bushes.
“Yes, but my dad called me after he left you in the parking lot, on his way to meet us. He told Boone and I to go back to the bakery. He was the one who stayed with Elena while we went—going in through the front door this time—for Cletus and Jenn.”
“Why didn’t he just go to the bakery himself? I’d asked for him to come meet us, not y’all.” I crossed my arms, not understanding the sheriff’s motives.
Jackson gave me a very small smile without humor. “Do I know? My father does what he thinks makes sense.”
“My guess is that he wanted to be with Elena when she woke up.” Billy scratched his cheek through his beard. “If she woke up, he wanted to be the one with her, to get answers, while she was still disoriented and would answer honestly. That’d be my guess.”
“Seems like a sneaky thing to do.” I stroked my beard, nodding my appreciation for the sheriff’s tactics, if that had indeed been his aim.
“More like shrewd, Cletus,” Billy corrected. “The sheriff isn’t sneaky, and he isn’t a fool.”
“No. He is not a fool. . .” I agreed, hiding a spike of alarm. If Jenn’s momma had been involved in her ex’s death, Sheriff James would find out.
“But listen.” Jackson glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice, pulling me out of my maudlin thoughts. “That’s the timeline, yes. But what folks don’t know yet is that when I found Kip in the car, he had a thick wire or a kind of metal rope around his neck. I had to nudge it out of the way to check for a pulse.”
“Like a chain?” I asked.
“No. No, it was a heavy rope. Hard to explain without showing you.”
“So . . .” Billy’s confused stare swung from Jackson, to me, and then back to the deputy. “He wasn’t shot?”
“No. He was definitely shot. Like I said, there was a lot of blood. But it looks like he was also strangled in his seat.”
“Before or after he was shot?” Billy asked inanely. He was having trouble keeping up, and so was I, not because we were dumb, but because none of this made a lick of sense.
The man had been strangled and shot? Which had Diane done? Not the shooting, I was sure of that. Plus, shooting someone usually didn’t require a rinse off in the kitchen sink. Strangling someone didn’t require a wash off in the kitchen sink either.
I was all muddled. What had Repo and Diane been doing in the kitchen? Why did she have blood on her hands?
“Someone strangled him first . . .” I spoke stream of consciousness, working through how it must’ve happened. “Whoever it was, they left the rope.”
“Why would they leave the rope?” Jackson asked the question like this detail bothered him. “Rope is evidence. Why leave evidence?”
“Maybe whoever strangled him was in a hurry?” Billy proposed.
“Or the shooter came up to the car and the person who was doing the strangling hid in the back seat, caught unawares mid-strangle? Before they could remove the rope. The shooter blasts out the window, puts two bullets in Kip, and then leaves. Meanwhile, the strangler—as I said, caught unawares—gets the hell out of there, forgetting to take the rope,” I postulated.
“Unless the strangler and shooter were working together?” Jackson made a face like he found all this thinking too strenuous for his meager brain.
I made a face. “Then they would’ve taken the rope, right? And why strangle and shoot someone? One or the other is plenty.”
“Okay, yeah. That’s what I was thinking too.” Jackson nodded with vigor. “And there’s more.”
“More?” Billy and I asked in unison.
“Yep. I just left the parking lot to come find y’all. My father called in a team from Knoxville to handle the crime scene. Sorry for keeping everyone so long, but the Knoxville crew took forever to get here. We’re not prepared for this kind of mess, don’t have that kind of expertise or all the right equipment. The only dead bodies we find up here are motorcycle gang casualties, not former high school principals.”
“What’d they find?” Billy leaned in.
“They don’t know which killed him yet, the rope or the gun. But they did find handprints—bloody ones—on his cheek, chest, and the outside of the car.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, because I had no theories.
“The investigator thinks someone, for whatever reason, opened the door after Mr. Sylvester was shot. They touched him where he was bleeding, touched his face. But the car door was closed when we showed up, so they must’ve closed the door after.”
I shook my head. “Why would someone . . .” Oh!
Diane.
Damnation and all the demons in hell! She’d touched him. I dropped my chin to my chest as though tired, but in reality I needed to hide my face so I could think.
Diane touched Kip. That’s why she’d been in the bakery kitchen. That’s why she’d washed her hands in the sink while Repo was searching the cabinets. Maybe he was looking for a towel to dry off her hands?
I pushed the irrelevant suspicion away. It didn’t matter if he was looking for a towel or dinosaur bones. What mattered was that Diane had touched Kip after he died.