Now everybody groaned. Ben booed and cupped his hands over his mouth when he called, “Cut to the chase!”
“Everybody calm your tits!” Leda commanded. “I’m getting there, but the answer won’t make any sense unless I explain how I got there, okay? And Grady’s the only one who knows the whole story, so I’ll have to set the scene for the rest of you.”
Before anyone could argue, she quickly said, “For most of my life, this whole clairvoyant thing has been really hit-and-miss. I spent a lot of time making incorrect predictions based on my psychic flashes, or that’s what I thought. What was actually happening was that I was drawing the wrong conclusions from the right information. I was bad at sorting out the signal from the noise. Singing here at Castaways has helped a lot with that, so thank you, Ben—and Matt, and everybody else who’s been making that possible over the last few months.”
Tiffany led the tiny crowd in another small fit of applause.
When it died down, Leda said, “Even so, I’ve been generating a lot of useless hits for poor Grady over there when it comes to the case of the murdered Gilmans. I was pinging hard on things like the name Scott, and a piano at the Beckmeyers’ place. I had no idea what any of it meant, but I knew it was important. My point is, I knew I was right, but I didn’t know what I was right about. I was thinking about it all wrong—trying to tie each little piece of info to some specific theory, when in fact, I needed to take all the small weird things as a whole and look at them that way. It’s like I’ve been playing a game of Password with myself.”
Niki frowned. “I don’t get it. I want to get it, but I don’t.”
“Let me try this from another angle.” Leda turned her attention to the murder board. “Let me walk you through what really happened, starting with Tod Sandoval and Amanda Crombie.”
“You can do that?” asked Matt.
She steeled herself, assuming her best teacher pose. “Well, I’m going to try. Some of this is stuff I know from psychic visions, some of this is stuff I figured out from the clues at hand. Some of this, I’m pulling directly out of my ass. Let the record reflect that I never said otherwise.” She stabbed her laser pointer at the left-hand column of index cards. “Now, here goes: Tod and Amanda didn’t meet until a few minutes right before they died, we know that much. We also know that they met at a gas station a little east of town. Here’s what I think happened next… cobbled together via psychic flashes and good ol’ intuition. And I know, I know. Some of this is speculation, but I’m asking you all to play along, okay? Hear me out: Tod had just filled up his car when he heard someone calling for help in a loud whisper—it was Amanda, hanging out just outside the service station lights. She didn’t want to be seen, because she knew she was being followed. She’d been run off the road nearby and attacked by a strange man—but she’d escaped, and now she was hiding and trying to get help.”
Matt was on a question-asking roll. He raised his hand and didn’t wait for Leda to call on him. “Why wouldn’t she take a chance, sprint inside, and ask the desk person to call the cops?”
Leda pointed the laser at his sternum. “I don’t have the faintest idea.”
“Actually, I do,” Grady said. “She’d lost her glasses. She was really, really nearsighted, and she couldn’t be sure that the assailant wasn’t right behind her or looking for her around the gas station. She couldn’t even be sure that she wouldn’t accidentally ask him for help.”
“Good to know. At any rate, she picked Tod. She asked him for help, and of course, he tried to help. He was Tod. He always tried to help.” Leda’s voice hitched, but she was on a roll and she couldn’t stop now. She swallowed and kept going. “He offered her a ride, but they didn’t get very far. He ran off the road and crashed into the guardrail near the lake, and maybe he was stunned—maybe he thought he’d blown a tire and got out to check.”
Tiffany raised her hand. “Why did he run off the road?”
“I can’t say for certain, but I can guess: The killer saw Amanda get into Tod’s car, so he followed them. He’d already run Amanda off the road, and he figured he could do it again. He could’ve flashed his high beams…” Her voice wobbled. The high beams. The brilliant white light behind her eyes.
“It wasn’t just an ocular migraine,” she marveled aloud. “It was the high beams.” Several hands went up, but she waved them all away. “Never mind. One way or another, Tod and Amanda were both out of the car. Tod tried to be a hero, and it didn’t go well for him. Amanda didn’t get very far on foot without her glasses. When they were both dead, the killer stuffed Tod into the car and pushed it into the water.”
Grady’s hand shot up. “Why did he leave Amanda’s body in the culvert? Why not stick her into the car, too?”
“I have no idea,” said Leda. “I never touched or saw anything of Amanda’s, and I don’t have that connection to her experience. But if you forced me to guess, it was probably just because it was easier. If he shot Tod near the car, all he had to do was stuff Tod into the car—and get rid of two birds with one stone. If Amanda made it far enough away that it’d be hard to haul her back, then he might as well stash her someplace close at hand.”
The detective nodded. “You have a point. He could’ve tipped her in almost anywhere. But we still don’t know why she was the target in the first place.”
Leda waved her laser around one of Amanda’s index cards. “She was an accountant. She found evidence of embezzlement.”
“Another connection between the two cases,” Grady observed. “Amanda caught someone skimming from Probable Outcomes, just like our Gilman killer was caught doing the same.”
“Correct. It turns out that stealing money is like any other crime: If you’ve gotten away with it once, you can do it again. And the same goes for murder. After Tod and Amanda, our villain just kept on thieving. Which brings us over here, to”—she waved her pointer at the right-hand column—“Christopher and Kevin Gilman. And Janette Copeland,” she added—indicating one of her freshly written cards. “All murdered by the same dude. I’m not even sure he killed Tod on purpose, but once he’d knocked off one person… taking out a few more didn’t seem like such a stretch to him.”
Leda took a step back and stood to the side of board. “Now, let us consider the Gilmans. Christopher may have been a real dick, but he wasn’t stupid—and when one of his newer employees began stealing from Digital Scaffolding, he took notice… but he didn’t blow the whistle.”
Tiffany, who had not been privy to the whole case thus far, raised her hand and asked: “Why not?”
Leda said, “Allow me to refer you to this card.” She pointed at one that read, in its entirety, Christopher Gilman: dick. “Chris was a jerk and an opportunist. He realized that he had dirt on the thief. With this information, he could use this dirt to manipulate the thief into doing even worse, grosser things than skimming a little cash. Things like…” She swirled the red dot around a card that read Richard Beckmeyer: frame-up victim.