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“I have. You locked up the wrong man. Wolf Langdon didn’t kill Dany.”

There were gasps of shock around her hospital bed. In a corner of the room, four cats also stirred. The nurses, understanding Odelia wasn’t going to part with her cats, even though they didn’t agree, had brought in blankets, bowls of food and water, and even a litter box. It was an unusual arrangement, but Tex had talked to the head nurse, and had convinced her it would help Odelia enormously in her recovery, and she’d grudgingly agreed.

“How do you know?” asked Chase, reluctant to let go of his main suspect.

“Remember how I mentioned Ringo?”

“The mysterious witness,” said Chase, shuffling uncomfortably in his chair.

“Ringo said he saw the murder, and led me to a second witness. Her name is Rita. And she said the thing that made the killer stand out was an owl-shaped mole on the back of his hand. I checked pictures of Wolf’s right hand. He has a mole, but it’s not owl-shaped.”

She held up her phone, and showed a close-up of Wolf’s mole to the others.

“It’s more, like, pear-shaped,” Marge said.

“Pear-shaped, owl-shaped. Who cares?” said Chase. “The guy did it. He had the parka still hanging in his closet. You saw it yourself!”

“That’s what I thought, until a man came to visit me earlier, and he does have an owl-shaped mole on his hand. Conway Kemp.”

“Wolf’s business partner? Why would he kill Dany?”

“I’ve talked to several crew members this afternoon—I have nothing better to do while I’m laid up here anyway.”

“Honey, you’re supposed to rest, not conduct a murder investigation over the phone,” said her dad.

“I know, but an innocent man is in jail, and the real killer is walking around a free man. What do you expect me to do? Besides, I feel fine,” she added waving away her dad’s tut-tutting. “The thing is, Conway was madly in love with Dany.”

“How do you know?” asked Chase, who was proving hardest to convince.

“Several people said he’d been making advances towards her ever since production started. He’s the one who discovered her, not Wolf. And apparently Con had this crazy idea of taking her to the top as her husband-manager. She fell for Wolf, though, and wasn’t interested in Con. He kept showering her with gifts, though, and asking her out, and she kept turning him down. I think he must have lost it yesterday, after she turned him down yet again. He stabbed her in a fit of rage and left the yellow parka in Wolf’s closet to frame him.”

“But we found that parka by accident. Nobody told us where to find it,” said Chase.

“I’m pretty sure Con would have put in an anonymous call to put us onto the parka. Only we beat him to it, which made things work out even better than he’d expected.”

“This is all conjecture,” Chase pointed out. “For one thing, who are these witnesses? This Ringo and this Rita? Are you going to produce them so they can testify in court?”

“We need to extract a confession from Conway Kemp,” said Uncle Alec.

“We’d have to arrest him first. And on what grounds? The word of two witnesses who won’t come forward? A mole on his hand?” Chase shook his head. “This is ridiculous. Odelia, honey, I’ve gone along with this as far as I can, but you’re just grasping at straws.”

“I’m not crazy, Chase. Conway killed Dany. I just know he did,” she said.

Chase was looking at her as if this bump on her head had messed with her sanity, and she hated it.

“I’m not going to arrest a man based on some flimsy ‘evidence,’” said Chase. “We have a solid case against Langdon and I’m sure the judge will agree with me on that. How about you, Chief?”

Uncle Alec was in a tough spot. Either he sided with his niece, on the basis of evidence he would never be able to bring into court, or he sided with his lead detective, knowing he was dead wrong. Either way, he would be criticized.

“I think—” he began.

But he was interrupted by some type of loud commotion outside.

He got up, and so did the others, and moved over to the window.

Underneath Odelia’s window, on the hospital parking lot, Gran was holding up a sign that read, ‘Justice for the Pooles. Arrest the Yellow Parka Gang Now!’

“End police incompetence!” she yelled when she caught sight of her son. “Put our tax dollars to work now!”

Chapter 40

Conway Kemp was in a lousy mood. He’d offered the part of Mary Poppins to that Odelia Poole and she still hadn’t gotten back to him. He didn’t get it. Any other actor would have jumped at the chance to accept a plum part like that, potentially launching her career, and this woman preferred to stay buried in this small town andwork as a stupid reporter?

Women. One was even dumber than the next.

It was late already, and he passed by the dining room on his way to the small theater Marcia Graydon had installed in the basement. He’d gotten a text from Marisa, one of the interns helping out in the script department, to meet him down in the theater. She had something urgent she needed to discuss with him that couldn’t wait.