"Why did he take my picture? It's creepy." It made me sick to the stomach to think about what he might do with my photo. I was still in my coat, but I shivered as if I was standing outside in the cold.

  Marc answered, "I don't know. I admit it was weird even for him."

  "Just tell me I don't have to see him again."

  "You won't. I'm going to have a real long conversation Stitch about what happened here today. He calls you or comes anywhere near, you call me. There are a lot of folks in the district attorney’s office who would love to see his license snatched. I’ve got enough on Stitch to make that happen."

  Pushing my ears between my shoulders and shivering in disgust, I groaned. "Was he really the only person that would give me a bond?"

  "On short notice and with your shaky history? Yes. I swear, he's never flaked like this before."

  Darlene was stalled in the doorway. She held her hands out and looked from Marc to Vinny. "What just happened?"

  Vinny made a b-line for her. "Nothing, babe." He curled his arms around her and started guiding her out of Marc’s office.

  "Hold on," Marc stretched a hand out to them. To me he asked, "Have you eaten yet?"

  "I'm not hungry.” Any appetite I had dried up when I met Stitch Ramirez.

  Ignoring me, he turned to Darlene and asked, "Do you mind ordering lunch for us?"

  "Oh, sure," she called over her shoulder. "Not a problem." Shaking her head as she moved through the door, she mused, "Just another crazy day at Jacobs Legal Associates."

  Marc settled me at the conference table then snatched Ramirez's soda of the table and threw it in the trash. "Okay, Vinny found some interesting stuff on Fred."

  “This is what you wanted me to stick around to discuss?” I asked, checking my watch. It not that I wasn’t interested in what Marc might say but I had a business to run.

  "I actually hit the jackpot," Vinny said, sounding proud. He made a fist and wiggled his hand back and forth like he was about to throw dice.

  Instead of taking his place at the head of the table, Marc sat beside me. Right on top of me would be a better description. His arm was slung across the back of my chair, his body was angled toward me. He nodded quickly in Vinny's direction signaling him to start talking.

  "What do you want me to start with - the stuff I found on Fred Guthrie, or the stuff I found on her."

  It was an innocent question, but the implication was enormous. My eyes swung in Marc's direction. "Me?" I startled. "You researched me?"

  Marc slid an annoyed look in Vinny's direction. I felt him tense. "Just tell her about Fred.”

  "No, wait," I said, holding out my hand to halt Vinny. The slip didn't pass me so easily. "Did you look up my background?"

  On cue, Vinny piped up, his mistake written all over his face. "Okay, yeah, so Fred Guthrie had a rap sheet as long as my arm. He was in trouble from the time he was fifteen - everything from grand theft to money laundering."

  My pulse hadn't stopped racing and I felt the veins in my throat throbbing as I kept my eyes glued to Marc. My past was off limits. "I told you not to check on me." Now I understood why he sat so close. His hand was slung across my chair in a protective gesture, but it really was to keep me from pushing my seat back and running as I done once before.

  "Calista, please, you need to listen." To Vinny he urged, "Tell her the rest." A pinched expression crossed his face.

  "In 1993, Fred Guthrie was convicted for a series of home invasions."

  That got my attention.

  "Eleven of them in Estonia, Minnesota. Four of the invasions occurred when the owners were home. All the victims were female. Guthrie served seven years for those break-ins."

  Vindication.

  "That's proof.” I said. “It explains what he was doing in my house that night. Have you told the police about what you found?”

  "Hang on, there's more," Vinny said. The house next yours was owned by Guthrie's mother. Guthrie's sister, Alice, inherited the house after the mother died. Fred was thrown out of the family home over twenty-years ago. His sister hasn't seen him since. She was placed in an assisted living facility about three years ago. Alice thought she’d be able to return home after a few months. That’s unlikely. Her mind is sharp, but her body is wasting away. She’s kept the utilities going. Paid the taxes. Paid a lawn care company to cut the grass. She even paid for a cleaning company to tidy up around the place once a month. She's kept it going just like she was living there. Yet, in three years she never laid an eye on her own place."

  "So, she didn’t even know her brother was living there," I said.

  "Exactly," Vinny said.

  Marc nodded. "I remember my grandmother saying something about the house being vacant at one point, but Fred was in the house when I moved back to the neighborhood. I didn't question it. Like everyone else, I just assumed he was some sweet old guy. He spent his days wandering the neighborhood. No one said he was senile, but I'd say it’s a normal reaction when you see someone like Fred mumbling to himself. I think your assessment was right, Fred was pretending the whole time."

  “Have there been other break-ins in our neighborhood? You know, like mine.”

  “The short answer is yes. We’ll get to that in a sec.” Marc said.

  Finally, someone understood what I had believed all this time; Fred Guthrie was gaming all of us. He’d been running a con right under our noses.

  “Guthrie had just been released from prison a few months before he broke into his mother's home. Now, for the good stuff." Vinny's fingers flew across his laptop. He spun it around for me to see. "This is from Washington State."

  I pulled the computer close and read the caption from the Snohomish Examiner. "A fifty-two-year old man was arrested in connection with an attempted sexual assault. The lump that formed in my throat made it tough to breathe. I managed to squeeze out the words, "Sexual assault?"

  "Read the name," Vinny insisted.

  "Fredrick R. Guthrie, was arrested on suspicion of the attempted sexual assault of a Northwest Indian College freshman." I was stunned.

  "Yeah," Vinny said, sounding dour.

  "Was he convicted?"

  "No, but that was the third time he was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault. The thing is," Vinny shot a glance in Marc's direction, "each time Guthrie was under suspicion for sexual assault, it coincided with an uptick in home invasions against single women in the same vicinity. Each time, he moved to another town. I researched complaints in a five-mile radius around your home. There have been over nine break-ins within the last sixteen months. Three of the victims are single women. Three complaints of sexual assault but none of the victims could describe the assailant." Vinny lowered his head as if uncomfortable with the rest of the news. "Two of the sexual assaults occurred when the victims were bathing. Both women said a man stepped into the doorway and leered at them. One woman says he pulled her out of the tub and raped her. The other fought hard enough to make him run.” Vinny pressed his lips together for a moment, “Most of his victims claim that the assailant wore a dark mask. They didn’t see a face. Still, they described a tall, thin man with a raspy voice. That description is consistent with the other women who were assaulted. I never got close enough to that old man to hear him speak, but he'd be a match for the rest. I have a friend on the police force. Four weeks before Guthrie was killed, there was a home invasion a few blocks away from you guys. A woman claimed that a man stepped into the doorway of her bedroom while she was getting dressed. She’d called the cops a few days before that convinced someone had been inside her house. Nothing had been taken, but she’d discovered that the lock on her back door was broken and things seemed to be out of place."

  “Just like me.”

  “Yeah,” Vinny said. “She told the cops that the man who broke in tried to grope her. They started tussling.”

  I leaned forward to hear the man’s description.

  Marc explained what the woman saw. “The victim said the man who assaulted her was old – maybe in his seventies, tall, thin and his voice was raspy.”

  “Guthrie,” I sighed. He hadn’t been as old as he appeared, but that description was a hit and shock inside thinking about the horrible things that could have happened if I hadn’t chased the man out of my house.

  Vinny quieted, pursed his lips and stared at his computer. After a moment, the silence became uncomfortable.

  Marc cleared his throat and said, "Go ahead. Tell her."

  Pinching his bottom lip, Vinny nodded first then raised his eyes to me. "Fred Guthrie served four years for attempted murder. He and two of his buddies had been robbing warehouses in Albuquerque. Guthrie was responsible for finding the right locations and then turning merchandise into cash after the job was done. One of his partners accused him of cheating. Guthrie split his old friend's head open with a lead pipe. Sound familiar?"

  Of course, it did. Guthrie gets convicted for bludgeoning a friend, then ends up being victimized the exact same way years later.

  Laying his arm on the edge of the table, Marc said, "I plan to use Guthrie's past as your defense. Everything you described the night he broke in fits with Guthrie's criminal history."

  Marc inched closer, but I didn't find it comforting. "Kind of makes me a stronger suspect. Don't you think? The cops could spin this to look as if I went after Fred out of spite."

  "I spin with the best of them," he said. "And I think this makes you look like a victim." He laid his hand on top of my shoulder, but I shifted away from his touch. I asked Vinny, "Can we get into Fred's house?"

  "Not right now."

  "For what?" Marc asked.

  "I just want to see if the house is laid out the same as mine, that's all." Vinny squinted, looking perplexed by the question.

  Marc knew where I was going. "There some odd things about Calista's house. You have to move through the place carefully the first few times until you're familiar with the layout. Fred wouldn't have been able to go in-and-out so easily. Either he'd been there before, or his house is structured the same as hers."

  “I think Guthrie broke into my house before the night he found me in the bath and I think he came back after. There are things missing, namely the rolling pin that I chased him off with. He wasn’t finished getting up to his mischief, so he took the rolling pin. It became a convenient weapon for whomever killed him,” I said, speculating on how the whole thing must have occurred. "What about the neighbors? Can't we talk to Ms. Douglas? She's the one who accused me of killing Fred." I was annoyed, and it showed in my voice. "I want to know why she thought of me first."

  Vinny looked at Marc, and asked, "Can I tell her?"

  Marc hadn't missed my sudden coldness toward him. Sounding stilted, he shrugged, "Yeah, sure."

  "We already talked to Ms. Douglas. Says she overreacted. She was outside and heard two of the cops talking. One said something about a red rolling pin and that Fred had been beaten to death. She saw you threaten Fred. Saw you run out the house holding that pin and threaten to hurt the old man, so it seemed a natural progression to her at the time that you’d followed through on your word.”

  "I didn’t threaten," I corrected. "I only grabbed the rolling pin out of fear. I never said I'd hurt him with it."

  He nodded, "Just the same, after things settled down, Ms. Douglas says she remembered a few things about Guthrie. A couple of months ago, she found him sitting in her den. She figured he just lost his way and didn't think anything about it until now."

  "Wait," I leaned across the table. "She caught Fred in her house. Why didn't she say anything before now!" The night I chased Fred out of my house, she insisted that it was impossible for him to break into my house. She told me that I was mistaken. I could see the old woman's face in my mind as clear as day. The way she'd fixed me with that disappointed gaze. The way she'd negated me when I told Marc and Landry what Fred had done.

  "She says stuff was kind of tossed around on the floor beside the chair where she found Fred," Vinny said.

  “Stuff?”

  “Papers. Personal documents that she kept in her den. Newspapers. Magazines.”

  “Hold on! She found a strange man in her house with her personal documents and she didn’t think that was strange?” I shouted.

  “Guthrie wasn’t a stranger. As far as Ms. Douglas knows, he was a neighbor who was afflicted with memory challenges. He’s locked himself out of his house before and he’s walked into the wrong house a time or two. So, no, she didn’t question it. The mess of papers just seemed a …” he struggled to find a word, “mistake. Ms. Douglas says that Guthrie thought he was home and she claims that he kept saying something about finding his wife’s birth certificate.”

  “Wife? It was the first I’d ever heard about Fred Guthrie being married.”

  “Yeah,” Marc seemed to dismiss the notion. “The guy was a con. There’s no record of a marriage that we can find. It was probably some crap he came up with on the spot to distract Ms. Douglas. She didn’t take him seriously. As far as she’s concerned Fred Guthrie was confused about everything. She just walked him back to his house."

  "How does she account for how he got in?"

  "At the time, Ms. Douglas thought she’d forgotten to lock her front door. As far as we know, she still thinks that it was just a big mistake.”

  “We didn’t tell Ms. Douglas about our suspicions,” Vinny added.

  "Will she vouch for me?" I asked. "I mean, she got me into this mess. She can help get me out."

  Marc scratched the nape of his neck distractedly. "We're working on that."

  Still, angry, I found a spot above Vinny's head to stare at while I spoke to Marc. What does that mean?"

  "She feels like she's done enough damage. Doesn't want to get involved."

  I was at a loss for words. The woman had fingered me as a murderer. My life hung in the balance, but she didn't want to get involved. A guttural sound came from deep in my throat.

  "We'll keep working on her," Vinny said, stretching a palm toward me. "We’ve dealt with reluctant witnesses before. She's embarrassed. She made a snap judgement and told the police that you killed Fred. She's lived in that neighborhood for a long time and she knows a lot of people. Folks trust her. Now she has to retract everything.”

  "What if she refuses to talk to the authorities?"

  "Then I'll subpoena her," Marc said.

  I felt myself go limp. A subpoena meant more time. It meant this mess would continue to drag out. It meant more people scratching into my past. And, it meant that my time in Centre City was most assuredly coming to an end. No way was I going to stay around while my neighbor worked on her conscious.

  Vinny checked his watch. "One more thing," he said, drawing my focus again. "Ms. Douglas claims that a social security check had arrived in the mail the day before she found Fred in her house. Afterwards, she couldn't find it."

  I shrugged. "Doesn't mean anything. Maybe he stole it. Maybe she lost it." When I first walked into Marc's office, that kind of news would have left me feeling hopeful. Now it barely registered. "How much longer is all this going to take?" I asked once again shrugging away Marc’s touch. Before I did, I wanted to hear what information they’d scooped up on me. “I need to get back to the bakery.”

  Marc rubbed his hands together as he considered my question. "A few more weeks to resolve the assault and arrest charge. The suspicion of murder - maybe just a matter of days."

  "Weeks? Day?" The news was disappointing. I studied the finish on the table as I thought about my options. I wanted a clean break. I'd been running away from a very big problem for three years. I didn't need the cops or Simon Ramirez in pursuit as well which meant that I needed to stay here until my troubles were resolved. But every day in Centre City, every probe into my background was like a nail hammered into my coffin.

  I looked up to find Marc and Vinny watching me.

  Vinny lifted his brow apologetically. "That's all I have for now."

  "No, that's not all." I said. Finally, I turned to Marc, fury pulsating off me. "What exactly did you find on me?"

  Vinny's eyes widened. His gaze ping-ponged between us.

  "Why don't you check on lunch," Marc suggested to him.

  "I'm not eating," I said. "I just want to know what you found."

  Marc waved Vinny along. "Give us a minute."

  "Are you serious?" I seethed. "You dug into my background but won't even tell me what you found?"

  Vinny grabbed his laptop and made for the door. "I'll be in my office if you need me," he called over his shoulder, hustling out of the room.

  Snatching my gloves off the table, I started after him. "Fine. Don't tell me. Who believes a man named "Onion, anyway"? I fumed.

  Marc hustled toward the door cutting me off. "Calista, give me a chance to explain."

  Spinning and pointing a finger at his face just as he reached me, I boomed, "You promised."

  "I promised to do everything I could to get you out of trouble."

  "Oh, that's a slick play on words. Very lawyerly of you." So angry, I could barely focus, I shook my head from side-to-side and moved away, then swung back. "Tell me what you found!"

  Taking on a pinched look, he started. "The Calista Singletary who purchased the building where your bakery is housed died six years ago, but the Calista Singletary who filed for a business license is linked to a woman who passed away nineteen years ago."

  "So, what? You already know that I'm using fake identification. Both of those women are dead," I confirmed. "It's not like I'm hurting them."

  "Yeah, well the Calista Singletary who purchased your house died when she was sixteen. The inconsistencies pop up like red flags. If I found them, so will others.”

  "Yeah, thanks to you. I don't want any links between the identities. Did you ever think about that? The inconsistency makes it harder for someone to make a connection to the real me." I pointed to myself then jammed my finger into his chest, which was so hard it felt like I was punching a wall. "Most people stop looking after one hit, satisfied with the information they’ve gathered. It takes effort – time to pull the pieces together the way you have. Only the obsessed have dug this deep into my past. When they do, then curiosity pushes them to start questioning me directly and that’s my clue to disappear. You should have left it all alone," I said.

 

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