“Bottled or tap?”
“Tap. I filled his glass myself, from the spigot behind the bar.”
“Ice?”
“Yes, from the bucket behind the bar.”
“Any left?”
“I threw it in the bar sink at the end of the night.”
Flynn scribbled furiously. Binder must have noticed my puckered brow. “Don’t worry. We’re doing this out of an abundance of caution. And I might as well warn you, when the techs come back to get the soup and the bourbon, they’ll be searching through the rest of the food as well.”
“Looking for poison?”
“Looking for a syringe. Gus found the victim alone, with no sign of a needle. If he injected himself, it’s possible he hid it in one of the pots, even buried in Gus’s hot dogs before he lost consciousness.”
“Do you think that’s what happened? He killed himself accidentally in Gus’s walk-in?”
“Or his killer could have hidden the needle in the food.”
“Oh.” That scenario depressed me even more than the first one.
“Either way, if we find the syringe, we’ll know a lot more about the manner and means of his death. So I hope we do.”
There was a sharp knock at the kitchen door. When Binder opened it, Jamie stood outside. Binder leaned toward him and they held a whispered conversation. Flynn put away his pen and notepad as they spoke.
Binder turned back toward me. “I’m afraid we have to interrupt this again. We’re needed urgently elsewhere. Is there anything else about last night you need to tell us?”
“No?” The word came out as a question, with a rising inflection at the end, because somewhere at the back of my murky, sleep-deprived mind, an unformed thought nagged.
Chapter 7
Binder and Flynn climbed into a cruiser driven by Officer Howland, who then sped out of Gus’s little parking lot, though he didn’t turn on the siren.
I looked at Jamie, who leaned against the doorjamb. “Want some coffee?” He seemed like he needed it.
“Thanks.”
I thought he might fall asleep where he stood, propped against the doorway. Gus didn’t stock anything as prosaic as a to-go cup. “If you wanted ta go,” he’d say to the unwary inquirer, “whyja come heah in the fust place?” So I brought Jamie black coffee in a heavy ceramic mug.
“For goodness’ sake, come in.”
He looked around the little parking lot. “Okay, just for a minute.”
“You look like I feel.”
He dropped onto a stool at the counter. “You got, what, three hours’ sleep last night?” he asked.
“Four. And I dozed for a while sitting up in a kitchen chair at my mother’s. You?”
He yawned and stretched. “None. And I worked double shifts both Thanksgiving Day and Sunday. I was running on fumes as it was.”
“A double shift on Thanksgiving? Why?”
“Guys have families, Julia.” He said it with a finality that didn’t invite conversation, but I could hear the echoing, unsaid, “And I don’t.”
“I thought you were going to Gina’s family for Thanksgiving?” I’d returned to Busman’s Harbor in March to discover that my old buddy Jamie had a long-simmering crush on me. I only had eyes for Chris, and the situation had gotten a little awkward, compounded by the time in June when he and I drunkenly, mistakenly, kissed. I was thrilled when Gina came on the scene in the fall, because her presence as Jamie’s girlfriend had removed the last remaining tension between us.
“Nope,” Jamie said. “That didn’t work out. And it’s not going to. Long term.”
“I’m sorry.”
He gave a casual whatcha-gonna-do shrug, a guy sloughing off emotion.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You went straight from the accident to the body in the walk-in? Why?” In the off-season, when the part-time employees were cut back, the Busman’s Harbor police force consisted of seven sworn officers, including the chief, as well as a civilian receptionist and a few civilian 911 operators. But even given the size of the off-season force, there should have been better coverage.
“I’d finished what paperwork I could after the accident and was just leaving the station when Gus’s call came in,” Jamie said.
“But why did you answer it?”
He stared down at the counter. “I thought the two cases were related.”
“The accident and the body? Related? How?” I couldn’t imagine. The stranger, whomever he was, was sitting at our bar at the time of the accident. Vee Snugg had told us he’d come to town on the bus. How could a person who didn’t have a car cause an accident at a time when he clearly hadn’t been there, unless he was some sort of a time traveler?
“I’m going to tell you something, Julia, but you have to keep it to yourself. It’s unofficial. I mean it. You can’t tell your sister or your mother. Not even Chris.”