“He’d like to see me.”
“Why?”
“To talk, he says. He wants to meet me at the sheriff’s office.” Her eyes rose and she glanced at O’Neil and then Harutyun. “He also asked if I had a pleasant night.”
Harutyun exhaled in surprise. “That man is something else.”
She texted back that she’d meet him at nine.
He replied: Good. Look forward to spending some alone time with you, Agent Dance.
Chapter 46
AT NINE ON the dot Kathryn Dance met with Edwin Sharp in an apparently little-used office in the FMCSO, not an interrogation room. No intimidating decor, no mirrors.
The location was Dance’s idea; to put Edwin at ease, though it wasn’t exactly comfy. The room was windowless and featured a gray battered desk, propped up by books where a leg was missing, a trio of dusty dead plants and stacks of boxes containing files. On the walls were a half dozen bleached pictures of a family vacation at a lake, circa 1980.
The imposing man entered ahead of her and sat, slumping in the chair and regarding her with amused, curious eyes. She noted again his outsized arms, hands and eyebrows. He was wearing a plaid shirt, tight jeans and a thick belt with a large silver buckle, an accessory that somehow had come to be a stereotypical element of cowboyness, though she wondered if anyone had ever really worn one on the plains of Kansas or West Texas in the 1800s.
His boots, with pointed toes tipped in metal, were scuffed but looked expensive.
“You mind if I take notes?” she asked.
“Not at all. You can even record this.” He looked around the room as if he knew they were doing just that; Dance wasn’t obligated to tell him, since they’d gotten a magistrate’s okay, given that he was a suspect in the murders.
Dance remained placid but was troubled by his perception, or intuition. And his utterly calm demeanor. That false wisp of a smile added to the eeriness.
“Any time you want to take a break for some coffee or a smoke, you just let me know.”
“I stay away from coffee,” he said and gave no reaction to the other offer. Was he being coy? Dance had been fishing to find out about his current smoking habit. But whether he’d outmaneuvered her or just hadn’t thought to refer to the vice didn’t matter; she’d raised the issue once and couldn’t bring it up again without giving something away—as Madigan had done throughout the first interview.
He then surprised her further by asking casually, “How long’ve you been in law enforcement, Agent Dance?”
Just the sort of question she herself would ask early in an interview to establish a baseline for kinesic analysis.
“For some time now. But please call me Kathryn. Now, what can I do for you?”
He smiled knowingly as if he had expected such a deflecting answer. “‘Some time.’ Ah. You seem seasoned. That’s good. Oh, and you can call me Edwin.”
“All right, Edwin.”
“You enjoying Fresno?”
“I am.”
“Little different from Monterey, isn’t it?”
Dance wasn’t surprised that she herself had been the subject of Edwin’s own investigation. Though she wondered how far his knowledge of her life extended.
He continued, “It’s pretty there. I don’t like the fog much. Do you live near the water?”
“So, what can I do for you, Edwin?”
“You’re busy, I know. Let’s get to the nut of it. That was an expression of my mother’s. I thought it was about squirrels, hiding nuts. I never did find out what it meant. She had all sorts of great expressions. She was quite a woman.” His eyes scanned her face, dipped to her chest and belly, though not in a lascivious way, then back to her eyes. “I wanted to talk to you because you’re smart.”
“Smart?”
“I wanted to talk to somebody involved in this situation who’s smart.”
“There’re a lot of good people here, on the sheriff’s office staff.” She waved her arm, wondering if he’d follow the gesture. He didn’t. He continued to study her intently, soaking up images.
And that smile …
“Nobody as smart as you. That’s a fact and a half. And the other thing is you don’t have an agenda.” He grimaced and his brows furrowed even more. “Don’t you hate phrases like that? ‘Having an agenda.’ ‘Sending messages.’ ‘Drinking the Kool-Aid.’ Clichés. I regret saying that about the agenda. Sorry. Put it another way: You’ll stay focused on the truth. You won’t let your … let’s say ‘patriotism’ for Kayleigh mess up your judgment, like’s happened with the deputies here.”
She noted he was articulate, which she recalled was true of his emails as well. Most erotomanic or love-obsessional stalkers were above average in intelligence and education, though Edwin seemed smarter than most. Lord knew, if he was behind the killings, he was clever. This, of course, had nothing to do with a completely skewed sense of reality—like believing Kayleigh would actually be touched that he’d murdered her stepmother or a file sharer stealing her songs.
He continued, “Officers here, they won’t listen to me. End. Of. Story.”
“Well, I’ll be happy to hear what you have to say.”
“Thanks, Kathryn. Basically, it’s real simple. I didn’t kill Bobby Prescott. I don’t believe in file sharing but I wouldn’t kill anybody because they did it. And I didn’t attack Sheri Towne.”
He would have learned about the second and third attacks in the press. And she noted that he didn’t say, “or anyone with her.” The stories had not reported Dance’s own presence at the incident involving Sheri.
“You tell me that, Edwin. But everyone I interview denies the crime, even when we have them dead to rights—”
“Hey! Another expression of my mother’s.”