before Andy would have died. Obviously, that wasn’t you. It might help if we could find this woman, but we don’t have much to go on—Wade admitted he only saw her from the back, and only for a few seconds, before she entered the office. I’ll question him again, but I doubt he’ll have anything useful to add.”
“Right. Who remembers anything very clearly that happened three years ago?” Lacy sighed.
“I think Andy’s files are the best place for us to start,” Travis said.
“Andy hadn’t been in practice very long,” Lacy said. “Still, he had a couple of big cabinets full of files. Everything was backed up on the computer, too, but he had been trained by a man who liked to keep paper copies of everything, and Andy was the same way. It will take a while to go through everything.”
“We can do a couple of boxes at a time. You could even bring them back here to look through.”
“Do you trust me to look through them by myself?” she asked.
“It would look better in court if we went through them together,” Travis said. “Otherwise, a good defense attorney would point out that you had a strong motive to make people believe someone else murdered Andy. They could suggest you planted evidence in the files.”
She fought against her inclination to bristle at what sounded to her ears like an accusation. After all, she knew all too well how attorneys could twist the most mundane events to make someone look guilty to a jury. “I guess you’re right,” she admitted. She stretched her legs out in front of her. “So how do you want to do this?”
“I’ll get together with Brenda this afternoon and go over to the storage unit with her. I’ll select a couple of boxes to go through first, seal them in her presence, get her to sign off on them, then bring them here. We’ll open them together and start going through the contents. Maybe I’ll even video everything, just in case there’s any question.”
“You’re very thorough.”
“I’m determined not to make any mistakes this time.”
And I’m determined not to let you, she thought.
* * *
ANDY STENSON’S STORAGE unit was located in a long metal shed at the end of Fireline Road on the edge of town. Weedy fields extended beyond the chain-link fence that surrounded the shed on all sides, the land sloping upward from there toward Dakota Ridge and the mountains beyond. With no traffic and no neighbors, the location was peaceful, even beautiful, with the first summer wildflowers blooming in the fields and a china blue sky arching overhead. But there wasn’t anything beautiful about Travis’s errand here today.
Brenda agreed to meet him, and when he pulled into the rutted drive, he found her waiting at the far end, key in hand. “You open it,” she said, pushing the key at him. “I haven’t been in here since before Andy died. I paid a cleaning company to move all his stuff out here.”
“Are you okay being here now?” Travis asked, studying her face. Tension lines fanned out from her mouth, but she didn’t look on the verge of a breakdown.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I just want to get this over with.”
He unfastened the padlock and rolled up the metal door of the unit. Sunlight illuminated jumbled stacks of file boxes. Furniture filled one corner of the unit—several filing cabinets and some chairs and Andy’s desk, scarred and dusty. The chair he had been sitting in when he died, stained with his blood, was in a police storage unit, logged as evidence.
Brenda traced a finger across the dust on the desktop. Was she thinking about her young husband, who had been taken from her when they were still practically newlyweds? She squared her shoulders and turned to study the file boxes. “There’s a lot of stuff here,” she said. “Do you know what you want?”
“I want to look at his case files.” Travis studied the labels on the boxes, then removed the lid from one with the notation Clients, A through C. “I know you said you didn’t know much about his work, but who would you say was his biggest client at the time he died?”
“That one’s easy enough. Hake Development.” She pointed to a box on the bottom of the pile, with the single word HAKE scrawled on the end. “Andy couldn’t believe his luck when Henry Hake hired him instead of one of the big-city firms. Mr. Hake said he wanted to support local business.” She chuckled. “He did that, all right. Hake Development accounted for a big percentage of Andy’s income that year.” Her voice trailed away at these last words, as if she was remembering once more the reason the good fortune had ended.
“All right, I’ll start with this one.” Travis moved aside the stack of boxes to retrieve the Hake files, and found a second box, also marked Hake, behind it.
He set the boxes on the desk, then went to his car and retrieved the evidence tape and seals. “You’re verifying that I haven’t opened the boxes or tampered with them in any way,” he said.
“I am.” He ran a strip of wide tape horizontally and vertically across each box, sealing the tops in place, then asked Brenda to write her name across each piece of tape.
“I’ll video opening the boxes,” he said. “With Lacy’s parents as witnesses. That ought to satisfy any court that we aren’t up to anything underhanded.”
Brenda watched him, arms folded across her chest. “I hope you find something useful in there,” she said. “Though I can’t imagine what.”
“What was Andy doing for Hake, do you know?” Travis asked.
“Just the legal paperwork for the mining claims Henry Hake had bought and planned to develop as a vacation resort. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that environmental group got an injunction against the development and Andy was fighting that.”
“I remember a little about that,” Travis said. “They had a Ute Indian chief speak at a council meeting or something like that?”
“He wasn’t a chief, just a tribal representative—a friend of Paige Riddell’s. She was president of the group, I believe.”
“Maybe someone who didn’t want the development thought taking out Hake’s lawyer would stop the threat of the injunction being overturned,” Travis said.
“If they thought that, they were wrong. Hake hired another firm to represent him—someone out of Denver this time. I don’t know what happened after that, though I guess he hasn’t done anything with the property yet.”
“Wouldn’t hurt to check it out,” Travis said.
He picked up the first box as his phone beeped. Setting it down, he answered the call. “A car just crashed through the front window of the Cake Walk Café.” Adelaide sounded out of breath with excitement. “Gage is headed there. Dwight and Roberta are in training today. I can call someone from another shift in if you want me to. The ambulance is en route from Junction.”
“I’ll handle it. I’m on my way.” Travis hung up the phone and studied the boxes. He could take them with him, but after what happened yesterday, he didn’t want to risk someone trying to get hold of them. He returned the keys to Brenda. “Lock up after I’ve left. I’ll have to send someone to retrieve these later.”
“Is
