Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 78227 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78227 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
“So you don’t believe him? That he didn’t know what was going on?”
“No, I do not believe him. He’s not that stupid, Brock.”
“For a hot minute, I was thinking Brittany was the truly bad person and that Doc was just…trying to make a living, you know?”
“We don’t like to think the worst of Doc,” Uncle Bryce offers. “But honestly, your father and I have never quite trusted him. Otherwise we would’ve given him the veterinarian job ten years ago.”
“So you say. What was it about Doc that you didn’t trust?”
“I could say it was a feeling,” Dad says, “and that’s certainly part of it. But we had reason to believe that his wife, Brittany’s mother, was murdered.”
My heart. My stomach. “Reason to believe?”
“Nothing we could prove, just information that came from our sources. It’s nothing we ever investigated, but it was enough to make us look elsewhere when it was time to bring our veterinary care in-house.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t need one more fucked-up thing inside my head right now.”
“Like I said,” Dad continues. “It’s nothing we can prove. It’s mostly hearsay. And it’s nothing we ever looked further into. So it’s not anything you need to concern yourself with.”
“It sure as hell is. If Doc Sheraton is a murderer, it changes everything about what happened in Wyoming.”
“Our information doesn’t indicate that,” Uncle Bryce says. “There’s no reason to suspect that Doc himself was the murderer.”
“Then what is the reason to hold it against Doc?”
Uncle Bryce clears his throat. “Our sources showed that he suppressed evidence. Evidence of who the real murderer was.”
“Why would he do that?”
Dad and Uncle Bryce exchange glances.
“Don’t even think about keeping this from me.”
“Take a guess,” Dad says. “Based on what we’ve just found out in the past forty-eight hours, take a wild guess.”
“Not Brittany?” My skin goes cold. “She was just a kid.”
“A kid who we think has some kind of personality disorder. She’s on medication. She has been since she was a little girl.”
“Operative word being little. How does a little girl murder a grown woman?” But then I stop. “Doc’s medication.”
“Give the boy a silver dollar,” Uncle Bryce says.
“Damn it, if either of you refer to me as a boy once more—”
“Calm down, son. We don’t mean anything by it. We know you’re a grown man. But we’ve also known you since you were in diapers, so you’ll always be a boy to us. You’ll feel the same way when you have kids.”
“This just adds one more piece we don’t need to this puzzle.”
“You don’t need to give it any more thought,” Dad says. “It can’t be proved, and it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on now.”
“Are you kidding me? A child who was capable of murder?”
“That’s just it,” Dad says. “Children can’t be capable of murder. They don’t have the brain function yet to have the thought process. So even if we could prove it, nothing would happen to Brittany anyway.”
He’s right, of course.
But my opinion of Brittany Sheraton just lowered, and I didn’t think that was possible.
All this time, I was concerned about Doc.
And Doc is certainly guilty.
But Doc is not a psychopath.
His daughter is.
All this time, Rory and I thought that Pat Lamone talked Brittany into tranquilizing the two of them. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it was all Brittany’s idea. She’s an accomplished liar and actress, no doubt.
Talk about an iceman.
“Uncle Bryce…”
“Yeah?”
“Some of the gemstones we found—”
Uncle Bryce gestures for me to stop. “I’ve already looked at them. I’m no jeweler, but they do look familiar. They look exactly like the ones my mother inherited from her aunt. The ones that my father kept from my mother.”
“So what do we do about that? What does that tell us?”
“It tells us,” Dad says, “that the human trafficking ring we thought we broke up twenty-five years ago? The Feds didn’t get all of them. It also tells us that Tom Simpson was using those yellow diamonds, which never belonged to him, as payment, and some of them are still around.”
“But again,” Uncle Bryce says, “this is still a theory until I can determine that those yellow diamonds did in fact belong to my mother.”
“How do you determine that?”
“It shouldn’t be too difficult,” Uncle Bryce says. “When your father and I found those diamonds hidden in my father’s cabin twenty-five years ago, we had them checked out. The gemstone expert determined they all came from the same source.”
“Okay, I get it. So if the ones Doc had came from that same source—”
“Right. Still an assumption, but in our eyes, we’ll pretty much know.”
Finally I sit down.
And boy, am I weary.
Not tired weary, but emotionally weary.
I finally got a decent night’s sleep last night, with Rory at my side. But although my body is physically rested, my mind is not.