Page 10 of Diamonds in the Mud

Aria rolled her eyes. “Fine, we’ll see you there at eight?”

I nodded.

Then she reached up and touched my hair. “You’re due for a trim. When you bring your mom in, I’ll carve out time.”

“I don’t know if Edith wants to come in yet,” I answered.

Aria’s blue eyes turned sad. “I have everything set for her when she’s ready. It has to be her decision though.” She leaned in and hugged me. “Go, be a detective. Catch a bad guy or girl,” she added with a smile.

“See you this weekend,” I called out as she let herself into her building.

I glanced around the town and watched people come and go.

The older part of downtown had morphed into a very nice place to be. When I’d been in high school, I could scarcely remember ever wanting to be down here let alone walk on the sidewalk alone.

Back then, most of the old buildings had sat empty or had dusty antique stores in them. There had been a handful of old smoky bars that only the hardest drunks frequented.

Now we had four popular restaurants, more than a dozen little shops like Aria’s place, clothing stores, and a home goods store. Two very popular bars had live music and packed out each weekend.

“Hey, Rayne,” someone called out as they passed by in a car.

I waved and then walked back to the station. I unlocked my office door and tossed my keys down on the desk. I sat down and glanced around my office. It was a little messy, but I had gotten so caught up in the case that I hadn’t taken the time to clean. There were files scattered everywhere, along with several cups of coffee.

I picked up a cup of cold coffee, hoping it was the one from this morning, and quickly chugged down the cold liquid.

I was not even close to solving this case. Usually, I was one of the first people at the station in the morning and the last one to leave.

I took my work very seriously and wanted to do whatever it took to make my fellow officers and my community feel safe.

The murderer had either been very smart and had covered their tracks or had gotten lucky and left very few clues. My guess was the first one. We were dealing with someone who planned this out. They wanted Sharon dead for a reason.

One thing was clear at this point—this wasn’t a crime of passion. Even the gruesome way she’d died, there was an art to it. Each slice was meticulous. Calculated. Precise.

We were still going through all of the fingerprints lifted from the home, but thus far, there weren’t any that didn’t belong to the family, close friends, or coworkers. Any of them could be the murderer.

The murder weapon hadn’t been found anywhere in the home or on the grounds. Since the driveway was part gravel and part asphalt, there weren’t any tire tracks to look out for either.

Hell, there wasn’t even a muddy boot print to go off.

I scoured the reports until my eyes blurred. Sherry dropped off a sandwich that I’d ordered along with a cold soda from the machine in the lobby area.

I hadn’t realized it had gotten so late until Randy knocked on my door.

“Go home,” he said, running his eyes over my messy office. “And clean your room,” he added with a wink.

“Night.” I waved to him as he left.

Standing up and stretching, I accidentally knocked over a stack of paperwork. When I picked up the folder that had fallen, I noticed something odd in one of the files. Someone had gone through it, taking some of the pages and replacing them with blank ones.

After half an hour of glancing through all the files, I realized that they had all been tampered with in some way. I had no idea who would have done this or why they would have done it. My office was always locked. The files were always kept inside a locked drawer or file cabinet.

Only Randy and I had keys. Not even the cleaning crew that came in after hours to clean the building had keys to my office. I normally left my full trash bin just outside for them to empty each evening.

I sat back down at my desk and went through the files, trying to figure out what had happened. I had files on each of the suspects in this case. Files I had worked very hard on putting together since the murder.

The only file that was missing pages was the one on Jackson Pennington. Why his file?

So far, the man was low on my radar to interview in Sharon’s death. Yes, he and Sharon worked together in the county building downtown but, as far as I could tell, that was as far as their relationship went.