Gin Jones - Helen Binney 01 - A Dose of Death by Gin Jones Page A

have any leads on who did it?”
    She snorted. “They think a burglar did it. They’re not even considering any other options.”
    “ A burglar?”
    “ Used to just steal things, but apparently he’s turned violent,” Helen said. “They wouldn’t even consider me as a suspect.”
    “ You?”
    “ Why not me?” Helen said.
    Jack glanced at her in his rear-view mirror. “You probably have an alibi. When was she killed?”
    “ I have no idea.” She hadn’t thought to ask, and she didn’t know enough about head wounds to make any sort of educated guess. “I doubt the police will tell me. I didn’t exactly bond with the detective.”
    “ Melissa wasn’t here when we came back from the courthouse around 6:00,” Jack said. “If she died before that, then you’ve got me and Tate and even the judge to confirm your alibi. Plus there’s the log I file with the company. It would confirm when I left here.”
    “ She could have been here, and we just didn’t see her.” She shivered. The body could have been lying out there all night, a few feet away from where Helen was sleeping. “It was dark when we got home, and her body was in the side yard, away from where you parked.” 
    “ We’d have noticed if her car was still here,” Jack said. “I don’t remember seeing it.”
    “ You’re right. It was gone then,” Helen said. “She had to have been alive then to drive it away, but then how’d she get back here later? The car wasn’t here when I found her body.”
    “ The killer must have taken it, so you wouldn’t notice anything was wrong,” Jack said. “Give himself more time to get out of town. You’d have been suspicious if Melissa’s car was here last night, and she wasn’t, and you’d have gone looking for her and found the body.”
    Melissa really could have been dead since the previous afternoon, Helen thought. She hadn ‘t heard a car coming or going at any time during the morning before she’d found the body, and it was hard to miss the sound of tires on her gravel driveway. The only time she might not have noticed a car arriving this morning was while she was taking a shower. But it seemed unlikely that Melissa could have arrived, been killed, and then had her car stolen by her killer, all in the ten minutes or so that Helen had been unable to hear anything outside.
    “ It doesn’t make any sense,” Helen said. “If the killer drove Melissa’s car away, how did he get to my house in the first place? She’s never brought anyone with her before, and it’s not exactly walking distance from anywhere. I doubt anyone hires a taxi or limo to go to kill someone.”
    “ True.”
    “ And there were still a couple cans of her Diet Pepsi in the refrigerator this morning. She usually finishes all of them before she leaves,” Helen said. “Something had to have happened to make her leave without finishing them all on Monday.”
    “ Like realizing you’d flown the coop?”
    “ That’s about the only thing that would tear her away from her soda and radio,” Helen said. “I wonder if she told her boss. He didn’t say anything about my having escaped from Melissa’s care.”
    “ She probably tried to find you first, and then got killed before she spoke to the boss.”
    “ If Melissa did leave on Monday afternoon to look for me, and was gone when we got home, then it narrows down the time of death to somewhere between 6:00 that night, and 10:00 Tuesday morning.” That was the exact time when Helen had no alibi for yesterday. She really deserved to be a suspect. “But why did Melissa stay outside in the yard, instead of letting herself into the cottage to bug me, like she normally does? She couldn’t have known that I barricaded the doors against her, and I would have heard her if she’d tried to come in.”
    “ Lost her key?”
    “ Maybe.” Helen tried to recall if there had been keys in Melissa’s hands. She didn’t think so. Melissa never carried a purse, presumably