Page 11 of A Future To Remember

“What kind of bullshit is this?” I demanded.

Oscar leaned toward me, trying to eye the fine print, so I just handed it to him. I wanted my hands free should I need to strangle this asshole sheriff.

Wheaton nodded toward the paper. “We finally got a copy of Fusco’s phone records,” he said triumphantly.

“And?”

Wheaton punched the paper with his finger. “And…look at the time stamp.”

Oscar looked up from the paper. “Which time stamp?”

Wheaton tapped the paper like an impatient schoolmaster. “It’s right there. His wife’s phone number and the call to Mrs. Fusco’s came in at—” Wheaton paused to cup his ear, like he was waiting for us to answer.

We didn’t.

“. . . nine thirty-eight! Not ten thirty, like you keep claimin’, Mr. Rivers! Time stamps don’t lie. We’re an hour behind Austin. I checked. So, if your story that your wife called her friend just after leaving the cabin were true, then that call should register on Mrs. Fusco’s end at eleven thirty-eight, not nine thirty-eight, and that means your wife actually left your cabin at eight-thirty, which is two hours earlier than you said she did! All of that makes me think that your wife left your cabin early that morning, called her friend, ran her errand, and got back to your cabin around ten or ten thirty, and then maybe you two got into a fight and you killed her. You would’ve had two hours longer than you said you did to cover it up, dispose of her body, and get rid of the Tahoe, and now your timeline don’t work so good, does it?”

Wheaton had worked himself up into a near lather. His face was flushed and his brow sweaty. You could tell he was itchin’ to draw his weapon.

So, I closed my eyes and shook my head. The weight of all of this was crushing me under the heel of despair and hopelessness. “You caught me, Wheaton,” I whispered.

You could’ve heard a pin drop.

“Sir?” Oscar asked.

I opened my eyes and stared straight at the slobby, sweating lawman, possibly the dumbest fucknut I’d ever met. “You caught me. My wife called her best friend at nine thirty-eight Pacific time. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Candice was at the Las Vegas airport on her way back to Austin after interviewing a witness in a private investigation she was pursuing when my wife called her, which fully explains the two-hour discrepancy. You can check plane records to verify that. Or ask Candice for the receipts I know she keeps after every business trip. Having traveled with her and my wife on dozens of occasions, and knowing how much Candice loves a preboarding vanilla latte, I’m positive there’ll be a receipt from the LAS airport’s Starbucks right around the time of that phone call.”

Wheaton’s mouth opened a fraction, and he just stared at me.

With a dramatic sigh, I added, “Candice’s phone records are time zone sensitive, which is why, on paper, the call is showing an hour earlier than I initially told you Abby left the cabin. And because I’d also told you that Candice had gotten that call from my wife while she was in Vegas, and I’d figured you weren’t a complete idiot…well… I guess that’s my bad.”

For a long moment, Wheaton just blinked at me.

“Time zone math is hard,” Oscar said, handing the paper back to Wheaton, who looked like he was going to refuse it, but then I lowered my brow, and he snatched it from Oscar’s hand.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” I said next, turning my glare to his deputies, who sat down like two Dogues de Bordeaux caught raiding the kitchen trash can, “we need details about the SUV you pulled out of the river. I want a copy of all forensic evidence you’ve collected, photos, et cetera.”

Wheaton continued to stare at me, and I could almost see the mental jujitsu his mind was flipping through, trying to figure out a way he was still right about his timeline and could use it to get me to crack.

He’d thought I’d had something to do with Abby’s disappearance from the beginning, and hard-ass that I am, I could see the point. Seventy-six percent of the time, it’s the husband or boyfriend; fourteen percent of the time, it’s a family member, friend, or acquaintance; and the remaining are totally random acts of violence.

Leave it to Abby to end up in the top ten percent.

I’d played along with Wheaton’s suspicions for the first couple of days and cooperated fully. I’d spent six hours being interrogated by my colleagues at the FBI, answered every question Wheaton had thrown at me, and Candice, Brice, and Oscar had all backed me up and helped to provide an alibi.

Abby had called Candice on the ride to the campground store, and they’d talked for a good thirty-five minutes.

Candice had told everyone who’d asked that she’d been at LAS at the time, headed back home. She’d gotten on the plane while chatting with my wife and only hung up when the plane was pulling away from the gate. She’d told me that, when they’d said goodbye, Abby had just arrived at the camp grocery store. Meanwhile, my call to Candice looking for Abby was made to her when her plane was cruising to the gate at Austin International.

The window was two hours and forty-two minutes from the time that Abby had talked to Candice—alive and well—and I’d called Candice to ask if she’d heard from Abby.

Sure, that was time enough to commit murder, and maybe even enough time to commit murder and cover up the crime scene, but it would’ve taken Abs forty minutes to get back to the cabin, plus the ten minutes in the store, so that narrowed the window of opportunity to about two hours. Two hours to murder my wife, thoroughly clean the crime scene, drive her and the SUV to a remote location that couldn’t easily be found, walk back in the pouring rain to the cabin, change, and start making calls.

I’d called the ranch owner the minute I couldn’t get ahold of Abby, which was two hours after she’d left. He’d driven to the cabin, which was only ten minutes from the central house, and we’d been driving Highway 20 when I got ahold of Candice.

My story held up. It held up with every witness, with the phone calls via satellite, and with the fuzzy memory of a store clerk who remembered earlier that day a woman in a red sweater, toting a big black purse, asking him if they carried tomato soup. He’d said she’d spent about twenty to twenty-five minutes in the store getting her groceries.

Which really meant that Abby had disappeared sometime between eleven-forty-five-ish and twelve-thirty p.m.