She made a rude noise. “Teddy Swenson has been on both coasts at the same time we were.”
“Teddy wasn’t old enough to kill Franklin Jackson. He had no reason to kill my parents if this is about voting machine fraud. He was barely out of college and hadn’t been elected to anything then. His father might be involved in fraud, but Gus had no reason to kill Clancy or Pendleton, even if we could prove he was on both coasts at the right times.”
“So you figure the motivation for killing your parents and Jackson was Sovereign’s voting machines? Maybe Clancy and Pendleton knew something about that?”
He should really resist pulling Evie into this, but as a sounding board... She sure beat the hell out of basement walls. “If the new machines were still using the faulty circuit board, vote fraud might be a motivation for the Swensons, but neither Pendleton nor Clancy were involved in their manufacture.”
“But Clancy was running for office and apparently knew about the fix,” she reminded him.
Jax grimaced. “Maybe Clancy was blackmailing Gus over the crooked machines? Still unlikely that a US Senator would commit murder. He’s too visible. I can see Teddy maybe, but he was only seven at the time of the mine incident.”
“Two different killers?” she suggested. “Or were the early ones really accidents? Except Clancy’s ghost said he murderedsomeone, possibly at the behest of a female.”
If one believed in ghosts... “Not many females in this scenario, unless we count Bernice. Or maybe Larraine Ward out of sheer irritation if she learned about the machines.”
Evie snorted and waved away those suggestions. “Teddy’s mother Donna and her Aunt Marge may not have told you everything—or even told you the truth. They were west coast and could easily have killed Pendleton.
“Kinda hard seeing a connection between them and Clancy and my parents on the east coast—unless, of course, they knew Aaron Ives escaped. Could one of them have been covering up Gus’s tracks?” Restlessly, Jax rocked back in his chair, his pen and paper forgotten. Watching Evie frown focused him.
“Clancy was old enough to kill everyone on the list—so maybe his death really was suicide if he thought his ill deeds had caught up with him?”
“He went into anaphylactic shock and killed himself? Uh uh. I can buy Clancy being murdered for local reasons, maybe. But the voting machines and the Swenson connection are an ugly coincidence we can’t ignore.”
Evie leaned forward, offering glimpses of temptation. “Even Geoff Hayes and Hank Williams had connections to the Swensons. The ripples keep spreading.”
“But they had nothing to do with decades-old deaths, and listening to a ghost is a real long shot. I need concrete evidence before I can convince Sheriff Troy to call in the feds to evenstartinvestigating a presidential candidate. Even then, I doubt Troy can pry the senator’s itinerary out of a host of bodyguards and assistants. That requires the feds—and at least a tie-in to the murder weapons.”
“OK, are there any similarities in the murder weapons?”
Jax called up the latest report Roark had siphoned from the sheriff’s files. “Pendleton was shot with a .22, just like Clancy. The guns were found at the scene and had no registration or license. There is no correlation with the presumably accidental deaths of my parents and Franklin Jackson—other than the voting machines and Swenson.”
Evie swirled her finger at his computer. “R&R spent the night analyzing close elections in towns using DVM machines. Check the files. Reuben says they have a list of elected officials who may have benefitted from voter fraud. They compared it to the list of investors in Sovereign and DVM. The Swensons are the most obvious, but there are a dozen others and more they probably don’t know about. Tracking all of them...
“Isn’t happening,” Jax agreed, glaring at the list he’d called up. He created a file of the most pertinent material and emailed it to Sheriff Troy.
“Any way we can lure our list of suspects into Clancy’s presence?” his nemesis suggested with an almost evil gleam in her eye.
Shit. He’d known it would come down to this. “We’re talkingkillers, Evangeline Malcolm Carstairs. Killers.No, there’s no chance.”
“You don’t want to see if Clancy will try to strangle his killer? C’mon, Jax, I’m safe.” She puckered up her nose. “You might not be.”
That did it. She was protecting him? “My father’s patents. We’ll offer them for sale and use Clancy’s haunted office for the meeting.”
Evie jumped up and threw herself in his lap. He hugged her, then whispered in her ear, “Except if we’re setting me up as a target, we’ll both have to stay out of sight until all the bad guys are in one place. Clear Loretta out of the house and stay with your family.”
* * *
Evie watched R&Rload up their van and head downtown to Jax’s office. She hoped one of them would drive on to stay near Ariel.
She’d thought about raising hell over his protective demands, but Jax had agreed she could meet him at city hall Monday night. He just needed his macho thing of protecting theweak. Since she had no purpose beyond talking to ghosts, this almost made sense. She didn’t have to like it, but she could do it. That he thoughtshecould protect Loretta was probably his idea of respecting her talents.
It didn’t take much effort or talent to round up her family, warn them of danger, and circle Gracie’s house with Malcolm abilities. Iddy’s raven watched outside. Psycat strolled the rooms of the tiny cottage, sniffing out trouble and maybe a few mice. Pris chose to watch from the cottage’s unfinished attic, which was sweltering in the June heat. Evie brought her buckets of ice and lots of fans. Her freaky cousin had zoned out and barely noticed.
Mavis and the aunts took turns staying awake through the night to monitor whatever wavelengths worked best for them. Evie was fairly certain Pris’s mother had a police radio frequency along with her more psychic talents. And Mavis had her telephone gossip circle who could be monitoring the entire town, for all Evie knew. Her mother had the ability to summon an entire parade of townspeople at times of need, but this didn’t appear to be one of them.
She hated the idea of Jax setting himself up as a target, but she hated the idea of a killer running loose even more. As owners of the patents of the microchip used by the voting machine company, he and Ariel might already be targets. DVM probably owed them a fortune in royalties. If Jax chose to reveal the PCB flaw and software manipulation that Reuben had documented, he could destroy the careers of some very powerful—and not particularly moral—people.
She tried to look cheerful and not fret while she taught Loretta the board games the child’s parents had never allowed her to play. Gracie had a/c, so Evie even baked cookies to channel her spinning thoughts more productively.