All Shots

He says she started going to his house to take showers.”
    “And pretty soon, they were showering together,” I said. “So to speak,” Al agreed. “And she used his computer. That’s how she knew where to find the two of you.” He nodded at Holly and me. “We’re looking at the computer now. I’ll bet we’ll find a long history about you two.”
    Looking embarrassed, Zach Ho said, “She said she was escaping from an abusive relationship. From what I can tell, she was the one—”
    “Not really,” Al said. “Grant had made her big promises about getting rich. And all she was getting were trips to the L.L.Bean Outlet in Ellsworth. Wal-Mart.”
    Holly Winter threw me a look that said, I told you so. She hadn’t, of course. Her solution to the puzzle had been ridiculous. Still, she’d been right about some of the pieces; she’d just put them together in the wrong way.
    “And meanwhile,” Al continued, “Grant had set up a little meth lab, and he was dealing, but he still was small-time. That’s when he came to our attention. Then he started using. He’d get agitated and paranoid. So Calvin says. As far as we can tell, her main objection was that he wasn’t taking care of business. And she liked Calvin better. So the plan was that the two of them would take things over. But she jumped the gun, if you ask me. This is guesswork, but Calvin has a boat, and I’d bet that their plan was to take Grant out and dump him overboard. Nobody’d have missed him.”
    “But?” I asked.
    “Calvin says that Grant hadn’t slept for three nights straight. Meth’ll do that. And then he got paranoid and went for his dog. The way Calvin tells it, Holly was protecting the dog. If you ask me, she tried to kill Grant. There’s no way to prove it, but that was probably the plan all along, and she jumped the gun. I think she left him for dead.”
    “Exactly when was that?” I asked. “I’m still unclear about the chronology.”
    “August twenty-eighth. Or thereabouts.”
    Zach Ho said, “That’s when she got to Cambridge. Or that’s what she said. It’s when I met her. My house sitter had backed out the day before, and I was leaving the next day. We started talking. The problem was the dog. Well, not the dog. I like dogs. The problem was this damned asthma. I couldn’t have a dog in the house. Vacuuming and filters won’t take care of it. I couldn’t have lived here again for months. But we worked things out with Mellie. She’s only two doors away.”
    Kudos to Zach! He’d managed to get through that part of the story without embarrassing himself and the rest of us. I said, “You two know each other. You and Holly. When you heard that her name, the woman’s name, was Holly Winter, did you say something?”
    “I just said that I knew someone else with the same name.”
    “Any more than that?” Holly asked imperiously.
    “No,” he said. “Look, I can’t say how sorry I am. There’s no excuse. Poor judgment doesn’t begin to—”
    No one spoke up to claim that he’d used great judgment, but Al said that the murder victim had known about the other two Holly Winters before she’d arrived in Cambridge, and I said that since Cambridge is a city that feels like a small town, the chances were excellent that she’d have run into someone who knew one of us, anyway. “After all,” I said, “we were the reason she picked Cambridge rather than Boston or somewhere else. She came to Cambridge because of us.” Holly Winter probably wanted to say that a piece of trailer trash would’ve been unlikely to cross paths with any of her friends, but she had the sense to keep quiet, possibly because it was precisely what had happened.
    Al picked up the story. “So, Zach, you left the next day.”
    “August twenty-ninth. Tuesday.”
    “I was still abroad,” Holly Winter said. “I didn’t get back until September fifth. A week later. So she had a whole week to—”
    My strong impulse was to tell her to shut up, but I tried to imagine what Rita would say. “A great deal of what she did is infuriating.” I added, “Maybe we need to acknowledge that she betrayed Zach’s trust and that she intruded into our lives in ways we didn’t deserve.”
    “Thank you, Holly,” Zach said. “Al?”
    “So, it wasn’t until that Thursday, the thirty-first, that Grant got to the hospital.”
    “He said that he was alone for three days before he crawled out to the road,” I explained.
    Al nodded. “He had