Maybe it was the lack of sleep or the stress if the situation, but the reaction Fiona felt herself having to the picture of her coat in the case file was immediate and felt uncharacteristic even to her. In her time she'd seen far more corpses than she'd like to admit. She'd seen young men, little more than boys that had died as a result of Jimmy's stupidity, with their body parts lying strewn around them in the street. At the age of ten she'd also been the one who had found her mother, dead on the kitchen floor of a brain aneurysm. At the age of forty she'd held her younger brother as he cried while they both stared at the corpses of his wife and infant daughter who had been murdered after he'd dare to speak out against Jimmy's abuse towards her. However, there was something about there not being a corpse this time was what caused her to clasp her hand over her mouth as she fought back silent tears. Death was easy enough to handle, you were gone, taken to a hopefully happier place, but she knew from being with her Filip, even years later, that surviving something you weren't supposed to especially at the hands of another human being was hard.
Of course the sheriff would likely take her reaction as a silent admission of guilt, but it was an reaction of the exact opposite meaning. It was one of compassion.
"You've seen that coat before haven't you?" Jarry asked before answering her own question. "Considering it was manufactured by a company that runs out of Belfast, Northern Ireland I think it would be safe to say it's yours. It's good quality too, in American money probably sixty, seventy dollars, so why would you allow it to be ruined by putting it on Tara Knowles' bloody body?"
Before Fiona could formulate a response that would satisfy the other woman, there was a knock at the interview room door and the black deputy popped his head into the room before Jarry got up to leave with him.
xxx
Outside the interview room with Deputy Cane stood another man who was wearing a suit. It was obvious that he was a big city detective, from the style of shoes he wore to the way he combed his hair and he looked almost comically out of place in the Charming police station.
"Detective Hannon is here from Oakland with the recording from Juan Carlos Ortiz's final phone call."
"What brings one of the big city boys to hand deliver evidence?" Jarry asked.
"I wish I could say I wanted to meet the new sheriff, but I'm actually on my way to see my daughter's play. That and I recognized who your victim was talking to in his final call."
Jarry was almost certain this new evidence would coincide with Fiona Larkin's hair being found on Ortiz's corpse and nodded her head towards the interview room door, silently asking if Larkin was their answer.
"Her husband." Cane responded in answer to the unasked question. "Ortiz was being followed by someone, likely the killer and he was scared, but he turned to Filip Telford in his final moments."
"I thought Telford was kicked out of the club?"
"There's more," Cane added.
"Filip Telford appears to have mentioned Tara Knowles in the course of the call, however porcelain fragments pulled from Gemma Teller's nose wound will likely match the broken figurine found at Tara's crime scene."
xxx
Less than an hour later, Jarry was back at Saint Thomas hospital. This time her visit wasn't to talk to Tara Knowles or visit Dr. Gwen Reaser in the morgue, but to ask some long overdue questions to Gemma Teller.
The older woman was sitting up in a hospital bed with several IVs attached to her arms and gauze covering her broken nose.
In the past hour, Jarry had begun to develop some doubts that Filip Telford and Fiona Larkin were involved in the attack in the way she had originally assumed they were. The look on Fiona Larkin's face when she saw the spilled photos of Tara was either one of a very good actress or someone who looked genuinely concerned about what had happened. That combined with how she had rushed to her husband's side to support him, ignoring how she became covered in his vomit after Jarry had told the deputy to give him two Excedrin pills to stop his migraine in an attempt to make him available for questioning, didn't paint a narrative of a heartless biker whore who changed men as fast as some women changed shoes. The coat had also been placed over Tara's body in a way that was almost indicative of wanting to protect her modesty and that combined with the photo that paramedics had found on her chest painted a contrast to the way she had been brutalized. Either Fiona Larkin had covered Tara as repentance for what her husband had done to her or by some odd coincidence the pair who had earlier witnessed the murder of the former sheriff had been the ones to discover Tara.
Gemma Teller on the other hand, had no even vaguely sensible reason for why evidence from the crime scene had been found on her person.
Instead of outright telling the older woman that she was a suspect, Jarry decided to give her just enough rope that she could accidentally hang herself.
"We arrested Filip Telford and Fiona Larkin in connection with your daughter-in-law's murder. Can you think of any reason they might want to hurt her?"
Gemma was quick to jump on with a response. "That Irish bitch has always been bad news...and Chibs, he lost his way after she came back into his life. It's the reason why my son had to "
"What do you mean by 'he lost his way?" Jarry asked, trying to prompt the woman who was now her prime suspect to take the rope.
"Look sweetheart, I refuse to solve your case for you, but she was involved in some real kinky shit between the two of them."
