Nuts

"Okay, okay, hold up. Time out, Motormouth," Kyle said, tapping his hands together in a tee. "You're going to need to rewind just a second there…"

Andrea had rapidly been explaining everything that she had discovered on her trip to the apartment, describing Steel and her interactions with him, and her interview with Crowshaw.

Kyle for his part had been pacing back and forth. He said he thought better on his feet, which Andrea could relate to, but it was a bit obnoxious in the tight confines of the interview room. A couple of times he had waved his hands animatedly when he turned, and she had needed to lean out of the way of his to avoid getting accidentally clipped.

As he interrupted, Andrea wound down from her eager delivery and realized that she had gotten so into sharing her findings she was a little out of breath.

"What's the matter Kyle, struggling to keep up?" she teased. "I thought an experienced lawyer like you would be able to digest the facts more quickly than that."

Kyle gave a small exasperated shake of his head. "Okay, first of all, you talk like you're about to get your car towed if you don't finish in the next sixty seconds. Second, I was following you fine actually, thank-you-very-much Miss Sarcasm. But third, what you just said didn't make sense. Why did you care so much about if Crowshaw had heard anything Tuesday evening?"

"…Because that's when the murder was actually committed of course!" said Andrea with matching exasperation.

Kyle took three slow blinks, then quietly pulled out his chair, sat down with exaggerated care, templed his fingers in front of him and stared Andrea dead in the eye.

"Say that again…"

Andrea couldn't believe he was taking so long to grasp this. "Beatrix wasn't murdered on Wednesday. Based on the coroner's estimates, the time of death was around sunset on Tuesday."

"Why didn't you lead with that?!" Kyle exploded. "That's huge! That changes everything!" He didn't sound angry, just incredulous that this was the first he was hearing of this.

"I thought you already knew!" Andrea shouted back.

"Why would I know?! I'm the suspect. The police don't tell ME anything!" He gestured towards her imploringly. "That's the kind of thing my lawyer is supposed to tell me!"

Quickly thinking back to their prior conversation, Andrea realized to her embarrassment that she hadn't actually mentioned the evidence about the time of death to Kyle. Rallying, she said, "Well you should have read it in the coroner's report!"

"It wasn't IN the coroner's report. If it HAD been, I would have SAID something!" Kyle ran his hands frustratedly through his messy hair.

"Of course it was! He told me himself."

"He might have told you, but it wasn't in the written report."

"That's ridiculous, of course it was, you just didn't read carefully enough!"

"I'll show you!" they both exclaimed.

And they both reached for the police report at the same time. Andrea ended up having to smack his hands away. Grabbing the report, she flipped the pages to the coroner's report and slammed it down onto the table between them. They jostled against each other as they leaned in to read it at the same time.

Andrea read as fast as she could. It was the same competitive spirit she got every time she faced off against Kyle in court. She desperately wanted to find the section that talked about the time of death before Kyle did so she could wave it in his face!

But as she reached the bottom of the page and started again from the top, she started to suspect that SHE might have been the one in the wrong. How could such a fundamental piece of evidence be missing from the report? Bob had only mentioned it almost as an afterthought, could he really have forgotten to include it?

That gave her a thought. Lifting the corner of the page, it turned out there was more writing on the back! She flipped the document and slammed it down on the desk with satisfaction. Documents were generally one sided, but when Bob had run out of space, he must have written on the back of the paper rather than getting a fresh sheet to continue his report.

"You see!" Andrea cried triumphantly.

Kyle moved in even closer so he could quickly read the missing part of the report. "I didn't see this before!" he cried mournfully.

"Well, you should have read more carefully!"

"I wish I had!"

"So do I!"

"Then we agree!"

They paused, both breathing slightly heavily. Andrea could feel the flush in her cheeks from all the arguing. She could also feel the heat from his body pressed against her as they stood side by side…

'So help me, if he calls me 'Freckles' right now, I'm going to slap him!' she thought.

Kyle stepped back and ran his hands through his hair again. "This changes things," he said, gesturing at the report. "I thought I had my alibi sewn up. I was at the East Side Docks, buying fish! I knew the fishmonger there would have remembered me—he looked ready to kill me by the time I'd haggled him down."

He took a deep breath and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. "I know there was still some time from when I got home to when the police came in, but I figured that we could have made a case that it wasn't long enough for me to have time to have done the murder. Add to that how cooperative I was, I thought we had the makings of a pretty good case."

"We still can, it's just that the timeline has changed a little," Andrea said, hoping to reassure him. "We just need your alibi for Tuesday."

She had been planning on asking Kyle about his movements on Tuesday ever since she realized that an alibi was one of the first things she should have worked with Kyle to establish. She wished she had started there with the latest meeting rather than telling the entire story of her investigation.

"So, what were you up to on Tuesday evening?"

Kyle leaned back and stared at the ceiling as though trying to think of an answer that wasn't admitting the truth.

"Don't tell me that you were home alone…?" she said. That would make it almost impossible to prove he didn't have the opportunity to commit the murder.

"No…" said Kyle, still talking to the ceiling. "But it's almost as bad…" He tilted his head down, and said through clenched teeth. "I… I was foraging." And then winced as though waiting for a blow.

As far as Andrea could tell, he looked as though he was expecting her to laugh at him again. But she didn't even understand what he was saying.

"I don't get it," she said.

"Foraging," he said again, as though that explained everything. "You know what the word means?"

"Suuure," she said, "like when animals hunt for nuts and berries. But I don't understand what that has to do with you, is it some kind of slang…?"

"No, you've pretty much got it. Triss and I were out in the woods hunting for nuts and berries. Wild ones. And mushrooms and herbs and other things."

Andrea couldn't believe this. "So you want me to go to court and tell the judge that you can't have committed the crime because you were in the woods with your girlfriend picking wild nuts and berries?!"

Kyle looked chagrined. "I mean… I wouldn't say 'girlfriend,' but otherwise that's about the size of it."

Andrea rubbed her temple. "You'd better start from the top."

Kyle explained that Triss had heard about a place just outside the city that was popular for local foraging and suggested a trip together. It was apparently something of a fad among foodies lately.

"I mean, you know the lengths I'll go to to get fresh ingredients!" Kyle looked nostalgic for a moment. "There was this one time when I even…"

Andrea coughed meaningfully. Kyle got the hint and got back on track.

"Maybe she just wanted to get out of the city, I don't know, trick me into a romantic walk through the woods at sunset or something. A lot of fun that was—more like a waste of time. She acted like she'd done this before but clearly had no idea where she was going. The woods were muddy and unpleasant, we ended up getting lost, and worst of all, we didn't find any good ingredients…

"I think she caught on that I wasn't too happy about the whole fiasco… That's when I said I'd cook her dinner the next night, kind of extend the olive branch to show there were no hard feelings. Anyway, by the time we got back into town, I only had time to drop Triss off at home and grab a change of clothes before I had to be in court for… y'know."

Andrea tried not to think about how insulting it was to have been beaten in court by someone who had spent the night before getting lost in the woods, when she had been up most of the night practicing her arguments. She tried very, very hard not to think about that…

"Did you take your car?" she asked, thinking that perhaps it might have been picked up on traffic cams.

"We did. And I know what you're thinking, but that's only going to prove where my car was. Nothing to prove that I was in it at the time; they'll say I could have lent my car out to create an alibi."

"Well, Triss can testify for you."

"True, but her testimony won't be viewed as impartial. Still, it wouldn't hurt. Have you talked to her yet?"

"I tried calling twice," Andrea said. "Left messages, but no response."

"She's probably at work," Kyle said. "I can't believe she still has no idea I'm here, I don't know what she's going to think when she finds out… You'll have to be sure to tell her that it needs to stay secret, ok?"

Andrea went to make some notes about what Kyle had just told her. To her frustration, she couldn't seem to find her pen.

Noticing her searching, Kyle waved his hands back and forth like he was David Copperfield…

"Hey Blondie, check it out, magic trick…" Before she knew what was happening, he leaned in so close their cheeks were almost touching and reached his arm around her…

…and pulled the pen out of her hair that Andrea had been using to keep her bun in place. Her blonde tresses fell down over her face, and she tossed her head angrily to get them out of her eyes. She was just about to chew Kyle out for not just telling her, when she caught his expression.

"Magical…" he whispered, half to himself, the pen held loosely in his hand as though he'd forgotten he was holding it.

Andrea realized that dramatically-letting-the-girl's-hair-down to reveal that she was beautiful-all-along was a classic scene in a lot of movies.

She wondered if Kyle had felt like he was watching in slow motion…

Tucking a loose hair behind her ear, she snatched her pen back from him and hurriedly made a couple of notes, though she could barely remember what she had wanted to write in the first place. She was worried if her face got any redder she might pass out from the blood rushing to her head.

Checking her watch, she muttered, "I have to go," and hit the button to summon the guard. In truth she had a little time before her court appointment, but she needed a few minutes to compose herself first.

Besides, she knew neither one of them were going to get anything more productive done feeling like this.