She really needed to grade them. Her students were beginning to wonder if they were ever going to get them back. But Sally couldn’t get her mind off the murders. She could understand the way Weems and Desmond were thinking; Ralph Thompson, enraged by what had happened, killed his wife and then went to the school and killed Val. Or vice versa. That was the simple answer. It tied everything up in a neat package and gave the investigation one person to concentrate on. But it bothered Sally that Weems and Desmond were ignoring all kinds of important things, of which the missing painting was only one. Some of them she hadn’t even mentioned to Desmond. There was the forged purchase order, for example. She hadn’t wanted to tell Weems about it, but she had. Then there were those signatures showing that Ellen Baldree and Jorge Rodriguez had visited the art gallery. Either one of them could have gotten into an argument with Val, Ellen over past grievances or Jorge over current ones. And the argument could have gotten out of hand.
