“This article makes it look as if you were paying her off,” Lucy said. “That’s what I would wonder if I read this and didn’t know.”

“I certainly wasn’t paying her off, but it sounds as if someone was,” I said.

“It’s all making a little more sense,” Wesley said. “If this bit about her financial picture is accurate, then Susan had gotten a substantial sum of money, meaning she must have supplied a service to someone. Around this same time your computer was broken into and Susan’s personality changed. She became nervous and unreliable. She avoided you as much as she could. I think she couldn’t face you, Kay, because she knew she was betraying you.”

I nodded, struggling for composure. Susan had gotten into something she did not know how to get out of, and it occurred to me that this might be the real explanation for why she fled from Eddie Heath’s post and then from Jennifer Deighton’s. Her emotional outbursts had nothing to do with witchcraft or feeling dizzy after being exposed to formalin fumes. She was panicking. She did not want to witness either case.

“Interesting,” Wesley said when I voiced my theory. “If you ask what of value did Susan Story have to sell, the answer is information. If she didn’t witness the posts, she had no information. And whoever was buying this information from her is quite likely the person she was going to meet on Christmas Day.”

“What information would be so important that someone would be willing to pay thousands of dollars for it and then murder a pregnant woman?” Lucy asked bluntly.

We did not know, but we had a guess. The common denominator, once again, seemed to be Ronnie Joe Waddell.

“Susan didn’t forget to print Waddell or whoever it was that was executed,” I said. “She deliberately didn’t print him.”

“That’s the way it looks,” Wesley agreed. “Someone else asked her to conveniently forget to print him. Or to lose his cards in the event that you or another member of your staff printed him.”

I thought of Ben Stevens. The bastard.

“And this brings us back to what you and I concluded last night, Kay,” Wesley went on. “We need to go back to ‘the night Waddell was supposed to have been executed and determine who it was they strapped in the chair. And a place to start is AFIS. What we want to know is if and what records were tampered with.”

He was talking to Lucy now. “I’ve got it set up for you to go through the journal tapes, if you’re willing.”

“I’m willing,” Lucy said. “When do you want me to start?”