Sanders froze for a split second, then recovered. He said he had placed the order only because Daniel Reed asked him to arrange concrete for insulating the floor. According to him, he had paid for the delivery and Daniel later reimbursed him.
Walsh asked whether he had a solid alibi for the night of the murders. Sanders said he had been asleep at home with his wife, though he couldn’t provide much detail. Walsh closed his notebook, told him not to leave town, and left.
Every instinct Walsh had told him Sanders was lying. Over the next two weeks, the investigative team tore through old records. They established that Sanders had used that same power of attorney to transfer the Reeds’ apartment and profit from the sale.
Not long after, he had bought himself a luxury condo. Sanders’s wife dutifully confirmed his alibi, but her statement felt rehearsed. A medical record turned up showing Sanders had once been treated for a severe allergy to lilac pollen.
Walsh remembered the large lilac bushes growing near the front steps of the Reeds’ cabin. But there were lilacs outside Sanders’s city residence too, which made that detail useless. The investigation stalled again. There were still no direct physical links.
Walsh stayed late at the office, trying to rebuild the crime from the ground up. He noticed that after the murders, the cabin had been locked from the outside. That meant the killer had taken the keys to avoid drawing attention.
He then sent Anna’s letter out for a second handwriting review. This time, the analysts found signs of tension and restraint in the writing. Walsh concluded that Sanders had pressured Anna into writing it before the murders.
But without stronger evidence, that theory would never hold up in court. The next day, investigators found a record of a late-night call from the cabin to Sanders’s pager. Walsh brought the Realtor in again, but Sanders denied everything with cool confidence.
The detective had no choice but to let him go for lack of evidence. Walsh knew the case was slipping away, and in frustration he tried once more to reconstruct the night. He remembered the neighbor’s description of the dark car and realized the witness could easily have mistaken Sanders’s mid-size vehicle for a larger sedan…
