by Linda Howard
Swiftly he looked around. Yeah, there it was, parked to his right: a beater with the engine still running, exhaust pouring from the tailpipe. No driver, so that meant this stupid shit was on his own.
The google-eyed girl handed the coffee out to him. He gave her a brief nod, pretended to take a sip of the coffee, then said loudly, “This coffee is old. Could you make a fresh pot, please?”
She gave him an agonized look. He said, “Look, if you think it’s too much trouble to make some fresh coffee, then let me speak to the manager.” As he was talking he flipped open his wallet, let her get a quick flash of his badge. She took a deep breath, gave a nod as brief as his, then said, “Yes, sir. It’ll take a minute, though.”
“I don’t mind.”
Shit. Now what? His car was too close to the building for him to squeeze out through the driver’s-side door. Moving as fast as possible, he put the transmission in park, put the cup in the cup holder, released his seat belt, and jacked himself over the passenger seat and out the door, grabbing the coffee cup from the holder as he went out. He didn’t have a second to waste. Shit could go down fast, and people could get hurt. The last thing he wanted was to start a shooting spree in a crowded fast-food restaurant.
He jerked the plastic top off the coffee cup, rounded the front of the car, and was pulling his weapon from his holster when he all but collided with a thick-necked bozo who came barreling out of the door with a money bag in one hand and a pistol in the other. The bozo roared, “Move, fucker!” and jabbed the pistol in Eric’s direction.
With his left hand Eric threw the hot coffee in the bozo’s face, cup and all. Bozo bellowed, automatically raising both hands to his face; he was so close, less than half a step away, that his pistol almost hit Eric in the nose as he swung it up. Eric shot out his left hand and caught the guy’s wrist, giving it a savage twist. The bozo squealed like a little schoolgirl, his voice rising high with panic, and dropped the pistol, which went skidding across the pavement with a speed and sound that made Eric stop and stare at the weapon in disbelief. A heavy pistol wouldn’t skid like that, wouldn’t make that sound. Only something lightweight, and made of plastic—
A fucking water pistol?
“That does it!” he snapped as he whirled Bozo around and slammed him facedown on the hood on the car, dragging out his cuffs and snapping them on before the guy could stop whining about being burned. He felt as if steam were boiling from the top of his head, he was so angry. “I’m not stopping for fucking coffee ever again!”
Behind him, the crowd that had spilled out of the McDonald’s began applauding.
“Hey, Wilder, are you paying these dickheads to rob places so you can play hero?”
The jibe was lobbed at him as soon as he showed his face in the bullpen. He growled under his breath as he wove his way to his battered desk. Garvey walked over, grinning. Hell, everyone around him was grinning. “That kid they interviewed did a great job,” he said. “Of course, they had to bleep the part about what kind of coffee you’re never stopping for again, but if you’re any kind of lip-reader you can tell what the kid was saying. By the way, the lieutenant wants to see you.”
“Now?”
“Wouldn’t hurt.”
“Fucking great,” Eric muttered, but took himself upstairs. How was he supposed to have stopped one of the local TV stations from interviewing the restaurant’s customers? He supposed he could have slapped a hand over the kid’s mouth and told him to keep quiet, but at the same time he hadn’t realized how many of the customers had heard him ranting about his coffee. Wouldn’t you know it, the reporter had picked one of the kids with bright eyes and big ears who was all but dancing with excitement at being on television. Why couldn’t they have gone for some shy kid who was scared to death, hiding his face against his mama’s arm?
It had been all over the noon news. “Whoosh!” the kid had said, imitating the motion Eric had made in tossing the coffee in the bozo’s face. A big grin had lit the kid’s face like it was Christmas. “Then he took the gun away from the robber and threw him down on the car, wham, like this—” He imitated that motion, too. “And said he was never stopping for fucking coffee again!”
They’d bleeped the “fucking,” but Garvey was right, there wasn’t any doubt about exactly what the kid had said.
He knocked on Lieutenant Neille’s door and pushed it open at the muffled “come in.” “You wanted to see me?” He sounded grumpy to his own ears, but he didn’t care.
“Sit down.” Neille leaned back in his black leather chair, a perplexed look on his face. “Wilder, do you have any objection to making an apprehension using normal methods?”
Eric dropped into one of the visitors’ chairs. “There was a restaurant full of people. I didn’t want any bullets flying around.” That should have been self-explanatory.
“I don’t know if you could get any luckier, considering the guy didn’t have a real gun. If you’d shot him, the media would be raising hell.”
“If I were lucky, I wouldn’t keep walking into situations like this,” he said irritably.
“As it is, the mayor’s office has called, I’ve already had five requests for interviews with you, and a charity group wants to know if you’ll be one of the bachelors auctioned off—”
“Hell, no!” Eric barked, then caught himself. “Sorry, sir.”
Neille grinned. “I didn’t think so. I refused on your behalf.” Still grinning, he looped his arms behind his head. “I don’t know if I can get you out of the interviews, though. This is two days in a row you’ve brought the bad guy down in an unconventional way, and the mayor thinks this will be great publicity.”
“Except I don’t have time for publicity.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “I’m investigating a murder, I have suspects practically falling out of the trees but none of them look all that good for the job, and this circus has already taken up most of the morning.”
“Understood. I’ll do what I can to stall, and maybe something else will happen to take the spotlight off your smiling face and turn it on someone else. But if the mayor says you do the interviews, then you do the interviews.”
“Yes, sir.” Frustrated, Eric got to his feet and returned downstairs to his desk, and the mountain of paperwork that was waiting for him. It didn’t help that grins followed him every step of the way. Of all the days for a huge time-suck to happen, when he had more to wade through than he could handle.
He glared at the thick stack of reports and paperwork on his desk. That was something about television cop shows that really griped him: they never showed the mountain of paperwork real cops had to wade through on every case, every day. Reports had to be written and filed, requests written and filed, every shred of evidence accounted for every step of the way.
He dropped into his chair, and began flipping through the reports to see what he wanted to read first. He knew the report on Jaclyn’s clothes wouldn’t be back yet; he’d just logged them in last night, so the lab techs probably hadn’t even started yet. The clothes had been wet, and they’d have to air dry before they could be tested.
There was a preliminary report on the trace evidence the crime techs had turned up. No analysis yet; that took time. But just knowing what was there would usually point him in the right direction. It might take him awhile to weed out what was important from what wasn’t, but this was a start.
He pulled the report out of the manila envelope and began to read. The first thing he noticed was that there was hair—a lot of it, in just about every color he thought human hair came in, though there were a couple of hot pink ones that threw him.
Garvey dropped into the chair beside Eric’s desk. He glanced up at the sergeant. “Have you seen this?”
“Yeah.”
“Gray hair.”
“No telling where it came from, though. It’s a public place.”
Which enormously compounded their problem, but then again, maybe not. Sometimes when you started digging into something t
hat looked complicated, at the end of the day you found that the answer was simple, after all.
“I interviewed Jaclyn Wilde’s mother this morning. She’s so organized she makes a Swiss bank look fucked-up. Every minute is accounted for. She and Jaclyn had a muffin at Claire’s yesterday afternoon, and the time frame means that if Jaclyn is our killer, then she calmly left the scene and went straight to have an afternoon snackie with mom.”
“Which she wouldn’t have done if she’d had blood all over her.”
“Right.”
“I didn’t think she was good for it, anyway. We can’t completely write her off yet, but I think we’d be wasting our time to keep looking at her.”
Eric was relieved to hear his sergeant say that. For the most part Garvey let them follow their instincts, knowing he had some good men under him, but it was nice to have his approval to change their focus.
Because of the medical examiner’s estimated time of death for Carrie Edwards, and Jaclyn’s statement about a gray-haired man arriving at the reception hall just as she was leaving, they had to look hard at the gray-haired men in the victim’s life. They’d have to do some digging, but the two most obvious, as he’d previously noted, were her father and her fiancé’s father. It was a sad fact that whenever a woman was killed, it was usually a man close to her who did the killing.
“She was so beautiful,” said Corene Edwards, her voice thin and so ineffably sad that Eric wondered if she’d ever recover from the death of her daughter. How did anyone recover from that? He knew people did, he knew they were usually much stronger than even they themselves expected, but in the moment they were broken and seemed beyond repair.
“Yes, she was,” he agreed gently. Carrie Edwards might not have been pretty in personality, but she’d been their child. He and Garvey sat side by side in the Edwardses’ living room. The house was an eighties-style brick, but the yard was meticulously maintained and the interior, though dated, was spotless. The doors had been raised on the garage when he and Garvey arrived. There were two vehicles parked side by side: a red Ford, and a blue Ford pickup. Other cars choked the driveway—one of them gray, and he’d duly noted down the tag number and run it before they even went inside, to find it belonged to an eighty-three-year-old woman—and several friends and family were in the house with the bereaved couple, offering what solace their company would bring, fielding phone calls, answering the door to accept so many offerings of food that the dining room table, which Eric could see through the open archway behind them, looked as if it would collapse under the weight. The eighty-three-year-old woman turned out to be Corene’s aunt, and she was all of five feet tall and as wispy as smoke. No way was she the killer.
An authoritative woman who introduced herself as the next-door neighbor had taken charge of the others in the house, shepherding them toward the kitchen in the back, so the Edwardses could have some privacy with the detectives.
Carrie’s father, Howard, sat beside his wife, his head down. The two were holding hands, as if only the other’s support kept each of them upright. They both seemed to have aged years since he’d notified them the night before of Carrie’s death. Howard wasn’t gray-haired so much as silver-haired, a thin, long-limbed man with the long, graceful hands of a piano player.
“Do you know who did this to our baby?” he asked, his voice trembling as he got to the last word, and tears began sliding soundlessly down his face.
“Not yet,” Eric said. “We’re hoping you might know something that will help us catch her killer. Did she tell you anything about what she had scheduled yesterday afternoon, after meeting with the vendors at the reception hall?”
“No,” Corene said. Her eyes were swollen, but her face was completely pale, as if she’d cried so much her complexion had moved beyond the ability to turn red and blotchy. “I know she wasn’t happy with her gown. I don’t know why; I thought she looked like a princess in it. But Carrie was so particular about things. She wanted her wedding to be perfect. She was marrying the perfect man, she said, so everything else had to be perfect.”
She sounded like the pain in the ass everyone had said she was, but Eric kept that opinion to himself.
“She was going to eat dinner with us tonight,” Howard said. “It’s Thursday. She eats dinner with us every Thursday night.” The thought that they’d never have those Thursday-night dinners with her again made his thin chest heave.
“Had she mentioned anyone she might have had an argument with, someone who might have held a grudge?”
“I don’t know,” said Corene listlessly. “All Carrie said was that people were giving her trouble, but that she’d take care of them. She talked a lot about how she wanted everything to look.”
“The dressmaker, Gretchen Gibson, mentioned something about an argument with a bridesmaid?”
“Taite Boyne. Yes, she’s Carrie’s best friend. Carrie said she’d handle it, so I assume she did. They’ve been friends forever.”
“Ms. Boyne dropped out of the wedding party. Didn’t that put pressure on Carrie to find another maid of honor?”
“Oh, no, she simply called someone else. She told me that Taite couldn’t afford the dress, that was why she dropped out, and she was embarrassed because of her money problems.”
That wasn’t the tale Mrs. Gibson had told him, having witnessed the vicious argument between the two young women, but Eric didn’t contradict Mrs. Edwards. His job was to keep people talking, not antagonize them to the point where they wouldn’t talk to him at all.
“Did Carrie seem worried about anything?”
“My goodness, no. She was on top of the world. She was more and more excited about the wedding every time we saw her. She said it was going to be big, the biggest wedding of the year, and everyone would talk about it and imitate it. She really liked that idea, that people would imitate what she did. She thought the wedding might even be featured in some magazines.”
“Was she getting along okay with her fiancé and his family?”
Howard’s head came up, and his spine stiffened a little. “You think Sean might have done this?” Life came back into his eyes, in the form of growing anger. It was easy to see he wanted, needed, someone he could blame for the pain he was feeling.
“No, not at all,” Eric said, and that was true as far as it went. Sean Dennison had talked on his cell phone to Carrie right before she died; he’d been at work at the time, and had remained there for more than an hour after her estimated time of death—an easily verified, solid-as-stone alibi. “But any investigation starts with the nucleus of people around the victim, then you find out who they knew, moving out in widening circles. Does that make sense?” It was kind of bullshit, but at the same time kind of true. It’s just that they seldom had to look further than the nucleus.
Howard’s shoulders slumped again. “As far as I know, she didn’t have any trouble with any of his family. I don’t really know any of Sean’s friends. We’ve met his parents, of course, but we’ve seen them just twice.”
“They seem like nice people,” Corene offered, then her voice faded away and she kind of checked out, sitting motionless and staring at the floor.
“Thank you for your time,” Eric said gently. They had no information to offer, and they were so numb with grief that asking them any more questions would be abusive. “I’ll be in touch.”
He and Garvey walked out to the car. Garvey put his hands in his pockets, jingled his change. “Nothing there.”
“No. Maybe we’ll have better luck with the Dennisons.”
The Dennisons lived in Buckhead, which meant they were out of their jurisdiction, again, but Eric had called beforehand and requested an interview, and both Senator and Mrs. Dennison were supposed to be there. He’d kept the request general, because if the senator was involved in any way Eric didn’t want to tip him off ahead of time.
The Dennison family money, actually Mrs. Dennison’s family money, was evidenced by the massive gated entrance, with no house in sight b
ehind the high rock wall. There was a keypad on the left, as well as a security camera. Eric lowered his window to press the alert button beside the keypad. A woman’s brisk voice came clearly over the speaker: “Yes.”
“Sergeant Garvey and Detective Wilder to see Senator and Mrs. Dennison.”
There was a delay while their names were evidently checked against a list, then the gate began to swing open. Eric exchanged a glance with Garvey, then drove through the entrance; he watched in his rearview mirror as the gate smoothly closed behind them.
The stamped concrete drive curved to the right, through a thick stand of various species of mature shade trees. Once they were past the trees the house came into view, set back to the left, among more trees. It was like looking at something from a travel catalog. The massive house, crafted of golden stone, was three stories tall, with balconies and porticos and a five-car attached garage. All of the garage doors were lowered, so he couldn’t see the vehicles. Garvey grunted, and took out his cell. They didn’t have to see the cars, though it would have been nice to actually eyeball them. Records from the DMV would tell them exactly what vehicles were in the senator’s name.
Eric parked in front, and together they walked up to the double front doors, which were easily ten feet tall. He pressed his finger to the doorbell, and even from outside heard the reverberation of a bass gong on the other side of the doors. “What is this, a temple?” he muttered.
“Only if you’re Indiana Jones,” Garvey replied.
Because he hated being kept waiting on a step, Eric watched the second hand of his watch sweep around. When it hit fifteen, he lifted his finger to gong the house again, but before he could the left-side door was opened by a woman of indeterminate age, dressed in the most severe business suit he’d ever seen. “I’m Nora Franks, Mrs. Dennison’s assistant,” she said with as much emotion as an eggplant. “Please come in.”
