by Dana Marton
Denvil was tall, as tall as the intruder the night before, but slimmer. Of course, the guy last night had worn a jacket. Denvil was years younger than Bing, and handsome enough, he supposed, but he had weasel eyes. Not that Bing was biased. His blood pressure punched up a notch when he tried to picture him with Sophie, so he quit.
He introduced himself and pulled up the picture of the pen with the staircase logo on his cell phone, showing it to the man. “Have you seen this before?” Everything inside him stilled as he waited for the answer.
“Yeah. Sure. What is this about?”
The first piece of progress. He watched the man closely. “Can you tell me what it means?”
“Golden opportunity. I’ve got a pen just like that from an exclusive investing club I’m involved in. They gave out promo stuff at the initial investment pitch meeting. Mugs, folders, mouse pads, and whatever.” His eyes narrowed. “Why are you asking me about this?”
“One of their promo items was found at a crime scene. Probably unrelated.” Although he didn’t think so. “I’m just trying to run down every last lead. You have a contact number for this investment group?”
Jeremy scrolled through his contact list on his phone, then rattled it off. “How did you find me? I mean, how did you know I had something to do with them?” he asked as Bing finished writing.
“I saw a mug with the logo at Sophie Curtis’s house. Miss Curtis informed me upon questioning that it was yours. She provided your contact information.”
Greg’s expression changed instantly from mild annoyance to true alarm. He stepped forward. “Why were you at Sophie’s place? Is she all right? Is she sick?”
“I can’t discuss confidential police business with you, I’m sorry.” He paused while a mother with two toddlers passed by them, struggling with the stroller. “I’m also going to need your whereabouts for last night.”
“I was out for drinks with a buddy from work. From seven until the bars closed at two in the morning. Then at his apartment until almost four. He’s going through a rough divorce. Am I being accused of something?”
“I’m going to need your friend’s name and contact information.”
He rattled that off without having to look, although he didn’t seem pleased about it. “Is everything okay with Sophie?”
“Miss Curtis is fine,” Bing said as he jotted the number down. “Where were you the Monday of April 27th?” The day Kristine Haynes had been murdered. Not that he could think of a connection beyond the staircase logo, but he might as well be thorough while he was here.
“At work.”
“Have you ever heard the names Greg Bruckner, Stacy Bing, or Kristine Haynes?”
“No.” He drew back. “And I’m not answering any more questions without a lawyer, unless you tell me what this is about,” he snapped.
Bing considered his options. He could bring Denvil in, make him sweat in interrogation, show him what true aggravation was. He would, he promised himself, if the man’s alibi for last night was off by as much as a millisecond.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the investigation at this time. I’ll be in touch, Mr. Denvil.”
He strode away, forwarding the investing company’s information to Joe at the station and asking him to track down who was running the thing. He called Denvil’s alibi for the night before. His buddy vouched for him. And then so did the people he worked with, giving him a solid alibi for the day of Kristine Haynes’s murder.
Bing kept turning all the information over and over in his head. Stacy’s murder—for which he still needed a motive—Kristine Haynes’s death, the intruder at Sophie’s place last night. The single link that tied all three women together, the damned staircase logo, was tenuous at best. Maybe he was reading things into it because he was desperate for answers.
As much as he thought, he didn’t arrive at any great revelation by the time he reached the station. He grabbed another cup of coffee on his way to his office. He was feeling decidedly bleary-eyed this morning.
After he topped off the java, he paged through Greg Bruckner’s yearbook once again, and this time he caught a photo he’d somehow missed before. The wrestling team. Two dozen kids in uniform grinned into the camera, the middle two in the back row familiar.
Greg Bruckner and Tag Taylor.
He stared at the grainy image. What in hell was Taylor doing with Stacy’s killer?
Stacy and Kristine worked for Anselm-Gnamm Pharmaceuticals. Bruckner and Taylor were old friends. Connections or coincidences?
Okay. He rolled his shoulders, all senses alert like a hound on a scent.
What did he really know about Taylor? He and his wife Amanda worked for the same company as Stacy had. They’d been married forever, typical professional couple with a nice house, annual vacations in Hawaii, and pretty fine cars, especially Taylor. They both brought in good money and, without children, spent it on themselves. Not a crime.
The few times Bing had met with them, he hadn’t gotten the sense that anything was off. Then again, he hadn’t been paying that close attention. He tried to think back now, recall snatches of conversation, body language. Nothing stuck out in his memory as unusual.
He ran Taylor through the system, but the man didn’t have a record. Bing glanced at the clock on his computer. Taylor should be at work this time of day.
“Going over to Wilmington,” he told Leila as he strode by her on his way out. “I need to look into something regarding the Haynes case.”
She didn’t even lift her gaze from her computer screen as she nodded, her fingers flying over the keyboard, probably working on one of the dozen reports they had to put together each month. She was the heart of the station and no doubt about it. “Need backup?” she called after him.
“Just following a hunch. It’s a pretty long shot.”
Traffic was light, so he was at the company in less than half an hour. Fancy building, plenty of expensive cars in the parking lot. The pharmaceutical industry seemed to be doing well, whatever else was going on in the economy, he thought. Sick people would always need their pills.
He took the elevator up to the HR department and caught Taylor between two video conferences.
“Can it wait?” The man flashed an unconcerned, friendly smile, stopping in the hallway but looking past Bing at the conference room door, and shuffling. “I really can’t miss this meeting. We’re switching HR software.”
He might have been graying on top, but in the back he kept his original dark blond color. The maid, Maria Gonzales, had only seen Kristine’s lover from the back when she described him as blond. Could she have seen Taylor?
Bing thought of Amanda for a second, all that she would have been through already with the cancer. Then he put everything that was personal aside. “Did you have an affair with Kristine Haynes?”
Taylor stiffened. He glanced around. “What are you talking about?”
Bing gambled. “There was a witness to the affair at the Mushroom Mile Motel.”
The man’s lips narrowed, his gaze turning hard, then, little by little, his expression changed to chagrin, then embarrassment. He ducked his head. “Why don’t we talk in my office?”
The place was small and crowded with bookcases and file cabinets, but it had a window and a small buffet cart in the corner with a fancy coffeemaker.
Bing followed him in but didn’t take a seat. He stayed standing and waited while Taylor put the desk between them as if needing a shield. No pictures of his wife in his office. The place had few personal touches, in fact, other than a poster with a sunny beach and palm trees.
“I don’t want Amanda to find out about this. Listen…” He grimaced, closed his eyes for a second, and when he opened them, his gaze begged for understanding. “It’s not a crime to want a beautiful woman.”
Bing swallowed the distaste creeping up his throat. “You’re married. So was Kristine.”
He waited a beat before answering. “Amanda and I have been together for over twenty yea
rs. It’s more friendship than anything else at this stage. Especially since the whole chemo thing. She’s just not the same. She has her ladies’ clubs and her girlfriends. I need something too. Kristine didn’t love her husband.”
“She told you that?”
“We didn’t talk a lot.” Taylor flashed a sly, man-to-man grin as he relaxed a little.
“How long did you carry on the affair?”
“It wasn’t a big deal.” The man glanced at his messy desk, the crooked piles of manila folders, then back up at Bing without fully meeting his eyes. “We met a couple of times.”
“More than that. You were seeing each other for over a year.”
Taylor swallowed, then hooked two fingers behind his tie to loosen it. “Look—”
But Bing didn’t want to hear any more pitiful excuses. “Did you know a man by the name of Greg Bruckner? He died two years ago.”
While Taylor had been uncomfortable with the conversation until now, this last question had him visibly withdrawing. He shoved his hands into his pocket. “Went to high school together. Hung out a couple of times a year. Why?”
“Did you kill Kristine Haynes?” Bing rapid-fired the next question to throw the man off-balance.
“I know this looks bad, but I didn’t hurt anyone. You have to believe me,” he rushed to say. “We’re friends, right?”
Bing watched him closely. “We’re not friends,” he said. “Do you know Sophie Curtis?”
“Who?”
“Did Kristine Haynes want to end the affair? Did you get mad at her?”
Taylor laughed off the question. “We ended things months ago. It was a pleasant distraction, but not the kind of passion a man would kill for. I was bored at home. She was there and ready to roll. We scratched a mutual itch. And then we ended things amicably. There’s really no great story here.”
He was lying about ending things. They’d been seen at the motel recently. But being a liar didn’t make the man a murderer. He could be lying to protect himself, because he knew how it looked, knew that as Kristine’s lover he’d be the primary suspect. Bing didn’t call him on the lie. Let him think the police didn’t have as much information as they did. The safer he felt, the better the chance that he’d slip up eventually.
To take things to the next level, Bing needed proof, and he didn’t have any. “Where were you on April 27th?” The day of the murder.
The man glanced at the desk calendar in front of him. “Home, sick. Amanda can back me up on this when she gets back from her management conference in Atlanta.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “If you must talk to her… I’d appreciate it if you could be discreet about your reasons for asking.”
He promised nothing, even if the thought of hurting Amanda bothered him. “Where were you last night?”
“Alone. I was burning the midnight oil, putting together some files for a big presentation due next week. The laptop probably time-stamped the documents if you want to see them.”
“I do.”
Taylor bent to his laptop on the corner of his desk, took a few seconds with the keyboard, then swiveled it to face Bing. “There. It’s the last saved field.”
The date and time matched the period in question, the time the intruder had been at Sophie’s house. And Taylor opened another document, and another. As far as Bing could tell, he was telling the truth and had been working most of the night.
It didn’t look like he’d been Sophie’s intruder. Which didn’t mean he hadn’t been Kristine’s killer.
“I don’t want you to leave town for the next couple of days.” Bing stepped back from the laptop, toward the door, wishing that for once the clues lined up and actually pointed at somebody clearly. There was something off about Taylor, but it could just be that he was nervous and embarrassed that someone had found out about the affair. His body language was all over the place, difficult to read.
Although, he no longer seemed to be embarrassed. He probably thought his boys-will-be-boys defense took care of everything.
He was shaking his head behind his desk. “I can’t believe it’s like this. You ate hot dogs in my backyard. What the hell happened?”
“Murder,” Bing said and left him to his video conference.
He took a call from an unidentified number on his way back to the office that eased his frustration a little—Murphy Dolan, the officer Jack Sullivan had replaced at the Broslin PD. He put Bing in a marginally better mood. They’d been friends once but hadn’t talked in ages.
He relaxed behind the wheel as he put Murph on speaker. “Hey. Good to hear from you. How’s it going?”
“Getting married.”
“Yeah? Congratulations.” That had to be difficult with the bride in the witness protection program. There’d be no families and friends attending. “I suppose it’s not going to be a fancy affair?”
“If I could, I’d ask you to be the best man. You know that.”
“I appreciate it.” He would gladly do the honor. “How is that beautiful bride of yours?”
“Happy, I hope. She sure makes me happy. Best thing that ever happened to me.”
Which was a lot to say, under the circumstances. Kate Bridges had come to Broslin to hide from a hit man with the help of the witness protection program. The FBI had messed up. She’d been running for her life when Murphy had stepped in, freshly home from Afghanistan. He’d gotten called up from the reserves, gone, then come back a different man.
They’d both been in a bad place, two people you would think couldn’t help themselves, let alone each other, but somehow they had. He saved her, and she saved him. And when it came to needing to move to keep hidden even after the primary threat had been eliminated, Murphy Dolan went without hesitation. He’d taken that on for love.
And it didn’t sound like he regretted it.
Bing congratulated him again and wished them all the happiness in the world.
Was it really like that? he thought after hanging up, trying not to miss Sophie too much. Did love really conquer everything?
Maybe it did, for those brave enough to believe it.
* * *
The key was not to think of Bing, not to think of where her heart had come from, but just go on with her daily business. Maybe if she pretended long enough that everything was all right, someday it would be.
Sophie checked her bank balance, happy as could be over the payments that finally came in from a client, and bought a new front door at the local hardware store. She even splurged and paid extra for same-day installation. She wasn’t tight on money. She made a good income from her business. Her clients liked her and tended to come back for more. She got a lot of new business through referrals.
Since the store had the door in stock and the installations were done by an on-site employee, her house was restored by midafternoon. She turned the locks and felt safer.
Not that she thought anyone would bother her now, not with the police car parked at the curb once again. At least that was what she told herself, what she wanted to believe. She wasn’t quite there yet, still startling at every noise. Thank God she had Peaches.
She worked a little, starting a new web site for a new client, then called her mother. “How are you?”
“Busy. Are you okay?”
“Fine, healthwise.” She thought of the rest, wishing they had the kind of relationship where they really told each other things. But if she shared her latest troubles, she’d have to listen to a list of reasons why she should move back home.
She wanted to be able to share things. She wanted her mother to be supportive.
Actually, she had control over half of that equation. Didn’t she? If she hoped to improve things, one of them had to get started. She glanced at her little sign of positive reinforcement over the sink.
“It’s been pretty crazy on this end for the last couple of days,” she began and went ahead and told her about what had been going on, instead of hiding all her troubles. “I could really use your support on this.
Even if we don’t agree on everything.”
Then came the predictable admonishment to give up the foolishness of living alone. And then, “I’m praying for you.”
“Thanks,” she said sincerely. “I appreciate it.”
When they hung up, she didn’t think they’d suddenly be seeing eye-to-eye now or feel closer than they’d ever been. But there was a seed of hope that if they both tried, it could be the beginning of something.
Peaches was playing with the giant rawhide bone she’d picked up at the pet store next to the hardware store, his prize for last night’s heroic actions.
“I appreciate what you did, I really do.” She reached down to pat the dog as she walked by on her way up the stairs to work. She couldn’t stand the thought that the intruder might have hurt him.
She finished Meredith’s update so her online-shopping-cart app would now automatically calculate tax and display it at checkout. She set up a testing page and sent a link to Meredith for final approval. She’d just hit the Send button when her doorbell rang. Maybe it was Joe outside, Officer Kessler, needing to use the bathroom. She’d told him when he came on shift to let her know if he needed anything.
He seriously looked like those models whose half-out-of-uniform pictures some of her friends sent around on Facebook. He’d given her the come-hither look when they’d talked for a minute by his car. She didn’t think he could help it. He seemed like a born flirt, and it suited him. But she hadn’t been affected. Her head was still filled with Bing.
But when she opened the door, Lester’s wrinkled face greeted her.
“Saw your cop boyfriend was over again last night. You sure get into a lot of trouble.” He peered in and checked around. “Ellie May’s furniture was smaller.”
“I suppose,” she said easily. “They make everything bigger these days. Would you like to come in?”
He harrumphed and stayed where he was but kept looking. Peaches was trying to sniff him. Sophie pushed the dog back. “Behave.”
“So what was the hullabaloo last night?” Lester wanted to know. “Whatever happened, I came over to tell you I didn’t do it. I don’t want that cop on my case again.”
