Veil of Night (15 page)

“Is there anything else?” she asked, her voice stiff.

“No, that’s all for now.”

Keeping her expression as blank as possible, she edged past him to her car, got in, and drove away without looking back.

That had gone well, Eric thought sourly as he got back in his car. He’d known she wouldn’t like being told not to leave the area, but he’d done it because she was a person of interest and that was what he was supposed to do. He’d followed the book; he’d played by the rules. He hadn’t given her any indication of special consideration, hadn’t offered to do her any favors, not even a tiny one. As his reward, she’d looked at him as if he were a slug she’d just stepped on, and she needed to wipe the slime off the bottom of her fancy shoe.

It especially pissed him off because he was doing everything he could to get her removed from their suspect list, and if he didn’t play by the rules, he’d be removed from the case. Any of the other detectives on the force would do their best to solve the case, and they were good guys, but they didn’t have the extra motivation he did.

He’d been up late the previous night, and he’d gotten an early start today. He hadn’t even been in to headquarters yet because he’d wanted to interview Madelyn Wilde and get that over with. The fact that she was so organized helped; he doubted she took a piss break without making a little note of it in her schedule—coded, of course, so no one glancing at her paperwork would know she’d actually had to stop and take a leak. She was a solid alibi. Unless the lab report came back saying Jaclyn’s black outfit had been covered with Carrie Edwards’s blood, which he sure as hell didn’t expect, then Jaclyn was well on the way to being cleared.

Not that she appeared to give a shit. She was so pissed at him she wasn’t even going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But, damn, he liked the way she looked with fire in her eyes. The cool lady could be pushed out of control, and he bet that would be a lot of fun. He’d broken through that control in bed, he’d had her digging her fingernails into his back and biting her pillow to keep from screaming, but he liked knowing he could get to her out of bed, too. It was kind of the same thing as the fact that she made lousy coffee. He felt a little bit of the princess and the pauper with her, even though she hadn’t said or done anything to suggest she felt the same. Maybe he was a little insecure.

He thought about that for a split second, then shook his head. Nah. He just wanted to know if he could roll and tumble with her, without her freaking out if her hair got messed up, or if she’d break down in tears if he so much as raised his voice. From what he’d seen this morning, he had no worries on that score—assuming she’d ever give him the chance to roll and tumble with her.

First things first: clear her of suspicion, then work on getting back in her good graces.

With an eye toward the first requirement, the next stop on his list was Gretchen Gibson’s dressmaking shop, Elegant Stitches, which was in a small, fairly exclusive shopping area, built in a U shape around a center fountain, with parking on all three sides. The shop was situated on the left leg of the U. Because of the relatively early hour—before nine—there were no cars in the parking lot, but he checked the rear of the building and a Honda Civic was parked just outside the back door of Elegant Stitches.

He went to the front and firmly rapped on the glass. After about ten seconds a short, plump, middle-aged blonde appeared and pointed at the “Closed” sign. Eric pulled his wallet out and flipped it open to show his badge. The woman’s mouth made an O of surprise, then she held up one finger and disappeared toward the back of the shop. She reappeared almost instantly, a key ring in her hand. He waited while she unlocked the deadbolt and threw the chain, then opened the door.

“Gretchen Gibson?”

“Yes,” she said warily. “May I help you?”

“I’m Detective Eric Wilder. May I come in?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” She stepped back, opening the door wider. He stepped through, and she firmly closed the door and locked it again. “This is about Carrie Edwards, isn’t it?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions about Ms. Edwards, if you don’t mind,” he said, keeping his tone easy and low-key. A big part of being a detective was getting people to talk, and they were more likely to talk if they felt comfortable with him. He was about a foot taller than Gretchen Gibson, so she might already feel intimidated. He couldn’t do anything about his size, but he could make a conscious effort to come across as a nice guy.

“I read in the paper that she was killed yesterday afternoon,” she said. “Well, and a couple of friends called me last night to tell me, too.” She heaved a sigh, then squared her plump shoulders. “I guess you know about the argument we had.”

“I gather she was a difficult client.”

Her face turned red. “Difficult? That’s like saying Charles Manson is a little disturbed. She was a mean, vicious bitch, and I don’t mind saying it.”

“Tell me what happened,” Eric invited.

Gretchen Gibson pressed her lips together. “I have a pot of fresh coffee in the back. Would you like some? Let’s go to my office and sit down, and I’ll tell you what it was like dealing with Carrie Edwards.”

Eric left the shop half an hour later with a few pages of notes, and another person of interest crossed off his list. Carrie Edwards had still been very much alive when the dressmaker had left the reception hall, and she’d been here taking measurements and discussing a wedding gown with a new client when Carrie had been killed.

Gretchen Gibson had filled his ears. If he went by what she said, the list of people who would have liked to kill Carrie Edwards far outnumbered the people who wouldn’t. The maid of honor had even quit the wedding party, after a screaming argument with Carrie.

With most victims, he’d find one or two people who wanted to do them harm. With Carrie Edwards, he could practically fill a football stadium.

Chapter Sixteen

ON THE WAY IN TO HEADQUARTERS, ERIC HIT THE
McDonald’s drive-through window for another cup of coffee. The coffee Mrs. Gibson had offered him had been regular coffee, not one of those flavored ones, but so weak he could see the bottom of the cup through the liquid. He needed caffeine. Mickey D made good coffee, and he didn’t want to risk another convenience store. A drive-through had to be as uneventful as possible, right?

The cashier, a gangly teenage girl who looked about six feet tall, slid the window open. “Cream or sugar?” she asked, then widened her already slightly protruding eyes and rolled them twice toward the direction of the counter before mouthing
Call the cops
.

“No, just black,” he replied as he gave the interior of the restaurant a quick survey. Everyone behind the counter was standing stiffly, instead of dodging around filling orders as they usually did. He couldn’t see many of the customers, but the ones he could see were doing the same thing: standing still.

No fucking way
. Not again. What were the odds?

“Shit on a fucking stick,” he muttered, fighting the urge to beat his head on the steering wheel. All he wanted was a cup of coffee, but some dickhead was in the process of robbing the place. What was wrong with the universe that he couldn’t just get some coffee and drink it in peace?

He couldn’t see the robber, but had a real good guess at the dickhead’s location; he was actually standing close to the side door that would open almost in front of Eric’s car. What he also couldn’t see was whether or not the robber was maybe holding a weapon to a little kid’s head, or something.

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 that 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.