Veil of Night: A Novel

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.

“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 behind 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.”

They stepped inside. Eric eyed the woman with more than a little wariness. Nora Franks, his ass; he’d bet her last name was Danvers, and Rebecca’s ghost was flitting around somewhere, except he couldn’t remember if Rebecca had been a ghost or not. He’d read the damn book under protest, to pass his high school literature class, and he’d hated every minute of it. Maybe he had the details confused with Macbeth, or something.

“This way.” She led them across a marble-tiled floor, the heels of her sensible pumps clipping on the stone. A double-barreled grand staircase curved up on both the left and the right, meeting in a landing and merging to make the final five steps up to the second floor. A crystal chandelier at least as tall as he was hung like a giant faceted tear in the middle of the foyer, under which an inlaid table was precisely centered. The table held an enormous bouquet of fresh-cut flowers. He recognized the hydrangeas, because his mother had some, but he had no idea what the other flowers were. They smelled good, though.

Mrs. Danvers—shit, Mrs. Franks, and he’d better remember that or he’d slip up and call her the wrong name—paused beside a closed door on the left, and gave a light tap on the wooden panel. She had her head tilted close to the door; Eric didn’t hear the answer but she must have, because she opened the door.

“Ma’am, Senator … Sergeant Garvey and Detective Wilder.” Then she stepped back, gave both of them a brief nod as they moved into the room, and closed the door behind him. They hadn’t introduced themselves, Eric thought, so she must have been the woman who they’d talked to over the intercom.

The room they were in was a library, the walls dominated by floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves that were crammed with books of all sizes. Unlike some libraries, this one looked as if the contents were actually read. For one thing, the books weren’t arranged by size or color. Paperbacks were shoved in among hardbacks. Some were stacked on top of each other, some of them were spine out. Knickknacks dotted the shelves, too: candid photographs, pieces that looked like expensive sculpture mixed with what had to be cheap memorabilia from vacations, like the starfish that was propped against a stack of books.

He liked the room, Eric thought, and that surprised him, because he hadn’t expected to like anything about the Dennisons. He could keep an open mind about whether or not either of them struck him as being a good bet for their killer, but that had nothing to do with whether or not he personally liked anything.

But the woman who put aside her book and rose from a deep, rich brown leather chair where she’d been sitting with her feet curled under her … he liked her immediately.

“I’m Fayre Dennison,” she said in a straightforward manner, coming to them and holding out her hand. They each shook it briefly; Eric even liked that about her, the way she gripped firmly instead of extending a cold limp fish of a hand. She wasn’t a big woman, no more than average height, and slim in a lithe, athletic way that said she burned off calories in activity, not by restricting herself to a lettuce leaf every day.

She was striking. If Douglas Dennison had set out to get himself a wife who would be an asset in politics, he couldn’t have done any better if he’d had her designed. Fayre Dennison had shoulder-length platinum hair pulled straight back and caught in a black clasp at the nape of her neck. The style wasn’t softened by bangs or stray wisps, but her face didn’t need any softening; it was what it was, strong-boned but very feminine, with a faint cleft in her chin, straight dark brows, and eyes so dark they looked black against the whiteness of her hair. Her voice was brisk, her gaze both friendly and shrewd. She was casually dressed in white pants, a black top, and black flats, but on her the outfit looked like a million bucks. At a guess, Eric put her age at close to sixty, but that was more because of the authority that sat so easily on her slim shoulders than any wrinkles in her skin, which were few.

Behind her, Senator Dennison was also on his feet. Unlike some people who didn’t resemble their photos very much at all, Senator Dennison photographed well and looked the same in person. He was about half a foot taller than his wife, with a trim, athletic build, his shoulders still wide with muscle. His skin was tanned, and it looked like a real tan and not something that had been sprayed on. He had dark hair that had gone mostly gray, an easy smile, and friendly blue eyes. He was less casually dressed than his wife, still in his dress pants and shirt, but he’d removed his jacket and tie, rolled up his sleeves.

Without appearing to, Eric paid sharp attention to the senator. On the surface, he was one of those immediately likable men—affable, intelligent, but with drive to him. He hadn’t been content to live off his wife’s money, but had started his own business and made a success of it before going into politics and being successful there, too.

They both looked relaxed, but he could see the tension in them. Their son’s fiancée had been murdered. At the moment they were on the sidelines, but all too soon they would be called front and center; they’d have to be in the public eye, answer questions from the press, comfort their son, do what they could to support the bereaved couple who in another month would have been Sean’s in-laws. They were in the eye of the hurricane now and they were taking advantage of the relative quiet, because it wouldn’t last long.

“Please sit down,” Fayre said, indicating an oversized leather sofa that was made to accommodate men. “Would you like anything to drink? I know alcohol’s out, but there’s coffee, iced tea, or soft drinks.” Both of the Dennisons had a glass of white wine beside them.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” said Eric as they sat. The plush leather enveloped his ass with just the right amount of support, inviting him to sink back. He didn’t, sitting forward with his notebook on his knee.

She looked at him and a slow grin lit her face. “That’s right. I caught the noon news. You’re giving up coffee forever.”

Garvey made a stifled snorting sound, and Eric felt his face getting hot. “Ma’am, I apologize,” he said.

“Don’t you dare apologize. That brought some humor into the day, the only little bit we’ve had since we got the news last night about Carrie. That little boy was a charmer, but I thank my lucky stars he’s some other woman’s problem and not mine because he looks like a handful. You did a remarkably brave thing, so I think you’re entitled to use a few cuss words if you want.”

“Not so brave.” He tugged at his collar, feeling the heat run down his neck. “The guy was armed with a squirt gun.”

“But you didn’t know that. You thought it was a real gun.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I missed the news,” said the senator, looking at each of them in turn. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ll tell you later. It’ll probably be on tonight, too, and you can see it.”

“Must be X-rated, then,” the senator observed, smiling a little. “Okay, I can wait.”

“Now,” she said briskly, looking from Eric to Garvey. “I suppose you’re here to ask us if either of us killed Carrie.”

“Fayre!” the senator said, shocked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Eric said, going on instinct. Bullshit wouldn’t work with her, and he’d bet she had an inborn lie detector. “It’s standard.”

“I know; look at the family first. For my part, I didn’t like her, but I got along with her, for Sean’s sake.”

“I thought you liked her!” the senator said, going from shock to puzzlement so fast he was in danger of getting whiplash.

“Liked her, no. But as long as Sean was happy, I was okay with him marrying her. Carrie and I had a silent understanding. As long as she didn’t try running any power plays on me, and made Sean happy, we were good. She signed the prenup agreement without any fuss, so maybe she really loved Sean and wasn’t just using him.”

“What made you think she might be using him?” Garvey asked. Normally he stayed in the background and let Eric do the questioning, but Fayre Dennison had a way about her that drew people out. Eric couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but he could almost forget why he was here, his job overshadowed by the simple act of conversing with her.

Charisma. That was it. Fayre Dennison had charisma, the kind that pulled people to her and then pried them out of their shells. Talking to her felt like being a kid again and opening Christmas presents.

Shit. He was crushing on her like a teenager, and she was the same age as his mom. Today must be his day for meeting attractive older women: first Madelyn Wilde, and now Fayre Dennison. One was very different from the other, but both were people he instinctively liked and wanted to spend more time around—and Jaclyn’s mom hadn’t been trying to charm him at all, she’d been too pissed.

“Gut feeling,” Fayre replied after a brief consideration. “Carrie was a user. She didn’t try to pull anything with me, and she was always sweet with Sean, but I saw how she acted with other people. There wasn’t anything definite, but I always got the feeling she was reminding herself to be nice. If we were at a restaurant, for example. If the least little thing wasn’t exactly how she wanted it, for a second she’d get this incredibly cold, mean expression, then she’d kind of catch herself and she’d put on this smile so sweet it made my teeth hurt.”

“You said there was a prenup?”

“Yes. We worked hard to make certain Sean didn’t grow up a spoiled brat like so many other kids in his position did. He wasn’t given a job, he had to go out and get one on his own, and he’s responsible for his own bills. We’re lucky in that he’s a genuinely nice person. His one fault, if you want to call it a fault, is that he tends to see the good in people.” She gave a small smile that was full of pride. “But he’s smart, and we’re smart, and we took the family money out of the equation. Carrie signed a prenup giving up all rights to any money he inherited. That’s all. Anything he made on his own, we thought that was his decision to make if he included provisions regarding that. He didn’t. And, as I said, Carrie didn’t question any of it, just signed the agreement.”

“Maybe she loved him.”

“Maybe,” said Fayre. “Anything’s possible.” Her tone of voice said she didn’t truly think so, but Carrie was dead so she was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“Do you know of anyone Carrie wasn’t getting along with, someone she may have argued with and it got out of hand?”

“Carrie argued with everyone—except us, and Sean,” said the senator. He breathed out a sigh. “I admit I was worried about Sean marrying her, but she was always—It was as if he brought out the best in her, if you know what I mean. She was never that way when she was with him.”

“Any particular argument that stands out?”

“Only the one with Taite Boyne,” Fayre said. “They were best friends. Taite was supposed to be the maid of honor in the wedding, but the way I understand it, she and Carrie got into a huge argument and Taite quit the wedding party.” The tone of her voice told them that the maid of honor quitting the wedding party was a disaster on the same level with the church burning down.

That was twice the erstwhile maid of honor had been mentioned. The problem with that was, she obviously wasn’t a gray-haired man, and no one had placed her at the reception hall.

“I think they made up,” the senator put in, then shrugged. “I’m not sure. I heard Sean and Carrie talking about it, and that’s the impression I got.”

“Maybe.” Fayre shrugged, too. “There was so much endless drama attached to the wedding preparations that after a while I stopped listening.” She wouldn’t have had any problems with anything she planned; she’d make the decisions, stick to them, let professionals handle the details, and if there were any problems she’d improvise, all without breaking a sweat.

“I have to ask,” said Eric. “Where were you yesterday, between the hours of three and six p.m.?”

She wasn’t insulted by the question at all. In fact, she gave him an understanding look. “I was here, with the four other members of the Crystalle Ball planning committee, doing what we do best: planning. I believe Sydney Phillips was the last person to leave, at … oh, I think around five-thirty. And of course Nora—Mrs. Franks—was here.”

“I was at work,” added the senator. “I had to stay a little later than usual. I left the office about five-fifteen, arrived home about … what? Six o’clock? A little before that, I think.”

As alibis went, they were solid, providing they checked out. Eric got the names of Mrs. Dennison’s fellow committee members, and the pertinent information from the senator, but they would be so easily verified that lying would have been a waste of time, which left him with nowhere to go on the gray-haired man Jaclyn had seen.

He and Garvey got up, and the senator stood also. “I’ll see you to the door,” he said. As they walked across the marble foyer he asked, “Do you have any idea when Carrie’s body will be released to her parents?”

“Probably tomorrow,” Garvey answered.

The senator nodded, looked thoughtful. “Then the arrangements would be made tomorrow afternoon; Fayre and I will clear time to be with Sean and Carrie’s parents, maybe help them make some of the decisions. Sean is devastated. He’s here, in fact, asleep upstairs. He couldn’t sleep at all last night, but finally he was so tired he couldn’t stay on his feet.” He opened the door, walked outside with them.

That was where he halted, put his hands in his pockets, and looked down.

Something about the way the senator was standing, a look of guilt shadowing his face, brought Eric to a halt, too. Garvey looked around, stopped. The three men stood in a loose circle.

“I have to admit to something I don’t like saying,” the senator said heavily.

Eric waited, studying every flicker of expression the senator gave.

“I wasn’t at work,” he admitted, keeping his voice low.

Without wasting more than a second’s thought, Eric could tell where this was heading. “Do you want to tell us where you really were?”

“With my—Look, I have a girlfriend. I was with her.”

Bingo! He’d been right. What kind of fucking fool would cheat on a woman like Fayre Dennison? Eric wondered. Oh, right—a fucking fool, that’s what kind. He didn’t say what he was thinking, just said, “We’ll need her name and address, her phone number.”

The senator nodded. “I left work early so I could be with her. She was able to get some free time from her own job, so we took the opportunity to be together.”

“Her name?” Eric prodded.

The senator looked miserable. “I—Never mind, I’m not going to make excuses. It’s Taite Boyne.”

The erstwhile maid of honor, Eric thought. Well, well. Things were getting interesting.