“What is it?” Calvin pressed.
“I might have left for a few minutes,” she whispered, her stare fixated on some smudge on the sidewalk that I hoped wasn’t dog shit.
When she failed to follow that comment up with anything more, and both Calvin and Quinn were shifting restlessly, I took a shot in the dark. “You went to the Wash & Fold.”
Harmony’s head jerked up. “How’d you—are you friends with Jazz?”
“Hang on,” Calvin interrupted, raising his hand. “Who’s Jazz?”
“He works at the Wash & Fold next door to Sandra’s,” I answered before motioning toward Harmony. “He’s sweet on her.”
Harmony snorted and crossed her arms over her chest, causing the crop top to ride up. “Yeah, all right,boomer.”
“I’m thirty-five,” I protested.
“Both of you,” Calvin warned. To Harmony, he asked, “How long were you with this gentleman?”
“Like… twenty minutes?”
“That’s a lot longer than ‘a few minutes,’” Quinn muttered as she scratched a line out on the notepad and wrote something else.
“Jazz closes at seven, so… it was empty, you know? But I locked the door when I left,” Harmony said defensively. “And it was still locked when I came back.” She tugged a key ring from her shorts that somehow hadn’t been forced out by the natural motions of thighs and butt working in collaboration with a very shallow pocket, so hey, a small miracle. Harmony held up one key and showed it to Calvin. “This one.”
“Is the lock a deadbolt?”
She shook her head, angled her body so as to look at the front entrance of the shop, and said, “Just a regular door lock.”
“Was Mr. Habel alive when you stepped out?” Calvin asked.
Harmony returned her gaze and smiled sheepishly. “I honestly didn’t even realize he was still here… but, I mean, he had to have been. I definitely would have heard someone stabbing him!”
Quinn snapped her notepad shut and said to Calvin, “I’ll have CSU dust the lock for fingerprints.”
Calvin nodded in acknowledgment.
I texted the photos of the fork on Calvin’s phone to myself before taking a few steps forward and tucking the cell into his back pocket.
Calvin said to Harmony, as she made like she wanted to walk away, “You’ve done a great job, thank you. I have one last question. Mr. Habel knew that his wife had been killed Tuesday morning, didn’t he?”
“I told him,” she confirmed. “I heard it from Jazz, who’d been told by Sandra’s cleaner.”
It was a relief to know that all the he-saids and she-saids in this case were aligning exactly how I’d been told. Sometimes games of telephone could be tricky.
“Was Mr. Habel at all upset?”
“Sort of. I mean, I’m sure he was, but he wanted to do readings at their shop too, and Sandra didn’t want that—change the name, share the spotlight. I think she’d been syphoning money from their joint account into a personal one too. So even if he was sad, he really didn’t like her anymore. I guess that’d complicate things.”
Radcliff stepped outside, strolling toward us while displaying a plastic evidence bag. “Want to take a wild guess as to whose business card Mr. Habel had in his pocket?”
Calvin took the offering, frowned, and stated, “Joe Sinclair.”
“Oh, right,that guy,” Harmony piped up. “I forgot about him. He didn’t stay very long.”
“When did he come by the shop?” Calvin asked.
Harmony pointed at me a second time and said, “Right after Mr. Snow left.”
Calvin set a small stack of photos on the tabletop before pulling out the seat across from me and sitting. He leaned back, hooked an ankle over his knee, then closed his eyes while massaging his forehead. We’d left Midtown Mediums shortly after Calvin had finished his interview with Harmony. CSU was collecting evidence of both the murder and the potential break-in that might have occurred while Harmony had been in hot pursuit of defiling a countertop or washing machine or wherever her and Jazz had been playing hide the pickle. And with Sinclair’s business card found on a dead man, Quinn and Radcliff had left to go invite him to the precinct for a conversation. Calvin had made good on his promise to let me study the flatware that had now been found at all three murders, which was why, at ten o’clock at night, I was back to the same conference room with the oval table and whiteboard pushed up against the wall. The precinct wasn’t empty, but when we’d walked through the bullpen, only a few detectives seemed intent on burning the midnight oil.
