Page 15 of If She Sensed

"Matt Devereaux and Tom Curillo.I've got their numbers."He reached for his phone without being asked, opened his contacts, and turned the screen toward Sloane so she could read them off.She entered them into her own phone, just in case.Though in her experience, anyone who gave this sort of information so willingly was not going to end up being the guilty party.

"And the bar itself would have a record of you being there?"Kate asked.

"Better than that."He tapped his phone screen twice, navigated to an app, and slid the phone across the desk toward them.It was a digital wallet receipt: Tanley's Bar and Grille, dated the previous evening.Timestamp 11:16 PM.Two drinks and a mozzarella stick appetizer.

Sloane photographed the screen with her phone.Kate leaned forward and looked at it as well.

"I'm happy to give you anything else you need," Godfrey said, sliding the phone back."Whatever would help."He looked between them, and for a moment the composure he'd been holding onto loosened slightly."She was a good person.I could tell that inside of about ten minutes.She deserved a lot more than one nice evening and… God, I can’t believe she’d… she’s dead."

Neither of them replied to that, because there was nothing to say to it that wouldn't ring hollow.Sloane stood and Kate followed her lead.

"We may need to follow up with more questions," Sloane said."Please don't leave the area without letting us know."

"Of course."He stood as they did and shook both of their hands again, though the warmth of the earlier greeting was gone now.He looked like a man who had just taken a punch to the stomach and was waiting for another one to fall at any moment.

Sloane and Kate took the elevator back down without speaking.The reception desk was empty as they passed it.The lobby doors opened onto the cool gray morning and they walked to the car in silence.

Sloane got behind the wheel and sat for a moment without starting the engine.She ran back through the conversation in her head, checking for gaps, for anything misaligned or off.

There was nothing.The receipt and the two friends cleared him.Godfrey had given them everything without being asked for any of it.He had not once looked away, not once offered anything that sounded like it had been prepared in advance.He had been upset in a way he’d not been able to fully understand.

"He's not our guy," Sloane said.

"No," Kate agreed."He's not.He’s just as innocent as Carol’s suitor."

“I’ll be honest with you,” Sloane said as she started the car.“I was rather hoping this was it.That for once, we’d wrap it quick and easy.

“Thatwouldhave been rather tidy,” Kate said.

Sloane started the car, her mind looking for something to lock on.Two dates, two women, two dead ends in the men who had taken them to dinner.There was an X-factor in there somewhere.Maybe the restaurants, maybe the men themselves without even knowing it.

She pulled out from the curb and headed back toward the highway, and she was already starting to feel like this case was moving far too fast.

CHAPTER TEN

Kate had taken over a corner of the conference room on the second floor, where someone had left a half-full pot of coffee on the warmer.She poured herself a cup and sat down with her laptop.She took a deep breath and a small smile crept across her face before she dove into the research she’d been planning on the way to the field office.

She started with Carol Paige.She already had the basics from the case file, but basics were not what she was looking for.She went deeper, pulling up property records, civic registrations, memberships, subscriptions, anything that had generated a paper trail in the last eighteen months.She knew this sort of thing might seem daunting to some, but it was always where she’d excelled.She simply knew her way around the databases and had always been good at sniffing out little morsels that others might have either never seen or disregarded.

Within just twenty minutes, she learned a great deal more about Carol Paige.Carol had lived in the same house for eleven years.She had a library card, a gym membership she had signed up for eight months ago, and a subscription to a meal delivery service she had cancelled after three months.She had donated to two local charities in the past year, both modest amounts.She had attended a neighborhood association meeting in the spring, according to a public attendance roster attached to meeting minutes on the city's community board website.

The picture that assembled itself was of a woman who had spent the last two years quietly rebuilding.Carol Paige had not made large gestures.She had made small, incremental ones.The gym membership.The meal kit service, abandoned but attempted.The part-time job at the library.The dating app her daughter had installed for her.Each one a small, careful step back toward a second act.

Kate recognized that shape, and not just professionally.She had been through her own long stretch of solitude before Allen.There had been years of coming home to a quiet house and learning to be comfortable in it.She had never gone through a divorce, but she understood the effort it took to choose, day after day, to keep moving forward when staying still would have been so much easier.The recognition sat in her chest in a way that was both tight and familiar.

She pushed it aside and moved on to Donna Holt.

Donna's trail was somewhat fuller, or at least more visible.She had a stronger social media presence than Carol, though she had not posted in several weeks.Her most recent posts were photographs: a meal at a restaurant, a weekend trip to see her college-age son, a snapshot of a book on a nightstand with a cup of tea beside it.The comments underneath were warm and easy, the responses of a woman who was genuinely liked by the people around her.Kate scrolled through them without lingering.

The divorce had been finalized fourteen months ago.Prior to that, Donna had been largely absent from social media for almost two months, which told its own quiet story.After the divorce she had reappeared gradually, posting more, engaging more.She had signed up for a pottery class at a community arts center, according to a registration list Kate pulled from the center's public event archive.She had joined a book club that met at a wine bar on the north side of the city.She had taken up running, logging short routes through her neighborhood three mornings a week according to a fitness app that synced publicly to her profile.

Kate sat back in her chair and looked at the window for a moment.Two women in their fifties.Both had ended long marriages and come through the other side into the same careful, deliberate project of rebuilding.Pottery classes and book clubs and gym memberships.Dating apps installed by well-meaning daughters.These were all small, brave attempts at trying to reclaim a life that felt full again.Both of them had been doing it well, by every measure she could find.Both had found someone they liked enough to meet for dinner and to feel something for the first time in a long time.

And now both were dead.

She thought about Allen again, briefly and without meaning to.She thought of the years before him, the long flat stretch when the job had been everything and the rest of her life had existed in the margins.She had never been as isolated as these women appeared to have been, but she had known that particular loneliness well enough to understand what it cost to climb out of it.The courage it took to decide, after years of a marriage going quietly wrong, that you still had something left to offer and that someone out there might want it.

She pulled her attention back firmly to the screen, doing her best to shake how targetedshefelt while working her way through it all.