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She began by getting herself out of danger. Or helping others more qualified to do so. Clarke had shown her quickly through the condo in a high-rise building. He’d left her at the door of the room she’d be occupying, pointing out its own adjoining private bath, before disappearing. He’d told her that once she was settled, he’d meet her downstairs.
She didn’t need to get settled. Wasn’t planning to stay long enough to warrant settling in. Unzipping her suitcase, she took out her toiletry bag, scrubbed her face and hands—to remove the smell and feeling of prison air—and then quickly reapplied her normal makeup. Foundation, mascara, a little eye shadow for shading, and she was done. Her fingers were the best comb for her short, sassy windblown hair.
A style choice she’d made in spite of the fact that her hair was the only thing sassy about her.
Or maybe because of it.
And then she ventured downstairs. Not sure where she’d find Clarke. Hoping she didn’t have to poke into too much of his private space to find him.
He clearly liked books. There were shelves housing them in just about every room she’d seen, including hers. Fiction, nonfiction...didn’t seem to matter.
She wondered if he read any of them, or if, perhaps, the same decorator who’d tended to her room had added the books to soften the more austere lines of the rest of the space.
Admonished herself for wondering. Whether he read or not was none of her business. How good he was at his job was all that mattered to her, and since he and the GGPD had been good enough to get her out of jail when her own attorney hadn’t done so, he’d more than proved his professional ability.
She found him sitting behind an impressive solid wood desk in a large room that reached off the spacious living area. Feeling like an interloper, she passed an impressive home theater system with a lovely large TV and knocked on the opened off-white door.
“Yeah.” He looked up from an array of computer screens of varying sizes. “Everleigh, come on in. I’ve just been searching some databases to compare registered employees at the health club over the past five years with criminal records...”
Good. Okay, then. Relaxing some, she walked slowly across the room to a dark leather armchair and little table with a lamp set.
Settling into the chair, her pose as prim as a schoolgirl’s, she asked, “Did you find anything suspicious there?”
His raised brow, as he glanced from the screen to her, seemed to hold amusement. He said, “I’ve only had about ten minutes to look.” He grinned.
She almost grinned back. Almost, but not quite. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Pushing a laptop aside, putting them in direct line of vision with each other, he asked if her room was okay.
And for some reason, she replied with, “It’s really nice, actually. Comfortable, but calming and peaceful, too. Who decorated it for you?”
“How do you know I didn’t do it myself?”
The first thing she noticed was that he didn’t deny her assumption. And the second was that he appeared to be baiting her. The third, that she’d kind of liked the way his grin made her stomach flip-flop, kept her from smiling back. “You’re right. I apologize,” she said, instead of holding tight to her assumption.
“No, you’re right. I didn’t put that room together. I told you the room is there specifically for guests, free for the use of my siblings in the event of overload, and my sister took over in there.”
In there. “So...you did the rest of the place?” Including the books?
His single nod spoke volumes. Looking around her, picturing what she’d seen of his home, she was impressed. And didn’t have room for that in her current sphere.
Didn’t have room for a flirt in her life ever again.
“So far, I’m finding nothing with your ex-husband’s club that would be a motive for killing him. From what I can see so far, and from what I’ve seen from case files, witness testimonies indicate that he didn’t cheat with married women.”
She hadn’t known that. Wasn’t sure it made a difference, though. He’d cheated. She was glad, though, that the man she’d vowed herself to had at least seemed to have some standards...
“So, no angry husbands...and no one who stood to gain by his being dead, in terms of the company’s future. As you said, he ran it into the ground. From last year’s business registration, it appears that he only had a couple of employees left, and they’ve both since found other positions.”
She hadn’t known that, either, being tied up in prison as she’d been. But she was glad to hear it. Relieved that no one else was suffering because of Fritz’s self-focused choices.
“Good news is, after a quick look at a financial record also in his file, while he has credit-card debt, it’s not substantial, and there’s no debt or spending that would point to creditors of a shadier variety.”
“Fritz would go to his dad for a loan, if he needed one,” she said. “Ron would give him a lecture first, but he’d give Fritz the money. It happened a time or two when he was first starting the gym. No way Fritz would risk dealing with some shady shark. He’d lose his inheritance. The one thing his father expected of him was to uphold the family name.”
“Which you don’t do by cheating on your wife.”
She acknowledged the comment with a nod, accompanied by a sick feeling inside her that he couldn’t see. “Hence, his lies about me cheating.”
