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Garvey gave a thin smile. “Like you, I’m detecting. It feels good to actually be working a case instead of wading through paperwork, shuffling you guys around, and running interference when one of you screws up.”
Eric could understand that. Even though his own ambition was to go as high as he could in the local police hierarchy—though he hadn’t ruled out moving into a state or federal job—he could also see where he’d miss working the cases. If he went state or federal, he might be able to stay in investigations. That was in the future, though; the Edwards murder case was right now. “So, what are you detecting?”
“I’m visualizing the angles of penetration,” Garvey began.
Eric snorted. “For God’s sake, man, get your mind off sex and back on the case.”
“Smart-ass,” Garvey growled, before grinning in appreciation.
Eric took his feet off the top of the desk and sat up. “Funny thing; that’s exactly what I was doing,” he admitted. “From what I saw, the angles are all over the place: from the left, from the right, slanted up, slanted down. Some of them were dangling from fairly superficial wounds. She’d have been fighting, trying to run. Maybe she fell, and the perp came straight down with a skewer, and that’s the one that got her heart. Unless the M.E. says the wounds only look as if they came from every direction, it’s gonna be hard to guess at the perp’s height.”
He picked up a pen and quickly sketched one of the skewers. “These suckers are eighteen, nineteen inches long, stainless steel. They’re big, but they’d be tricky to hold while you’re stabbing someone with them. This little ring at the end is the only place to grip them, otherwise, when the point hit resistance, your hand would slide right down the skewer.”
“Not the best weapon to choose if you want to kill someone. The perp didn’t go there intending to kill her.”
“Maybe, maybe not. We have seven people who knew the skewers were there: the wedding planner, the reception hall manager, the dressmaker, the florist, the veil-maker, the cake-maker, and the caterer. I haven’t ruled out the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, either.” As Garvey rolled his eyes upward, Eric reminded himself to try going lighter on the smart-assness. He tried that a lot, usually without much success. “Anyway, three of those people had had disagreements with the victim just prior to the killing, but the other four may well have had run-ins with her in the past. The picture we’re getting of her isn’t warm and cozy; it’s more like bitch-on-wheels, running down anyone who gets in her way.”
“Nine times out of ten,” Garvey said prosaically, “the perp is either family or friend. Maybe the groom realized his mistake and tried to break up with her.”
“I wish it’d be that obvious, but I don’t think he’s good for it. He said he was at work when he called her, which is too easy to prove or disprove, and I think the M.E. is going to give us a t.o.d. that rules him out, unless he can teleport.” He wouldn’t say so out loud, but he hoped the time of death would rule out Jaclyn, too. The medical examiner’s estimate of time of death wouldn’t be down to the exact minute, the way it was on television shows—hell, practically nothing they did was the way it happened on television shows, except maybe breathing—but they could get a fairly narrow time frame.
The techs hadn’t been able to lift any useable prints from the kabob skewers; as he’d noted, the skewers were too slender to really let anyone over the age of two get a good grip. Anyone grabbing the small wooden ring on the end would more likely hold the skewer with the ring pressing against his palm, rather than his fingertips, for striking power.
“What about the gray-haired man Ms. Wilde says she saw at the hall?”
“Neither of us thinks she’s good for the perp, so if she’s innocent, she’d have no reason to lie.”
“Mrs. DeWitt didn’t see anyone between the time she went into her office and when she found the body.”
“Doesn’t mean no one went in. She admitted the side door was unlocked. It may be that Ms. Wilde is actually the only witness who can tie the killer to the scene, unless we come up with some forensic evidence.”
That could be complicated. He hadn’t met the groom’s father, the state senator, but he’d seen him in political ads; he was gray-haired. The victim’s father was gray-haired. According to Mrs. DeWitt, there had been three other parties touring the reception hall earlier in the day, and two of them included an older man. He fully expected the crime scene techs to come up with a variety of stray gray hairs, and any of the multitude of people who’d been in the hall could have been in contact with someone gray-haired during the day and picked up a small hair. Wonderful.
Still, Jaclyn had said she’d seen a gray-haired man driving a gray, or silver, car. That gave him a little bit to go on, if nothing else panned out.
The problem with this case wasn’t a shortage of suspects, but too damn many. Almost everyone who had dealt with the victim evidently had some kind of grudge against her.
Garvey yawned, then hauled his ass up from the edge of Eric’s desk. “We both need some sleep,” he said, scrubbing a paw across his face and making a sandpaper sound. “My lovely bride is going to be pissed as hell at me, anyway. She wanted me to make sergeant so I wouldn’t have any more of these late nights, and now here I am, doing them anyway.”
Garvey always referred to his wife of fourteen years as his lovely bride, which sounded sweet, but Eric had met Garvey’s wife and thought he probably called her that out of fear. She was a short, slightly plump, deceptively pleasant-faced woman who ran the Garvey household like a drill sergeant. Once Garvey had even bought a gag tag for his car that read “I LIVE WITH FEAR (but sometimes she lets me go fishing).” He’d bought it as a joke, but Mrs. Garvey had liked it and insisted he actually put it on his car. He’d endured a lot of teasing over that tag, which he’d been forced to keep until he’d traded cars and “accidentally” forgot to get the tag off his old car.
On the other hand, they’d been married for fourteen years, so maybe the trick to a successful marriage for a cop was to marry someone who could kick ass and take names. She had certainly kept Garvey straight.
Eric got up, too, because there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could accomplish at this hour. “Give her a kiss for me,” he said, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to be on Mrs. Garvey’s good side.
“Bullshit. Kiss her yourself, if you have the balls.”
Chapter Thirteen
JACLYN DRAGGED HERSELF OUT OF BED EARLY THE NEXT morning, watched a few minutes of the local news—no new developments in Carrie’s murder, which meant no one had been arrested and this whole nightmare would dissolve like a soap bubble. Madelyn had stayed until after midnight, simultaneously trying to comfort her while at the same time hashing and rehashing everything that had been said and done at the reception hall that afternoon, which kind of canceled out the comforting part. But no matter what either of them thought, or how upset they were, the show—in this case, two wedding rehearsals that night, plus handling the details of the five weddings coming up over the next three days—must go on, meaning she had to get her butt out of bed and down to the office.
She was still worried about being questioned as a suspect in Carrie’s murder; what sane person wouldn’t be? But what could she do about it? She couldn’t go out investigating, trying to find the real killer on her own, because she didn’t know the first thing about investigating crimes; that was Eric’s job, and the best thing she could do was pray that he was really, really good at it.
Coming to terms with the fact that he was doing his job by investigating her would take a while longer.
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sp; In fact, she might as well get over her hurt, get over him, and write him off. They’d spent the night together, but to men that was no big deal, and despite all her pep talks to herself about being cautious and not letting herself get too involved, the fact remained that she’d let herself expect too much. Now, no matter how she tried to reason herself out of how she felt, she didn’t know if they’d be able to start over. For that matter, he might not be interested in starting over. He might think that, if she was the type of person he could even momentarily suspect was a killer, then she wasn’t the type of woman he wanted to get involved with. If so, she couldn’t fault him for feeling that way, because it was how she’d feel.
