AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“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 rel
ieved 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.
