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As alibis went, they were solid, providing they checked out. Eric got the names of Mrs. Dennison’s fellow committee members, and the pertinent information from the senator, but they would be so easily verified that lying would have been a waste of time, which left him with nowhere to go on the gray-haired man Jaclyn had seen.
He and Garvey got up, and the senator stood also. “I’ll see you to the door,” he said. As they walked across the marble foyer he asked, “Do you have any idea when Carrie’s body will be released to her parents?”
“Probably tomorrow,” Garvey answered.
The senator nodded, looked thoughtful. “Then the arrangements would be made tomorrow afternoon; Fayre and I will clear time to be with Sean and Carrie’s parents, maybe help them make some of the decisions. Sean is devastated. He’s here, in fact, asleep upstairs. He couldn’t sleep at all last night, but finally he was so tired he couldn’t stay on his feet.” He opened the door, walked outside with them.
That was where he halted, put his hands in his pockets, and looked down.
Something about the way the senator was standing, a look of guilt shadowing his face, brought Eric to a halt, too. Garvey looked around, stopped. The three men stood in a loose circle.
“I have to admit to something I don’t like saying,” the senator said heavily.
Eric waited, studying every flicker of expression the senator gave.
“I wasn’t at work,” he admitted, keeping his voice low.
Without wasting more than a second’s thought, Eric could tell where this was heading. “Do you want to tell us where you really were?”
“With my—Look, I have a girlfriend. I was with her.”
Bingo! He’d been right. What kind of fucking fool would cheat on a woman like Fayre Dennison? Eric wondered. Oh, right—a fucking fool, that’s what kind. He didn’t say what he was thinking, just said, “We’ll need her name and address, her phone number.”
The senator nodded. “I left work early so I could be with her. She was able to get some free time from her own job, so we took the opportunity to be together.”
“Her name?” Eric prodded.
The senator looked miserable. “I—Never mind, I’m not going to make excuses. It’s Taite Boyne.”
The erstwhile maid of honor, Eric thought. Well, well. Things were getting interesting.
Chapter Seventeen
“YOU UP FOR ANOTHER INTERVIEW?” GARVEY ASKED AS soon as they were in the car. He was already dialing Taite Boyne’s number.
“Sure.” It was after five o’clock, the hot afternoon sun scorching everything it touched, but police work wasn’t a nine-to-five job. Hell, it wasn’t even eight-to-five. If he was lucky, on any given day it was more like seven-to-six. He cranked the air-conditioning on high.
After a minute Garvey disconnected, unnecessarily said “No answer,” and dialed the other number Senator Dennison had given them. Another minute and he said, “Ms. Boyne, this is Detective Eric Wilder with the Hopewell Police Department.”
“Gee, thanks,” Eric muttered, but, yeah, this was his case and the sarge would let him handle it.
“I’d like to get some information from you regarding Carrie Edwards,” Garvey smoothly continued. “Please call me at …” He paused, thinking, then rattled off Eric’s cell phone number.
The exclusive boutique where Taite Boyne worked as a buyer would already be closed, though he wasn’t sure how much time a buyer would actually spend in the store she bought for. She wasn’t answering her cell phone, and if she was at home she wasn’t answering that phone, either, so it looked as if they were done for the day, unless Ms. Boyne returned the call pretty soon. He didn’t expect that to happen.
Neither did Garvey, because he yawned and said, “My blushing bride will be glad if I make it home at a decent hour tonight.”
“You mean you’ll be glad if you make it home at a decent hour, so your blushing bride won’t cut your nuts off and feed them to you.”
“There’s that,” Garvey agreed, smiling a little as he always did when he mentioned his wife. “Nut stew is a little chewy.” Eric might not envy the sergeant his wife—God, no!—but he envied the relationship. He hoped some day he found a woman he was still smiling about when they were years into the marriage, which made him think about Jaclyn, because that relationship had taken a shot to the heart before it could even get off the ground—not that he was thinking marriage or anything like that, God forbid. It was just that he’d really thought they clicked.
“I don’t understand jerk wads like the senator,” he said, because that thought led naturally to the couple they’d just left behind. “How can any man be stupid
enough to cheat on a woman like that?”
“I was thinking the same thing. Smart, good-looking, nice, rich—what more could a man want?”
There was no way they could know what went on between two people in private, but on the surface of the thing, Eric thought the senator was a piece of shit. Maybe it had something to do with him being in politics in general, because it seemed as if so many politicians cheated on their spouses, but he’d instantly liked Mrs. Dennison so much that cheating on her threw the senator straight into the realm of cosmically stupid.
