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“Oh, she’s beautiful,” he said, smiling and seeming to forget where he was for a moment. “I don’t normally go for black women, but man, she had a body like a dancer. You know what I mean?”
He smiled lasciviously at Michael, who exchanged a glance with Faith. Amanda Montgomery was Caucasian. Michael sighed and said, “What’s Mandy’s last name, Tony?”
“Umm …” he thought a moment. “Carlton. Yeah, Carlton.”
“So not Montgomery?” he said.
“No.” His eyes widened. “Oh. Yeah, I don’t know Amanda Montgomery.”
“Amanda Montgomery, thirty-one, Caucasian, five-foot-four, 115 pounds, black hair, blue eyes. Ring any bells?”
Antonio scoffed. “Man, you know how many women look like that?”
“She went to your gym,” Faith said.
“Well, I’m not sleeping with every woman at the gym,” he said, “even I don’t get aroundthatmuch. Besides, I usually go for older women. Forties. You know, they’re getting older, they’re not feeling so pretty anymore, but their husband is looking good because men look best in their forties. Maybe she feels insecure. Maybe she just realizes that she’ll never have a chance to be young again, so she reaches out to the sexy, young trainer and thinks, hey, why not?”
“All right,” Faith said. “Turk, what do you think?”
Turk glanced at Antonio. He chuffed and growled irritably but didn’t approach him.
She sighed. “We’ll follow up on those alibis.”
The three of them left the room. On their way out, Antonio said, “Hey, you can’t leave me here!”
“And yet, we are,” Michael said drily.
The sun was low in the sky when they got to the car. Faith looked at Michael and said, “You mentioned Chinese?”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “I saw a little mom and pop place near the hotel this morning. Looked terrible for you.”
“Sounds perfect,” Faith said.
Turk barked assent.
“And three makes it unanimous,” Faith said, “but you’re insane if you think I’m feeding you beef and broccoli when we have to share a hotel room together.”
Turk whined, and Michael offered a humorless chuckle. Faith didn’t blame him. It was business as usual for a lead not to work out, especially early in a case, but it never felt good to waste time and energy on something that turned out to be a dead end.
Especially not with a killer who moved as quickly as this one was.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Divorce was a bitch, it turned out. Elmore had a fantasy that he could simply walk into a lawyer’s office, say, “I want a divorce,” and walk out with the papers signed and sealed.
He never anticipated it would take months of arguing back and forth, clandestinely of course, because neither his nor Lucinda’s families would approve of a choice to dissolve their holy marriage before God. He never anticipated it would require what essentially amounted to a full audit. No, this was worse than an audit because at least the IRS didn’t hire a private detective to find out where he lived, forcing him to default on yet another lease and pay yet another exorbitant security deposit on yet another shitty apartment.
He turned left down the side street and drove four miles before remembering that this was the way to his old apartment and not his new one. He sighed and pulled into the left turn lane only to see the clearly marked no U-turn sign.
He lifted a hand, intending to slam it into the steering wheel, but then just let it fall softly. There was no point. It would be over soon enough. Five years from now, he would be four (he hoped) years divorced and he would be living large. Sure, he’d probably end up owing Lucinda half of everything he made, but he didn’t mind that at all. If she wanted to buy out every department store in Tucson on his dime, so be it. He’d buy himself a nice little condo somewhere in the Foothills and ditch the boring, luxury sedan for a lifted Jeep.
He smiled at that. Out with the old, in with the new. New condo, new car, new life.
No new wife. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
He just had to get through the damned miasma of this divorce first.
He tapped his code into the gate of the apartment complex, therightapartment complex this time, and drove inside. His assigned parking spot was close to his apartment, which made up for the fact that it wasn’t ground floor like his last one.
