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“That’s not all, though,” she went on, as if now that she’d gotten started, she wanted to unburden herself before she lost her nerve. “I kept getting the feeling he was seeing someone else, although when I confronted him over it, he told me I was imagining things and that he hadn’t even looked at another woman after we started dating.”
Now it was my turn to lift my glass of water to my lips and take a sip. Bad enough that both NancyAnne and Sara had been taken in by Jeffrey Sellers — and the Goddess only knows how many others in between — but he’d also been dating someone on the side?
Mr. Sellers had been a very busy man.
“What made you think he was seeing someone?” I asked.
“Just little things,” Sara said. “He’d break off dates at the last minute, or would tell me he couldn’t practice with me because he had a client meeting.”
“Well, that doesn’t seem too strange,” I replied, “considering he was a private detective.”
Her lip curled. “Oh, I know he had to keep weird hours sometimes. But after the last time he bailed on me, I got curious, so I drove by his office after work, figuring I’d see his car in the parking lot if he really was meeting a client. When I got there, though, the whole place was empty. He lied.”
I had to admit that anecdote did seem a little damning, although I supposed there could have been some logical explanation for why he wasn’t there. Maybe his client had wanted to meet at a restaurant or bar, or had canceled their appointment. If that was the case, though, you’d think he would have reached out to Sara to see if he could still see her that evening, despite everything.
“That does sound kind of suspicious,” I admitted. “Did you confront him about it?”
“No,” Sara replied. I noticed how she didn’t quite want to meet my eyes, although I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was because she was hiding something or was simply embarrassed to have been forced to admit her romantic connection to Jeffrey Sellers. She went on, “I didn’t have any actual evidence, and I guess I convinced myself I was just being paranoid. I’d never had an experience like that before — with the other men I’ve dated, it was good until it…wasn’t. But I never had any reason to believe someone might be cheating on me.” She stopped there, an entirely unconvincing smile pulling at her mouth. “I don’t suppose you found anything in those file cabinets to prove he was dating someone else at the same time he was seeing me?”
“Nothing like that,” I told her, then hesitated. When I’d first found the evidence of Jeffrey Sellers’ first marriage in his files, I’d decided not to say anything to Sara about NancyAnne, figuring since Sara hadn’t been involved with him, there hadn’t been much point in revealing the whole sordid story.
But she had been seeing him…which meant she was a better liar than I’d thought, and also that my gut instincts were definitely falling down on the job here.
Oh, what the hell. Who knew…maybe making such a shocking revelation would provoke a reaction that told me Sara really was the murderer, even if she’d almost convinced me with her innocent act.
“Did you know he’d been married in Iowa and had a child there?”
“What?”
Well, that outburst seemed to signal that Sara hadn’t known about that particular piece of Jeffrey Sellers’ checkered past.
“Yes,” I said calmly. “We — I,” I corrected myself, since I still hadn’t made any mention of how my police chief husband had been providing me with backup in all this, “found his divorce paperwork in his office, along with a whole bunch of unpaid child support claims.”
Sara stared at me. She’d set down her glass of water, and now her fingers were taut against the knees of her mint-green scrubs, almost white even though she had a light tan. “That unbelievable bastard,” she whispered. “No wonder someone killed him.”
The disgust in her voice was pretty damn convincing. True, she’d fooled me before, but some things were a lot harder to fake. And as someone in a profession dedicated to providing care to others, she probably hated the thought of the man she’d been seeing leaving his own child in the lurch like that.
Then a bitter smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, and she said, “Maybe his ex-wife killed him.”
“Oh, the thought definitely crossed my mind,” I said easily. “But when I talked to her — ”
“You — ” Sara broke off there and stared at me, consternation obvious in every plane of her face. “You talked to her?”
“Yes,” I replied. “She was here in Arizona, trying to collect some of that back child support. Jeffrey put her off, telling her he was about to come into a lot of money and that he’d pay her then.” I stopped there and fixed Sara with what I hoped was a reasonable facsimile of the steely-eyed stare I’d seen Henry Lewis use on so many occasions. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
She shook her head. “About him getting an inheritance or something? No, I never heard anything about that.”
“I’m not talking about an inheritance,” I said, maintaining eye contact so she could tell I was telling the truth. “I’m talking about the money he was trying to extort from Archie Bradshaw and Victoria Parrish.”
“Extort?” Sara repeated, and her eyes widened again. “You mean blackmail?”
I nodded.
“But why would Jeffrey want to do that to Archie and Victoria? They’re some of the nicest people I’ve ever met…well, Victoria, anyway,” Sara amended quickly, as if she’d seen the way my mouth had quirked at that description of Archie.
This was the part where I couldn’t really tell the truth about my friend, the former cat. “I don’t know,” I said. “Jeffrey must have made them a target because they were prospering and he wasn’t. But someone else must have known about his plans, or they wouldn’t have known he was going to meet with Victoria last Friday at her studio.”
“I don’t have any idea who it could have been,” Sara said dubiously. “He really didn’t have anyone in his life — at least, as far as I could tell.”
