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“Yes,” Faith replied. “Do you?”
She shook her head. “No. He got along well with everyone.” She chuckled, a bitter coughing sound that more closely resembled a sob than a laugh. “I almost wish I did. It would be easier if I did. Maybe I could help figure out who did this.”
“You leave that to us, ma’am,” Michael said. “That’s what we’re here for.”
Julia tried a smile but gave up after a moment.
“Did he mention anyone new in his life?” Faith asked. “Anyone he didn’t like, or anyone who rubbed him the wrong way?”
Julia shook her head. “No. I mean, guys come and go at the fire department, but the teams tend to remain pretty steady. The guys he worked with were the same guys he worked with for the past ten years.”
“What about outside of work?” Michael asked. “Any new friends?”
She met his eyes. “You mean lovers? You’re asking if he was cheating on me?”
“I wasn’t,” Michael said, “but if you have reason to suspect that, then I want to know about that too.”
She took a deep breath and said, “No, I don’t think he was cheating on me. I don’t think he could live with himself if he ever hurt me like that. Marvin was loyal.”
She pressed her palm to her eyes again and her lip trembled. Turk pressed his head against her stomach and whined softly. Julia reached down and hugged him tightly, and Turk patiently endured the gesture. Faith felt a rush of pride for her dog. He had more empathy than any human she’d ever met.
“I just don’t understand,” Julia said. “Marvin was a paramedic. He was a firefighter. I could understand people hurting him if he was something like an insurance adjustor or a repo man, but who hurts a firefighter?”
Faith knew that Julia was grabbing at any straw she could to make this make sense. She also knew that even when they found the killer and brought him to justice, it would never really make sense to Julia. She had lost the love of her life, the father of her daughter. To Julia, Marvin was Superman. She would never understand how anyone could be evil enough to take him away from her.
They asked a few more questions but didn’t learn anything useful. When they heard stirring coming from the bedroom, the three of them left, deciding to spare Julia the awkwardness of trying to explain to Harper why two somber people in dark suits were asking about her daddy.
They left the house in a much-subdued mood. Faith called Missy, but they were still working on the lists of employees. The previously very helpful management at the cemeteries had decided to draw the line at providing their employees’ personal information to investigators, and Missy was working on a warrant.
“It won’t take long,” she assured Faith. “I’ll have it by tomorrow. Businesses do this so their employees won’t sue them, that’s all. Everyone knows we’ll get our way. We just have to cross our i’s and dot our t’s.”
Faith could only hope the killer wouldn’t strike again while they were crossing their i’s and dotting their t’s.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He switched on his flashlight and spent a moment admiring the brilliant blue-white arc of light that cut through the night before toggling a setting and switching to a wide beam. It cast a soft glow over the headstones and he thought that scenes like this made him understand why cemeteries figured so often in horror movies. He could just imagine the terror of seeing the silhouettes of dead bodies rising from the dirt and shuffling toward their innocent victims.
He actually chuckled at the thought of one of his own targets crawling their way out of the dirt and scaring some unsuspecting night watchman like himself. He considered himself a fairly brave man, but if a human hand shot up through the dirt of one of these graves, he was pretty sure he would scream loudly enough that they could hear him in Galveston.
He walked through the rows, swinging his flashlight in slow arcs across the gravestones. Every now and then he would catch a drunk stumbling around and mumbling to himself or a particularly adventurous couple looking for an exciting place to play hide the salami, but mostly these nights were empty and free of distraction. He hated to use the words easy money, especially since it was barely enough for him to pay his bills, but it was easy, and he didn’t need a lot of money, so the phrase worked.
He was in a good mood. Both of his targets had gone down quietly. He had to admit, he was hesitant to leave them a chance to survive. It would be just his luck that one of them would actually make it out of the grave and be able to tell the police all about their ordeal.
Not that they would have much to tell. He didn’t leave behind any evidence and all of the research he’d done online suggested that the drugs he used were very effective, meaning his targets wouldn’t remember his face even if they registered him to begin with.
Still, the idea that they might actually get away terrified him. Not because of his own safety, but because of the chance that one or more of them could get off scot-free after what they did.
He reached the end of the row and turned down the next one. There was a soft rustling to his left. He shined his flashlight in the direction of the sound and caught a glimpse of movement. “Hey!” he called. “Who’s there?”
The rustling grew louder as the source of the movement tried to get away. He rushed after the trespasser and caught him a few yards past the row. The trespasser tried to twist out of his grasp, but with a deft movement, he tripped him onto his back.
The trespasser cast wide terrified eyes up at him and lifted his hands to defend himself. The guard shone the flashlight into the trespasser’s face and the eyes narrowed and blinked under the harsh beam. It was a man, probably in his early forties, but he looked twenty years older. His hair was caked and matted with dirt and more dirt caked his face and his torn clothing.
He smiled down at the clearly homeless man and said, “Evening, stranger. How are we doing tonight?”
“Man, I was just looking for a place to sleep,” the homeless man protested in the thick-tongued slur of the perpetually drunk. “I was just gonna sleep is all.”
The security guard chuckled. “Well, this is a place of rest, I suppose. Eternal rest. You can sleep as much as you want here.”
