“Yes, please.”
My dad said nothing, not even goodbye, as we got out of the car, but the self-satisfied smile on his face made me want to kick his tires.
He thought this proved him right. About me. About everything. He thought he’d won.
It was another forty-five minutes before my mom and I were dressed and to the police station in our rental car.
As much as I hated my dad’s smug attitude, I had to admit that I liked the new dynamic that my mom and I had developed while she was in Fair Haven. I’d thought it might have been an isolated situation, given that we were working for the police rather than against them, but I felt it here again. She treated me more as an equal and less as an inept protégée. During the ride, I briefed her on the situation.
As soon as we reached the station, an officer showed me into the interview room where Ahanti waited.
A half-empty water bottle sat on the table next to her, and she’d used the pad of paper and pen they’d left her to doodle intricate designs that looked a bit like those mandalas in the adult coloring books that everyone was so crazy about a couple of years ago. Some of her mascara had rubbed off onto the underside of her eyes, making her look even more tired and sad than she probably was.
Despite everything that had gone on between her and Cary, despite the suspicion that he might have been stalking her and might have threatened Geoff, I could almost see her thinking about the good times they’d had. He had helped her get her start. She had cared about him once.
“My mom’s with Geoff.” I pulled out the chair next to her and sat. “So you don’t have to worry about him.”
She rested her forehead in her hands for a couple of beats. “That’s good. I got the idea they think we planned it together, but that he carried it out.” Her voice carried a this-can’t-be-happening tone.
I scooted the chair in closer. My mom and I would get this straightened out as soon as possible. “What have they said to you so far?”
She pulled the pad of paper closer to her and picked at the edge. “Not much. Someone stabbed Cary last night when he was closing up his studio. I tried to explain to them that we thought Cary had been stalking me. I meant it to show that he was a danger to me, not the other way around, but they took it as motive. The detective said something about Cary and me having a prior relationship that ended badly. That’s when I asked to call my lawyer.”
She’d done the right thing, but the timing would have made the detective more suspicious than he already was.
While I knew Ahanti well enough to know that she wouldn’t have turned the tables on Cary by killing him, I did have to ask a question she wasn’t going to like. “How confident are you that Geoff wasn’t involved in this?”
She picked at the paper so hard the corner ripped off. “Ninety-nine percent.”
“Why only ninety-nine?”
“You can’t be one hundred percent certain about anything in life.”
Classic Ahanti grayscale, but if we couldn’t get this situation cleared up soon, we’d have to talk about her fudging her life philosophies a little when the police talked to her again.
The detective who came through the door looked young enough that this might have been his first case after being promoted. That they sent us a relatively inexperienced detective was a good sign. Besides, unless he was a prodigy, I could handle him. Better my mom be with Geoff. If they thought he’d been the one to carry out the crime, they’d lean heavier on him.
“I assume you’ve had enough time to confer with your lawyer,” the detective said.
I didn’t miss the slight that he failed to introduce himself to me. That meant he might already know who I was. If he did, my last name alone would put him on high alert. Fitzhenry-Dawes had a reputation for defending people who were guilty.
I’d go with a hackneyed response and hope it made him underestimate me. “We’ve had plenty of time, since my client had nothing to do with this.”
His slight eyebrow raise said trite. Which I marked as a win for me.
He pulled the pad of paper back toward him from where it sat in front of Ahanti. He glanced at it, and I couldn’t be sure, but I’d have sworn he rolled his eyes. He tore the top page off to reveal the blank one underneath.
“I don’t suppose your client can provide an alibi to substantiate that claim.”
Ahanti said Cary died when he was closing up his studio. It wasn’t unusual for Skin Canvas to stay open until almost midnight. If Cary stayed open as late, I knew Ahanti was home alone, which sounded like yet another cliché. Cary also wasn’t as busy as Skin Canvas, though.
“What’s the time of death window?”
“Between 6:00 and 8:00 last night.”
I shut down both a smile and a cringe. She had an alibi, and when the detective heard it, he’d be convinced I was lying. “She was with me during that time.”
This time he openly rolled his eyes. “Convenient that she was meeting with her lawyer at the same time as her former boyfriend was murdered. Almost like she knew she’d need an alibi.” The mocking drained out of his tone and the look he gave Ahanti could have left a bruise. “But as I’m sure your attorney told you, conspiracy to commit murder is punishable with the same sentence as committing the act yourself.”
Ahanti maintained her composure. She didn’t shoot a look in my direction. She didn’t give any indication of what she was thinking.
I’d been expecting her to react. Maybe she already knew, the tiny, always-suspicious voice in my head whispered. Maybe she and Geoff did plan this together.
“It wouldn’t make sense for us to kill Cary,” Ahanti said. “We weren’t even sure he was stalking me.”
Then I saw it in the way she held extra still. I-don’t-know-what-to-do Ahanti was frantic, like a squirrel who can’t decide which direction to run from the cars bearing down on them. That’s the Ahanti I’d been expecting. This was business Ahanti, the one who might screw up a part of a tattoo but always knew she could fix it. She knew she hadn’t been a part of anything illegal, and so she trusted that this could be fixed. That’s why she was so calm despite her nerves.
I really did need a vacation when I started suspecting my best friend was capable of murder. The next thing I knew, I’d be doubting Mark, too.
The detective leaned back in his chair as if he thought Ahanti’s reaction was too calm as well. “Maybe you and your new boyfriend didn’t want to take the chance.”
The same look flared in Ahanti’s eyes as when she wanted to tattoo cheater on my ex-boyfriend’s forehead. “Geoff’s a chiropractor. If he wanted to kill Cary, he wouldn’t have stabbed him. He would have snuck up behind him and broken his neck. Geoff’s so squeamish about blood he can barely stand to be in my studio, and he’s lucky not to take off a finger with his dinner knife. He’d never stab someone.”
She certainly sounded more than ninety-nine percent certain of his innocence. Some of that was likely her protective instincts because she felt Geoff was threatened, but it helped ease some of my lingering concern that Geoff might have killed Cary on his own.
The detective must have sensed the sincerity of Ahanti’s response, too, which raised my estimation of him a little. He got to his feet and went to the door.
