Maggie never knew so many weeds could sprout in seven days. The grass was hardly growing yet, but the weeds were everywhere. She worked with gardening gloves alongside Helen. Conversation passed over the rows, ranging from childcare to the weather to television shows. Maggie realized after thirty minutes that no one had said a word about the murder.
She broke the seal and spoke to Helen. “Did anyone hear about what happened yesterday? To Holly Gibbs?”
Helen didn’t look up. She raked at the black soil with a cultivator. “Did you know her?”
“No, but I saw her once.”
“Not many people knew her. She and her husband went to all the dinner parties and barbecues when they first moved into the Parish, but they didn’t keep it up. I can’t believe something like this would happen to either of them. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
Now Helen stopped. She looked left and right before leaning closer. “Apparently they had an open marriage. And you know how people like that are: they get into trouble with strangers they meet online. That sort of thing.”
Maggie didn’t go back to her weeding. “How do you know about this?”
Helen gestured vaguely with the cultivator. “Oh, you know, it’s the kind of thing that gets around. Julie knows about it. And Robin. Have you met Robin yet? She has a little party animal in her, too. And you know the husbands know about it. They have a nose for this stuff. I’m pretty sure Holly got around to a couple of them. Always flirting it up at the barbecues. I think that’s why they stopped coming. You can’t make the wives jealous.”
“What else do you know about them? I mean, the development isn’t that big. You know about that, so you have to know more.”
Helen went back to digging. “It’s none of my business. I stick with the gardening and the ladies’ golfing club and try not to worry about what other people are doing. It’s better that way. All I know is that if I ever caught Devin looking Holly Gibbs’s way, he’d have an appointment with a sharp knife when he was sleeping.”
They both laughed. Maggie thought a bit, absently gathering weeds into a small pile. “Is there anybody here who might know more?”
“Here? No, but you’re friends with Carole Strickland, right? Apparently she and Holly had…similar interests.”
“You mean…?”
Helen shrugged with exaggerated casualness. Her tone was coy. “Like I said, it’s none of my business, but you hear things. And maybe I heard something about Carole. I’m just saying.”
Maggie didn’t reply. She looked out over the garden, at the bent backs of the neighborhood ladies working diligently in the soil. She thought of Carole and she thought of the limousine and Holly Gibbs, the woman with the lavish red hair. And then she thought about Karl, and the idea turned in her mind.
Chapter 6
Karl called ahead. “I’m coming home late,” he said.
“I’ll be waiting.”
Maggie bathed the girls and put them to bed. She let a casserole warm in the oven while she had a glass of wine in the darkened front room. The streetlights glowed. She waited until the flash of headlights let her know Karl was nearly there, and then she went outside to meet him.
He wore exhaustion heavily around his shoulders, and his clothes were rumpled from two days of solid work. Maggie said nothing when she came to him and put her arms around his waist. He encompassed her body in his embrace and they stood that way for a long while in silence.
Finally, Karl kissed her and said, “It’s good to be home.”
“Let’s eat.”
“No, I have a better idea.”
Karl bent his legs and scooped Maggie up with an arm behind her knees, another at her back. She laughed at the extravagant silliness of the gesture, and they only made it a few steps before he had to set her down again. Maggie took his hand and led him in. They locked the front door and proceeded up the stairs to the second floor without turning on any lights. In the bedroom he shrugged off his jacket and there were more kisses and the hush of his breath in her ear as he lowered his lips to her neck.
On the bed they undressed each other. He touched her and kissed her, and she responded in the way she always did. He had the thing that worked for her. It had been this way from the start. When he pressed her back on the mattress and slipped between her parted knees, they made as little sound as they could. The rhythm began slowly, not urgent. Karl was good about taking his time. She put her hands on his arms on either side of her, looked up into his face as the tempo notched up bit by bit until there was the sound of skin striking skin and the give of the bed.
His breathing roughened, and his forehead began to shine with perspiration. There was heat and wet and body against body. Maggie gasped, the air driven from her, and then she felt his hand close around her throat.
Karl didn’t squeeze hard at first. His fingers rested against the thudding pulse in her neck, his thumb on the other side. Maggie saw a certain darkness fall across his eyes and then he closed his grip. Her windpipe constricted and she felt the blood rushing in her head. She grabbed at his wrist, but he didn’t let go. “Karl…” she tried, but her voice was weak. Karl’s face was a twisted mask of exertion and then his breath exploded in her face and the moment passed. He let go. The motion of his hips slowed and stopped. They lay together still joined. Karl rested his forehead in the crook of her shoulder. Maggie put her hands on his back, feeling the sweat there. Her neck throbbed.
After a while, she asked, “What was that?”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered in her ear.
“That was…new.”
“I wasn’t thinking about it. Or maybe…I don’t know. Did I hurt you?”
“No, but don’t do it again. That’s not me.”
“Okay.”
They stayed together, unmoving.
“Are you going to fall asleep there?”
“Can I?”
“If you want, but dinner is going to dry out.”
Karl rolled away from her. They lay side by side on the bed, looking up at a still ceiling fan in the shadows. They held hands. “I couldn’t eat right now anyway.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“No, I’m sorry. I let it get away from me. I’m in my head too much.”
“Is it getting to you?”
“I only wonder how we kept it up all this time. The hours and the reports and the BS. I don’t know.”
“You can talk about it if you want.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him glance at her. His hand twitched slightly in her grasp. “Yesterday…I know you were just trying to help, as a witness, but it was awkward to have you asking Mike questions, acting like you’re still on the job. You know how it works, Maggie.”
She didn’t look at him. “Someone dies in our neighborhood, it’s hard to look the other way. You wouldn’t.”
“I’d remember where the line is. There are cops and there’s everybody else. You’re a special case, but you’re not on the inside. You knew it was going to be like this. We talked about it.”
“I didn’t need you throwing it in my face like you did,” Maggie replied. “I used to be your boss. I used to be Mike’s boss. I was everybody’s boss. That’s not something you can turn off like that. Two years away isn’t that long.”
Karl turned on his side to face her. He put one leg over hers and a hand rested on her belly. She’d worked hard to make it flat again, but she wasn’t so young anymore and it wasn’t that easy. Karl kissed her shoulder. “What do you want to know?”
Maggie paused. Questions surged up, and she held them back. “I can’t. You’re right, I can’t. You’ll catch so much hell if you start talking about the case. I would have pulled your guts out if I were still in charge.”
“You can talk to me,” Karl said. “And I know you asked around. I know. Because you can’t help yourself. That thing last year with the kid and the glass cutter? I didn’t forget about that. You were all ov
er it.”
“A teenager cutting his way into houses to steal a few things isn’t the same as murder, and you know it.”
“But you still asked.”
“Okay, I asked!” Maggie admitted. “I dropped a couple of questions at the gardening club. I wanted to see if anyone knew something.”
Karl breathed quietly, and she felt him thinking. Then he said, “What did they say?”
“They said Holly Gibbs slept around. And maybe her husband was okay with that.”
“Mike said you spotted some marks on her.”
Maggie nodded. “She was tied up at some point. And she had…other marks.”
“She’s not the only one to be into that.”
Maggie touched her throat. “No, but one day she’s coming home from an all-night party, the next she’s dead. And if she was taking scalps in the neighborhood, maybe her husband wasn’t as cool about it as people think he was.”
Karl chuckled. “‘Taking scalps’? That’s one way to put it.”
“You know what I mean.”
He got up. Maggie stayed where she was.
“Unfortunately I can’t arrest a guy on suspicion of being kinky.”
“It’s an angle you can work, Karl. Sweat the husband. Nine times out of ten, the husband knows more than he’s saying.”
“Yes, boss. But you remember I’ve been doing this awhile, right? So relax. I had Mike stick his nose into the guy’s business right away. You know how Mike has a soft touch. Gibbs probably didn’t even realize we were checking him out.”
“And?”
Karl got a robe from the closet. “Didn’t you just say you’d string me up if I talked about a case with my wife?”
Maggie hit the bed with her palm. “All right, fine. Let’s talk about something else.”
“I want to talk about a shower and maybe somebody in the shower with me,” Karl said. He came to the bed and bent to kiss her softly. “And then we can talk about how dry dinner got while it was waiting. Deal?”
She sighed quietly. “Deal.”
“Great. I’ll run the water.”
He went into the bathroom and pushed the door closed. The lights switched on, and a rectangle of pure gold lit up around the edges of the door. A few seconds later, Maggie heard the shower’s spray.
“Nice and warm,” Karl called from the bathroom. Maggie went to join him.
Chapter 7
On Monday, she waited until Karl was gone for the day, and then she went to work.
Maggie googled Bryant Gibbs, discovered he was forty. She looked for more information about him. She found a few pictures of him with different men, always in suits and always in settings of dark wood or brilliant glass. He was featured on the website of a business called Kirby Development Leasing. Gibbs was friends with bankers and politicians, or so the pictures told the story. His wife never appeared in any photo, no matter how deeply into the search results Maggie went.
She dressed to go out, got the girls ready, and packed them away in her small SUV with snacks for the ride. On her phone she had directions to the offices of Kirby Development Leasing. The drive was only thirty minutes in midday traffic. She kept to the right lane and drove the speed limit, both hands on the wheel as the miles ticked off on the phone’s GPS.
She found the offices in an unremarkable business park not far from the highway. The buildings were single-story, made of brown brick, and had muddy, tinted windows. Perhaps half the units she saw were empty, but others had simple signs designating what went on within. Nothing flashy, or anything that might call attention to one business over another.
Kirby Development Leasing’s sign had the letters KDL at the top, with the full name in smaller letters. There were no cars parked in the spaces out front, and only a scattered few others were there. Maggie went by slowly, then cruised back again. She thought the lights might be on inside. She slipped into a space in front of another, unoccupied unit and left the engine running. She looked to the girls in the backseat. You cannot leave your kids in the car, she thought. People go to jail for that.
But Becky was asleep. Lana stared idly out the window, her eyelids promising a nap, as well. One minute. Sixty seconds to look around. That’s reasonable, right? “I’ll be right back,” Maggie said to Lana. “Behave.”
She got out and looked around. Nothing moved. No one was outside. The SUV idled, the compressor switching on and off as the air conditioning cycled. She felt a nervous sweat under her clothes. It was an old sensation, one she’d almost forgotten after being on the job more than twenty years. It was back again, as if she were starting all over.
The decision was made. She walked deliberately, controlling her speed and counting down the seconds. When she reached the door of KDL, she gripped the handle and immediately froze. A thought knifed through her mind: she’d seen Bryant Gibbs at the crime scene, and they were barely fifty feet apart. He’d looked right at her. Maybe he wouldn’t remember the details of her face. Or maybe he would know her instantly.
A second ticked past, and another and another. She didn’t move. A droplet of perspiration ran down her side beneath her clothes. She screamed at herself to move, to simply move. She willed her shoulder to flex, and then her bicep, and then her forearm, all the way down to her hand. She pulled the door open, and a vaguely antiseptic smell rushed out to greet her.
Inside she found herself in a small waiting area with a couple of chairs, a table stacked with magazines, and a potted plant that might have been artificial. A receptionist’s station faced the door, but it was empty. Maggie stepped in farther, until she put her hands palms-down on the cool counter. She made herself breathe.
“Is someone out there?”
A young woman’s voice carried from a side hallway, and Maggie heard the thump of footsteps on carpet. Moments later a slim, dark girl no older than twenty-five appeared. She had her hair pulled back conservatively, but her makeup was a perfect mask of delicate beauty. Her lips glistened when she smiled, and her teeth were flawless and white.
“Hello,” Maggie said.
“Hello! I’m sorry I wasn’t here. The office is closed for lunch and I’m…you know.”
Maggie recalled the details on the website. “This is a commercial leasing office, right?”
“That’s right.”
“You said the office is closed for lunch, but is Mr. Kirby in?”
The woman blinked, her smile faltering before it came back stronger than before. “Oh, there’s no Mr. Kirby anymore. He retired. Mr. Gibbs runs the business. I’m Rachel, by the way. I didn’t get your name.”
“Alyssa,” Maggie said. “Mr. Gibbs is out, too?”
“I’m afraid so. If you’d like me to leave a message for him, he’ll be back in thirty minutes or so.”
“No, that’s all right.” Maggie’s voice strengthened into the cover story she’d concocted on the drive. “I’m just stopping by to check it out. I saw on the website…well, I’m just interested in finding a space for my real estate business. I’m opening my own office.”
“That’s wonderful! I have a folder with a number of properties you can look through, and then you can call back and make an appointment to see Mr. Gibbs.”
Rachel stood behind the counter and gathered papers. Maggie leaned forward to see if she could peer down the hallway. It seemed dark there, with offices behind glass, but none of them lit. “Are there other associates?” Maggie asked.
“No, it’s only Mr. Gibbs and me. Here you go.”
Maggie accepted the folder without glancing at it. She smiled as easily as she could muster. “Thanks so much. I have to get going now, my kids are waiting. You’ve been a big help.”
She headed for the door. Rachel called after her. “Are you sure you don’t want to leave a message?”
“No, thank you. I’m sure I’ll see him very soon.”
Outside she walked away quickly, almost jogging back to the SUV, where the girls hadn’t moved. She climbed in, took deep breaths and tossed
the folder on the passenger seat. Both Lana and Becky were asleep now. Maggie buckled herself in and backed out of the spot. She made sure to drive past the window of the office for the benefit of Rachel inside. She went around the corner and swung toward home. The girls would be getting hungry and tired, and she knew her mother, who’d just returned to town, would be happy to take them for a few hours.
But she hadn’t lied: she would see Bryant Gibbs soon. And then she would be his second shadow.
Chapter 8
When Maggie returned exactly thirty minutes later, she didn’t have to wait long for Bryant Gibbs to show. True to the receptionist’s word, he was back within the hour, driving a dark Lexus whose license plate number Maggie took down. He went inside, and then the monotony set in.
Maggie hadn’t run a stakeout in years. Before she sat behind the desk of the chief of detectives, she’d spent ten years working cases, and sometimes that meant long hours in one place, waiting for the one moment on which everything would hinge.
It was late in the afternoon before she saw more action. No one had gone in or out for hours. Karl called twice, but Maggie sent him to voice mail with a text message assuring him she’d call back.
The receptionist’s ride came first: a blue Hyundai sedan with another young woman behind the wheel. Rachel got into the Hyundai without a second look back toward the offices of KDL, and then the car drove away. Gibbs still didn’t emerge.
Maggie exhaled in disappointment and put the SUV into Drive. Her foot lifted off the brake pedal and then she stomped down on it again.
When she saw the limousine, she gasped out loud. Adrenaline made her flesh tingle. Maggie grabbed the wheel in both hands and held on tightly as the limousine slowed in front of KDL. She tried not to hold her breath, but Gibbs emerged and she realized she was doing it anyway. Everything in her lungs came out at once when the limo driver stepped out from behind the wheel and opened the rear door for Gibbs.