Dan Sharp Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Jeffrey Round
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hand. “You said they were calling it suspicious?”
Sally nodded vigorously as she handed it over. “Big bump on her head. They think someone bashed her and dumped her overboard. You saw the body. What do you think?”
Dan looked down at the report, thumbed open the cover. “I noticed the bump,” he said. She waited. Dan looked up. “I’ll need some time to look this over,” he said, smiling patiently again.
“Oh right — of course! It’s all yours.” She turned to leave then stopped and turned back. “One other thing. You probably already knew this too. She was pregnant.”
Dan looked up in surprise.
Sally smiled. “Well, you do now.”
The pregnancy wasn’t the only item of interest in the report. Daniella’s blood-alcohol level showed she hadn’t been drinking. Not a drop. Dan recalled the martini glass he’d watched her empty and how pale she’d looked. And, later, how she stumbled as though she’d been drunk. But she hadn’t. Obviously she’d known she was pregnant.
He’d just finished the report when the phone buzzed. The display identified the call as coming from the Prince Edward Country OPP. Dan picked up.
“Hi, Dan, Pete Saylor here.”
“Pete! How are you?” Dan pictured the neatly dressed officer from Picton, wondering to what he owed the call.
“Have you got a minute?” Saylor asked.
“For you, I do — shoot.”
“I guess you’ve heard we’re calling it a suspicious death.”
“I just finished the report.”
“So what do you think?” Saylor asked, launching in without preamble. “You were there. Would anybody want her dead for any obvious reason?”
Dan hesitated. He’d already considered the question and come up with a few plausible if conjectured answers. “I haven’t really had time to think this through,” he said.
What he was really thinking was that small-town cops were known for taking things out of context and hanging on like pit bulls when they smelled blood. Bored by years of putting out grass fires, dragging drunks out of bars, and handing out tickets to careless cottagers for polluting rivers and lakes, they exaggerated harmless circumstantial evidence into something much larger when the chance came to seize on a moment of glory. More than one man’s reputation had been destroyed because somebody had had what at the time seemed like a good idea, but which later proved false, the victims of small town zealotry. David Milgaard, Steven Truscott, Guy Paul Morin — those were just a few names that came easily to mind. There had been others, men and women whose names weren’t as familiar, who had spent time in jail for other people’s crimes. And there were probably many more besides who never had the opportunity to have their names cleared.
“Completely off the record,” Saylor said. “Just between you and me.”
Dan tried to imagine Saylor in the larger picture: more than competent at his job, boxed in by life but devoted to a wife and kids living just outside the town limits, possibly in a grand version of a log home, something unique and half-hidden by a copse of trees off a busy highway. He’d watch sports, follow Hockey Night In Canada assiduously, but maintain an avid interest in the news, curl up with his honey over reruns of Sex and the City or possibly even Will and Grace for a lark after the kids had gone to bed when there was nothing better on. Sophisticated and good-natured, but under-challenged. The thought of cracking a case like this, if case it turned out to be, would have a strong appeal for him, something that would continue to glitter and twist in the back of his mind long after his shift was over.
“Pete, I really have to think about it before I open my mouth and get some poor innocent schmuck in trouble.”
“All right. I thought you might say that.” Pete laughed lightly. “Want to hear my theories?”
“Can’t hurt,” Dan said.
“Good man. I need to try them out on somebody — in confidence, of course.”
“Understood.”
“First there’s the gay aspect. It was a gay wedding.” He shifted gears here. “By the way — are you gay? It’s cool if you are, my younger brother’s gay.”
Dan frowned and wondered if it was true, but he let it pass. “Yes, I am,” he said. “And I was an invited guest.”
“Hey, no hang-ups here. We’re a new breed of cop,” Saylor said breezily. “So anyway, there’s that aspect. And we already know the dead girl was his wife, not his sister, as he’d claimed.”
“Actually, they’d both claimed that. I think they fooled everyone.”
“Right. Well, we had a few eyewitnesses who testified that the girl and her husband seemed to be arguing after the wedding, maybe half an hour before she disappeared. Apparently she hadn’t wanted him to go through with it, though my sense is he was bucking for citizenship….”
“I know all this,” Dan interrupted, trying not to sound impatient.
“Right. So it’s possible he killed her to stop her from ruining his plans,” Saylor said.
“I see what you’re getting at. That’s very interesting.” Except, Dan thought, I was fucking her husband around the same time you have him tossing her overboard.
Saylor sounded pleased. “The other possibility is that the guy he married — Thom Killingworth — quite the name, huh? Anyway, it’s possible he didn’t want her messing things up for them, so he killed her.”
Which is also a reasonable guess, Dan thought, except that Thom was busy fucking my boyfriend when it happened. On the other hand, he couldn’t confirm that Thom and Bill were still together when Daniella disappeared. Bill had arrived at the ballroom a minute or two after Thom. They could have gone their separate ways earlier, while Dan was tupping the Brazilian bull.
“What about family?” Dan blurted out before he could stop himself. He was thinking of Ted Killingworth. How far could you trust a junkie? But maybe Ted was exactly the sort of person who got caught in the crossfire of these things, innocent yet unable to clear his name.
“I’ve definitely thought of that one,” Saylor said. “Did you ever wonder what the parents thought about their son marrying another man?”
“I wonder about things like that all the time,” Dan said. “And wish I didn’t have to.”
“Point taken.”
“But in Thom’s case his mother paid for the wedding, so presumably she approved of it. I heard the father’s been missing for twenty years, so it’s not likely he had anything to do with it unless you assume he returned in time to murder the woman everyone presumed was his son’s sister-in-law.”
Dan heard Saylor chewing that one over. Maybe he was one of these cops who hated to be shown up. “Actually,” Saylor said. “I meant the other guy’s family. The Brazilian side.”
“Oh. Well, I think it’s fair to say they would have disapproved of the event, had they known the real story, which I now doubt they did. Still, doesn’t it seem more likely that they would try to kill the boy rather than his wife?”
“I’m getting to that,” Saylor said. “What if I told you I think the girl was targeted by accident and that it was really her husband that was supposed to die?”
This gave Dan pause. “What makes you say that?” he said slowly.
“Think about it. She looked like him. She was dressed exactly like him. With heels on, she would even have been about his height.…”
“….and in the dark, she would look even more like him,” Dan finished.
“Which is why everyone thought it was the boy who went overboard.”