“Then I’m sure you won’t mind telling me where you were the night he went missing.”
Breath held, I waited for her answer.
“I was at my AA meeting at the Episcopal Church on Van Buren. Same place I’ve been every Tuesday night for the last eleven months. You can check with my sponsor. She’s there every week. Meetings start at eight,” she said. “Just leave my husband out of it.”
“Is that why you’re working here?” Vero asked in a low voice. “To keep your husband out of it? Is that how you’ve been paying Harris off, using your paychecks to keep him from talking to Daniel?”
Aimee’s mouth fell slack. Her eyes darted anxiously around her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s okay,” Vero said softly. “The police already know about the photos. He won’t be able to hurt you again. If there’s anything you want to say, you can tell me.”
Aimee’s eyes glimmered with the threat of tears. She pulled herself up by her spine. “Would you like me to wrap anything up for you?” Her voice fluttered, fragile under the artificial edge she tried and failed to hone.
Vero must have heard it, too. “You know what, I’ll take that whole palette.” Vero pointed to a set under the glass. Aimee rang it up, smiling tightly as Vero put the bills in her hand. Our eyes caught as Vero took the bag off the counter. I was pretty sure we were thinking the same damn thing.
Aimee had a motive. But she also had an alibi. So if Aimee hadn’t helped Theresa kill Harris, who had?
* * *
“What does this mean?” Vero asked, throwing the bag of cosmetics in my lap and slamming her car door.
Aimee Reynolds was definitely the same Aimee on Harris’s phone. And she was definitely the same woman who’d made the anonymous call to the police, But if she’d been at her AA meeting from eight to nine, there’s no way she could have made it to the bar in time to see me leave with Harris.
“It means Aimee wasn’t there but Theresa definitely had a motive. And she still doesn’t have an alibi.” I thought of the cash Steven said he’d found in her underwear drawer. What if she’d killed Harris for far less noble reasons than revenge? What if she’d killed him for money? “What if Nick’s hunch is right and Theresa’s in over her head with Feliks?”
Vero tipped her head back, rolling it sideways against the headrest to look at me. “You think Theresa’s working for Feliks on more than just real estate deals?”
“It’s possible.” Nick had been right about everything else. “Harris clearly had a type. If Feliks wanted Harris dead, Theresa would have been the perfect lure. Maybe I just beat her to him.”
“What are we going to do about Nick? That man is like a dog with a bone. If he keeps after her like this, he’s going to end up right under our garage door.”
I shook my head, maybe just to convince myself. “As long as there’s no body, there’s no case.” It was possible to convict someone of murder without a body, but I knew from talking to Georgia, those cases were hard to prove. Nick would need solid evidence. He couldn’t arrest us on a hunch. “Julian told Nick he was certain the woman in the photo wasn’t Theresa. Theresa hasn’t blabbed yet and neither have we. And Nick’s not likely to get within three feet of Zhirov without Feliks’s lawyers putting up a wall. Nick said it himself: nothing sticks to Feliks. Assuming none of us talks, any evidence Nick has is circumstantial at best. At some point, Nick will get tired of chasing dead ends and the case will go cold.” I stared out my window at the rows and rows of cars, at the bright collective glare shining off the windshields. People went missing every day. As time went by, cases would pile up. Eventually, I told myself, Harris would get lost in the sea of them.
“Then you’d better make sure there aren’t any sod farms in this book of yours.”
“It was a cemetery,” I muttered against the window, the words almost lost under the steady stream of Zach’s babbling in the back seat. Vero looked at me askance. “In the book,” I explained, “she buries the guy in a cemetery, in a freshly dug grave. You know, on top of some other guy who’d been buried there earlier.”
Vero thought about that. She nodded appreciatively, as if she were tacking it to a corkboard in the back of her mind. “That’s good. We should have thought of that before. We’ll have to try that when you kill Andrei.”