Veil of Night: A Novel Read online

  She didn’t know what devil seized her, but she did know that payback was sweet. “Almost,” she murmured, and listened to the sudden fumbling and background cursing as he dropped his cell phone.

  Garvey approached Eric’s desk, some papers in hand. “The senator’s alibied tighter than Dick’s hatband,” he said in disgust. “He was at a fund-raiser, with Mrs. Dennison, in Savannah last night. It lasted until midnight. He couldn’t be in two places at once.”

  “He might not have done it, but he had it done,” Eric growled. “The fucker screwed up. If he’d just left it alone, we didn’t have enough on him to get a search warrant, but he was afraid Jaclyn could identify him. Now we’re going to look real hard at his girlfriend. Jaclyn just called; a woman pretending to be an old friend called her business yesterday, and her mother told the woman where Jaclyn would be. That was a puzzle, figuring out how anyone knew where Jaclyn would be at any given time, but the answer was simple.”

  “The girlfriend.”

  “Yep.” Eric pulled up some information on his computer. “Atlanta P.D. sent over their ballistic report. They found one bullet in the Jag’s upholstery; the other one went through the passenger door. The weight of the bullet is consistent with a nine millimeter. Ms. Taite Boyne is registered as the owner of a Glock 26, which is a subcompact nine millimeter.”

  “If she’s smart, that pistol is at the bottom of Lake Lanier.”

  “Problem is, she thinks she’s smarter than everyone else. People like that make stupid mistakes. We’ll trace the call to Premier’s office, see what pops. Maybe she used her cell phone.”

  “She can toss that, too, say it was stolen.”

  “Pistol and cell phone both come up missing? I’d say that’s suspicious behavior. Anyway, she might have been smart enough to use a calling card, so we can’t bank on the call leading directly to her. But the Atlanta P.D. didn’t find any shell casings at the scene last night, which means they ejected inside the car. There may be scorch marks, gunpowder residue in the car, on the steering wheel from contact with her hands. At any rate, it’ll be interesting to see if she has an alibi for last night.”

  Garvey rubbed his hands together. “I love it when all the details fall in place,” he said happily.

  “Jaclyn is on the way in, to look at photographs.”

  “Identifying Dennison won’t count for much, with him being all over television these days. Seems like he’s running an ad every fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ve got another angle I’m going to try. Jaclyn doesn’t know cars. She seriously doesn’t know cars. About all she can tell you is if a vehicle is a car, or a pickup, or an SUV. But she’s really, really good with details, so she might have noticed something particular about the car, even without knowing what make it is.” He’d come in early, started compiling stacks of photographs of cars, of both the kind the senator drove and the kind Taite Boyne drove. He’d noticed a striking detail about the car that the senator drove, and there was a possibility Jaclyn had picked up on it.

  He also had a lot of head shots of gray-haired men, including two of the senator, one from each side. He didn’t know which angle she’d seen him from, and one side of a person’s face could be markedly different from the other side. If she picked him out, that was a bonus. Let a defense attorney argue that she’d seen him in political ads; that was the district attorney’s worry. The important thing to Eric was collecting enough evidence that they could persuade a judge to issue a search warrant on that car.

  Jaclyn walked in a little after nine. Eric watched heads turning her way. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, because she wasn’t. Objectively, he supposed most people would say she was attractive. She sure as hell attracted him. But what set her apart was her effortless, long-legged stroll, those dynamite legs, and a classy sense of style. Jaclyn couldn’t look cheap if she tried. Everything about her was meticulously put together without being fussy. He hated fussiness, hated a lot of jangling things hanging off a woman. From the gold studs in her ears to the tiny gold chain around her right ankle, she was restrained and classy. It was funny how the very things that attracted him to her were what he most enjoyed messing up; maybe it was the challenge of getting her clothes off and her hair down, her nails digging into his back. Oh, yeah.

  He stood up as she approached, directed her to the chair beside his desk. If he’d pushed it a little last night, he thought, they’d have ended up in bed, but what he wanted wasn’t just sex. He wanted Jaclyn to decide that she wanted him. He wanted her to consciously, deliberately decide to give them a chance, because otherwise he’d always feel as if she had one foot out the door and was just waiting for him to do something wrong so she could leave.

  Garvey came up as Eric turned to get the stack of photographs he’d put to the side. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he said to her. “That was a close thing last night.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Garvey. Yes, it was. That was the most frightened I’ve ever been.”

  “We’re making progress in the case. With luck, this will all be over pretty soon.” He pulled up a chair and sat down—evidently he wanted to be involved in the process.

  “I hope so.” She glanced at the clock, then at Eric. “Ready?”

  He gave her the head shots first. She flipped through them, taking maybe two seconds on each one, then shook her head and set them aside. “Nothing, but let me look through them again in a few minutes. Sometimes my impressions need to simmer.”

  “Take your time.”

  She gave a tiny smile. “Today? Time is the one thing I don’t have.”

  Next she went through the photographs of cars in the same measured way. She went all the way to the end of the stack, but instead of setting the stack aside the way she had with the head shots, she went back to the beginning and started again, a tiny frown knitting her brow. She went more slowly this time, her head tilted to the side.

  Eric and Garvey sat silently, watching and waiting. Eric almost stopped breathing. He was putting a lot of faith in her attention to detail. She might not know cars, but she knew style.

  She pulled a photograph out of the stack and tossed it on the desk. “This one,” she said. “The car was like this.”

  He glanced at the photograph. He wanted to smile with satisfaction, but he kept his expression noncommittal so he didn’t inadvertently influence her. “Are you certain?”

  “Yes. It had that same doohickey sticking up on the hood.”

  Eric picked up the photograph. The car she’d selected was a Mercedes S-Class, the S600, which ran about a hundred and fifty thou. Only the S-Class vehicles had the Mercedes emblem standing on the tip of the hood; on all of the other models, the emblem was made into the grill.

  Senator Dennison drove a silver S600.

  He gave her the other stack of photographs. These had been harder to come by, because they were photographs of the taillights of several different makes and models, taken at night. “Do any of these taillights look like the ones on the car you saw last night?”

  “You’re asking a lot,” she murmured. “I was scared out of my head. I barely remembered to look for a tag number, and fat lot of good that did.”

  “Just see if anything rings a bell.”

  She did the whole methodical thing again, but when she reached the last one she shook her head. “Sorry. Nothing there.”

  That had been a long shot anyway. Still, she’d pulled out a piece of information that might sway a judge. She hadn’t identified the senator, but she’d identified his car.

  She picked up the head shots again, went back through them before finally shaking her head. “I don’t recognize anyone.”

  Eric took the pictures back. “That’s okay. Thanks for coming in.”

  She stood, gave him a quizzical look. “That’s it? You aren’t going to tell me if that hood doohickey means anything or not?”

  He smiled. “It means a lot.” It also meant a lot that she was being cordial, that she was keeping her hostility firmly