Roz snorted and typed out a text to the deputy asking if he had any information on Wayne’s laptop, including investment schemes and research on bringing down planes, with a promise to tell him what she knew later. And she asked whether he knew if Wayne had a will.
She put down the phone when she was done and started the car. “That was draining, talking to Sheryl. I don’t know how she could still love that guy.”
“Love is blind.”
“Is that what it is?” Roz turned to him.
“Not always. But it’s powerful.” Alden’s heat-filled gaze focused on her, saying so much more than his words.
Am I in love with Alden?
Probably.
Yes.
But saying it would make things so complicated. Would force her to confront the future. She didn’t think she was a scaredy-cat, except when it came to big emotions. She didn’t know how to deal with those. Work, she understood.
He’d already told her he loved her. But now wasn’t the time for her to get into all those sticky feelings. So all she said was, “Can we really rule out Sheryl?”
“Not entirely, but we can see if your buddy Duke finds anything to implicate her.” A corner of his mouth lifted, and the moment passed. “She’s a better suspect than the other writers who only coughed up twelve hundred bucks. That’s a piddly amount.”
“It’s not piddly if you’re starving in your writer’s garret,” Roz said.
“You mean your reporter’s garret?”
“Same thing,” she said as she pulled away from the curb.
“If the other women were anything like Sheryl and Nicole, they weren’t starving,” Alden said. “They were ripe for the picking. When he got them on the hook with the web listing, he led them on and asked for more.”
“The way Sheryl was conned.”
“Maybe not exactly the same way,” he said. “I think she was a con with benefits.”
Roz cringed. “She’s in bad shape. I don’t like making people cry.”
“And if you think that was fun …”
“What?”
“We still don’t know who killed Wayne,” he said. “And we really have to talk to Enolia.”
Right, she thought. Because Nicole saw Enolia yelling at Wayne behind the bookshop.
“You don’t think—” Roz tried to see Enolia as a killer. The ego. The need for prestige.
“I don’t know what to think,” Alden confessed. “But Wayne seemed to inspire strong emotions in people, especially women.”
“Should we get a police escort?”
“Of course not,” Alden scoffed. “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
“Especially if you blow someone up with one.”
“Different kind of pen,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Do we tell her we’re coming over?” Alden asked Roz as she drove toward the beach.
