I didn’t want to be the first to speak, so instead I took the camera from Charlie’s hands and restarted the video.My heart hammered a steady rhythm.
“What are you doing?” Charlie asked, his brows furrowed as if he thought I might delete the footage.
“Playing it again,” I said, sure that the late hour and my pounding headache had clouded my thinking, certain that I had to have missed something.
“You saw it too?”
“What do you mean?” I feigned ignorance.“What did you see?”
“Lacy,” Charlie answered, his tone heavy and resigned. “Her hand, and the way she backed away when Brett started making noises.”
I didn’t answer as I peered down at the camera, watching the terrible tableau unfold again, pausing it every two or three seconds.
“I have to question Lacy again, maybe even detain her,” Charlie said, sounding more and more official with each word.
I clenched my jaw. Did Charlie always have to act immediately? Couldn’t his conscience take a half-hour break? Couldn’t his reactivity wait until morning?
“She obviously had opportunity,” Charlie mused. “Motive too, with their past relationship.”
I looked up from the video and into his eyes. “What do you know about their past?”
“When I interviewed her earlier, she mentioned that they’d dated,” he said, staring back at me. “Things ended badly.”
That was an understatement.
“They were eighteen, and lots of relationships end badly,” I said in her defense. “Anyway, Brett was the one who would have a motive against her, not the reverse.”
“Why is that?”
“She was the one who left,” I answered, my tone implying it was obvious.The one who got away, I thought, but didn’t say.
“He ended up going away to school that fall too,” Charlie argued back.
He was right, of course. I remembered Lacy telling me back then that Brett had gotten off the waitlist at Virginia Tech at the last minute. With the amount of partying he’d posted on Snapchat, admission to college had seemed to heal whatever wound their breakup had inflicted.
“Maybe Lacy regrets letting a reality TV star escape?”
“If you think Lacy cares about fame, you don’t know her,” I scoffed.
“That’s the thing: I don’t really know her,” Charlie said, and for perhaps the first time in our relationship, I realized that was true.
Charlie, as they say, wasn’t from around here. He didn’t know my friends, and I didn’t know his. I’d never heard of his former partner, the gorgeous new deputy, until I happened to run into them at the diner months ago, and I hadn’t met her properly until tonight. In the brief span of our relationship, with half a dozen trips to visit one another and snatches of time on the phone, we’d only ever had time to get to know each other, and now I was beginning to wonder how well we’d done at that.
“Look, Dakota. I have to do what’s in the best interest of the law.” Charlie’s voice was both preparing me and pleading with me to understand.
I hushed him with a wave of my hand. “Give me two minutes, that’s all I ask.” I let out a long breath and continued watchingthe video, and that’s when I saw Brett’s cup tilt, something long falling from the glass.
“Did you bag this up?” I asked, pointing at the screen.
Charlie studied the image. “The garnish? Yeah. I had one of my officers test it before sending it to the lab.”
I thought back to the drinks Joe had been serving. My chat with Joe at the bar. My FaceTime with Aunt DeeDee. Two images came to mind: the thin stalks sticking out of Joe’s drink concoction and the pile of leaves near the sink while Aunt DeeDee stirred the contents of her mixing bowl. “It must be rhubarb. I saw mounds of it in the kitchen, and Aunt DeeDee said the caterer over-ordered.”
“And Joe was the caterer?”
I nodded. Charlie already had his phone out and was looking up the plant even though I knew what he would find.
“The leaves are poisonous,” I told him. “But it only causes stomach upset if ingested in bulk.”
