Tanner looked at her, head cocked, waiting for an affirmation.
She understood why Rosemarie was doing this. She grasped the stark utility of casting Garrett as the culprit. But for all his failings, he hadn’t done this, and he couldn’t defend himself because he’d been murdered by the actual perpetrator. It felt so utterlywrong.
She passed a hand over her eyes and nodded.
“Miss Harper,” Tanner said, “we believe Garrett dumped you at that godforsaken park and expected you would die there. No one visits except the beat cop doing a quick check, and only then in the evenings. If you hadn’t been singing, the officer who found you would never have come up.”
Rosemarie stared at her.“Singing?”
“To keep the time,” Beatrix said. “For the CPR.”
“Ah.”
“We don’t know what Garrett did to you both after drugging you, but it almost worked,” Tanner said. “The doctors tell me that if you’d gone much longer without medical attention, you could have died yourself.”
She gasped. That was the first she’d heard of it. Was it the result of using too much magic?
Stop—concentrate. She had to think about extraneous things like that later. Avoiding Rosemarie’s eye, she said to Tanner, “But why do you think Garrett is the one who did this?”
“Well—he’s skipped town, first off.”
So they hadn’t found his body. Wherewasit?
“Also,” Tanner said, “his colleagues at work were growing concerned about him. Two of them independently used ‘obsessed’ to describe his behavior relating to you.” He paused. “You don’t look surprised by this, Miss Harper.”
“No,” she murmured. “Not entirely.”
“One of his colleagues reported that Garrett, while intoxicated, said Sunday night that he would have you—that no one was going to stand in his way because he had a plan, which he refused to explain. The wizard was so concerned that when Garrett didn’t show up as expected on Tuesday, he called the police. We searched his house, and we found these.”
He reached into the bag he’d set down by his chair, pulled out a folder and opened it. Inside were photographs of her. Coming out of church. Walking up Main Street, arm-in-arm with Ella, laughing. Picture after picture of her in the forest, alone—except not. She shivered.
The detective cleared his throat. “That banned substance in your system? He had that in his house as well. And he’d obtained a marriage license for you both.”
Her mouth dropped open.
“Did you know about the license? Did you sign the application?”
“No!”
He nodded. “That’s what we suspected. He applied for it as a nonresident, so the application was mailed to him, and presumably he then forged your signature on it.”
She tried to follow this train of thought. She’d figured Garrett had broken into Peter’s house to ensure he could spy on them unobserved and see for certain what they did behind closed doors. Now she had to consider the possibility that Garrett wanted to lie in wait for Peter—either under the assumption that Peter would do something that could justify arrest if he thought he was alone, or … She shuddered. Peter would have had no warning. And then what? Drugs, chapel,I do?
“Just to be clear,” she said, “you believe that he—that he?—”
“Planned to exchange vows with you while you weren’t in your right mind, yes.” The detective tapped his temple. “But I don’t think you were suggestible enough for that, Miss Harper. You were performing CPR on your fiancé when you shouldn’t have been able to think straight. You were pleading to stay with him when you should have gone docilely with the beat cop. So Garrett couldn’t get you to marry him. And if he couldn’t have you, no one would.”
It was entirely possible, of course, that Garrett had ayayak root because he drugged people to force them to do what the magiocracy wanted—not that that was any better—and he’d gotten the marriage license with the idea that if he could change her mind, he would marry her on the spot.
But either way, she hadn’t taken seriously enough the threat he’d represented. Those photos—they were chilling. That split second in the forest when she feared he might kill her—perhaps not an overreaction. Seen from the clarifyingperspective of hindsight, it was even unsettling that he’d proposed to her just a few weeks after they’d met.
He hadn’t understood her at all. It seemed she had not really understood him, either.
“We’re searching for him,” Tanner said. “Don’t worry, Miss Harper.”
That brought her back to the present difficulty. Garrett had died eighteen hours too early for Tanner’s neat scenario. If the police found him soon …
“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” the detective asked.
