Darius had a pad of paper out, a pen in his other hand, but he didn’t write anything down. Like the young Eve had had a habit of not swerving at whatever game of chicken she had been forced into, the young Darius also had his own habit of remembering everything the girl said.
He suspected time hadn’t changed that ingrained skill.
Still, for appearance’s sake, he held on to both.
“Family lawyer, huh?” he said. “Pretty close, I guess, to come to an out-of-town wedding.”
Eve shrugged.
“When you have enough money, even the lawyers get close enough to become part of the family. He was at almost just as many family events as I was.”
“So you were friends?”
Darius didn’t have to look back at the body to know the details. Once he had rushed into the lobby and noticed the man, it had been hard not to take it all in.
A man who appeared to be in his late fifties, early sixties, slumped over on a worn and weathered wooden bench. Not at all worn and weathered was his suit, charcoal gray, with a whitebutton-up shirt beneath it. The white was pristine in all places except where it had come untucked at his waist. It was stained crimson.
The bullet wound that had most likely killed him was hidden beneath his coat.
For Eve, not much had changed about her appearance since Darius had seen her at County 22. Her coat was gone, and her hair had been pinned up. Another quick look down at her dress, and Darius couldn’t help but think that the Eve of their younger years would have disliked such an uncomfortably tight thing.
He buttoned that line of thought as Eve sighed out long.
“I wouldn’t call usfriends, but we were familiar,” she said. “As Scott Keys’s personal assistant, I had more cause to run into him than most. Especially since he helped out with the philanthropy side of things.”
She shook her head—not even a strand of hair moved.
“I don’t know why anyone would want to kill him, though. Or why they would kill him and then put him here.”
She motioned toward the late Gary Whittaker.
“And before you ask how I know he was killed somewhere else and then moved after, it’s because there’s not more blood,” she added. “If anyone other than you had found him, they might not even have noticed he’d been shot at all.”
She was right.
There was no blood around the victim. Not even a drop.
He had been shot elsewhere and moved.
But why?
“When’s the last time you talked to or saw Mr. Whittaker?” Darius asked.
He had to raise his voice a little to compensate for the chatter taking place across the room from them. The county coroner, Martin Blues, a newly hired crime scene investigator, and Deputy Gavin were professional when it came to their jobs.They were also social about it too. Darius had already had to skirt Martin on two other cases after the younger man had tried talking sports over a dead body. He understood trying to bring brevity into a heavy situation, but even the less-than-social Darius knew there was a time and a place.
Eve didn’t seem to mind the new distraction. Her brow furrowed, and her frown deepened.
“The last time I saw Gary was back at the company.”
“In Atlanta?”
She nodded.
“Scott had a meeting with a Green Suit and asked Gary to sit in. I didn’t sit with them but ended up walking Gary to his car in the parking garage. He talked about the upcoming wedding andhiswedding to his now ex-wife, but it was all just small talk.”
Darius tilted his head to the side a little.
“Green Suit?” he asked. “Is that some kind of business term I’m not familiar with?”
