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“Sylvia never told her sons about us. I found out that Pastor Deegan was meeting with them to discuss the funeral arrangements this evening. I wanted to be there to offer my thoughts, based on things she told me over the years, like which hymns she favored, but they weren’t interested, to put it mildly. I knew that it wouldn’t go well given that she refused to tell them about us, but I didn’t anticipate it going quite so badly.”

“How long were you and Sylvia a couple?” Josie asked. They knew the relationship had been going on at least three years given Sylvia’s phone records, but had no idea when it had started.

“Four years.”

Turner tsked. “Four years and she didn’t tell her kids she was seeing you?”

Fisher’s expression hardened. “Sylvia liked to keep her private life private.”

“There’s private,” Turner goaded. “And then there’s dirty little secrets.”

Anger flared in Fisher’s brown eyes. “It wasn’t like that.”

Before Turner could rile the man up any further, Josie jumped in. “Was your relationship casual or were things serious between you and Sylvia?”

Fisher’s anger drained away quickly, as if he didn’t have the energy to maintain it. “Who knows? Every time I thought we were moving forward, she’d push me away. I thought we’d grown close enough that she’d be willing to tell her sons one day soon. Maybe not that it was me, not yet, but that she was getting serious with someone. All I can tell you is that I was very much in love with her. I believe she felt the same, but with Sylvia—” He sighed heavily. “It was like she was always holding a part of herself back.”

“How long did you know her?” Josie asked.

“Eight years. She was already a congregant here when I joined.”

It would have been roughly four years after Sylvia moved to Denton.

“Did you move here from somewhere else?” Josie said.

“Yeah. Philadelphia.”

Josie had seen his prior addresses when she’d done the background check on him. The fact that the Main Line, where Sylvia had been living when she was attacked the first time, was a collection of suburbs outside Philadelphia had not escaped her attention.

“Why’d you move?” Turner asked.

“I wanted to start over.”

“From what?” Josie said.

She already knew the answer, but she wanted to see if he would tell them the truth and if so, how much spin he’d try to put on what he’d done to make himself look less awful.

Fisher rolled his lips. Exhaling, he said, “I’m a recovering alcoholic. At that time, I’d just finished up a two-year sentence for a DUI. A year in lockup and a year on supervised parole.”

That much was true, but he wasn’t giving them the full story. In fact, he’d left out a pretty major element of his crime. Josie exchanged a brief look with Turner that told her he was thinking the same thing.

Nineteen

Oblivious to their silent communication, Fisher continued, “My wife left me about a year before the accident. It kind of sent me into a tailspin, if I’m being honest. I had been driving for a limousine service so I had no one in my life and no job to return to when I got out. My conviction made it even harder to find work. Lucky for me, I found my faith when I was away. It saved me. I was just looking for a meeting the first time I came here and now I run them.”

“That’s quite a turnaround,” Turner said. Josie was sure she was the only one who caught the small edge of skepticism in his tone. “What do you do for work now?”

“I work at the Spur Mobile store on Aymar Avenue.”

There was a short knock on the door before a young woman poked her head inside. “We need this room, Louis.”

Fisher nodded. “Right, right.”

Josie and Turner followed him out and then down the hall. He stopped in front of the door where the AA meeting was supposed to have taken place. “I have to straighten up this room,” he told them. “It’s a shared meeting space, and I have to clear it for the next group.”

“Not a problem for us,” Turner said.

The tips of Louis’s ears turned pink. “Right,” he mumbled. “Of course it’s not.”