lot. I hated her cheating.” He looked up again, his nose crinkled. “How could she do it with one of them?”
“That’s pretty tough, Wes.” Ryan voice was non-judgmental. “It’s hard when your girl’s screwing around. Hard to keep things under control. When did the fights turn physical?”
Simpson stiffened. “Never. I never hit her. Not once. Just a lot of yelling.”
“She had a black eye.”
“Yeah, I saw it, but I didn’t do it.” Simpson’s face flushed, agitated. “Figured that was a present from fang boy.”
Fifteen minutes later Ari didn’t like Simpson any better, but she was convinced he wasn’t the killer. He didn’t have the stomach for it. And in some weird fashion, he had been more of a friend to Angela than anyone else. But that didn’t necessarily make him a nice guy.
“So what was your problem when you came charging into Basil and Sage?” Ari asked.
Simpson had the grace to look uncomfortable. “I didn’t know you were the Guardian. Just that you were a witch. A bad one, I thought.” He swallowed hard when Ari scowled. “Angie and me'd been fighting, about everything. But mostly how weird she'd been. When I saw a pamphlet on your class, I thought she was into the occult.”
“You said she changed long before that.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know this was her first class. I figured she’d been going there every week for months.” He hunched his shoulders. “I’d eliminated all the other explanations.”
“Like what?”
“Drugs. I found some blue pills on her dresser. That Fantasy stuff. She gave me the old story about holding them for a friend. Yeah, like I believed that. I figured she’d been experimenting, but I never saw them again. And she never acted strung out, like she was using.”
“Maybe she kept them hidden after that.” Ryan had been listening quietly until Simpson mentioned the drugs. Now he was on point.
“I searched. Several times. Nothing.”
What a creepy boyfriend, Ari thought. Follows her around, searches her apartment. She couldn’t decide whether he was a misguided friend or a stalker.
“So go on,” Ryan encouraged. “You must have had other suspicions.”
“Only one, really. This vamp dude, I thought he might of bespelled her. But she laughed when I asked. And those people act like zombies, don’t they? Or robots?” He glanced at Ari for confirmation. When she said nothing, he looked away. “Anyway, that’s when I found the candles and some crystals.”
“That’s how you made the leap to black magic? Candles and crystals?” Ari’s voice rose.
“Let’s go back to the drugs.” Ryan intervened to keep them on course. “Maybe you never saw drugs because Angela was quickly passing them on. A go-between. Did you see money? I haven’t heard anything about a job. How’d she pay her bills?”
“I don’t know,” Simpson admitted. “She quit her waitress job almost a year ago.”
The rest of the interview was pretty ho-hum. The morning of Ari’s class was the last time he admitted seeing Angela. On the night of her death, he said he went to a movie by himself and might still have the ticket stub at home. He’d look. Not much of an alibi, but Ari didn’t think it mattered. Given Angela’s injuries, he’d never been a likely suspect.
Simpson left, and Ryan leaned back in his chair, stretching out his long legs. “Well, that was a waste of time. At least as far as identifying a decent suspect. The drug bit was interesting, but I’m not sure it’s helpful. I’ll follow up with the narcotics squad. But it looks to me like we’re out of suspects.”
Ari looked at him and shrugged. They’d have to start over, somehow develop new suspects. A knock on the door was a welcome interruption.
A harried-looking, twenty-something male, one of the couriers employed by the city, popped in long enough to drop a packet on Ryan’s desk, the lab results from the crime scene. Ryan read the report aloud without much enthusiasm. As expected, it was unremarkable, until he reached the last item of evidence: twenty-six canine hairs.
Ari sat up straighter. Dog or werewolf? Angela didn’t own a dog. And given Andreas’s description of the woman at the club, werewolves suddenly seemed a real possibility. She knew DNA tests wouldn’t hold the answer. Wolf and dog hairs were too similar to be distinguished without the follicles: an interesting fact Ari’s forensics instructor would be surprised she remembered. He’d always complained her frequent looks out the window meant she wasn’t paying attention.
“It doesn’t have to be a wolf,” she cautioned. “Maybe our