too.”
“I don’t think he’ll be taking any more calls,” she told the dead man’s friend gently.
* * *
“I’ve moved on,” Ria Long snapped indignantly when Kari asked if she remembered the last time she’d been in contact with her former boyfriend.
The painfully slender young woman was standing in the doorway of her modest town house, the gossamer robe she had on barely covering all her assets as a breeze teased the material.
“What’s this all about? Philip send you over to plead his case?” she demanded haughtily, tossing her long brown hair over her shoulder. “Too bad. He had his chance.”
“So you don’t remember when you saw him last?” Esteban pressed.
The dark-haired woman smiled like a predator spotting a new prey as her eyes swept appreciatively over Esteban.
“A week ago. I saw him a week ago. He brought my stuff over and dumped it on the doorstep. The spineless jerk thought I wasn’t home, but I saw him slinking off. Why?” she wanted to know, her eyes narrowing as she honed in on Kari. “Did he say I took something?” She instantly became defensive. “That watch was mine—it belonged to my father. I gave it to Philip as a token of my love, but I don’t love him anymore so I took it back. If he—”
Kari cut the other woman off before she could get carried away, telling her curtly, “This isn’t about a watch.”
“Then what’s with all these questions?” Ria demanded, fisting one hand on her almost nonexistent hip. “What’s going on?”
“Ms. Long, where were you between the hours of twelve and three?” Kari asked, citing the approximate time of death the medical examiner had provided.
The woman looked from Kari to Esteban and then back again. It was obvious that her indignation hadn’t allowed her to connect the dots yet. “In bed. With my new boyfriend.”
“This new boyfriend have a name?” Esteban queried.
Ria gave up flirting and rolled her eyes. “Of course he has a name. Donald Barry. Now, why are you giving me the third degree?” she wanted to know. And then it finally hit her. Her eyes darted suspiciously back and forth between the two detectives. “Did something happen to Philip? Is that why you want to know where I was? Did he tell you I did something to him?”
Kari wrote down the other man’s name. They were going to have to speak to him in order to verify the alibi they’d just been given.
“I’m afraid he’s not saying anything anymore.” Kari faced the A.D.A.’s ex-girlfriend, hating the words she was about to say even though she’d taken an instant dislike to the woman she was talking to. The words were never easy to utter, because, in most cases, they confirmed the worst fears of the person on the receiving end of them. “I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, Ms. Long, but Philip Watson was murdered sometime between midnight and three a.m. this morning.”
Ria’s dark eyes widened in shock and disbelief. “No. You’re lying. This is some sick joke of Phil’s to get me to stay away. He’s not dead,” the woman shouted at them, tears of fear springing to her eyes even in the heat of her anger. “He can’t be dead. He can’t be!” Dissolving into despair, she crumbled to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. “He can’t be,” she repeated hoarsely, saying the words to herself rather than to them.
* * *
“Either she is one hell of an actress or that was on the level,” Kari said nearly an hour later as she and Esteban drove back to the precinct. Getting her second wind, she was behind the wheel again and, at the moment, annoyed with herself for feeling sorry for the woman they had just left in the arms of her current boyfriend. The latter, it turned out, had been in her bedroom the entire time they had conducted their interview with Ria on her front doorstep.
“Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing,” Esteban told her. “For what it’s worth, I think she’s innocent. This was definitely our slasher striking again.”
Kari nodded, slanting him a surprised glance as she came to a stop at a red light. “Wow, we agree on two points. This is almost scary.”
Whatever he was going to say in response was put on hold because his cell phone was ringing. Shifting slightly, he took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen.
Still waiting for the light to change to green, Kari saw that