A Farewell to Legs: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,40

mad at me, Dutton mad at me, and worst of all, Abby really mad at me. So I was driving away from a man who had probably thrown a rock at my window, and toward a wife and a police chief who might very well throw rocks at my head.

Meanwhile, back in the detective business, the “Case of the Mysterious Stink Bomber(s)” was far from solved. Here, a problem that would have taken Encyclopedia Brown maybe a page and a half to solve, and I was no closer to a solution than I had been a week and a half before. I didn’t so much as have a plan of action.

And then there was the investigative reporter business, where I was seriously stumped in my examination of the Crazy Legs Gibson murder. The cops were probably staking out Stephanie’s house, other reporters were down in D.C. interviewing actual witnesses and players in the case, and I was in New Jersey, having spoken to a grand total of one person who had been involved at all. Luckily, she was the one who everybody else wanted to talk to, and who wouldn’t talk to anyone but me. That, and that alone, was the edge I held in this story. And so far, it had gotten me almost as far as I had gotten in the stink bomb case.

This wasn’t turning out to be my October.

My cell phone hadn’t rung since Burke’s house. This was not a good sign, as it indicated that my wife didn’t actually care whether I was in the clutches of a possible serial killer.

I had to concentrate on just one problem at a time, and since $10,000 was riding on only one, I chose Crazy Legs. If there were DNA evidence, it would have to place Stephanie at the scene of the crime to get the cops moving on her so quickly. If it wasn’t DNA, but a witness who was actually there, it would be weird. The only people who could be in a place like that would be the killer, the victim, who in all likelihood wasn’t talking, and the girlfriend, who had already been interviewed and insisted she’d been in the shower and hadn’t heard anything. Maybe she’d recanted her previous testimony. (You freely use words like “recanted” when your nightly bedmate is a lawyer. And when you have impersonated one unsuccessfully in the recent past.)

Could there have been someone else there? Stephanie had definitely been in New Jersey a couple of hours after the killing— I could personally attest to that. If she’d been in D.C. in time for the murder and New Jersey in time for the reunion, she’d have had to fly. But she’d had her car—the D.C. plates were evident on the BMW she was driving at my house that night. For that matter, on my block, the BMW was pretty evident all by itself. And a BMW is not the kind of thing you can place in the overhead bin as a carry-on item.

DNA evidence would rule out Stephanie hiring someone to kill Legs, unless she hired someone who could be directly tied to her, like a member of her family. So it became that much more important that I get some solid information from Abrams as soon as possible.

I’d have to talk to Legs’ mother, too. I couldn’t imagine she’d have vital information. But you never know where the good stuff is going to come from, so you talk to everybody and rule out most of them.

I was off the Garden State Parkway by then and onto Rt. 27, driving into Midland Heights, when the phone rang. It wasn’t a number I recognized, so it was entirely possible it was someone who wasn’t furious with me at the moment. I picked up.

“Hello?” I said tentatively.

“Hi, Aaron, it’s Stephanie.”

“Hi, Steph. Are you in jail?”

She laughed, as if I hadn’t meant it. “No,” she teased. “I’m at my mother-in-law’s house.” Ah. So she was putting on a cheery exterior to deal with the old lady. “We were wondering if you might be able to do the interview now. Lester has a business appointment later.”

“Now?” I checked the dashboard clock—it was still three hours before the kids would come charging through the door.

“Is this a bad time?”

“No, I can do it now. But you’ll have to give me directions. The ones I wrote down last night are still in my office.”

She gave me the directions as I made a U-turn on Edison