Eleven
Jack wasn’t taking the news about Kelter’s relationship with Stella Bridges well—at all. He’d smoked two cigarettes since we’d found out, and he smelled like a human ashtray sitting next to me at the conference room table.
Paige and Zach had filled us in on their visit to Magical Bar & Grill and had dropped off the security video. Now they were following their lead to Stella’s front door while Jack and I stayed back at the police station. They were having all the fun so far, but at least we had a “movie” to watch. It would provide us some visual context to the manager’s testimony and might even provide us with some useful information.
Jack was breathing heavily, and it didn’t take a profiler to know that he was mad. Probably more at himself than anyone else. I’d be angry with myself if I were in his position, too. After all, he’d broken his own rule about letting emotions factor into the job. There was no way around it: Jack’s connection to Marsh had pushed him to act prematurely. Nothing else could explain his swift—and unprecedented—reaction to a missing person report. Twenty-four hours hadn’t even passed before we all hopped on a plane down here. I hoped it wasn’t going to bite Jack in the ass, but attempting to make him feel better would be useless. For one, Jack didn’t take to coddling, and two, I respected him too much to try.
He was pawing through the hate mail on the table, though not really looking at it. I’d never seen him so fidgety before. It was as if he was in a holding pattern until we received an update on Stella Bridges.
“We might find a lead among the different letters,” he deadpanned.
I hated seeing this man in place of the almighty and confident Jack Harper.
I nodded. “Makes sense.”
The silence might as well have been thunder, and I itched to fill the silence. “While you were out earlier, I verified Ava Jett’s alibis and pulled the background on the manager from the bar. He had a bit of a rap sheet, but no offenses in the last eight years. Before that, he had two charges of drug possession and served minimal jail time. Nothing to indicate that he is a cold-blooded killer.” I looked at Jack, expecting some snarky response about paperwork not necessarily showing a person’s true colors, but he gave me nothing. I cleared my throat and continued. “If he’s behind any murders, nothing points that way on paper.”
“Did his alibis check out?” was all Jack asked.
I nodded.
“That leaves us with the video.” He gestured to the laptop in front of me where the opening image of the video was frozen on the screen.
I fast-forwarded to 8:50 and saw Kelter take a seat at the bar. By nine, a man sat on her left and tapped her on the arm. Her facial expression and body language indicated that she wanted him to go away. She leaned away from him and kept putting her left elbow on the bar, erecting a barrier between them. The guy refused to take the hint. He tapped her shoulder a few times, and it only made Kelter wriggle farther from him.
After about thirty minutes of that, throughout which I was impressed by Kelter’s self-control, a woman came up to Kelter and kissed her on the mouth.
“Stella Bridges,” I said.
The man watched them for a while but then left without looking back. And any heterosexual man wouldn’t have blamed him if he had.
Jack and I continued watching until the two women staggered out of the bar, arm in arm.
I stopped the video, my stomach roiling for Jack. He got up and headed for the door. Some people drowned their stress and regrets in booze, but Jack smoked his away.
I felt so bad for him that a very small part of me almost wished we were wrong to suspect Kelter had left her husband.