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Albuquerque, New Mexico
Friday, October 25th, 4:40 PM Local Time
Instead of just one thing causing tension, there were two. My guilt and Paige trying to suppress bad memories from her last visit to California. Hopefully, the fact it was a large state, and she’d had her problems in Valencia, a few hundred miles south of Bridgeport, would help her release the past. I was out of luck with that until I decided to forgive myself—apparently easier said than done. But regardless of feelings and personal drama, Paige and I would be boarding a flight at ten minutes after seven, in just over three hours, so we had to make our visit to Josefina Alverez a quick one.
Paige rapped her knuckles against Alvarez’s apartment door a second time. “Ms. Alvarez, it’s the FBI. Please open the door.”
“One minute,” a woman said, followed shortly by the sound of bare feet padding across the floorboards toward them. The door swung open, and a thirtysomething Alverez stood there, tying the strap on a thigh-length silk robe. What little modesty she showed still didn’t cover up her long, tanned legs and ample cleavage.
Not that I noticed. I was always the professional. I cleared my throat and held up my badge. “We’re Agents Fisher and Dawson with the FBI. You’re Josefina Alvarez?” Not so much a question, as I recognized her from the compromising photos.
“I am.” She was soft-spoken, but the devil danced in her eyes.
“I hope now’s a good time, but we have a few questions for you about Robert Wise. Can we come in?” I adhered to the more-bees-with-honey approach, unlike Jack, who would have presented such a question as a request. Alvarez wasn’t moving, though, so maybe a little more force was necessary. “It’s important that we talk with you,” I stressed, hoping to sound closed to negotiation.
She took a half-step back when a man came up behind her, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of boxers, and put an arm around her waist. He eyed me with instant dislike.
“Who are these people?” he asked Alvarez.
“The FBI,” she said, turning to face him and putting them cheek to cheek. “They’re here about Robert.”
The man took a dominating position behind Alvarez and put his hands on her shoulders. “This isn’t a good time right now.”
“Actually, this is the perfect time,” I countered. “We have a plane to catch and need to ask Josefina a few questions before we leave.”
“Maybe when you get back, then.” The man was smug.
“We won’t be back,” I said firmly.
Alvarez put a hand over the man’s. “It’s okay, Garrett.” She moved back, and Garrett moved with her. “Come in,” she told us.
Paige and I entered the apartment, and Alvarez and her boy toy just stood there and made no offer of a place to sit.
“We shouldn’t be long, but it still might be more comfortable for you if we were seated,” Paige said as if reading my mind.
Alvarez and Garrett moved as a unit toward a sofa, where they sat snugly beside each other. Paige and I dropped into chairs across from the sofa.
“We understand that you and Robert were lovers,” Paige said.
“We were.”
“We’re sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.” Alvarez blinked slowly.
“You and Robert were close?” Paige put it as a question as her gaze drifted over Boy Toy. I hated that I even felt a twinge of jealousy. I was in great shape, too, and worked out every chance I got—which hadn’t been often lately. Ate healthy. I sucked in my flat gut even more and sat up straighter, squaring my shoulders.
“Guess you could say that,” Alvarez admitted. “I cared about him, but Rob and I were rather casual. He was married and just having fun. So was I…having fun, anyway.” She gave a smoldering look at Boy Toy, who put his finger to her lips and eyed her like he was going to take her right then and there.
Okay!
I glanced at Paige, but she wasn’t looking at me.
“So you never developed any real feelings for him, despite it being ‘for fun’?” Paige’s gaze danced briefly to me, and I flushed with a rush of new guilt, feeling like I’d used her. That’s what my sleeping with Paige had been to me: fun. But I had been married. The affair had been exciting and risqué, off-limits, like forbidden fruit.
“No, I did,” Alvarez admitted.
Spikes of self-flagellation exploded in my chest.
“But I knew we weren’t going anywhere,” Alvarez said. “He wasn’t going to leave his wife, and they were in counseling.”
“Have you ever returned to the Lucky Pub since he was shot?” Paige asked.
“No interest.” A shiver visibly tore through her, and Garrett wrapped an arm around her.
“We understand that you had dinner with Robert at the Lucky Pub the night before he was murdered,” Paige said.
“That’s right. We were there most nights, actually. He was obsessed with the patio and insisted we sit out there whenever the weather was nice enough.”
“Did you notice anything or anyone unusual the night before the shooting?” I asked, not wanting to come out and show her Michelle Evans’s picture.
“There was a woman who kept staring at Robert. She was driving me nuts the way she was looking at him.”
“And how was that?” Paige asked. “Like she was interested in him?”
“I wouldn’t say so. More like she had something against him. I asked him about her.”
My curiosity piqued. “What did he say?”
“He didn’t want to talk about her. And I let it go at the restaurant because I didn’t want to make a scene.”
“But after you left,” Paige pressed, “did you pick up the conversation?”
“Oh, yeah. I was furious, but he still refused to talk about her. He wouldn’t even tell me her name, but he knew it. I knew he did. I told him I wasn’t having sex with him until he told me about her. He bid me a ‘good night.’ Can you believe it?” Alvarez consulted her companion, who shook his head and swept a strand of her black hair behind an ear and kissed her cheek.
Whatever had transpired between Evans and Wise was still volatile—and raw after many years. What the heck had happened? “Did you mention this woman to investigating officers?”
“I never did. Do you really think some chick killed Robert? ’Cause I don’t. I think he messed with that girl somehow for sure, but I don’t think she killed him. That’s why I never brought her up to the police.”
I leaned forward, clasped my hands between my knees. “Messed with her how?”
Alvarez bit on a bottom lip and shrugged, and the robe slid down the curve of her shoulder a few inches. “It would only be a guess, but I’d say he slept with her.”
“Broke her heart?” Paige inquired.
“I wouldn’t know, but she was pissed about something.”
I thought back to Evans’s emotionless expressions on the video. Something didn’t jibe here. I was pretty certain Alvarez was talking about Evans like we were, but we should make sure before we continued. “What did this woman look like?”
“She had blond hair, pretty,” Alvarez spoke slowly, like she wasn’t sure why all this mattered.
There was one more way of verifying we were all talking about Michelle. “At the pub, the night before Robert’s murder, where was she seated?”
“At a table, facing us.”
It was clear we were talking about the same person, except for the face I remembered from the video, the one that had been devoid of emotion. “What made you think she was mad?”
“Well, I could tell Robert was mad. It was just oozing from him. He was normally cool under pressure, slow to anger, but this woman had him livid. His face was all scrunched up, and he said something to her.”
“When was this?” I glanced at a clock on the wall, only to realize things were getting interesting and we had a plane to catch—soon.
“I’d stepped out to use the restroom. Really it was because I needed a break from this woman’s constant staring. I came back and saw Robert sitting at her table. He didn’t know I saw him. I hung back.”
I’d have to look at the video again, but I don’t remember seeing Alvarez standing back and watching Wise and Evans. It was possible that she was just out of the camera’s range.
“Did you know she had the audacity to follow us back here?”
“She came to your apartment and spoke with you or Robert?” Paige asked.
Alvarez shook her head. “No, but I found a note under my door the next morning. I know she put it there.”
“How do you know she left the note?” I was interested in proof, not suspicion.
A flicker of irritation crossed her eyes. “The note told me that Rob was a dangerous man. The handwriting was certainly a woman’s. We’re typically neater.”
What a generalization! She’s never seen my mother’s handwriting. “Can we see the note?”
“I threw it out. It scared me at the time. Some wacko stares at us all through dinner and then gives me a note like that. It had to be her, who else?”
“Okay, thank you for your time,” Paige said and led the way out of the apartment.
In the SUV, Paige turned it on and commented, “So Josefina calls Michelle a wacko, admits she was scared of her but doesn’t report her after Rob was murdered? Some people are crazy.”
“Uh-huh.” My thoughts kept steamrolling me with guilt. It was for fun.
“Three widows receive compromising photos of their husbands,” Paige began. “Now Wise’s mistress says she received a note, essentially warning her away from Robert. It’s almost as if part of Michelle’s mission is to expose these men to all the women in their lives.”
“All right, so we have the Marines, a diner, the Mavises, four male victims, two mistresses—”
“And a partridge in a pear tree.” Paige chuckled.
“Yeah, I have no idea how it all fits together yet.”
“Good, because neither do I, and as the senior agent among us, I should figure it out before you do.”
I fell silent, thinking that was her way of apologizing for pulling the seniority card the other day. But if anyone owed anyone an apology… “Paige—”
“Brandon—”
“You go first,” I told her.
Her face went serious. “I did feel guilty. Still do sometimes. Not for falling in love with you, not for sleeping with you, but for hurting Deb—that’s if she ever found out. But only a little. You weren’t happy, Brandon, not with her. If you were, you never would have…” She didn’t need to finish, and I nodded.
“We’d been drifting apart,” I admitted, grabbing the morsel of justification she’d extended.
“And like it had been for Josefina and Robert, what we had when you were in the academy was casual.”
“It didn’t feel that way sometimes.”
“No, it didn’t.” She locked her gaze with mine. “But all that’s behind us now. You and Deb, well, you’re divorced, and you’re happy with Becky. I’m happy for both of you.” She smiled one of those sorrowful smiles you gave people when your heart was breaking.
“I’m sorry, Paige.”
“For—”
“Please, let me get this out.” Before I find an excuse not to. “I’m sorry for hurting you, for putting you through everything I have.” I loved Becky, but in another life, if things were entirely different, I could see myself with Paige; I loved her, too.
She sniffled and batted a hand of dismissal. “We were adults. We both knew what we were doing.”
“Yeah.”
“Besides, the past is harmless if we just leave it there. It’s not like we can go back and do things differently anyway.” She attempted a smile, but her eyes darkened. I sensed she was revisiting the lesson she’d learned her last time in California. She’d gone to hunt down one of the men responsible for raping her friend when she was on spring break in college—but it had snowballed into a legal nightmare when he’d turned up dead and Paige looked good for his murder. But even that trip to the past had a silver lining: we’d uncovered a serial killer and brought him to justice.
No more was said as Paige put the SUV into drive and took us to the airport. My heart hurt for the women in my life—past and present. But the past wasn’t something I could change, just as Paige had cleverly pointed out. My only hope was that over time I might forgive myself. I also had the lesson to make smarter choices moving forward and utilize a little thing called self-control. I just hoped I had some.