“His lover picked him up.”
“That’s what she testified to, yes. Addison Canright, a volunteer he’d met at his most recent rehab facility, now a writer on something called Moonshine. She said that she drove him to her apartment, where he stayed for two hours before she returned him to his car.”
He pulled out her photo, a newspaper shot snapped as she was leaving the courthouse. A small, neat woman, she wore her black hair in a shoulder-length blunt cut, her features hidden behind sunglasses too big for her face. I remembered Keesha’s words: that sweet thing with the batty-bat eyelashes and heart full of love. But in this photo, Addison Canfield’s slate gray dress and sensible shoes spoke of restraint, not come-hither high jinks.
“But you think she’s lying. You think he came back to his house and killed Jessica, that he was never at Addison’s apartment.”
“I do.” Trey pointed to the map of Chastain Park. The tree-lined trail to the golf course ran along the edge of Powers Ferry, the street that bordered the backyard of the Talbots’ home. “Talbot had no way of knowing that Macklin would return. He expected to have more time staging the scene before the body was discovered. He hadn’t planned on using the murder weapon on Macklin, but he had planned on fleeing through the backyard back to the golf course clubhouse, where his car was parked. That was always a part of the plan.”
“Did anybody see him?”
“We received several reports of a man matching his description crossing Powers Ferry that morning.”
“A white man in golf clothes headed for the golf course.”
Trey exhaled. “You see why this was not a conclusive ID.”
He stretched his legs out and rolled his head in a slow circle. I crawled over and sat behind him. He bowed his head forward and let me massage the corded tendons of his neck.
“What about other people in Jessica’s life?” I said. “Finn said she’d had multiple affairs. Surely there were some jilted lovers? Jealous wives?”
“We never found any with both motive and opportunity.”
“Any other suspects?”
“Not that we discovered. We checked out the other members of the family—Talbot’s brother and his wife, both of whom were verified at the Talbot Creative offices when Macklin called in the murder. We checked out the other employees of Talbot Creative. Also alibied. We ran background on all the service workers with access to the house. All of them came back clean and—”
“Let me guess. Alibied.”
“Yes. And without motive. No matter where we looked, the evidence pointed to Nick Talbot.”
“Except for his alibi.”
“His highly suspect alibi.”
His index finger tapped erratically against his thigh, his caffeine level reaching critical mass. What could I tell him? Let the dead lie? Let the past go to dust and sweep it away? I wasn’t the one to make that case. I knew how hard it was to pull your roots out of the dirt that had made you, leave that ground behind, no matter how poisoned it had become. All our regrets and mistakes and hauntings, they were always ours, always. We hauled our own private graveyards with us everywhere we went.
I rested my chin on his shoulder. “Trey?”
“Yes?”
“Say you decide to do this. What if you learn that you were right all along, that Nick Talbot really is a cold-blooded killer?”
He kept his head bent forward. “Then I gather the evidence and take it in.”
“It wasn’t enough to get an indictment then, and it certainly won’t be now, four years after the fact. And I don’t think the APD is going to take your word on it, either, no matter how awesome your lie-detecting ability is.”
He didn’t answer. I pressed the heel of my hand into one particularly stubborn knot, and he inhaled sharply, but didn’t complain. The night outside the window was complete, as complete as it ever got in the city.
I held the pressure, but the knot refused to yield. “You’re going to see him regardless, aren’t you?”
Trey exhaled, emptying his lungs. “Yes.”
Chapter Fourteen
As I’d predicted, Trey slept terribly, tossing and turning most of the night. Despite that, he went to work an hour early so that he could leave in time for his meeting with Nick Talbot. I usually slept in on Mondays, the last day of my weekend. This Monday, however, after reading even more about the crime committed against the unsuspecting Jessica Talbot, I went to the gun range to practice my defensive skills.
I had new hearing protection earmuffs to try out, the electronic kind that blocked gunfire while still allowing conversation to come through. Trey had given them to me, and they did the job perfectly, which on this particular afternoon was a good news-bad news situation. They deadened the heart-stoppingly loud .357 Sig rounds from the lane next to me, but they amplified the conversation of the two guys shooting them off. Each whoop and holler barreled straight into my ear canal.
I turned the volume way down, blocking their voices as much as possible. Practicing with speedloaders meant I needed to concentrate. I didn’t enjoy the process, though. Speedloaders were speedy, yes, and from a tactical perspective, necessary, but there was something satisfying about thumbing bullets one by one into the chamber, slow and purposeful. I’d shot many guns since I’d opened the shop, from the bulky Magnums to the sleek Heckler and Koch semi-autos, but the snub-nose Smith and Wesson 640 was my weapon of choice.
The guys next to me did a rapid-fire session and my earmuffs kicked in, dampening the booms into a white electronic hum punctuated with soft poofs. I adjusted my goggles, sighted and fired. Five rounds fast at ten yards, defensive distance. I placed the gun on the counter and stretched my fingers out as the target fluttered my way. Four ragged holes at center mass, one in the shoulder. I cursed. If a shot went wrong, it was always that first one, which was not the
