Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

said.
    “She’d never do such a thing. Never! Melissa and her mother were very close. I’ve never heard anything so outrageous. For heaven’s sake, whatever evidence you think you have, I’m sure there’s an explanation. Talk to the girl! She’ll set you straight.”
    “Melissa has confessed,” Detective Wedmore said. “She came in here of her own accord.” Gail was speechless, so Wedmore added, “But she was here, in this building, when her father was killed. We don’t know what the connection is.”
    “This is crazy, insane. I have to . . . I have to call someone.” Gail Beaudry fumbled in her purse for her phone. “And my husband, I’m going to have to call my husband.”
    Wedmore excused herself. She had to go back and see Melissa again.
    * * *
    The girl howled like a wounded animal.
    She threw her arms around Detective Wedmore, put her face on her chest and sobbed. “No, no, no.”
    It wasn’t, strictly speaking, procedure to take murder suspects into one’s arms and comfort them, but Wedmore found herself doing just that. She placed her hands on the girl’s back and patted her ever so gently, thinking to herself what a pathetic gesture it was. Might as well be saying, “There, there.”
    “Daddy,” she whimpered. “Daddy.”
    “I have to ask you some questions, Melissa,” Wedmore said.
    But the girl continued to weep, and it was ten minutes before Wedmore could get her back into the chair in the interrogation room. Instead of facing her from across the table, she brought her own chair around next to Melissa’s and allowed the girl to hold onto her hands.
    “Someone killed him?” Melissa asked disbelievingly. “Are you sure?”
    Wedmore thought back to what she’d seen. “Yes,” she said with certainty. “What haven’t you told me, Melissa? What aren’t you telling me?”
    “I’ve told you everything, I swear.”
    “Who would want to hurt your father?”
    “No one.
Nobody
.”
    “Did someone else help you, Melissa? Was there a third person involved in getting your mother, and the car, up to the lake?”
    “No, I’m telling you, it was just me and Dad. And he didn’t even hurt Mom. That was me, that was all me.”
    “What about the man who’s the father of your child?”
    “Lester?”
    “That’s right. Did he and your father get along? Is it possible they could have had some kind of argument?”
    “My parents
liked
Lester,” Melissa said. “They were mad at me because I didn’t want to marry him.” She put her face in her hands again and wept.
    Wedmore sighed, and got up.
    This was the damnedest thing she’d dealt with in a while.
    She was just leaving the interrogation room when her phone buzzed. It was a text, from Joy.
    It read: “Got something. Call me.”

Twenty-two
    Keisha tried to think how she would explain it.
    Because she
would
have to explain it. There was no doubt in her mind. The police would eventually find Wendell Garfield, if they hadn’t already, and sooner or later they’d discover her business card, tucked into his shirt pocket.
    If the card had been anywhere else—in a drawer, in his wallet, even—it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. Over time, everyone collects lots of business cards. You find them in your car, your coat pocket, pinned to bulletin boards.
    But a card that’s been tucked into a shirt, well, that’s a card that has to have been acquired, or at the very least referred to, very recently. Assuming that Wendell Garfield did not wear the same, unlaundered shirt for days or weeks on end, it would be reasonable for the police to assume he’d acquired, or been looking at, that card in the last couple of days. Since his wife had gone missing.
    And how did most people acquire cards? From the people whose name was on them.
    It was just a matter of time before the police would be at Keisha’s door, asking whether she’d met with Wendell Garfield. When was this meeting? Where was it held? What was its purpose and who had initiated it?
    What would she tell them?
    “I have no idea how he got that card.”
    That’s what she would tell them.
    It might be a hard story to stick to, but now that Kirk had gotten rid of everything else linking her to the Garfield house, she believed she could ride it out.
    She’d tell them that she often left her cards pinned to noticeboards in grocery stores. Sometimes she’d leave a few out on tables at craft shows and community center events. She’d distribute them to random people she