High Noon

let her be, and she got more and more unhappy. He expected her to be available round the clock for him, but he could do whatever he damn well pleased.”
    “Easy tiger,” Dub said as he rubbed Glynis’s shoulder.
    “All right.” Glynis took a long breath. “All right. She was miserable, and he wouldn’t give way on anything. He wouldn’t consider counseling, and nixed therapy for her when she got depressed. She didn’t have any money of her own by that time. Everything was in his name. When she came to realize divorce was going to be the only way, she’d come in here a couple times a week, more if she could manage it. She’d do setup, darkroom work, digital manipulation, anything we needed, and we paid her in cash.”
    “She met someone. She wouldn’t say how or where or who, but she was happy.” Dub pulled out a blue handkerchief, handed it to Glynis so she could wipe her eyes. “The light came back into her.”
    “When did the light come back?”
    “About six months before she died. She called him Lancelot, her pet name for him.”
    “How’d they contact each other?”
    “She bought a preloaded cell phone. His idea, right, Dub?”
    “Yeah, she said that he knew how to do what had to be done. Listen, the men responsible for what happened to her are in prison. What’s the point of dragging this out now?”
    “It’s going to help us on another case. Anything you can tell us about the man she was involved with could help.”
    “Well, I think he had a place on the west side where they’d hook up.” Glynis glanced at Dub, got a nod. “I saw her the day before it happened. She was flying. She said she’d decided to move out, to get a divorce. As soon as that was done, she and Lancelot were going to get married. She was going to take what money she had and move to Reno, establish the residency requirements for the divorce. She wanted it fast. She always wanted fast.”
    “Anything else that you know about him, anything she said about him? However minor a detail.”
    “I think he worked out—seriously. She talked about how he was really built, and worked at it. He was giving her tips on getting stronger physically.”
    “Blue eyes,” Dub remembered. “She bought him a shirt one day, said it matched his eyes. Blue rugby style. Nice. And he cooked.”
    “That’s right, that’s right. She said how sexy it was to watch him cooking dinner. I remember it surprised me, because he didn’t seem the type.”
    “Why not?”
    “Everything else she said, or the impressions I got, said ultra machismo. To be honest, I was worried about her. We both were. He seemed like the polar opposite of Joshua, and we wondered if she didn’t fall into all this as a kind of reaction. Hot-blooded, tough, physical. Blue collar.”
    “Why do you say blue collar?”
    “Sometimes she called him her blue knight. Maybe it was the eyes, though. But I got the impression he was a working stiff, you know.”
    Or maybe the blue was the uniform, Phoebe thought.
    “He was really pushing her to leave Joshua. He didn’t like the idea of her sleeping with another man, even though sex had become a non-issue between Angie and Joshua. She said it made Lancelot crazy to imagine it, and I think she liked that part. It made her feel sexy and vital again. But it felt like another kind of manipulation to me.”
    “She needed a breather,” Dub said. “Some time to get Angie back. But this guy, he made her feel like a goddess, like she was indispensable and indestructible. Nothing bad would ever happen to her when he was with her. He’d promised.”
    “But it did,” Glynis said softly. “The worst happened.”
    “He never contacted you after her death?”
    “No.”
    “Where are her cameras?” Phoebe asked.
    “I don’t know. She kept them at the mystery man’s. She had two, and for a while I checked eBay, the pawnshops, the secondhand stores. Just in case he sold them. It’d be nice to have them back, those pieces of her.”
    “You’d recognize them?”
    “Yeah, at least if I had my hands on one of them I would. She painted this little pink rosebud on the bottom of her equipment. Like a signature. Pink roses were her favorite.”
     
    “Pink roses like on the grave where Roy was chained.” It was energizing, Phoebe thought, to have that much confirmed. “Lancelot’s our guy.”
    “Yeah. Now we just have to find a blue-eyed hard-body who can cook and lives on the west side. Or did three years ago.”
    “Add in