“No, they won’t. Morris, did you know that Detective—that Amaryllis had had an intimate relationship with Max Ricker’s son, with Alex Ricker, before she transferred to New York?”
8
SHE KNEW THE ANSWER INSTANTLY. HIS EYES widened; his lips trembled open. He said nothing for a moment or two while she watched him drink coffee and compose himself. He sat, not in one of his sharp, stylish suits, but in a lightweight black sweater and jeans, with his hair pulled back in a simple tail with none of the usual ornamentation.
As he sat, in silence, she knew just as she’d told Roarke, she’d kicked a friend in the gut a second time.
“Morris—”
He held up a hand asking for another minute. “You’ve confirmed this?”
“Yes.”
“I knew there had been someone, that she’d been involved with someone before she left Atlanta.” He lifted a hand to rub at his temple. “They’d broken it off, and it left her upset, at loose ends. It was one of the reasons she decided to transfer. Just a fresh start, a clean slate—some distance between what had been and what could be. That’s how she put it. I should’ve told you yesterday. I didn’t think of it. I couldn’t think—”
“It’s okay.”
“She mentioned it, the way you do when you’re getting to know someone. She said . . . What did she say? I’m trying to remember. Just that they couldn’t make it work, couldn’t be what each other needed them to be. She never mentioned his name. I never asked. Why would I?”
“Can you tell me, did you get a sense she was worried about him, about how they’d ended it?”
“No. I only remember thinking what kind of fool had let her get away. She didn’t bring it up again, and neither did I. It was the past. We were both focused on now, on where we were going. On what could be, I suppose. Did he do this?”
“I don’t know. It’s a lead, and I’ll follow it. But I don’t know, Morris. I’ll tell you what I know, if you trust me to handle it.”
“There’s no one I trust more. That’s the truth.”
“Alex Ricker is in New York.”
The color that came into his face was rage, barely controlled. “Hear me out,” she demanded. “He contacted her, and she went to see him the day before she died. He volunteered this information to me this morning when I went to see him.”
Morris set his coffee aside and, rising, walked to Eve’s skinny window. “They weren’t still involved. I would have known.”
“He said they weren’t, and that they broke off their relationship amicably. They met as friends. They had a drink and a catch-up conversation during which she told him she’d met someone, was involved. He stated that she looked happy.”
“Did you believe him?”
Hell, she thought, how did she dance around her suspicions and keep her word? “I believe he might have been telling the truth, or part of the truth. If she’d felt threatened or worried, would she have told you?”
“I want to think so. I want to think even if she hadn’t I would have seen it, felt it. She didn’t tell me she was meeting him, and now I can’t ask her why she didn’t. What it means that she didn’t.”
She didn’t have to see his face to know there was pain. “It could be it meant so little to her she didn’t feel it was worth mentioning.”
He turned back. “But you don’t think so.”
“Morris, I know people in relationships do strange things. They say too much, don’t say enough.” Take me, she thought. Had she told Roarke she intended to contact Webster?
“Or it could be, especially since our relationship had become very serious, I might have asked questions. Ones she didn’t want to answer. It’s not that she’d been involved with someone before, neither of us were children. But she’d been involved with Alex Ricker.”
“Yes.”
“The son of a known criminal, a known killer. One who, when they were involved, was still at large. Still in power. How likely is it that Alex Ricker is uninvolved, unconnected to his father’s activities? But she, a police official, became involved with him.”
“He’s never been arrested or charged with any crime.”
“Dallas.”
“Okay, yeah, it’s dicey, it’s tricky. It’s sticky. I’m a police official, Morris, and I not only got involved with a man cops all over the planet—and off it—gave the hard eye to, I married him.”