Whispers at Midnight Read Free Page B

ordinary. No telltale brown stains on the carpet. No suspicious dark spatters on the walls. No corpse sticking out from under the couch.
    Matt’s mouth quirked wryly. If it were only that easy.
    “Look, Sheriff, I ain’t stupid. I know what you’re getting at,” Kenan burst out, turning to face him. “I didn’t lay a hand on Marsha, I swear.”
    “Nobody’s saying you did.” Matt’s voice was calm, his demeanor nonconfrontational. No point in provoking Kenan by escalating the discussion into more than it needed to be at this stage of the investigation. It was still quite possible that Marsha had left on her own; she could turn up alive and well somewhere at any minute. On the other hand, he didn’t like the feel of things. Call it instinct, call it applied common sense, call it whatever you wanted, but he didn’t think that a woman who’d lived in the area most of her life, who’d shown up like clockwork since she’d started at the Winn-Dixie eight years ago, who had regular habits and a good number of friends, would light out to parts unknown without letting somebody know.
    “She just took off,” Kenan said. “She got in her car and took off. That’s what happened. That’s it.”
    Matt took his time. “Mind telling me what the fight was about?”
    Kenan looked harassed. “Baloney, all right? I had some baloney in the refrigerator and it was gone when I got home from work and went to make a sandwich. Turns out she’d fed it to a damned dog.”He took a deep breath. “It was stupid. Just one of those stupid things.”
    Over Kenan’s shoulder, Matt watched his deputy, Antonio Johnson, emerge from the bathroom down the hall. Antonio would turn fifty in two weeks. He was black, a little less than six feet tall and nearly as wide, built like a linebacker gone to seed. He had a bulldog’s pugnacious face, a more or less permanent scowl, and basically looked like a thug in deputy’s uniform. He had asked to use the john right after Kenan had let them in, as a way of getting a look at the areas of the apartment the sheriff or his deputy were not normally allowed to see without benefit of a search warrant. It was a ploy they had used before, and would use again. Sometimes it netted them valuable information. Today, apparently, they weren’t going to be so lucky. Antonio replied to his questioning look with a negative jerk of the head.
    “Thanks,” Antonio said to Kenan as he joined them in the living room. Kenan nodded, then glanced back at Matt.
    “I didn’t do nothing to her,” he said, wetting his lips. “I swear to God.”
    Matt looked at him. Kenan held his gaze.
    “You mean besides yell at her,” Matt said agreeably. “And chase her down the stairs and out of the building. Isn’t that what happened that night?”
    Kenan didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The breath he sucked in through his teeth was as much confirmation as Matt needed this side of the courtroom.
    “Might as well give it up,” Antonio said, folding his arms across his massive chest and glowering at Kenan. “We know. ”
    Matt barely stopped himself from casting his deputy a wry glance. What they knew was basically what Kenan and the neighbors had already told them: Marsha Hughes had had a fight with him, had left or been chased from the apartment and had not been seen by anyone important to her since. Without any kind of solid evidence that Marsha had come to harm, what they knew didn’t amount to a hill of beans. There was no case. But Antonio was an optimist. He was always thinking that if he applied enough pressure, potential suspectswould crack, confessing all and saving everybody concerned a boatload of time and trouble.
    Sometimes it even worked.
    Kenan’s expression changed. His lip curled angrily as his eyes slashed to Matt. “I saw you talking to that damned Myer woman the other day. Stayin’ home all the time, claiming she hurt her back and can’t work, getting her kicks butting into other