Page 34 of Dark Terror
“Check out where his hand is.”
“Double hell.” Harry glanced up at him. “Suspect number one all because he has his hand somewhere it shouldn’t be. Who took the picture?”
“Don’t know, but there’s no way he was aware that picture was being taken.”
“The man is all about family values. I really hate hypocrites. Doesn’t he have a gaggle of kids?”
“Five, and a devoted wife who looks adorningly up at him in every photo I’ve seen of them.” He’d spent yesterday afternoon not only hiding from Cara but pouring over the senator’s life.
“Does he ever look adoringly at her in any of them?”
“Not a one. His gaze is always on the camera.”
“Weasel,” Harry said.
“A weasel does not necessarily a murderer make. I’m having trouble seeing him in the park at night, viciously stabbing a woman. Too much chance of being discovered.”
“Maybe he paid someone to take her out.”
“Possibly. If so, then she must have been threatening him. Leave your wife or I’ll go public. Something like that.”
Harry nodded. “Or blackmail. Pay me or I go public. A way to make some easy money.”
“Both motives for murder for a man with a lot to lose if their affair became public.” That was one of the things he liked best about being partnered with Harry. They worked well together and easily fed off each other’s thoughts and theories.
“Give me half of her bank statements,” Harry said.
He opened the folder, placing it between them. “Have at it.”
They were only minutes into pouring over the bank records when Gabe said, “Bingo.” Seeing he had Harry’s attention, he handed her the one he’d been looking at. “This one’s from six months ago. A deposit every other day on three occasions of nine thousand each. Obviously she was staying under the ten-thousand-dollar requirement for the bank to report a transaction to the government.”
“My guess is that she got a total of thirty thousand, but kept three thou for pocket money,” Harry said.
“Sounds likely. Let’s see if we can find any more.”
Altogether, they found two more instances when Sheri Carstad had deposited lump sums of money the same way.
“There were six months between each payment, which seems to indicate that she was attempting to go back to the money tree again,” Gabe said. “Our man must have realized she’d never be satisfied and decided enough was enough.”
“She could have embezzled that money from the company.”
“That’s not a good enough reason to kill her,” Gable said. “An employee steals money? You just call the cops and have them arrested. No, she had something on someone. The big question is, who and what was worth killing her over?”
Harry sat back in her seat. “You’re right, and if that’s not the way it went down, I’ll eat my hat.”
“You don’t have a hat.”
She grinned. “That’s why I felt safe in saying that. I’m hungry. Give me a minute to get us an appointment with the senator. After that, lunch, then sofa shopping, then we drop in on Sherman Enterprises.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Chapter Twelve
“Oh my God,” Risa Caldwell, a Dark Falls firefighter who volunteered at the library, said Monday morning as she rushed up to Cara. “I heard what happened.”
“What? What did I miss?” Alan Glover, the assistant librarian, asked.
“Cara witnessed a murder Friday night.” Risa glanced out the window. “Right there in the park.”
