The Darkest Hour Page 5

  I couldn’t miss how even though he remembered every minute of the relationship between Alex and Helena, he seemed to have a lapse in memory as to what had happened to that poor homeless man that warranted the police come to investigate. I wanted to ask more about it, but I had the feeling he wouldn’t be able to give me much more than something had happened to him that magically brought two people together.

  Changing tactics once again, I encouraged him to talk about Alex and Helena’s relationship and hoped I could glean some sliver of a clue that might help with figuring out who had murdered Bethany.

  “Is it possible that Helena had enemies who would want to see her dead?”

  Ken frowned and shook his head. “Enemies? No. She was a sweet person who would help anyone, even those who often didn’t deserve it. She worked as a chef at Manger. What kind of enemies could someone like that have? Once a person ate one of her meals, they were crazy about her. That’s what happened with Alex.”

  I looked up from jotting down where Helena had worked and wondered if I’d heard him correctly. “He ate one of her meals and fell in love?”

  Talk about knowing the way to a man’s heart. No wonder I was still single. I barely knew my way around a kitchen, and even the crock pot presented me with challenges that made a good meal almost impossible.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what happened. She fed him her Coq Au Vin and that was it. He told me he had never tasted food so incredible in his life. He had to get to know the woman who could make a dish like that. Six months later, they were married in a ceremony overlooking the Chesapeake with family and a few friends.”

  Six months? The man I knew had taken six months to even realize he liked me enough to kiss me. Then again, he still was haunted by the ghost of his wife. Now I understood why.

  “Sounds like a whirlwind romance, especially considering what I know of Alex,” I said, hoping my jealousy wasn’t obvious.

  “It was. They went from the best meal he’d ever had to ‘I do’ in a sunset ceremony in a heartbeat. I have to admit I wondered if they were rushing things, but they both said it was true love when any of us dared to ask if they were moving too quickly.”

  I couldn’t help but be enchanted by the story of Alex and Helena, even if it made me jealous for my own happily ever after. They sounded perfectly happy, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that if some monster hadn’t taken her away from him, they’d still be living their fairytale.

  “Well, it’s good to know that true love exists in the world. Here’s to the rest of us finding a love like they did.”

  Ken shifted in his seat at my pronouncement of Alex and Helena’s romance as one the rest of us would want. He began tapping the point of a pencil on a notepad that I noticed had hundreds of little dots from when he’d done the same thing at some earlier time.

  “Did I say something wrong?” I asked, curious as to why his mood had changed so suddenly.

  His pale eyes narrowed, as if what he had to say caused him pain, but he shook his head no. “I’m afraid this love story wasn’t entirely happy.”

  “I don’t understand. They fell in love over Coq Au Vin, had a whirlwind romance, and got married a few months later overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. Sounds pretty happy to me.”

  “It’s what happened after the wedding that makes it a not-so-happy love story.”

  Alex had told me very little of his marriage, but everything he’d said had indicated that he and his wife had been happy up to the day she died. Ken’s characterization seemed entirely at odds with how Alex had always portrayed his life with Helena. I didn’t want to think that he’d intentionally lied, but the thought did occur to me that how he saw their life together was likely colored by the love he felt for her.

  Ken’s judgment of their relationship, however, was from the standpoint of an outsider looking in, so he may not have truly understood everything the way it truly was. Still, I thought it worth hearing his opinion on what troubles they had experienced.

  “They hit a hard patch that made things change. Alex was promoted to detective two years into the marriage. He began to work more and more hours and was always on the job. Helena wanted them to start a family, but that was impossible with Alex never being at home. I think they began to drift apart because he was so dedicated to his work.”

  I could certainly see Alex getting wrapped up in his cases. He’d given every one we worked, from the simplest robbery of someone’s terra cotta planter taken from their porch to each murder, all his attention to the exclusion of everything else in his life. I’d just assumed he acted like that because he lived alone and loved his job, but Ken’s memory about him being a workaholic made me think that’s just who he was. The problem was if his wife wanted him to be someone else.

  “Didn’t he want to have children?” I asked as I thought for the first time about Alex being a father.

  “I think the problem was every day he saw such ugliness in the world that he wasn’t sure bringing a child into all that was a good idea. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have been a great father or didn’t love Helena enough to have a child with her, but it wasn’t a priority for him like it was for her.”

  As I wrote down details I knew probably wouldn’t help me much with proving Alex was innocent, I felt sad for him, knowing that if he had made different choices he might still have a piece of her with him today that could give him solace like only a child could. My father had told me so many times that he didn’t how he would have continued to go on if he didn’t have me after my mother died.

  “Then he got shot and it convinced him that he couldn’t father a child he might not get to see grow up,” Ken said in a voice full of sadness. “Helena didn’t understand why he felt like that since the wound wasn’t that bad.”

  I sat stunned at the news that Alex had ever been shot. He’d never told me. I wondered if I knew him as well as I thought I did because it felt like he’d intentionally kept an important detail about his past from me.

  But why?

  As my brain processed all this, I tried to keep my surprise at what Ken had said at bay by commenting as casually as possible, “Well, taking a bullet can certainly make a person look at life differently, as I’m sure you know, no matter how bad the wound is.”

  Ken didn’t look impressed by my idea and continued. “Helena was devastated not only by the shooting but also by his announcement when he came home from the hospital a couple days later that he didn’t want children. From that point on, nothing was ever the same. She couldn’t let go of the desire to have a baby, and he wouldn’t budge. All of us who were friends with them watched as their perfect love story disintegrated in front of our eyes.”

  Although he appeared saddened by having to tell me this story, I had the sense there was a hint of blame underneath his words. For me, the unraveling of Alex and Helena’s relationship just made me wish things had turned out differently for them. I could only imagine how terrible his life was after her death, so full of what could have beens since that fateful day.

  Leaning forward toward me, Ken lowered his voice. “I hate to have to tell you this, but I feel like you should know everything that went on back then. It’s better to know than not know. They fought a lot after he made that decision. They fought like cats and dogs, sometimes even in front of me. When Alex is angry, he has quite a temper.”

  Without even thinking about it, my defense of Alex came right out of my mouth. “I can’t believe that. I don’t think I’ve ever met a calmer, more rational person in my life. If anything, the way Alex is makes others want to lash out, not the other way around.”

  Ken held his hands up to calm me down. “Oh, no, I wasn’t saying he ever hit her or anything like that. He wouldn’t do that. Alex isn’t that kind of man. But ask anyone and they’ll tell you when he’s really angry, his temper can get the best of him.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Whatever Alex Montero was, he wasn’t violent or the type of man who would ever lay a hand on a woma
n. But Ken had known him a lot longer than I had, so maybe he had seen evidence of that supposed temper I’d never seen in all the time I’d spent with Alex.

  “Then things got really bad when he accused her of cheating on him. She came to me nearly hysterical asking me what to do. Her marriage was crumbling around her, and she didn’t know how to stop it.”

  I saw by the look on Ken’s face that my surprise was evident. “You look shocked, Poppy.”

  Stunned by what he’d said, I stammered out, “I guess…I just don’t know him that way.”

  The person he was describing was so foreign to the one I thought I knew so well. The truth was, though, that I didn’t know Alex as a man madly in love. Perhaps the man he was with Helena was more prone to emotion and losing her had made him close off that part of himself.

  “People change, but who they really are stays with them,” he said in an attempt to calm me, but all he succeeded in doing was making me think I didn’t know much at all about the man I loved.

  I didn’t want to talk about them anymore. I’d come here to get information on her death, not their life together. Everything I’d heard only made what Derek suspected more likely. That didn’t help me prove Alex’s innocence at all.

  “I think I’d like to hear some details about the actual murder, if you don’t mind.”

  Ken nodded, as if he had nothing else to share about the love story of Alex and Helena. “She was found murdered behind Manger in the very same spot where she and Alex met that first night when he answered the 911 call. Someone had slit her throat and left her there to die. The homeless man she fed every night found her and called Alex directly because she’d given him both of their cell phone numbers.”

  And with that, my sadness for what Alex had gone through grew even worse. The place where his life had begun with Helena was the very place where it ended. I could only imagine the pain he lived with because of that still to that very day.

  Chapter Five

  While Ken looked through a stack of file folders on the side of his desk for the information on Helena Montero’s autopsy, I sat silently wishing Alex was there by my side. Questioning witnesses and suspects I could handle. I’d actually gotten pretty good at figuring out exactly what to ask someone and how to ask it to elicit a truthful answer from them. This was nothing like that skill. Researching how someone died made me feel ghoulish, especially since the person’s death I had to learn about was Alex’s wife.

  I’d never truly admitted how much I depended on him for virtually every step of our investigations. Obviously, he had ways of finding out information only the police could obtain, but it was so much more than that. His quiet way of making people want to bare their souls to him far outsmarted my more direct way of questioning, even when I asked the right questions in the right way.

  And as much as he always liked to say I had great instincts, it was his gut feelings I relied on more than anything else. I knew the citizens of Sunset Ridge. He knew what made people tick. The difference wasn’t lost on me.

  Now when I needed his guidance and support as a partner the most, he couldn’t be there with me. I didn’t want to let him down. Never before in any of our cases had everything ridden on what I could do, and part of me feared I wasn’t ready to take on a case alone, much less a case that could end up robbing him of his freedom if I didn’t find out who the real killer was.

  “You look uncomfortable, Poppy. Something wrong?”

  I focused my gaze on Ken’s face and forced a smile. “No, I’m fine. I’ve just never been anywhere near where dead bodies are kept.”

  Ken chuckled. “It’s strange for civilians, but for those of us who work with the dead, it’s just another day at work. I’ve had my hands in so many dead bodies that I can’t even give an accurate count anymore.”

  I flashed him another half-smile while my skin crawled a little at the idea that anyone’s day-to-day job involved putting their hands on the dead. More and more as I got to know him, I saw Ken Bryer’s look fit the man and his job perfectly.

  “I don’t think I could ever do what you do, but you’re an integral part of murder cases, so thank God you love your job.”

  Throwing his head back, he laughed louder this time. “I need you to talk to the cops in this city. You’re great PR for the coroner’s office, Poppy.”

  I couldn’t help feel strange joking and smiling while he thumbed through the stack of brown folders full of autopsy details of murder victims. It felt disrespectful and unfeeling, but I had to imagine for him it was just another day at work. Chalking up his ability to be so lighthearted to gallows’ humor, I hoped he’d find Helena Montero’s file soon because as much as he had tried to make me feel welcome there, all I wanted to do was get the information I’d come for and get back home.

  “I’m sorry it’s taking so long,” Ken said as he continued to look through the files. “My assistant is new and I’m afraid she mixed up the contents of all these folders this morning. I’m almost to the bottom of the pile, so it won’t be much longer. While I’m doing that, why don’t you tell me what you and Alex have been up to in that little town you two live in? Other than dealing with the murder of his girlfriend, that is.”

  Ken flipped open each folder and quickly scanned the top page briefly, each time returning his gaze to me as if what I had to say was far more important than the contents of those files. Certainly flattered, I wished he would focus more on what I’d called him about and less on the boring goings-on in Sunset Ridge. But since I didn’t want to offend him, I tried to think of what the two of us had been doing before the horrible news of Bethany’s murder had turned our lives upside down.

  “You know how small towns are. There’s not much to do, so people spend a lot of time indoors in the winter watching movies. We live very exciting lives up in Sunset Ridge.”

  A file slid out of his hand and fell to the floor. He didn’t make a move to pick it up, oddly enough, but since he’d scanned that one, I figured he’d checked it and saw no need to stop his search for Helena’s file.

  “I often wonder how Alex handles that since he’s a born and bred Baltimore boy used to the city,” Ken said with a chuckle.

  As he continued to scan each file, I explained how his friend seemed right at home in Sunset Ridge. “I think he’s gotten used to the slower pace up there. All we do is work during the day and watch movies at night now that the weather has gotten cold. I have to say I’m looking forward to spring coming and us having a chance to get out of the house after we get done for the day.”

  Ken’s hands stopped shuffling the file folders, and he stared at me across the desk like I’d just given him some disturbing news. “What do you mean you watch movies at night? I thought Alex was dating the young lady who was murdered.”

  “No, they stopped dating a while ago. I want to say sometime in August maybe?”

  He shook his head and knitted his brows. “That’s not possible. I met her when he brought her to the city in September.”

  I thought back to the early fall and realized he might have been right. “It could have been in September. I know by October they were definitely done.”

  My answer pleased him, and the smile returned to his face. “I was beginning to get worried I’d forgotten the last time I saw my friend. I’m sorry to hear he and Bethany broke up. They seemed like such a good couple. She looked like she made him happy.”

  Whether or not Bethany had made Alex happy I couldn’t say without my jealousy clouding my judgment, so I gave Ken my best polite smile and a noncommittal shrug. He seemed to want more than that from me, though, so I reminded him of her demise and hoped he’d find the file so we didn’t have to make this awkward small talk about Alex and my social life.

  “It’s still sinking in that Bethany’s gone. I just can’t imagine why anyone would want to do this to her.”

  Ken stopped rifling through his files and looked at me with an expression of disgust. “Murderers have a code of ethics all to themselve
s. I don’t think anyone so nice like yourself could ever understand the mind of one of them.”

  “You’re probably right. I can barely kill a bug, much less look someone in the eyes and end their life, no matter what my reason might be.”

  “Here it is at the bottom of the pile,” Ken said shaking his head as he opened the folder on his desk. “I’m going to have to talk to that assistant of mine so I don’t have a replay of this kind of thing.”

  Instead of immediately telling me the details of Helena Montero’s death, he turned to the pile of file folders on the right side of his desk and tapped them into a neat pile before placing them in a basket on the cabinet a few feet away. He really was a neat freak.

  “Does it say anything about what weapon Alex’s wife was killed with?” I eagerly asked as he turned his focus back to the open file just waiting for him to examine it.

  Unlike when he was looking for the file, now that he had it right in front of him, he seemed intent on reading every single word before answering me. I sat there on the edge of my seat desperate for any details I might be able to use in the case against Alex.

  “Well, it looks like it was a hunting knife, a Krear 550.”

  He sounded impressed by the murderer’s choice of weapon, so I asked, “Is that a good knife for these kinds of things? Not to be indelicate, but you seemed to like that model.”

  After a few seconds, he lifted his gaze from the page and shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hunting knife outside of work, so I don’t know if it’s a particularly well-chosen murder weapon. I can say that it’s efficient, if this report is any indication.”

  I leaned forward to catch a glimpse of what he had read but couldn’t see anything clearly on the upside down page. “Efficient? What do you mean?”

  “It nearly cut her head off.”

  He said those words so calmly, like it was a normal utterance coming out of his mouth. As the horror of them settled into my brain, a thought came to me. “I thought no one had ever been arrested and tried for Helena Montero’s murder? How did the coroner know what knife was used to slit her throat?”