“What? She tried to tell the police but they didn’t listen to her. And even worse, they treated her like an idiot who didn’t know what she was talking about.”
“I’m sure that’s not what they thought.”
I squinted at him. “It’s been my experience that especially law enforcement types tend to think women are helpless, hysterical, or unobservant. Not you or Jer or any of my friends, but others, when they talk to women, the first words out of their mouths are usuallycalm down.”
“That’s valid,” Luna agreed, using a phrase she’d picked up from me.
Eli growled under his breath. “May I see the pictures, please?”
“Sure.” She found them on her iPhone and passed it to him. “I took them because I thought Senan was screwing around on Lincoln, and I thought Lincoln might find them interesting.”
“You wanted to torment Senan with them,” I called her out.
“Yes. That too,” she agreed.
I sighed deeply. “I would’ve done the same thing. We’re bad people.”
“I know, but at least he won’t laugh when we fall anymore.”
Eli turned to look at us. “He laughed when you guys fell?”
“Yeah,” I assured him. “Remember when I sprained my ankle three months ago? I thought he was going to crack open champagne.”
“This guy sounds like he was a real prick.” Jer made his opinion known.
“You don’t know the half of it.” Luna began regaling Jer with the horror show that Senan Weaver had been.
When I leaned forward and put my hand on Eli’s shoulder, he took hold of it and pulled it down over his heart. I had trouble breathing.
“Don’t scare me, Cel, all right?”
“I won’t,” I promised him, enjoying being so close that I could smell the earthy scent of his skin, like pine and amber, teakwood and musk. Normally, I wouldn’t have inhaled deeply and then lightly kissed the side of his neck. Now I could. His soft sigh made me smile.
Slow and steady would win the race.
It turnedout that Maven was in the pictures Luna had taken, so she got called to come down to Eli’s office too. She had taken photos as well, which she shared with Eli and Jer. Oakes and Brewster were furious that neither Luna nor Maven had mentioned anything to them specifically, as they were the detectives assigned to the case.
“You talked to me for a minute,” Luna informed them. “You had the uniformed officers take statements from me and Maven and Zoey. Did you know that?” She looked from one to the other. “Were you aware that you only spoke, at length, to the men yesterday?”
Apparently, from their expressions, they were not.
“During our brief interlude, you didn’t ask me anything but what I saw right before and after Senan was shot.”
“Same,” Maven concurred. “But I’ll admit to being in shock yesterday.”
“Yeah,” Luna said softly. “Me too. But even as out of it as I was, I still mentioned to the officers who questioned me afterwards, that I had pictures of Senan arguing with a stranger who I thought he was cheating with.”
“So really,” Eli chimed in, addressing the detectives. “If you’re going to be upset with anyone, it shouldn’t be either Ms. Soto or Ms. Ashmore, but whomever took their statements and didn’t relay the information that was given to them.”
If there was something to the lead, they’d lost time running it down and I was betting they felt like total crap. They certainly looked like two men who had screwed up and were well aware of it.
“Let’s get these pictures into the database,” Eli said reasonably. “Cel, I need you and your friends to stay here in our meeting room while we run these through facial-recognition software. I’ll bring you all some water, but I need you to sit tight.”
“Absolutely,” I promised. “No problem.”
Of course it was a problem.
Dancers, as a whole, were not sit-around-and-do-nothing kinds of people. After I told Maven about Luna’s plan for our off-season this year—and she agreed that it was a good idea as long as I was going to do it with them—it took only another fifteen minutes for Maven to do a handstand on the wall. Luna followed suit, and then I couldn’t be left out.