Love Can Be Murder

you know?"
    "To Buckhead. We'd had an early dinner near my apartment. He said he had a few things to take care of and that he'd call me the next day. He wasn't specific."
    "Was that typical, for him to go out after the two of you had had a date?"
    Jolie frowned. "I wouldn't say it was typical, but it had happened a few times."
    "Did he seem different to you that night?"
    "What do you mean?"
    Salyers shrugged. "Had he received a phone call that upset him? Was he overly tired? Had he been drinking?"
    She had replayed her last conversation with Gary so many times, looking for clues as to his frame of mind. "He seemed a little...irritable."
    "Had you argued?"
    Jolie shrugged. "It was nothing, really. Gary was a bit of a slob, and I was picking up after him. He snapped at me."
    "So he had a temper."
    "I'd heard him raise his voice during phone calls, but he'd never lost his temper with me."
    "Until that night?"
    Jolie nodded.
    "Did you break up?"
    She bit her lip. "No."
    "Did you get the feeling that he wanted to stop seeing you?"
    Yes . "Maybe. He'd grown distant in the previous few days, and when he snapped at me for picking up after him...well, I remember thinking it was the kind of nitpicking that couples go through when they're on the verge of breaking up."
    "Was he wearing a hat when you last saw him?"
    Jolie's heart jumped. "Why?"
    "We found a man's hat in the car."
    "He liked to wear an orange ball cap, one of those rounded ones that fit close to the head, with a gray bill. Is that the cap you found?"
    "After that much time in the mud, it's hard to say what the original color was, but the shape is similar."
    Jolie covered her mouth, the image of Gary's body submerged in the thick muddy water of the Chattahoochee too awful to imagine.
    "Ms. Goodman, what exactly was Mr. Hagan's occupation?"
    Jolie squirmed—it was the one point of contention between her and Gary. "He was vague about what he did, but he called himself a services broker."
    "A services broker?"
    "Gary had this incredible network of acquaintances. If a person wanted something special, they called Gary. He said he could arrange a ride in a traffic helicopter, or courtside seats for the Hawks, things like that."
    Salyers nodded, making notes. "Did his services extend to supplying drugs or prostitutes?"
    Jolie grimaced. "No, of course not."
    "Are you certain? If he were deliberately vague about what he did, maybe he was covering up."
    Jolie didn't know what to say, so she simply lifted a hand. "I suppose anything is possible."
    "Did the two of you ever do drugs?"
    " No ."
    "Were you aware that Mr. Hagan has a record for dealing coke?"
    She felt nauseous. "No. When?"
    "Eight years ago in Orlando."
    "I didn't even know he'd lived in Orlando."
    The look that Salyers gave her made her feel stupid and susceptible. "Did Mr. Hagan own a gun?"
    Anxiety eddied in her chest. "If he did, he never mentioned it."
    "You didn't see a gun at his apartment, in his car?"
    "I only visited his apartment a couple of times, but no."
    Salyers made more notes. "Okay, you said that Mr. Hagan left that night to go out—what happened next?"
    "I watched TV, then I went to bed. I got up the next morning and when I went out to run errands around nine o'clock, my car was gone."
    "Were there signs that the car had been broken into—glass on the ground, for instance?"
    "No."
    "Did Mr. Hagan have a key?"
    "Yes. I had locked my keys in the car once, so we made a copy for the sake of convenience."
    "Was that your idea or Mr. Hagan's?"
    Jolie squinted. "Gary's, I believe—why?"
    "Just asking." She consulted her notes. "You drove a 2005 gray Mercury Sable Sedan, is that right?"
    "Yes."
    "But you didn't make an immediate connection between your car missing and Mr. Hagan?"
    "No. After I called the police to report my car stolen, I called Gary, but he didn't answer his phone. Several hours later, I began to suspect that something was wrong, except I was worried about Gary, not my car."
    "You called his cell phone?"
    Jolie nodded. "He was never without it. He didn't even have a land line at his apartment."
    "And he lived in Buckhead?" The woman turned back a few pages in her notebook and read off the address.
    Jolie nodded. "That's right. But there was a fire at his complex a few days after he...disappeared."
    Salyers heaved a sigh. "It seems like we had an apartment fire every week this summer. We have two serial arsonists in custody. His unit was damaged?"
    "And almost everything in