Page 20 of Liar's Point

Nicole and Emmett stepped outside, and she darted a look at him.

“That was bizarre,” she said.

“What was?”

“Her reaction.”

He shrugged.

“She definitely didn’t want to talk to us,” Nicole said as they reached the car, and she popped the locks open. “It was strange, don’t you think?”

“Not really. The woman wears a crystal around her neck and teaches yoga.”

“So?”

He slid inside, and Nicole got behind the wheel.

“So, she’s a little out there,” Emmet said. “Plus, we hit her with a shock. We just told her that her friend was murdered. How’d you expect her to react?”

Nicole shook her head. “My radar is up. She’s hiding something.”

***

Emmet gazed down at the young woman seated on the curb.

“And what time was it that you left here for work?”

She looked up at him with puffy pink eyes. Her makeup was smeared, and she’d obviously been crying. “Around one forty I think.” She rubbed her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “My shift started at two. I didn’t get back home until after ten.”

Aubrey Lambert’s roommate waited tables at a seafood place on the bay, and Emmet remembered seeing her there when he’d been in for po’ boys. She had told him just now that she was twenty-two, but he’d always thought she looked more like eighteen.

“And she was at the apartment when you left?” Emmet asked.

“She’d come home around one. I didn’t see her yesterday morning. I don’t know where she spent the night.”

“Where do you think she spent the night?”

She shook her head.

“If you had to guess?”

She bit her lip and looked down at her sneakers. They were on the sidewalk outside the victim’s apartment while Miranda and a CSI they’d borrowed from the county crime lab scoured the place for clues.

“I don’t know. She wasn’t seeing anyone lately, so maybe her ex.”

“Ex?”

“Sam Somebody.”

Emmet wrote it down on his notepad. “You don’t know his last name?”

She pulled her sleeves over her hands and crossed her arms. “I never met him. They weren’t together very long.”

“Okay. And did Sam ever come here to the apartment?”

“Not that I know of. I think they went to his place.”

“Hey, Emmet.”

---