“I wasn’t stalking anyone! I had an audition and it didn’t go well. To blow off some steam, I drove by his apartment, taking great pleasure and schadenfreude in his shabby building. Je-ez! Can I go now?”

Decker took a chair and pulled it up close to Terry. “Lance, you’re not a suspect—”

“Well, thank you.”

“You’re here to help us find a killer, okay? So if there was another guy in her life, I want to know about him . . . starting with his last name . . . which I know you know. So tell me.”

Terry closed his eyes. “Latham. John Latham.”

McAdams was already on his iPad. “There’s a John Latham who’s a stage actor in England who’s fifty.”

“The guy wasn’t fifty,” Lance said.

“There’s a John Jeffrey Latham who won a Windsor Prize: Political Analysis of Prolekult and the Soviet Socialist Realism Art Movement.”

“Well, ex-cuse me!” Lance said.

“Let me get an image.” McAdams showed the picture to Lance. “Is this him?”

Lance stared at the picture. “Yeah, that’s him. Do you know him?”

“Nope.”

“What does the article say about him?”

“Not much . . . it mostly talks about the Windsor Prize. It’s given to candidates every four years who have excelled in the fields of arts and politics . . .” McAdams looked up. “I know that Tufts is known for the Fletcher Graduate School of International Affairs. I bet he’s either a postgrad there or maybe a lecturer—something like that.”

“He’s a prick, that’s what he is,” Terry said.

“Lance, do you know anything else about Latham?” Decker asked. “If you know something, tell me now.”

“Only that he and Angeline like to go out for Thai.” He bowed his head. “Okay. So I followed them a little in the beginning. Then Lucy and I starting hanging and I lost interest.”

“Do you have any idea where Angeline got the money to buy expensive purses?”

“No.” Said emphatically. “And it’s really ironic. Because if she wanted nice things like that, I would have bought them for her.”

“You went together for two years and you didn’t buy her anything nice?” Decker asked.

“I took her out to nice places—restaurants, concerts, sports events. I took her to a couple of Jets games, a Knicks game. We went on a couple of nice weekends. But . . . I never bought her much of anything: T-shirts, books, flowers a few times . . . nothing expensive like designer handbags.”

“If you loved her so much, why not?”

“Well . . . for starters . . . she never asked.”

Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

IT WAS TURNING up dawn by the time Lance Terry left the station house. Decker offered to drive him back, but the kid elected to walk, saying that he needed to clear his head. Decker was putting on a fresh pot of coffee when his cell rang. He depressed the button. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Rina answered back. There was an awkward pause. “Just like old times.”