“Of course. We’ll go through it this afternoon, and I’ll have someone drop off whatever we don’t need back at your house. If we keep anything, I’ll get you a list of what it is.”

“I don’t want her going through it,” Ruby said with a glance at me. “Whatever’s in there is private.”

Darrell sighed. Something in his face told me that he knew what Ruby’s problem with me was, even though he’d kept me in the dark about it. “Whatever we find stays inside the department, Ruby.”

She shot me one more venomous stare. Then she swept strands of her red hair out of her face. “So what do you want to know?”

“I’m sorry that we have to do this now,” Darrell said, “but take me through exactly what happened, step by step.”

Ruby rolled her wedding ring around her finger. I could see long, perfect nails, none of them broken. “Thursday morning, the kids and I went to see my sister in Marquette for a long weekend.”

“Ajax didn’t go with you?”

“He hates my sister. The feeling is mutual.”

“Did you talk to him while you were gone?” Darrell asked.

“Yes, I called him later that day to say we’d arrived. He was heading out to the 126. We talked again on Friday evening around seven. That was the last time I spoke to him. I tried calling him a couple of times on Saturday, but there was no answer. That was when I packed up the kids and drove home. We got back after dark on Saturday night.”

“Did Ajax know you were coming home?”

“No. I was supposed to stay until Sunday.”

“Why did you come home early?”

Ruby tugged her T-shirt down. “Because I assumed he was taking advantage of me being gone to stick his cock between some tramp’s legs. I thought I’d catch them together.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“What did you do when you got home?”

“I put the kids to bed. I waited up for a while, but then I went to bed myself.”

“What time was that?” Darrell asked.

“I don’t know. Midnight.”

“Did you go down in the basement at all?”

“No. I checked here in the Playboy mansion, and that was it.”

“Were you surprised that his car was still in the garage if he wasn’t home?”

Ruby shook her head. “We’ve got an extra detached garage, and Ajax keeps his restored Mustang out there. It’s his baby. I assumed he was driving that. It’s his chick-mobile.”

“But you didn’t actually look to see if it was there?”

“No.”

“And then what?”

“I told you. I went to bed.”

“Did you hear anything overnight? Cars outside? Noises in the house?”

“No. And I didn’t sleep well, so if anything was going on, I would have heard it. It was quiet.”