“Why didn’t you sleep well?”

“Because I was pissed off thinking that my husband was in bed with another woman! Shit, Darrell, do I have to spell it out for you? You worked with him. You knew what he was like.”

Darrell didn’t answer, but it was true. He did know Ajax. So did I. Every one of us in that room knew the kind of man Ajax was, and neither Darrell nor I had any trouble believing Ruby’s story. Of course, it was also true that she had no real alibi. If he’d come home late, smelling of his latest conquest, they might have argued in the basement while the kids were asleep. She could have hit him. Killed him. Done all the rest and then calmly showered away the blood. Ajax liked to joke that Ruby was a redhead, and redheads were crazy. Looking in her scary eyes, I believed it.

However, I didn’t think she’d done it. Her nails were too perfect. You couldn’t do what had been done to that body without breaking a nail.

But if not her, then who?

“What time did you get up?” Darrell asked.

“Early. Maybe five thirty. The kids wouldn’t be up for hours, so I made coffee and decided I would get a jump on the laundry. I gathered it up and went down to the basement.” She closed her eyes and exhaled sharply. “That’s when I found him.”

“Did you touch anything in the room?”

“No. I just screamed. I stood there screaming. Then I ran back upstairs and called you.”

I sat on the other end of the sofa, listening to the back-and-forth. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Since I wasn’t a deputy anymore, I didn’t really know if Darrell wanted me asking any questions, but then again, he’d asked for my help because we’d worked on the Gordon Brink case together. So I decided to butt in. There was an uncomfortable question that needed to be asked, and I could probably ask it better than Darrell. Ruby couldn’t be any more pissed at me than she already was.

“Do you know who Ajax was sleeping with?” I asked.

Seeing Ruby’s reaction, I realized that she had no trouble getting even more pissed at me. In fact, she practically foamed at the mouth. “Shut up, you little—”

“Ruby.”

Darrell interrupted, but not before Ruby called me what she wanted to call me.

“This is not helpful,” he went on. “I know you’re upset, but Rebecca and I are here to figure out what happened. So let’s leave the personal stuff out of this. Please, if you know, answer Rebecca’s question. Who do you think Ajax was having an affair with?”

“Now or last January?” she spat in reply.