Blood on the Wedding Cake

Episode 2

The Detective

The ballroom had transformed.

Forty minutes ago, it was the most elegant room in Voss City. Now it was a crime scene. The white silk ribbons still hung from the chandeliers. The gardenias still filled the air with their unbearable sweetness. Three hundred white roses still stood in their crystal vases along every aisle.

But the burgundy carpet now had a chalk outline being carefully drawn around the body of Phillip Hartwell, and the beauty of everything surrounding it made the whole thing worse somehow. Like finding something dead in a garden.

The guests had been separated and moved to the hotel's secondary ballroom on the other side of the building. It had taken twenty minutes and four uniformed officers to accomplish this, and even then, there had been resistance. Vincent Voss had stood in the center of the room like a mountain that had decided it did not feel like moving and informed the responding officers in a voice that carried no particular volume and yet silenced everything around it that he would be speaking to the Commissioner personally before the night was over.

The officers had let him finish speaking.

Then they had moved him anyway.

Dorian had gone quietly, which surprised Mara. He had looked at her once over his shoulder as they separated them, and she had read nothing in his expression except something that might have been calculation, might have been concern, and might have been both at the same time.

Now Mara sat alone.

They had put her in a small room just off the main corridor on the fourteenth floor. It had probably been a storage room at some point. Now it held a folding table, two chairs, and Mara Delacroix in her seven-thousand-dollar wedding dress with dried champagne on the hem and a silence around her that felt like a living thing.

She had asked twice to call her lawyer.

Both times, the uniformed officer at the door had told her someone was coming to speak with her shortly.

She had stopped asking.

Instead, she sat with her hands folded on the table in front of her and kept her breathing even and thought very carefully about everything she knew and everything she did not know and the significant gap between the two.

Phillip Hartwell was dead.

He had been alive at the beginning of the reception. She had seen him speaking to Vincent Voss near the bar, laughing at something, his champagne glass raised. He had been the picture of health and good humor. And then the lights went out, and when they came back on, he was on the floor, and he was never going to get up again.

Poison, she thought. It had to be. The speed of it. The way he had simply dropped without warning or struggle. She was not a doctor, but she had read enough, and she was observant enough to recognize what a sudden, violent physical collapse looked like versus what a man dying from poison looked like. Phillip Hartwell had looked like the second one.

Which meant someone at that wedding had poisoned him.

Which meant someone had planned it.

Which meant Mara needed to think about whom, and why, and most importantly, why tonight.

She was still thinking when the door opened.

She had expected another uniformed officer.

She had not expected him.

Detective Eli Crane walked into the room the way people walk into rooms when they own them, which is to say he did not hurry, and he did not hesitate, and he did not look around to get his bearings because he already had them. He was tall. Broader across the shoulders than the dark suit he wore, until he moved. Dark hair cut close on the sides and slightly longer on top in a way that was either deliberate or completely unconsidered, and she could not tell which. His jaw was sharp and set and carried two days of stubble that somehow looked intentional. His eyes, when they found her, were the color of steel left out in winter.

He carried a notebook. A real one, not a tablet. Spiral-bound, worn at the corners, the kind that spoke of habit and preference rather than necessity.

He sat down across from her without introducing himself, opened the notebook to a clean page, and looked at her with those winter-colored eyes and said nothing for a moment that lasted precisely long enough to be uncomfortable.

Mara did not fill the silence.

She had learned a long time ago that silence was a weapon and the person who broke it first had already lost something.

He seemed to understand this. Something shifted in his expression, so brief and small she almost missed it. Almost.

"Detective Eli Crane," he said finally. "Voss City Criminal Investigation Division."

"Mara Delacroix," she replied. Then, after a single beat, "Voss. As of about two hours ago."

"Right," he said. He wrote something in the notebook. She could not see what. "Congratulations."

The word landed on the room like a stone dropped into still water.

"Thank you," she said evenly. "It has been quite an evening."

He looked up from the notebook. Those grey eyes moved over her face with the kind of attention that most people reserve for documents they are trying to find errors in. She held very still under the examination and gave him nothing.

"Tell me about Phillip Hartwell," he said.

"I barely knew him."

"Barely isn't the same as not at all."

"No," she agreed. "It isn't. I met him three times. Twice at events hosted by my husband's family during our engagement. Once at a dinner six weeks ago. He was pleasant. He told a long story about a fishing trip that I do not think had a point. He laughed loudly at his own jokes."

"Did you like him?"

"I didn't know him well enough to like or dislike him."

"Did your husband like him?"

She considered the question the way it deserved to be considered, which was careful.

"Dorian respected him," she said. "Whether that is the same as liking someone in the world my husband comes from, I honestly couldn't tell you."

Eli Crane wrote something else in his notebook. She watched his hand move and thought that he wrote the way he spoke, which was with economy and precision and no wasted motion.

"Where were you when the lights went out?" he asked.

"Standing next to my wedding cake," she said. "With a knife in my hand."

He looked up.

"I'm aware of what it looks like," she said before he could respond. "I'd like you to be aware that I'm aware of it. Because I think that matters."

"Why does it matter?"

"Because innocent people rarely volunteer the most incriminating detail about themselves in the first two minutes of an interrogation. They get there eventually when you push them to it. I didn't wait for you to push."

Something happened in his expression again. That brief, small shift that she was beginning to think might be the closest he got to showing that something had surprised him.

"This isn't an interrogation," he said.

"Detective Crane," she said quietly, "I have been in this room for forty minutes with an officer at the door who won't let me leave or make a phone call. This is absolutely an interrogation. I simply don't mind."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"You're calm," he said. It was not a compliment. It was an observation being filed somewhere.

"Yes."

"Your husband's family's associate just died at your wedding."

"Yes."

"Most people would not be calm."

"Most people," she said, "did not grow up in my household."

He wrote something in the notebook, and she thought that whatever he wrote was more than a few words, and she thought that was probably not ideal for her.

"The knife," he said. "Where is it now?"

"I put it down when the officer arrived. On the table next to the cake. I imagine your forensics team has it."

"You put it down."

"I wasn't going to stand there holding it while police officers arrived. That seemed unwise."

"But you held it while everyone else was moving and screaming."

"I was processing what had happened," she said. "I process better when I'm still."

"What were you processing?"

She looked at him directly.

"The same thing as you are," she said. "Who did this? And why did they choose tonight?"

The room went quiet. Outside in the corridor, she could hear the sound of other officers moving, voices low and professional, the occasional crackle of a radio. Inside the room, there were only the two of them and the overhead light and the distance across the folding table felt both very large and very small at the same time.

"You think it was planned," he said.

"Don't you?"

"I think a lot of things at this stage of an investigation."

"Then I'll tell you what I think," she said, "since you're going to find out eventually anyway, and I would rather you hear it from me. I think Phillip Hartwell was poisoned. I think it was put in something he consumed during the reception. I think whoever did it chose tonight deliberately — this venue, this guest list, this particular wedding — because the chaos of three hundred people and a power outage gave them cover. And I think," she paused, "that whoever did this wanted someone specific to be standing closest to the body when the lights came back on."

Eli Crane had stopped writing.

He was watching her with an expression she could not read at all, which was the first time in the conversation that she had not been able to, and she found it unsettling in a way she did not entirely understand.

"And who was standing closest to the body," he said slowly, "when the lights came back on?"

"I was," she said.

"You were."

"With a knife in my hand," she added. "At my own wedding. Where I had every reason to want to impress people rather than terrify them. Detective Crane, if I had wanted to poison someone at my wedding, I would not have been standing next to the body holding the murder weapon when the lights came back on."

"People make mistakes," he said.

"I don't," she said.

The words came out quieter than she intended. And truer. And she watched him hear them and file them somewhere in whatever system he used to organize the things people told him about themselves.

He closed the notebook.

"I'm going to need you to stay in the city," he said. "I'm going to need access to your phone records for the past thirty days. I'm going to need the names of every person you spoke to privately in the last seventy-two hours."

"You'll have everything you need," she said. "As soon as I have spoken to my lawyer."

"Of course."

He stood. He was taller standing than she had registered sitting, and the small room became smaller.

"One more question," he said.

"Go ahead."

"Your bouquet," he said. "The one you carried down the aisle. Forensics found it on the floor near the cake table. The ribbon was partially undone." He paused. "Is there anything you'd like to tell me about that?"

The air in the room changed.

Mara looked at him and thought about the envelope she had tucked beneath the ribbon. The slim white envelope with the information inside it. The information she had not yet decided what to do with.

She thought about all of this in the space of two seconds.

Then she smiled at Detective Eli Crane. It was a small smile, carefully constructed, and it gave him absolutely nothing.

"My bouquet came apart during the chaos," she said. "That's all."

He looked at her for one long moment.

"Goodnight, Mrs. Voss," he said.

"Goodnight, Detective," she replied.

He walked out and closed the door behind him, and Mara sat alone again in the little room with the folding table and the overhead light and thought about three things simultaneously.

The first was that whoever had framed her had done an extraordinary job.

The second was that she was going to find out who they were.

The third was that Detective Eli Crane had the kind of eyes that made it very difficult to lie convincingly, and that was going to be a problem.

A significant one.

TO BE CONTINUED...