Nowhere to Hide by Nancy Bush

Dempsey.”
    “Sure. Whatever.”
    “You never know,” Gretchen said in an aside to September. “You find something in the house, try to arrest the guy. His lawyer says in court that you weren’t invited in. Unlawful search and all that. Besides, it’s polite.”
    “Okay.”
    The living room smelled like sour beer, which wasn’t a surprise given the cans that were tossed into every corner and spilled off a table onto the matted carpet. Dempsey was sprawled on a couch, staring at a television that had been muted. “What do you want to know now?” he asked.
    “We’re heading up the investigation of possibly three women, maybe more, who’ve been killed in essentially the same manner,” Gretchen said. “Your wife is the first that we know of. We were hoping you could just fill in a few things for us.”
    “Me and Sheila were done,” he volunteered. “Kaput. She’d moved on. Kicked me out of the place and started screwing every guy she could find. I moved back here after she . . . died.”
    September had a picture of Sheila living at the house and thought it had probably been a lot nicer then. “Do you know if she was seeing anyone in particular?” she asked diffidently.
    “Jake Westerly, the miserable fuck.”
    Jake Westerly!
    September hid her intake of breath behind a short cough. She’d just been thinking about him. But Jake . . . linked to this investigation . . . it couldn’t be. The idea made her so uncomfortable that it took an effort to snap herself back to the present.
    “You know that she was seeing Westerly for certain?” Gretchen was asking skeptically. “You didn’t mention it before.”
    “You mean to that deputy who told me my wife had been murdered?” Dempsey sneered. “He was more interested in me and my whereabouts than listening to anything I had to say, so I just shut up. Fuck ’em.”
    “But you’ve thought it over now . . .” Gretchen prodded.
    “Sheila knew Westerly from way back. She cut his hair and they were . . . friends,” he said with a twist of his lips.
    September remembered, then, that Sheila had worked as a part-time hairdresser. Deputy Dalton had reported that Sheila had no particular client list and had only worked at the salon a short time. He hadn’t followed up, apparently, so maybe he did put the blame for Sheila’s death at her husband’s feet.
    But Jake Westerly!
    September suddenly recalled the slide of his hands across her skin, the heat of his mouth, the shock and thrill of intimacy. She felt slightly dizzy. Almost ill. She’d had a few other relationships since Jake, but they’d never had that same, throat-grabbing power. Now she clenched her teeth together until her jaw ached and tried to stay in the moment.
    Gretchen asked Dempsey more questions about Sheila: who else she was friends with, how she spent her extra time, did she have any enemies that he knew of. Dempsey didn’t have much else in the way of real information. Kept circling around to the fact that “she couldn’t keep her legs together” after they’d split up, and that she had a real thing for the cowboy type.
    September kept silent throughout. Jake Westerly had been a three-sport athlete in high school, tough and strong, but from her recollection, not a thing about him read “cowboy.” At least not then. She wondered now if he hung around The Barn Door . . . his family had lived in the Laurelton area back in the day, and his father, Nigel Westerly, had worked as a foreman/overseer at The Willows when her father first invested in the winery, commuting the forty minutes each way every day. Nigel had been first on the scene of September’s mother’s accident as Kathryn had been driving away from the winery. He’d tried to save her, but she was gone before the ambulance arrived. Braden, in his grief, had half-blamed Nigel for not saving his wife, and even September, dealing with her own loss, had lashed out at Jake’s father. But Nigel was as torn up as anyone. He’d