Never Saw It Coming by Linwood Barclay

Author:Linwood Barclay [Barclay, Linwood]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Thriller
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-08-07T07:00:00+00:00

Twenty-two

Keisha tried to think how she would explain it.

Because she would have to explain it. There was no doubt in her mind. The police would eventually find Wendell Garfield, if they hadn’t already, and sooner or later they’d discover her business card, tucked into his shirt pocket.

If the card had been anywhere else—in a drawer, in his wallet, even—it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. Over time, everyone collects lots of business cards. You find them in your car, your coat pocket, pinned to bulletin boards.

But a card that’s been tucked into a shirt, well, that’s a card that has to have been acquired, or at the very least referred to, very recently. Assuming that Wendell Garfield did not wear the same, unlaundered shirt for days or weeks on end, it would be reasonable for the police to assume he’d acquired, or been looking at, that card in the last couple of days. Since his wife had gone missing.

And how did most people acquire cards? From the people whose name was on them.

It was just a matter of time before the police would be at Keisha’s door, asking whether she’d met with Wendell Garfield. When was this meeting? Where was it held? What was its purpose and who had initiated it?

What would she tell them?

“I have no idea how he got that card.”

That’s what she would tell them.

It might be a hard story to stick to, but now that Kirk had gotten rid of everything else linking her to the Garfield house, she believed she could ride it out.

She’d tell them that she often left her cards pinned to noticeboards in grocery stores. Sometimes she’d leave a few out on tables at craft shows and community center events. She’d distribute them to random people she might meet waiting in a checkout line, or at a bus stop.

The cards were out there, she’d say. Who knows where he might have gotten one?

Maybe he’d come across one weeks ago, put it in a drawer, and after his wife disappeared, he went hunting for it, thinking maybe a psychic could assist him in ways the police had not. He’d found the card and slipped it into his shirt, and probably would have called her if he hadn’t ended up with a knitting needle in his brain.

Of course, only Keisha knew it would have made no sense for Garfield to engage the services of a psychic to find his wife. He knew all about his wife’s fate. But the police didn’t know that, did they? So far as they were aware, Wendell Garfield was still a distraught husband desperate for his wife’s return. Maybe the police would even start working on the theory that whoever got rid of Ellie—at some point they’d conclude that she was the victim of foul play, even if they never found her body at the bottom of that lake—was the same person who’d killed her husband.

That would make sense, right?

And really, what did her business card have to do with all that?

It’s just a card.

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