Echoes of Titanic by Mindy Starns Clark

and went right to her office, but she wasn’t there. I called out her name a few times and wandered around looking for her, but after a while I gave up. By the time I left, I was pretty aggravated.”
    â€œI’m sorry to ask this, Mr. Poole, but when you were looking around for her, didn’t you think to check the conference room?”
    Vern shook his head. “I might have opened the door and looked inside, but the light was off. I mean, I knew she wouldn’t be sitting in the dark, so I just continued on and kept looking elsewhere.” With that, a fresh sob gurgled from his throat, and the poor man collapsed into a sobbing mess. Kelsey patted his back, knowing she had done the same thing when she’d been looking for Gloria herself.
    As Matt went on a hunt for a box of tissues and Kelsey tried to comfort Vern, the detective sat quietly, reviewing his notes and waiting for the man to get a hold of himself. Once Vern had regained his composure, he apologized for having fallen apart like that.
    â€œIt’s certainly understandable,” Hargrove replied evenly.
    Vern reached for another tissue. “Can I ask you a question, Detective?”
    â€œYes?”
    Kelsey was afraid that he was going to ask the same thing she had, about the mechanics of the suicide. Instead, he looked up at the man, clearly in agony, and said, “If she really did kill herself, do you think the reason she called me down here was so I would be the one to find her body?”

CHAPTER
EIGHT
    S imply asking the detective that question had brought Vern to a fresh onslaught of tears. As he cried, Kelsey considered his words.
    â€œ Do you think the reason she called me down here was so I would be the one to find her body?”
    The very idea nearly broke Kelsey’s heart. Vern was a strikingly handsome man even now in his sixties, but over the years he’d proven to be, as Gloria liked to put it, “all flash and no substance.” While Gloria had worked her way up the corporate ladder at B & T and amassed enough personal wealth through wise investments to keep the two of them in a tony condominium overlooking Gramercy Park, he’d flitted from job to job and served primarily as arm candy for Gloria’s corporate functions.
    Truly, their relationship had been an odd one. But the thought that she might have staged her own death so that he would be the one to run across her body first was sickening. Could Gloria really have done something like that? Surely, even at the lowest point in their marriage, she hadn’t been capable of that kind of cruelty.
    The detective seemed to sense that Vern’s question was rhetorical because he didn’t answer. Instead, he just looked back at the man sympathetically and asked if the two of them had been having marital problems.
    Vern took another tissue and blew his nose. “If that was what she was trying to do, I probably deserved it.”
    At that point, the detective looked over at Kelsey and tilted his head as if to say it was time for her and Matt to leave. She nodded, grateful to bedismissed. Kelsey and her brother headed for the elevator, leaving the two men to continue their conversation in private.
    When they reached the first floor and stepped off, Kelsey was surprised to see the flashing lights of a police car right outside, a uniformed officer standing near the door, and a cluster of curious onlookers peering through the front windows. Except they weren’t just curious onlookers, she realized as she got a better look. They were reporters.
    â€œOh, man,” she moaned. “I should have anticipated this.”
    The fact that the vice president of management recruitment and training for Brennan & Tate had been found dead in the company’s executive conference room was newsworthy by itself, but coming on the heels of the incident here earlier today, it was positively titillating. Of course the media was coming out in