Free Evil Season by Michael Benson

questioning from law enforcement, Garfield admitted he worked in the morgue and had grown comfortable around dead bodies, even decomposing bodies.
    â€œWhy’d you leave the force?”
    â€œGot hurt. Car accident.”
    Detectives did some fact-checking. Opitz verified the Ohio law enforcement story. Cespedes checked Garfield’s criminal history and he came back clear on all searches. Opitz verified that Garfield had served two years as a security specialist in the air force, stationed in Washington, D.C., and San Antonio, Texas, as he claimed.
    Stephen Garfield remained a person of interest until February 3, when SPD crime scene technicians determined that his fingerprints didn’t match those found in the Provenance.
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    Also on that Sunday, January 25, Walter Megura went to Joyce Wishart’s home on Wagon Wheel Circle. Also there were Detective Sergeant Norman Reilly and Detective Jim Glover. Criminalist Megura took digital photographs of the house, inside and out. The place was very neat and orderly. A fingerprint from a plastic cup found in the front office of the house was processed. A computer in the den was seized. Also found in the den was a copy of Wishart’s will, prepared by attorney Johnson Savary, of Dunlap & Moran. In the garage was a Honda auto registered to Wishart’s son Jamie, who, just back from Europe, had visited over Christmas. A search of the master bedroom uncovered no items of interest. Ditto for the small bedroom, which contained items belonging to Jamie Wishart.
    While there, Glover was approached by a neighbor and friend of Wishart’s named Sue Sweeney. Before Wishart became ill with cancer, they had been tennis buddies. Sweeney said she thought Wishart had two boyfriends, both from somewhere in the Midwest. She last saw Wishart on Tuesday, January 13, when she stopped into the Provenance to visit.
    â€œNothing seemed to be bothering her,” Sweeney said. Joyce was very upbeat and positive. Her daughter Patty was there, but she did not partake in the conversation. “Who would want to hurt Joyce?” Sweeney wondered.
    Later that day Detectives Jim Glover and Carmen Woods interviewed Thomas Kearney, who’d been a coworker of Wishart’s at the Asolo Repertory Theatre. After she left the Asolo, he helped her build the website for her art gallery. They’d had a falling-out when she became “very demanding” regarding his time. He had not spoken to her in over a year.
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    Captain Laracey and Sergeant Reilly separately interviewed Patty and Jamie Wishart, who had flown in from the home the siblings shared in San Jose, California. Patty was thirty-two years old, distraught, and said she’d just recently visited her mother, from January 8 to January 13. She flew out of Tampa International Airport on Delta Airlines. Nothing was wrong. Nothing was bothering her mom.
    Her mother and father were divorced in 1982 and hadn’t had any contact since the early 1990s. Recently her mother had hired a private investigator to find her ex-husband. Patty thought her dad had been found in Dayton, Ohio, but she wasn’t sure and had no address for him.
    â€œI haven’t spoken to my father since I was in tenth grade,” Patty said. Basically what she remembered about him was that he was drunk and abusive. “He used to tell me about abusing cats when he was a kid.”
    Patty said her father was the only person she could think of capable of killing her mother. There hadn’t been one incident in particular that led her to that conclusion, just a pattern of abuse. “My dad had a hunting rifle above the fireplace. Mom would freak out when a domestic argument occurred.”
    The two Wishart kids who didn’t talk to their mother (or their father) were Kirsten and Scott. Joyce and Kirsten had a falling-out because the mother didn’t like Kirsten’s husband. Similarly, Joyce had a falling-out with Scott