Love By Association. Tara Taylor Quinn

guess I wouldn’t know,” she told Wayne. “Jill was. I am. Meri is. That’s pretty much the sum total of my experience. And it doesn’t really matter,” she said. “Because the second thing I’ve learned is that aggressive men don’t like aggressive women, unless it’s in their beds, and then only when they want it that way. Protective men like to protect. They don’t want a woman who says, ‘Stay down. I’ve got this,’ while facing the bogeyman alone with a gun in her hand. Near as I can tell, it emasculates them. Or, at the very least, makes them feel incompetent.”

      Wayne’s silence wasn’t a surprise. Because he was one of those protective guys.

      He knew she was right. The upside was, he left her alone after that so she could pursue the work she’d stopped in to do.

      To no avail.

      No matter how she searched, either as victim or perpetrator, Julie Fairbanks was not in the system.

      Keeping an eye over her shoulder, lest someone see what she was doing and wonder why she was looking at the commissioner’s wife, she tried to find what she could about Patricia Reynolds. It took her two seconds to discover that the woman didn’t have a police record. No real surprise there.

      The society pages were filled with her. The queen of philanthropy, she’d been an advocate for the downtrodden since high school, using the influence of being the daughter of a senator—before she’d married Paul Reynolds—to draw attention to matters that bothered her.

      She and the commissioner had no children—due, one article said, to her own infertility. She sat on the boards of three different infertility clinics as fundraising chairperson.

      And there Chantel had it. Too bad “it” wasn’t anything she could use.