Название | The Detective's Dilemma |
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Автор произведения | Karen McCullough |
Жанр | Короткие любовные романы |
Серия | |
Издательство | Короткие любовные романы |
Год выпуска | 0 |
isbn | 9781616506513 |
“You look better.” He scanned from her hair to her shoes and back. “We’d like you to come back down to the station and help us sort out some of Vince’s papers and things.”
The detective looked better too. The tired lines on his face had eased and muscles in his jaw relaxed. The change made his expression warmer and less intimidating. That might be wishful thinking on her part. Or it might be an act on his.
“Are you arresting me?” she asked.
“No. Not yet. We want your help.”
“You still think I killed him, though.”
Christianson’s mouth twisted into a grimace. “You pulled the trigger.”
The reminder cut through her like a knife to the gut. She drew a breath and held herself rigid until she could control her emotions. She would not cry in front of this man. “Not because I wanted to.” The words almost didn’t get past the constriction in her throat.
“I--” He stopped and gestured toward the parking lot. “Let’s see if we can figure out who did want you to, then.”
Once in his car, she asked, “Do you have any leads?”
“We’ve barely begun to look into it.”
“Oh. Do you have any idea when I can get back into the house? Not to live. I know it doesn’t belong to me, and I don’t have the right to live there anymore. But to get my things. And my car. The car is mine--I mean the title is in my name--and I need it to get to classes and to look around for a place to live now.”
“I don’t know about the house. It could be a while before it’s released. I’ll ask about your car. We might be able to get that back to you in a day or two.”
“That long?” She sighed. “I guess I’ll have to get the bus to class tomorrow.”
His lips twisted in an ironic grin. “Most people are glad to have an excuse to skip classes.”
“I can’t afford to goof off, maybe even fail a class. Now more than ever.”
“Why not?” He sounded genuinely curious rather than suspicious.
“Because I don’t have anyone else to depend on. There’s only me. Even before…before Vince died I knew I couldn’t expect to live off him, forever. Eventually I’d have to depend on myself. That’s why I’ve been going to school to get the GED for the last two years, and now I’m working on the associate degree. If I’m ever going to make something of myself, I’ve got to have an education. More than just the associate degree, too. I want a real college degree. You can’t get a good job these days without it. My mom used to tell us that all the time. You can’t get ahead in this world without the college degree.”
“What will you do with it?”
“I don’t know yet. Make myself into somebody.”
“Somebody?” They stopped at a traffic light and he turned to stare at her.
She met his eyes for a moment. “Somebody who matters. A person who has a place in the world.”
“You don’t think you’re someone who matters now? Doesn’t every person matter?”
“Do I? When you first saw me last night, what did you think? Did you think, ‘she might be someone with interesting opinions about things I might want to talk about, or someone who might do something important in the world?’ Of course not. You saw me and thought, ‘She’s a rich man’s pretty plaything. A parasite. And probably greedy enough to murder her lover for his money.’ You did. I saw it on your face.”
“Mostly I thought ‘this woman was just involved in a murder and it’s my job to sort out the facts.’” Christianson didn’t say anything more for a moment as he turned the car into the parking lot of the police station. “You have a point, though.”
“I know. You think I’m thrilled about it? When I was desperate to keep my sister comfortable, to keep us from ending up on the street--literally--I traded on the only asset I had. My looks. I don’t want to be in that position again. Ever. I want to have something else the world values. A skill or knowledge. I’m not really smart, but I’m not stupid either. I just need the education.”
He parked the car, turned off the engine, and looked at her. His lips relaxed out of the ironic twist and the lines around his eyes gentled. Not that his expression had softened particularly, but it didn’t seem quite as condemning. Or maybe it wasn’t as condescending.
“I don’t think you’re stupid at all,” he said.
“It probably makes me more likely to have murdered Vince.”
The man stiffened--an interesting reaction, though she couldn’t guess what brought it on.
Finally he said, “I can’t comment on that.” He got out and walked around the car to open the door for her.
They went into the police station through a back entrance. He escorted her down a long drab hall and then into a room that held a dozen or so desks. Four of them were occupied, while several other people stood around or sat beside them. A couple of people spoke on the phone. Others talked to each other. The rumble of several different conversations and the constant buzzing of phones made her wonder how any work got done.
Jay led the way to a desk near the far corner, his apparently, since he sat in the chair behind it. She plopped down in the rough wooden seat pushed against its side. While most of the desks looked like a tornado had passed through the building, emptying file drawers and scattering the contents across every available surface, Christianson’s was surprisingly neat. File folders sat in carefully aligned piles along the back and corners. A familiar book lay in the middle--Vince’s calendar.
Several boxes stacked on the other side of the desk, against the wall, held the contents of Vince’s filing cabinets according to the labels on them.
Christianson flipped through the calendar, got to the current date, which had no entries and began to work his way backward. He stopped frequently to point to a particular note and ask what it might mean, or to question who a first name referred to.
Some of them she didn’t know, but she did identify several people Vince had met over the past few months and interpreted a few of the scribbled notes. While they worked, Sam Hennesy came in, said hello, settled in at the next desk down the row, and later came over and took a stack of folders from the top box. He sat and thumbed through them.
When he reached the beginning of the year in the calendar, Christianson flipped to the current date again and paged forward to check future scheduled items. Meanwhile, Hennesy occasionally leaned back and twisted around to ask her about things he found in the files.
Once he’d gone through the calendar, Christianson also grabbed file folders from the box.
They worked for a couple of hours. Both men occasionally stopped to answer the phone, but for the most part they kept reading through papers and questioning her about things they found. She had no idea if she told them anything useful or if they came on anything that might help identify the killers or who’d hired them.
Her cell phone rang somewhere around five.
“Sarah?” Marc identified himself. “I stopped by the hotel to see you, but you weren’t there. Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m with the police. We’re going through some of your dad’s stuff.”
At the last words, Christianson turned toward her.
“Any clues to who killed him?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“I was thinking,” Marc said. “If you need a place to stay, we’ve got a spare room.”
“You know