She spun toward him. Myron moved to his right. Whoa. He could see now that she’d been interviewing Lex. Lex looked beyond awful, all color drained from his face, his eyes staring up at nothing, his body leaning limply against the wall. Muse snapped the pad closed and started toward Myron. She was a short woman, barely five feet tall, and Myron was six-four. She stopped in front of him, looked up, and met his eye. Myron did not like what he saw.

“How is Suzze?” Myron asked.

“She’s dead,” Muse said.

Chapter 17

17

It was a heroin overdose.

Muse explained it to Myron as he stood next to her, vision blurred, shaking his head no over and over again. When he was finally able to speak, he asked, “What about the baby?”

“Alive,” Muse said. “Delivered via caesarean. A boy. He seems fine, but he’s in the neonatal intensive care unit.”

Myron tried to feel some kind of relief at this news, but the stunned and numb still won out. “Suzze wouldn’t have killed herself, Muse.”

“Might have been accidental.”

“She wasn’t using.”

Muse nodded in that way cops do when they don’t want to argue. “We’ll investigate.”

“She was clean.”

Another patronizing nod.

“Muse, I’m telling you.”

“What do you want me to say here, Myron? We’ll investigate, but right now all signs point to a drug overdose. There was no forced entry. No signs of a struggle. She also had a pretty rich history of drug use.”

“History. As in her past. She was having a baby.”

“Hormones,” Muse said. “They make us do stupid things.”

“Come on, Muse. How many women eight months pregnant commit suicide?”

“And how many drug addicts really go clean forever and ever?”

He thought about his darling sister-in-law, Kitty, another addict who couldn’t stay clean. Exhaustion started to weigh down his bones. Oddly—or maybe not—he started to think about his fiancée. Beautiful Terese. He suddenly wanted to walk away from this, right now, just give it up. He wanted to chuck it all. Screw the truth. Screw justice. Screw Kitty and Brad and Lex and whoever else and just grab the first flight back to Angola and be with the one person who could make all the madness disappear.

“Myron?”

He focused in on Muse.

“Can I see her?” he asked.

“You mean Suzze?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He wasn’t sure himself. Maybe it was a classic case of needing it to be real, of needing—and God, he hated that word—some sort of closure. He thought about Suzze’s bouncing ponytail when she played tennis. He thought about her posing for those hilarious La-La-Latte ads and her easy laugh and the way she chewed gum on the court and the look on her face when she asked him to be the godfather.

“I owe her,” he said.

“Are you going to investigate this?”