He’d laid out his case against Rose Yates to Sergeant Al Brennan, Colin’s direct supervisor in the Special Investigations Unit. Brennan was a fiftyish fireplug of a man who wore a scowl as his default expression. Colin hadn’t been too hopeful; asking for travel funds from a tight budget to cross state lines and interview a person of interest was never an easy sell.

Colin had learned over the years to keep requests like this straightforward and to the point. No flowery language.

He’d outlined to the sergeant how thirty-nine-year-old Riley McKay died due to an overdose of diazepam, zolpidem, and alcohol. McKay commonly took both meds to help him sleep, but they were not prescribed to be taken in combination, certainly not with alcohol, and definitely not at the high levels of his final ingestion.

There were no usual hallmarks of a suicide, Colin had explained. No note, although the majority of suicide victims didn’t leave notes anyway. No phone call to anyone, no red-flag social-media posts. McKay’s only external communication that night was with a buddy, confirming their weekly Frisbee golf game.

Detective Cooper had taken the case shortly before his retirement and had only interviewed Rose Yates once for about fifteen minutes. Colin had told the sergeant that, in his opinion, Detective Cooper might have rushed through some of the standard procedure on his way out the door. He hadn’t asked Ms. Yates about her relationship with her husband or even if she thought her husband committed suicide. There were a lot of holes left to plug, including the question of why Ms. Yates had taken her son and quickly moved to New Hampshire after her husband’s death. Colin had conceded the move was not necessarily unusual for a grieving widow, but it was worth a few follow-up questions.

Capping it all off, Colin had told his sergeant about Ms. Yates’s alter ego, J. L. Sharp, a mystery writer. Not that being a mystery writer carried with it inherent suspicion or even the writer’s intricate knowledge of police procedure, case management, and suspect-interrogation techniques. What was suspicious was the scene in Yates’s most recent book in which a woman killed her forty-year-old husband by grinding up eight tablets of his prescription sleep medication and stirring the powder into his whiskey nightcap.

“That’s a reach,” the sergeant had said. “I’m not saying it’s not interesting, but you don’t really think she’d commit murder in the same manner as a character in her book, do you? That’s pretty blatant.”

“Maybe the wife had written the scene based on watching her husband regularly mix meds and alcohol,” Colin countered. “And on that night, she acted impulsively. Maybe didn’t think about the connection to her book.”

“Sounds like she’s smarter than that. Statistically speaking, it’s probably equally likely the husband offed himself in that manner to frame her.”

Colin nodded. “Could be. But we don’t have him around to ask. Just the wife.”

“And her motive? Money?”

“Don’t think so,” Colin had said. “They didn’t have much. Had a small life-insurance policy on him, but they’d stopped paying the premium a year ago.”