“I’m going to say this once.” Rose reached over and grabbed the recorder. Colin thought she was going to turn it off, but she actually held it to her mouth as she spoke. “I’m assuming you’ve never lost a spouse, so you can’t understand what it’s like, expecting to see them in the morning getting ready for the day only to find them still in bed. Then to go over and touch them, only to feel that unnatural cold on their skin. To know they’d been taking sleeping pills and anxiety pills for years, all the while mixing them with alcohol, and they were always fine. What they needed to sleep at night. And you…you eventually stopped protesting. Because, after all, they always got up in the morning, right? And then, one day, they don’t. Gone.”

Colin watched every tick of her face, every shift of her eyes. If she was lying, she was good. But he had run into more than his fair share of good liars in his work.

“I’m not offended by your questions,” she continued. “I know you have a job to do. But I can see the eagerness in your face, the hope you might make some kind of name for yourself with your new department. But I can tell you this: you won’t make it from this case. You won’t make it from me. Whether Riley’s death was accidental or maybe something he secretly wanted, I’m not sure I’ll ever know. But I would never hurt someone I loved.”

There were many key words in what she’d just said, and Colin would surely go over the transcript of the recording many times dissecting them, but one word stood out above all others. It stood out because it had the clearest ring of a lie, more than anything else.

“So you loved him, then?”

She rose, and that was that.

“If you need to speak with me again, you can contact my lawyer.”

Twenty-Four

The moment he leaves, a dull throb begins in my head, a manifestation of anxiety. As is the tightness in my chest and the sudden glaze of warm sweat inside my armpits. I try to calm myself with a few deep breaths, but it’s like trying to meditate while drowning.

Detective Pearson didn’t want to know about my distant past. I was paranoid to think he did. My distant past has nothing to do with Milwaukee, so a Milwaukee cop would know nothing about something that happened twenty-two years ago in Bury, New Hampshire.

I pull back the thick mahogany drapes from the living room window and peek outside as Pearson gets in the patrol car, where he sits and talks with the Bury cop. Who was it? Timmons? Simmons?

Our conversation didn’t end the way I wanted. I didn’t want to threaten getting a lawyer, but the alternative was to answer Pearson’s questions, and I saw no good end to that. Every cop I’ve ever interviewed for my research has told me it’s usually the best move for a suspect to lawyer up, but it always reinforces the perception of guilt.