Chapter 34 Andrea Kendal
Andrea Kendal
“So, the story I heard is that Andrea and Eric met at a cancer charity event in Pasadena. Now, what was a single mother with no job doing at a charity event? You tell me. Fishing for a rich husband, that’s my take.
She must have gotten a big settlement from her first husband—that’s her oldest boy’s father—because I’ve never seen her work.
Not when they were dating, and certainly not after they got married. ”
Surely Eric was almost here. He had texted her fifteen minutes ago that he was leaving the hospital, which meant that any moment, the automatic doors to the room would open and he would stride in.
As if on command, the doors opened. Her head snapped up, but it was a woman in a dark suit who walked in. She wore no makeup, her hair in a severe bun. She paused, spotted them in the corner, and approached.
“Walter.” She extended her hand. “Where’s Dr. Kendal?”
Walter rose and tucked his phone in his pocket, taking her outstretched hand and giving it a firm shake. “He’s en route. Is it necessary for Mrs. Kendal to be here?” He gestured to Andrea. “She has kids at home waiting for her.”
“Not really our problem,” the woman said crisply, but smiled at Andrea as if to soften the blow. “We’ll let her go as soon as we can, but we’ll be questioning Dr. Kendal first, so she’ll be after that. Hi, Mrs. Kendal. I’m Bridget, with the San Francisco detective’s office.”
She shook the woman’s hand and tried not to panic.
They must have found a loose thread, something that Andrea and Eric had forgotten to close up.
Maybe Roxanne’s bank account at her old credit union, or that clinic visit three weeks before her attack.
Or maybe they’d been digging into Andrea’s past. Walter had assured them that he had bulletproofed her timeline, but maybe he hadn’t.
They were the police, after all. Their job was to find the holes in a story, and she was afraid theirs was more riddled than Swiss cheese.
“I can show you to a room where you can wait.”
Walter nudged Andrea, and she realized that the woman was speaking to her.
“Okay. Will it be a while? I need to go out to my car and charge my phone for a bit.”
“It might be. Someone can loan you a charger. It’d be better if you stayed in the building; that way we don’t have to hunt you down.
” The phrase was meant in jest, but Andrea’s blood chilled at the words.
Hunt you down. That had always been her biggest fear.
Not the catching—not exactly. It was the slow anticipation, the dread of what might happen when the cat caught the mouse.
And she’d always been a mouse. Both before and after marrying Eric.
The sliding doors opened, and this time it was Eric in the opening, his green scrubs on, his face mask hanging from around his neck. His gaze connected with hers, and she stood and they hugged, right there in the middle of the waiting room, in front of the woman and Walter.
He kissed her neck and his stubble scraped her jaw, and his mouth moved close to her ear and he whispered, barely loud enough for her to hear, “We got this. Be smart.”