Chapter 43
FORTY-THREE
“Is he dead?”
Roy Dennison sat across from me. I’d seen this room a hundred times, but usually from the other side of the window. I supposed Mark Gilchrist sat behind it now. Probably Sheriff Rafferty too.
“I don’t know,” Roy said. “But I’m still the one asking the questions.” We’d been here all night. I could see the sun just starting to rise from the window across the hall.
I lifted my wrists, showing him the cuffs. One of the deputies repositioned them so my arms were in front of me, but wouldn’t remove them. “Are these still necessary? What do you think I’m going to do to you?”
Roy sighed, but reached over and unlocked the cuffs. I rubbed my wrists and sat back.
“Go through it again,” he said.
“Why? I’ve done it twice already. Plus the night I came to your house. Do you think I’m going to change my story? Slip up? I know how this works.”
“Do you? Because right now, all I can see is you’ve been lying to me from day one. The second Corrine Egan told her story in front of you, you should have come to me. Told me about Lock’s proclivities and what you suspected. If you’d done that, maybe they’d both still be alive right now.”
“Is he dead?” I asked again, more desperately. I had watched as two stretchers were wheeled out. Corrine had been pronounced dead at the scene. I watched what I thought was the life drain from Lock’s eyes. But when they took him away, they did it with sirens. Now, no one would answer my questions.
“Two people, Mina,” he said. “One dead. One with life-threatening injuries. You don’t have a scratch on you? You refused treatment.”
“Give it twelve hours. I’ll have bruises all along my torso and my shoulder, Roy.
I told you. Corrine jumped off that bluff.
I didn’t push her. Before that, she had a gun pointed at me.
If your deputies haven’t found it at the bottom of that bluff, they’re not looking hard enough. You think I tried to kill Lock?”
“I don’t know anything anymore,” he said.
“Yeah. You do. You’re accusing me of hiding something.
Except I did come to you. I told you everything that’s been going on.
I gave you photographs. You didn’t believe me.
Instead, you gaslighted me and took the word of a woman who was tragically unstable.
She as much as admitted to me that she was the one who painted my car.
Left that dead bird for me. Sent the photos. I told you. I warned you. You know me.”
“I thought I did,” he snapped back. “You sabotaged the task force, Mina. I want to know why.”
I rolled my eyes. We were getting nowhere. He read me my rights. He cuffed me and dragged me into this interrogation room. But he hadn’t yet arrested me. He was trying to catch me in some lie. I knew Roy well enough to know there was something else going on. Something he wasn’t telling me.
“How did I sabotage it? Daniel Palicki murdered Jade Darby, Lara Pasko, Gretchen Small, and Fiona McBride.”
Something flickered in Roy’s eyes. He was good at this. His colleagues called him a human lie detector test. I knew he knew I was telling the truth. But he wasn’t. I felt it in my bones.
“What?” I asked him. “You might as well tell me. We know each other far too well for games, Roy.”
He slapped a hand on the table. “Fine. Last night, we found Fiona McBride’s cell phone buried in a plastic bag behind a loose brick in Palicki’s fireplace.
And the digital forensics came back on Palicki’s phone.
A couple of interesting things popped up.
I was looking for you. You weren’t answering your phone.
Then, you place a 911 call from your residence.
I show up, I see Corrine dead and Lock nearly dead.
And you… with not a single satisfying answer as to what happened. ”
“Your satisfaction isn’t my problem,” I said. “What do the phone forensics have to do with me?”
“They don’t,” he said. “They have to do with your husband.”
I froze, not even daring to take a breath.
“Lockwood Manning was listed as a contact in both Daniel Palicki’s and Fiona McBride’s phones.”
The walls closed in. The overhead lights seemed to flicker and darken. What was he saying?
“She said she protected him,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Corrine kept saying someone was trying to hurt Lock. That she protected him from someone. She wasn’t making sense.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. But she said it over and over. Someone was trying to hurt Lock. It’s Corrine’s phone you should check.”
“You can see where this is giving me a problem,” he said.
“I’ve got a serial killer out there who leaves silk ribbons as a calling card.
The same ribbon around your own wrist. And the man you said gave it to you is somehow acquainted with both the accused killer, one of his victims, and a dead woman at the bottom of that bluff. ”
There was a knock on the door. Deputy Lennon poked her head in. “Roy,” she said. “I’m sorry. But you asked me to interrupt you if—”
Roy put a hand up, silencing her. He excused himself and went out into the hall for a moment. When he came back, he sat back down in front of me.
“The hospital called,” he said. “Your husband is waking up.”
A thunderclap went off in my head. Lock woke up. Lock was alive.
“He’s asking for you,” Roy said.
I rose slowly to my feet. “Roy,” I said. “If you had something on me, you’d have arrested me by now. You think I withheld evidence? Charge me. You think I killed Corrine Egan? Charge me for that. But until you do, I’m walking out of here.”
Roy grunted. Then he grabbed his keys off the table. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you to him. But you don’t get to talk to him alone.”