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Mac lowered his voice. “It seems Mary Cowell was killed last night.”
CHAPTER 25
A policeman waited outside Theo’s bedroom door as she changed. For a couple of minutes, she just sat on the bed trying to gather her thoughts. Mary Cowell was dead. Young, ambitious, brazen Mary Cowell with her ruthless reporting. The article in the Star had made Theo’s life a nightmare, and she’d hated Mary for it. But dead. She just been here yesterday, holding a gun on Mac… He’d said she seemed frightened.
Theo pulled herself together and got dressed, grabbing jeans and the first top that came to hand. Then she caught a glimpse of herself in the iconic LFK T-shirt and thought better of it. Perhaps it would be read the wrong way. She was an immigrant after all…and Lawrence Fucking Kansas was a local inside joke. Was she entitled to be part of it? She stopped. This was stupid…it was just a T-shirt. She pulled a Jayhawks hoodie over her head, hiding one Lawrence icon with another. Scooping her hair into a ponytail, she opened the door and told the officer she was ready, no doubt reassuring him that she’d not escaped through a window.
There were two police cars outside. She and Mac were invited into separate vehicles.
“Have you called Gus?” Theo whispered.
“Yes,” Mac replied grimly. “There’s a complication.”
“What complication?”
“They want to question him too. They’ve just picked him up.”
Gus was in the station when they arrived. He was furious, accusing Mendes of questioning him simply to deny his sister the presence of counsel. Jacqui Steven arrived, declaring that the interviews could not be held simultaneously as she was representing each of them and would not allow her clients to answer any questions without counsel being present. Mendes was clearly unhappy but it seemed that since Jacqui had invoked their rights, there was little he could do but comply. They spoke to Gus first. Theo and Mac were taken to separate rooms to wait with paper cups of weak coffee. It was two hours before an officer returned for Theo. He handed her a large chocolate chip cookie sealed in plastic.
“From your brother.”
Theo smiled, recalling Gus’s stories about criminals who would confess to anything once their blood sugar dipped. She was hungry, and the vending machine cookie tasted strangely delicious at nine in the morning. She caught a glimpse of Gus as they took her into the interview room. She waved the cookie at him, her mouth full. He winked.
Theo felt calmer now. Jacqui was already in the interview room. She looked fresh, sharp, though she must have been through this with both Gus and Mac now.
Mendes began by asking Theo where she was the night before. Theo told them. They created a timeline then: when she got back to Mac’s house, when Mac returned, when Gus returned, when Mac left, how long he was away, when Gus left, when she went to sleep. Theo was sure about the sequence but not the times, not exactly.
Then Mendes asked when she had last seen Mary Cowell. Theo wasn’t sure whether they knew about the reporter’s visit, so she answered carefully. “I haven’t spoken with her since she approached me at Aimee’s—what was it? Five days ago.”
“And that was when you last saw her?
“No. I saw her yesterday.” The question was too loaded for them not to be aware, and she was still lawyer enough to know lying was a bad idea. She explained that she’d noticed Mary’s car pass the house twice and then seen Mary step out and take photographs of the house on her phone.
They asked her for specifics. “How many photographs?”
“I don’t know… It was a phone, not a flash camera. It might have been video or she might have been taking a selfie with the house across the street, for all I know.”
“What did she do then?”
“I’m not sure… I got away from the window and rang Mac.”
“Cormac Etheridge?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s his house. I was concerned.”
“And then what?”
Theo told them that she’d peered through the curtain, that Mary Cowell had been in her car parked across the road talking on the phone. She recounted Mac’s arrival and what had occurred thereafter.
“Did you see a gun?” Mendes asked.
“Well, no…I didn’t actually see it. I couldn’t see Mary below the shoulder.”
“So you base your claim that she held a gun on Cormac Etheridge purely on his account?”
