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“You didn’t think to stay with him?” the cop asks, as if I’m some kind of idiot.
I smile tightly. “Like I said, I went after my partner. I had no idea what she would find in his room. She’s new, and she knows the victim.”
He shakes his head. “My boss would kill me if I let a suspect get away like that.”
“Well, fortunately, I’m my own boss.”
“Yeah,” he mutters, closing his notepad. “Fortunately.”
He doesn’t like me. Most cops don’t.
If that bothered me, I would never have lasted this long in this business.
“Can I go?” I ask, eager to get back to the kitchen where I can keep an eye on Leanne.
“Yeah. Send in one of the parents.”
I get up and move back into the kitchen.
My gaze goes straight to the patio doors, where I can see Leanne sitting with Beth, arm wrapped around her while the female cop takes notes in her pad standing in front of them.
I let out a soft sigh and glance at the Hamiltons. They’re both sitting at the table, looking anxious.
“The Officer would like to see Mrs. Hamilton now, please,” I tell them.
She gets to her feet, and her husband squeezes her hand.
“It’ll be all right,” he murmurs to her.
She nods, her face pale as she moves into the other room.
It probably will be all right. These people have money.
Enough of that can make almost any problem disappear.
Too bad that won’t stop the kid from making the same kind of shitty mistake again.
“I looked up in the closet,” Mr. Hamilton tells me. “When you were in the lounge with the cop.”
“If you destroyed any evidence …” I start, ready to warn him that he could have made trouble for himself if he did anything hasty.
He shakes his head. “I didn’t touch anything. I just … I saw the video tape and the headphones and … I knew the shit he was spouting all over the internet. I thought it was just a way to let his frustrations out. I didn’t think he actually … I had no idea he really felt that way about women.”
“We don’t always know what’s going on with family, even when it feels like we should.”
“I should have known,” he says. “The red flags were there. I just pretended they weren’t real and look what happened. That girl … I thought she was going to change him. She’s so lively and sweet, and it seemed like things were going well.”
“He made you think that,” I remind him. “He didn’t tell you the truth.”
He looks bitterly disappointed.
I remember the night my own father looked at me like that.
It was the night I realized Harlan West killed my mother.
I tried to tell him, and he screamed at me to shut up.
As far as he was concerned, my mother was already dead to us. His love for her had died long before my discovery. I was too oblivious, too distracted, to see that.
