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“Could work,” he said.
“Let’s go see.” She led the way into the interrogation room.
“And you’re back. Lucky me,” Lowell said drily. “Did you find the hero behind Katherine’s abduction?”
A bolt fired through Amanda. It was like he’d just dismissed the murdered teenager. But his reaction to them would fit well with how she intended to proceed. She sat down. Trent was already situated.
Amanda clasped her hands on the table. “The three of us are alike.”
“How do you figure that?”
As suspected, this approach had thrown him off. “You have a high regard for justice. So do we.”
“Yeah, right. Our viewpoints on that are completely different.”
“Not really.” Somehow, she managed to keep herself calm and her tone even. “We both take a situation and break it down. Right and wrong, black and white. There are no shades of gray.”
Lowell shuffled up in his chair. She had his attention.
“I can see how much you loved your son, and his mother came between you.” It sickened Amanda to put any onus on the woman he’d murdered. To get him talking though, he had to see her more as an ally.
“She lied about me to a judge. She said I was never there for Tyler, but I was.”
“I have no doubt you were.”
Lowell narrowed his eyes. Her comment had been too fast, too familiar, and he’d taken it as patronizing.
She rushed to repair the damage. “All I know is my father did everything for me. Dads are an important figure in a kid’s life.”
Lowell’s shoulders lowered, his arms and hands less tense. “Not mine. That’s why I vowed to do better by Ty.”
She resisted the urge to coddle Lowell, not about to make the same mistake again. “Katherine would have never understood that though.”
“What would you know about that?”
“I used to work with her. You get to know a person.”
Lowell didn’t blink. Katherine having worked with the PWCPD wasn’t news to him.
“She was a real witch too, wasn’t she, Detective Stenson?” She shifted in her chair to face Trent, and he was bobbing his head.
“Real witch,” he reiterated and looked at Lowell. “She was all about appearances, how she’d look to the bosses. She didn’t care about anything else. Certainly not justice.”
Trent’s words skimmed close to the truth of Amanda’s first impression of the woman, but in the ensuing months, Katherine had clawed her way back to Amanda’s favor. “I know, right? She was willing to sacrifice whoever to get someone put away for the crime.”
“See?” Lowell gestured emphatically with his arm. “So whatever she has coming to her is due.”
Amanda stalled on his reaction, unsure whether it was an expression of guilt or an admission he was in the dark about Katherine’s current whereabouts. “It’s an exciting time for you to be in town. You get a front-row seat for all this.”
A shadow passed over his eyes that Amanda took for Lowell erecting a wall around himself.
She held up a hand. “Not saying you’re behind this. I’m just thinking if she wronged me like she had you, I’d want my own revenge.” A play at his pride.
Lowell’s gaze fell to the photograph of Katherine that was face up on the floor. Amanda retrieved it and put it back on the table in front of Lowell.
Time ticked past in silence, as he stared at the picture, clenching and relaxing his fists in a repetitive rhythm.
“When did you get into town? Just curious,” she tossed out. A switch in topic might unsettle him enough to lower any guard he had raised.
