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“Uh-huh. Where were you?”
“I wasn’t here,” I said. “Rita called me—Astor ran away, and I went home to look for her.”
Deborah curled her lip. “Home,” she said, with heavy irony.
I ignored it. “Astor came here, to be on location, and I came to ask if Jackie had seen her, and …” For no good reason, I looked back to where Jackie’s body lay. “And there she was,” I finished, rather lamely.
Deborah was silent, and I watched her. She was still staring at me with unblinking frostiness, but at least she hadn’t reached for her cuffs yet. “Where is she now?” she said at last.
I looked at her, wondering whether she had lost her mind. “Deborah, she’s right there,” I said, nodding toward the body. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“Astor,” she said through her teeth. “Where is Astor?”
“Oh,” I said, oddly relieved. “I don’t know. With Robert somewhere.”
Deborah looked at Jackie’s body again, then shook her head. “You left her here alone,” she said. “And he got her.”
“What?” I said, filled with righteous indignation and certainty. “It wasn’t Patrick. The stalker—it couldn’t be!”
She looked back at me. “Why not?”
And she had me there, of course. If we were still enjoying our old bonhomie, I might have told her why not, explained that Patrick the stalker was no more. But as things stood between us now, I did not think I could explain away one death by confessing to another. So I did what Dexter does and temporized. “It doesn’t look like the way he works,” I said carefully. “And, you know. Both eyes are still there.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, just the way I’d heard her say it many times before when she was trying to get a suspect to keep talking. And for some reason, it worked on me.
“And anyway,” I babbled, “how could he get in here? There’s cops all around the perimeter, all over the place. Nobody could get past them.”
“Nobody who didn’t belong here,” she amended.
“Yes, of course.”
“Like, for instance, an extra? Maybe an extra who was also her boyfriend?” And she put an awful lot of venom into that word.
“All right, Deborah,” I said, and if my tone of voice revealed that I was peeved past caring, fine. “If you’re so mad at me that you’d rather lock me up than get whoever really did this, fine. Get the cuffs. Take me away and be a hero, the hard-ass who locked up her brother for a murder he didn’t commit.” I held out my hands, wrists together for the cuffs. “Go ahead,” I said.
Deborah looked at me a little longer, as if she might really do it. Then she shook her head and hissed out a long breath between her teeth. “All right,” she said. “One way or the other, it’s not my problem.”
“Deborah—”
“Don’t even bother,” she said. “I don’t give a shit.” And she turned away from me and took out her phone to call it in.
I have been on the scene of a great many homicides, professionally as well as personally, but I had never before been there as the person who found the body. And I had never been there as a suspect, either, even when I was guilty. I found it to be a vastly different experience, and I didn’t like it—especially when Detective Anderson arrived to take charge.
The first thing Anderson did was to usher Deborah out the door, and then he stumped around the trailer and grumbled and hissed and bullied Angel-No-Relation, who had arrived to handle the forensic side of things. And when he finally got around to taking me aside for questioning, he did not behave like a man talking to a professional colleague caught in unfortunate circumstances. Instead, he took me by the elbow and pulled me off to stand by the refrigerator. We stood there and he gave me a long and hooded stare. I waited politely, but he just stared, obviously convinced he could soften me up before dragging an incriminating statement out of me.
My phone chirped. I reached for it, but he shot out his hand and clamped it on my wrist. I looked at him with raised eyebrows; he shook his head. It didn’t seem worth fighting about, so I let go of the phone and looked at him, waiting for him to do something that might hint at an intelligence higher than the refrigerator’s. I waited in vain, but he finally shook his head and favored me with a slight frown.
“Some blanket,” he said.
It took me a moment to understand what he meant. It must have shown on my face, because he went on. “You said you were protecting her.” He sneered. “Like a blanket.”
It is usually best to stay polite and meek when being questioned by a detective, but the meekness had drained out of me with Jackie’s death, and I was irritated enough by his cheap shot to give it right back. “Some detective,” I said. “You said you’d find the killer.”
He blushed very slightly, and then shook his head. “Maybe I have,” he said, and there was no way to misunderstand him this time.
“You haven’t,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Except it’s always the boyfriend, isn’t it?”
