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I shrugged. "I can't say. It was on top of my inbox, but I haven't used that office for months because I'm on a leave of absence from my fellowship because of the attack...."
"It was found at the cabin where Derek Richardson was murdered."
"What?" I said and glanced from McDonald to Mahood and back. “Are the cases connected?” I asked, wondering about Derek’s fate.
“You were friends,” Mahood said, as a statement of fact rather than a question.
“Yes,” I said. “Acquaintances. We ran in the same circles. I already told you that I contacted him when I found out Lisa was in the NYU neurosurgery program.”
“You were concerned about it and felt he could provide you with some information about Dr. Monroe?”
I nodded. “I wondered what she’d been doing since the last time I saw her, which was more than a couple of years before.”
“Why were you interested?”
I sighed. “She was pushing things between us. I wanted to get a sense of her mental state from Derek. They'd been involved for quite some time. If anyone knew her, it was him.”
“What did he say?” she asked, her face impassive.
I shifted in my chair. “He said they had broken up not long after our last meeting. She was no longer happy; he was no longer happy. She had another involvement soon after.”
"Do you know the name of this involvement?"
I shook my head. "No, but from what I understand, he was her submissive partner."
"He liked to be submissive?" Mahood said, her face not changing expression. Beside her, McDonald tried but failed to hold back a smile, turning away slightly to hide his grin.
"Yes, Detective," I said, unwilling to pretend I was embarrassed. "Some men like to be submissive in a relationship."
"But not you," she said, turning back to me, a barely-suppressed smile on her lips. She was unable to hide the contempt she felt in the sound of her voice, which was lightly mocking. "You were the one who liked to be dominant. You want – you demanded that things go your way."
"In my relationships within the community, yes," I said. "They were all safe, sane and consensual. Every single partner I had consented to our relationship. I take pride in that."
Lara laid a hand on my arm as if to warn me not to get too emotional. I tried to relax and sat back in my chair, breathing in deeply.
"Dr. Morgan, we’re very close to making an arrest in the murder of Derek Richardson," McDonald said and closed the file. "You can imagine we're curious how your paperweight came to be at a crime scene."
"Lisa Monroe must have taken it from my office at NYU and placed it there," I said and glanced at Mahood. "She had the opportunity. Then, I remembered the time I found her in my office after I had left for a brief moment to speak with a colleague down the hall and hadn't locked my door.
"Why would she leave it there?"
I shrugged. "Maybe because she wanted to implicate me?"
Mahood looked back down at her file and flipped a page. "We have a few suspects, based on previous relationships with Dr. Monroe. When we arrest someone, you’ll be the first to know.”
“So I take it that means Dr. Morgan isn’t a suspect?” Lara said, her voice insistent.
“I didn’t say that," Mahood replied and glanced up at us. "I didn’t say he was a suspect either. You know well enough that we must explore every avenue in murder cases like Mr. Richardson’s. Very often, the intimate partners are our first persons of interest. Friends, spouses or lovers.”
Lara shook her head in disgust and met my eyes. I could see fire in them. She wanted to argue more with Detective Mahood, but she gritted her teeth and exhaled instead.
“Are we finished?” Lara said acidly.
“Yes,” Detective McDonald said, his voice pleasant. “Feel free to leave.”
“Stay in town, Dr. Morgan,” Mahood said, her voice dripping with warning. “Now is not the time to be going on business trips or anything.”
“I have no plans to leave,” I said, trying hard to keep the acid out of my voice, but I mostly failed. “I’m waiting to hear who you finally arrest. Derek was a friend, even if we didn’t speak much for the past couple of years. We were both busy with our lives.”
