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9
Then
IT WAS EMMA’S BROTHER WHO FIRST SAID IT OUT LOUD, BUTthe idea had wormed its way into her mind hours earlier, as she stood shivering on First Avenue with Detective Lennox and he announced that the police were eager to speak to her again.
“Em, you need a lawyer,” Griffin told her, and though his voice was low and weary from jet lag, she could see the conviction in his hazel eyes. It was ten at night and they were sitting in the little family room off the kitchen, Emma curled up in an armchair, and her brother on the couch, with his two long legs splayed across the coffee table.
She nodded. “You’re right. But I don’t even know where to start.”
“I took the liberty of calling a friend of mine from college, a guy in the federal prosecutor’s office in New York, andhe recommended a defense lawyer named Peter Dunne. Said he’s brilliant.”
“I’ll get in touch tomorrow, though I’m sure it’s too late for my next meeting with the cops.” Lennox had wasted no time—he’d called her right before Kyle and Jackie arrived and arranged for her to come to the station the next day.
“Can’t you postpone?” Griffin asked.
She shook her head. “My gut tells me it would look bad to put it off.”
When Emma showed up the next day for the interview, the small, sterile interview room she was led to made her heart start to race, but Lennox was cordial at first, like he’d been previously. After a while, however, the mood slowly began to shift, like a fog that rolls in from the water almost imperceptibly but eventually envelops you. He announced they were leaning away from the idea of a robbery gone wrong. There were no signs of a struggle or of Derrick resisting, so why would a mugger have shot him? And there’d been no similar crimes in the area.
“Can you think of anyone at all who might have wanted to hurt your husband?” Lennox asked. She heard something crisper in his tone than when he’d voiced the same question at the house, and to her dismay, she’d felt her face reddening and her breaths quickening.
And that’s when she knew: he thought she might be behind the whole thing. Not as the shooter—they probably already had evidence she’d never left the house—but as someonewho’dpaidthe shooter. At one point she caught a look between Lennox and the other detective, nothing more than a microexpression, but she’d learned to pay attention to soft data like that and this one translated asAre you picking up what I am?
Emma felt gripped by fear, and it was a struggle to get through the rest of the interview. She hired Dunne later that day.
To Emma’s shock she became a person of interest in Kyle’s mind as well. Not right away. In the days immediately following the murder, he continued to be supportive and they sat side by side with his sister at the funeral service. After Emma’s parents and brother flew back to the UK, Kyle started stopping by the house every few days—sometimes with Jackie, sometimes alone—to check on her.
No, the moment things shifted was when Kyle learned she was selling the house.
“Wow, why the hurry?” he asked with a furrowed brow.
“It’s painful being here alone,” Emma fudged, but he looked at her differently after that, always with a hint of suspicion in his eyes, and the next few times he dropped by, he tried baiting her with his comments.
“Any theories?” he asked her one day as she sorted through a hall closet, choosing items to keep or give away.
“Theories?” she said, confused.
“About who could have done it?”
“Nothing beyond what I told the police. About the contractor. And the former colleague who left the company.”
“You really think your contractor might have staked out Derrick and shot him because he insulted the guy’s grouting skills?”
“No, I don’t believe either of them was responsible, and I told the police that. But they asked me to relate anything suspicious no matter how insignificant it seemed.”
“Make a guess then. Who do you think did it?”
“Kyle, I have no idea. The whole thing is a horrible mystery.”
And then a few days later:
“We need to talk about the paintings,” he’d said.
“Okay.”
“You know you don’t get them, right?”
“Of course, Kyle. I know they go to you and your sister. Derrick always made that clear.”
