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A sob caught in Emma’s throat, and she pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth.
“Tonight,” she said after grabbing a breath. “Uh, last night, I mean. He called me around eight.”
“Long conversation, short conversation?”
“Short. Just hello, how are you. He was grabbing a moment between courses at the dinner.”
“And that was held where?”
“In a banquet room at the hotel. It was too big a group for a restaurant.”
“Did Mr. Rand mention anything about heading downtown or needing his car for any reason?”
Emma shook her head. “No. Nothing like that. You saidSoHo?”
“That’s right. Do you have any idea why he would have parked there to begin with? It’s such a long way from the hotel.”
“I don’t have a clue.” She bit her lip, trying to focus. “Maybe he didn’t want to drive through Midtown on Friday morning, so he took the Holland Tunnel into the city instead of the Lincoln and parked downtown. Then took the subway to the hotel. But that’s just a guess.”
Lennox tapped his lips a couple of times with his indexfinger before speaking again. “Is it possible your husband went back downtown to purchase drugs?”
She quickly shook her head. “No, definitely not. He didn’t do drugs.”
“Can you think of any reason someone might want to harm him? Someone in his personal life or even someone he knew professionally?”
“God, no reason at all. Wait, I thought you said this was a robbery. Do you think someone he knew—?”
“We’re not certain at this point,” Lennox said. “Shooting someone during a mugging is very extreme.”
The detective seemed to be holding something back. Emma’s trembling resumed, and beneath it she felt a mounting wave of nausea. She bent at the waist, sucking in air.
“Is there anyone who can be with you at this time, Ms. Hawke?” Martinez asked her softly. “A friend or family member?”
Her parents were in the UK, where they’d moved a decade ago, and at the moment her brother was there, too, researching a book. Her best friend, Bekah, was an hour away in Manhattan, and though normally she wouldn’t hesitate to call her, Bekah had suffered a miscarriage the week before and Emma couldn’t imagine imposing.
“Yes,” she lied. She didn’t know how she’d get through the night, but she knew she wanted them out of her house as soon as possible.
“Why don’t we leave you now, then?” Lennox said. “We’re so sorry to have to ask you to do this, but we’d like for you to come to the morgue at nine tomorrow to make an identification. Is that possible?”
“All right...,” she said, then something else occurred to her. “Could you please contact my husband’s brother and let him know? I don’t have the strength to break the news to him.”
There was no way she was talking to Kyle, not tonight anyway.
“Of course. Is he local? Would you prefer to have him make the identification?”
“He lives north of the city in Westchester County, but I’ll handle the ID. If you could just let him know what’s happened.”
She’d set her cell phone on the coffee table, and after pulling Kyle’s contact info from it, she scribbled the details messily on a piece of paper and offered that to Lennox. He thanked her, rose, and drew a card from his wallet.
“Here’s the address for the medical examiner’s office,” he said as he handed it to her. “We’ll meet you there. And it’s fine to have someone accompany you.”
Barely present, Emma led Lennox, Martinez, and the patrolman to the door and lingered briefly by the window as the two cars drove away. In the house across the street, a light blinked on upstairs. Was her neighbor, a snoopy middle-aged woman, peering out the window now, attempting to figure out what was happening?
Emma reset the security alarm, her fingers jerking across the pad. The nausea seemed to have spread through her entire torso, and the back of her mouth now burned with the taste of bile. She wondered if eating something plain would help, but she couldn’t summon the energy to even drop a piece of bread in the toaster. She should lie down, she decided.
She didn’t return to their bedroom, though. The thought of being in that space tonight seemed unbearable. In fact, she couldn’t envision ever doing it again. Instead, she drifted upstairs to the guest room she’d scurried into earlier, which hadn’t been used even once in the year or so they’d lived in the house. She flicked off the light and lowered herself onto the bed, lying flat on her back and trying to breathe.
There was no way she was going to fall back to sleep, she was sure of that. As frayed and ragged as she felt, she was also too wound up. So she simply lay there quietly, staring into the darkness above her and trying to picture what the next few days would entail—beyond the trip to the morgue.
In a few hours, she’d have to break the news to her parents and brother. Touch base with Derrick’s boss. Begin to make funeral arrangements. Field phone calls from friends, neighbors, Derrick’s coworkers, her own coworkers, and Kyle, of course. Emma realized suddenly that there also might be inquiries from reporters on various crime beats. Wasn’t this the kind of story theNew York Postate up? “Exec Slain in Downtown Alley.”
And what about the following days, and the weeks beyond those?
Did she dare imagine what it would be like to come home night after night to an empty house, never to see her husband’s face or hear his low, husky voice again?
And more than that. Did she dare imagine how good it would be to finally feel happy again?
