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“Thank goodness.”
As they stand there at a loss for further words, a female patrol officer approaches the tape from the other side and signals for Tom to step closer, which he does.
“Mr. Halliday, I have a detective who’d like to speak to you,” she announces. “Please come with me.”
Tom agrees and turns back to Emma. “Sweetheart, please go home, okay?”
She nods. In the heat of the moment, her fears about Tom had been nudged aside, but they barge back in now as she watches him duck beneath the yellow police tape. Within seconds he’s swallowed into the throng and is out of sight.
Despite what she indicated to him, Emma doesn’t go home. Instead, she moves farther along the perimeter of the tape, snaking through the crowd and hoping for clues to what has happened. But there’s no telltale evidence, like shattered glass, to suggest an accident, for instance. She does a quick search on Twitter for any news about a fatality in Westport but finds nothing yet.
Finally, she reaches the edge of the crowd, just past the end of the parking lot, and one of the guys in khaki pantsand a dark, short-sleeved shirt, maybe part of the crime scene unit, wanders past her on the other side of the tape, absorbed in a phone call.
“Another couple of hours,” she overhears him say, and then two more words: “paired wounds.”
Paired wounds? What in the world does that mean?
A second later he looks up and, after locking eyes with Emma, turns his back to her.
There doesn’t seem to be any more to learn here. Besides, she’s exhausted and frayed around the edges, and all she wants now is to be home. Tom must still be talking to the police because he’s nowhere in sight.
She troops back up the street toward her car. Though there’s still a sizable crowd near the Halliday building, the main street is deserted, so she stays alert. She’s seen no sign that the police think there’s a threat to public safety, but she’s glad when she’s finally inside the car with the doors locked.
After arriving home a short time later, Emma pops her head into the front hallway and picks up the muted sound of movement in the guest room upstairs. She decides to stick to the main floor—there’s no reason she can think of to fill Brittany in and cause her to panic until they have more information.
She peels off the cotton sweater she’d worn on the train and tosses it in a heap on the banquette. She’s trying to pull her thoughts together, but her mind, already flooded with anxiety and endless questions, has finally stalled.
After settling at the island, she checks Twitter again, but turns up nothing about a death. Maybe Tom will be able toinfer certain details from the questions the cops ask him and can tell her more when he comes home. The wordswhen he comes homeecho in her head. How can she possibly be alone with him and pretend everything is normal at this point? Tom didn’t seem to pick up on her distress when they were by the parking lot, but he’ll surely guess something’s wrong when it’s just the two of them.
Her phone rings, and Emma nearly flings herself across the island to grab it, thinking it’s someone calling to tell her what on earth is going on. To her surprise, Lilly Shelbourne is on the other end of the line.
“I just wanted to be sure you made it home, and that you’re okay,” Lilly tells her.
“That’s so sweet of you. Yes, all set.” There’s no point in sharing the Westport news with her when she has so little idea yet about what’s happening.
“I still feel terrible that I never put two and two together about Derrick coming downtown that morning and then being killed in SoHo the next night. Those events never seemed connected at the time.”
“Don’t worry, Lilly. As I said before, it’s pretty clear they’renotconnected. The real question is why he went back to the parking garage Saturday night, and we might never know the answer.”
A few seconds of silence follow, heavy as wet sand.
“Oh god, I actually think I know,” Lilly says.
Emma’s heart skips. “What do you mean?”
“Derrick was actually planning to see Chris that Saturday night. They’d rescheduled from Friday morning.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me this afternoon?”
“I had no idea then. But after you left, I was feeling awful about the whole thing, so I decided to check Chris’s old email to see if it might shed any light. He never shared his password with me, but after he died, I managed to access his account, and I found out that Derrick was supposed to come back to our place the night he died.”
“Huh, weird.” That makes no sense to Emma. “The cops reviewed Derrick’s emails and texts, but they never said a word about him planning to see Chris that night.”
“The exchange I found actually wasn’t between Derrick and Chris—it was Chris and Jacob Whaley, this gallery owner he used to buy art from. And, in fact, it affectsyou, Emma, because it’s about one of the paintings you have. I hate telling you this—and bear in mind, it might not be true—but it looks like Chris thought it was a forgery.”
The breath freezes in Emma’s chest.
“Here, I’ll forward the email,” Lilly says. “Let me know when you get it.”
