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ing with his sister-in-law. Savvy was saying, “I’d like to talk to you later, if that’s all right.”

Ella’s face was ashen; her eyes were huge. “All right.”

“You’re scaring my employees,” Hale told her.

Savvy sent him a faint smile as she came his way. She wore black pants and a tan shirt, and he saw that she’d hung her black jacket on an empty peg. “I’m dripping water all over your floor,” she said.

“You and everybody else. It’s unavoidable. Come on in.”

As a detective, she wasn’t required to wear the regulation uniform that the deputies sported, which, she’d told him, suited her just fine, because interviewees in the course of her work found it less intimidating—at least until she said something that gave her job away, as she apparently had with Ella.

He held the door and watched her walk across the expanse of his office floor and ease herself into one of the two visitor’s chairs. Circling the desk, he retook his chair. He knew she was here to ask more questions about the Donatella murders, but he couldn’t help just staring at her. It boggled the mind that she was carrying his child. His and Kristina’s.

“How’s it going?” he asked her.

“Good. Dinner last night was just what the doctor ordered. Wonderful stuff. Thank you.”

He waved that away. “What did you and Kristina talk about?” Then he heard himself and said, “Never mind. That’s not why you’re here.”

“No, it’s fine. We talked about the baby a little. It’s getting close now. Could be any time, really, and I think Kristina’s feeling . . .” She hesitated a moment, then said, “Scared. A little.”

Scared a lot, he thought but said, “What about you?”

“Oh, I’m fine.” A shadow crossed her eyes.

“What?”

“I’m being treated like a leper at work. No, that’s not quite right. More like an alien. It’s difficult.”

That faint smile again. Hale examined her smooth cheeks, blue eyes, the auburn hair pulled upward into a messy bun of sorts that looked, well, sexy. A woman in a uniform, so to speak. Who knew?

“What?” she asked, noticing his expression, which he realized had grown a bit wistful.

“I was just thinking about Kristina.” Wishing, once again, that she was more certain of herself, more in control, he thought.

“You’re going to make great parents,” she said, and he wondered if the words sounded as hollow to her ears as they did to his. With that she flipped open the small notepad, which he hadn’t noticed she was carrying, and detached the pen she’d clipped on to it.

She started asking him the same questions as another member of the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Department had asked him months earlier, at the time of the murders. Then, he’d been so stunned by the Donatellas’ deaths that he couldn’t recall his answers as soon as they were uttered; he didn’t know what he’d said. He’d felt like a blathering idiot.

But he sure recognized the same questions now: Where were you at the time of their deaths? What was the tenor of your working relationship? Were you aware of any enemies they might have had?

He answered that he’d been home the night the murders took place. The lawsuits had been at full boil at the time, and there were people mad at both the Bancrofts and the Donatellas, but he did not believe they were mad enough to actually execute Marcus and Chandra. Personally, he and Kristina had been good friends with them.

“When was the last time you saw them?” Savvy asked.

“I saw Marcus that day . . . the day they were killed,” he said soberly. “Chandra the Saturday before. The four of us had gotten together for dinner at our house to bond, I guess you could say. Not just because of the lawsuits, but seeing all those properties condemned . . . We were going through hell. Our engineer, Owen DeWitt, was practically drinking himself to death, and Marcus and I were trying to figure out what to do next. Kristina didn’t even want to talk about it. She was sick about the Donatellas’ house in particular. She loved it.”

“I remember her mentioning it,” Savvy said.

“Chandra felt the same. We were all . . . glum.”

“On that last day, the next Friday, when you saw Marcus?” she prompted.

“We all met at their house. It wasn’t in immediate danger of structural problems. It still isn’t, actually. But the owners had abandoned the surrounding houses, which we hadn’t purchased from them yet, so it was a ghost town.”

“Who’s ‘we?’ ”

“Declan and I met with Marcus. We tried to come up with a plan, but nothing concrete was decided upon. When Declan and I left, Marcus was still at the house.”

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