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She hung up. Staring at his hands, he thought about Shelly and why she hadn’t been enough. He had been tired of being alone, and she’d been available. Right after he gave her the engagement ring, he’d lost interest in her through no fault of hers. It was just him. He had the attention span of a gnat. If she’d suspected he was messing around, she’d never confronted him with her suspicions.
But when he thought of Lily, for the first time, his eyes welled up. He should have dumped Shelly and asked Lily to move in with him. She’d still be alive if he’d done that.
“Stupid!”
“Stone?”
Looking up, he found his boss, Gary Chadwick, staring down at him and not looking too pleased. To his right, just behind him, stood the DA, Alison.
“That’s me,” Alan said.
“You’re under arrest for the murder of Lily Porter.”
Alan frowned. He didn’t get it, like his understanding of the English language had just disappeared. “I didn’t kill Lily,” he said, looking from face to face.
“We almost have a smoking gun, Alan. Come along.”
Behind him, Gary smoothed his palm down Alan’s arm toward his hand to handcuff him. It was a maneuver that all cops did, but this time, it felt intimate, secretive, and Alan cringed.
“You’re going to handcuff me?”
“We’re going to follow procedure to the letter,” the DA said. “You know why.”
He did. A cop accused of murder? The entire police union would be behind him.
“I didn’t kill her,” he said. “Who said I did?”
“A gun covered with your prints…”
“Impossible. I have my service weapon on me.”
“It’s not your gun,” Chadwick said. “It’s registered to Maxwell Markham. A nine-millimeter.”
Incredulous, Alan looked at his boss, his eyes wide, mouth open. “That’s my former girlfriend’s gun. I can tell you when I touched it. She’d just cleaned it after target practice with her father, and I picked it up. I’m sure my prints are all over the gun.” He thought about the moment for a second and smiled. “I bet there isn’t one print of Shelly’s on the gun.”
“Just yours,” Alison said. “And it’s a match for the bullet recovered from Lily’s head.”
He wondered, had Shelly killed Lily? But this wasn’t the time. “Where’d you get the gun?”
“It was found on Sea View,” Alison said. “We have a video of you hiding it there.”
“You don’t have a video of me, I can assure you. I never hid a gun.”
“Why didn’t you just tell us you were having an affair with her?” Chadwick asked.
“Who said I was?” Alan asked.
“Her parents just admitted it to a private investigator.”
“They’re lying. Why’d they wait to tattle? They could have saved us a week.”
“Who knows?”
They led him off to his arraignment, everything perfectly lined up.
Dan sat on the edge of the couch, watching the evening news, waiting for Shelly to get home from work. Breaking news came on, announcing an arrest in the murder of Lily Porter. They showed a wobbly video, probably from someone’s phone camera, of Alan Stone getting out of a patrol car, his hands cuffed behind his back, being led to a back door of the courthouse.
Stunned, Dan straightened up, listening.
