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“You are.” Sadie took a seat across the coffee table from her. The weapon nestled against the small of her back scrubbed at her bare skin. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“I couldn’t stay at that lovely resort,” Naomi announced with a big breathy sigh. “Though I do appreciate your thinking of my safety. I was never afraid.”
“Yeah. I get that.” Sadie removed the thumb drive from her front pocket and tossed it on the table. “I thought you might want this.”
Naomi stared at the incredibly small device and laughed. “Well, I’ll be damned. I searched this house from top to bottom and never found that thing. I caught Asher with it once, and I knew he had something incriminating hidden on it, but I just couldn’t find it.”
“I have only one question for you,Iris.”
Naomi laughed again. Probably the weed.
“Did you kill Asher?”
Shock claimed her face. “Of course not! How could you say such a thing? I loved him.”
Images of Asher’s smile, his eyes, flashed across Sadie’s vision, sparking a powerful need for revenge. “Why don’t you tell me who did?”
Naomi carefully tapped out the fire at the end of her joint and settled the remainder on the edge of the ashtray. “I thought Lee had done it.”
“His father?” Surprise trickled through Sadie, though it shouldn’t have. The bastard apparently had a lot to lose.
“I’m sure you’ve established the identity of Harvard.” Naomi said this with a sort of nonchalance that warned she was as high as a kite.
Sadie nodded. “I never could get right with the whole parent-killing-the-kid thing.” Not entirely true but she had to keep the conversation going. Either that or she would put one between the woman’s overly dilated pupils here and now.
Devlin would be pissed. She wanted to solve the whole case, not just Asher’s murder.
“Please, men like Leland Walsh have no true moral compass behind the facade they present to the rest of the world. He would kill his own mother if necessary.”
“The two of you are partners in the distribution game with the Osorio cartel. Asher found out and planned to take you down.” No need to beat around the bush.
“Actually, it was Lana who figured out there was something between myself and her husband. But she was never able to catch us. She was never that bright, you know. Frankly, luring her husband into business as well as my bed was quite easy. She thought she’d married into this fine, upstanding family when, in fact, dear old Harvard is as underhanded as they come. As soon as he figured out what I was doing, he wanted a slice of the pie. Helped cultivate new distribution channels all the way to Canada. Everyone was pleased.”
“Why would you set out to steal your sister’s husband?” Sadie didn’t actually care; she was merely curious for the purposes of putting all the pieces together.
“Our mother, God rest her no-good soul, left me here with my father. I put up with his mental abuse my entire life until the COPD killed him. By then I’d considered all sorts of ways to kill him myself, but thankfully I didn’t have to. I realized, of course, what mother chose to do was not really Lana’s fault. But Lana’s decision to take her son—towhom I had grown quite attached—away from me was her fault. She shouldn’t have been so cruel. I decided it was only fair that I make her pay for that shameless decision. Oh, and I made her pay in all sorts of ways.”
Sadie gritted her teeth and let the woman carry on with her confession. Too bad she hadn’t turned on her phone’s recorder. Just went to show it was never good to be emotionally involved in a case.
Just her fucking luck to make the same mistake twice in one shitty lifetime.
“Why did you let Asher go too far?” Sadie said, her voice catching in spite of her best efforts. “Why didn’t you do something?”
“That was her fault,” Naomi said miserably. “Asher found out his mother believed his father was having an affair, and he started digging around. Sadly he found far more than the affair. He even had me fooled at first.” She sighed. “I had no idea the only reason he took the appointment here was to get close to me again. To find the truth.”
“You understand,” Sadie said, barely holding on to her emotions, “his murder is as much your fault as the shooter’s.”
Naomi nodded, her expression distant. “I do, and for that I cannot forgive myself.” She made a dry sound that was likely intended to be a laugh. “Or her.” Her lips tightened. “My idiot sister even called me in the middle of the night last night demanding to know if her husband was here.” She snorted. “Like I would have told her if he had been. Twisting the knife a little harder was all I had left.”
Sadie’s spine stiffened as her instincts kicked in more fully. “Have you spoken to or seen him?”
“Not since the day before yesterday,” Naomi said. “As I said, I presumed Lee had killed Asher, and I needed him to tell me I was wrong. Not that it mattered who pulled the trigger. Asher’s death was like my own. Worse, actually. My one goal from that point was to survive long enough to see that his killer was found.”
All those years she had spent as a cop nudged at Sadie to call for backup, but she didn’t dare slow the momentum of the conversation.
Despite her concern for what Naomi might have in mind, Sadie had to ask, “Did he tell you what happened?”
“He said he knew who had killed Asher, and he was going to have his revenge the old-fashioned way. The way they did things in the Bible.” She laughed, another of those dry, brittle sounds. “I wasn’t sure I believed him, but he refused to meet with me. Just as well, I suppose. I would probably have killed him with my bare hands, and that would have been a mistake. You see, when Lana called last night, quite hysterical, she said all sorts of unpleasant things. Including the fact that on Sunday night she and Lee had a terrible fight. She actually slapped him. Obviously, Lee couldn’t have killed Asher if he was in Boston arguing with his stupid wife.”
