Page 26

CHAPTER 26

A PLAINCLOTHES COP LEANED against the ambulance beside me and peeled the lid off his coffee, which was still steaming. He was maybe pushing forty, fit, with a short-cut beard. I hadn’t even let him introduce himself before I launched into my statement from where I sat on the tailgate of the ambulance. The police officers stomping in and out through my front door eyed the eggshells on the steps suspiciously as they passed.

“I feared for my life, and I acted with the force I believed was required to defend myself,” I concluded my third run-through of the story. I was trying not to look at my hands, at the cuts the cable ties had left on my wrists. The comedown from the adrenaline and rage was giving me the twitches. “If you want more detail about what happened, it’ll have to be in front of an attorney in a formal setting.”

“You’re a lawyer, huh?” The detective sipped his coffee.

“How’d you guess?”

“I know who you are,” he said. “I’m not here because of the home-invasion homicide. I was actually on my way here anyway, even at this late hour. Hence the coffee.” He lifted the cup. “A call like that? A woman beat a guy to death in her home gym with a barbell? Hell, you know I hit the gas. I’d just picked up this coffee when I heard, otherwise I’d have skipped the caffeine injection.”

I stared at him. The confusion must have been plain on my face.

“I’m Detective William Brogan.” He shook my hand warmly. “I’m heading up the Troy Hansen investigation.”

“Oh, Jesus.” I held my head.

“You said the intruder told you to drop the case,” Brogan said. “Did he mean the Troy Hansen case? Is that what this was about?” Brogan gestured to the front door of my house where the EMTs were wheeling the dead intruder out on a gurney. I wondered how many of my neighbors had been awakened by the commotion and were now watching from their windows.

“I don’t know what this was about,” I said. “I told you three times — I don’t know the guy. Never seen him before.”

“What’s your best guess?”

I tried to organize my thoughts. Brogan gave me time, waiting, leaning, watching.

“The Troy Hansen case has captured everybody’s attention.” I shrugged. “You must know better than anyone that the internet crazies are out in force.”

“They are,” he conceded. “But it’s a big leap from throwing eggs at your door to sticking a gun in your face.”

“My sister and I — we’re still a pretty new outfit,” I said. “We haven’t dealt with a case like this yet. The rest of our cases have been pretty mild.”

I fell into my own thoughts, pondering my hesitation to tell Brogan the truth. In fact, there were a few active — albeit slow-burner — cases on our books at the 2 Sisters Detective Agency that, at a stretch, might have inspired someone to threaten me and Baby. Cheaters. Frauds. Bail jumpers with violent pasts.

But I couldn’t ignore the sense that whoever the man I’d killed was, he was likely to be connected to Troy, to Daisy, to the ten missing people and the box with their things that Troy had found under his home.

I hesitated to reveal any of my thoughts to Brogan. I didn’t know him, didn’t trust him.

“Were you able to ID the guy?” I asked as the second ambulance, the one carrying my victim to the morgue, headed out.

“His name is Martin Rosco,” Brogan said, his eyes wandering over my face. “I’ve seen his work before. Career crook. Thug for hire. Got a couple of priors for sexual assaults. The cable ties — guy loves them. Or did love them.” He shrugged, seemed to see something in my expression. “Don’t break your heart over him, Ms. Bird. You said it yourself — you were acting in self-defense.”

“I thought my kid sister was ... in the other room.” I swallowed. “If I’d known that she wasn’t here, that it was just me, maybe I — ”

“But you didn’t know,” Brogan said.

I gathered myself. It wasn’t easy.

“Where is she?” he asked. “Your sister.”

“She snuck out,” I said. I tried not to let my fury infect my words. I’d save it for when Baby arrived back home. “I called. She’ll be here any minute.”

“Maybe you should get out of town for a while,” Brogan said. “The two of you. We’ll be laying charges on Troy in the next couple of days for his wife’s murder. After that, this will die down.”

“So you were on your way here to try to convince me to drop Troy as a client?” I asked. “Did you see what happened to the last guy who tried to get me to drop a case?”

He gave a quarter of a smile.

“It’s a free country,” I said. “I have every right to look into this case, to help the truth come out, whether for my own interest or for financial gain.”

“And it’s not that I don’t appreciate it, Ms. Bird.” Brogan put a palm up, reasonable. “Dave Summerly told me about the security camera mix-up. That was a good save.”

I smirked. “Never underestimate people’s ability to mishandle technology.”

“Well, it changes our timeline,” Brogan said. “But you’ve probably worked out already that it’s not a silver bullet. Troy still could have come home right after Daisy, got into an argument with her, and killed her. He could have put her body in the back of his truck and driven her to a dumping site that night. He might have just driven the other way out of his driveway and down the street, missed the camera. So you can stop helping now.”

“What if it’s not that simple?” I asked, trying to match the patronizing tone of his last few words. “What if, for once, it’s not the goddamn husband?”

“Tell me why it’s not.”

I looked up at the third floor. My bedroom. I thought about the box of trophies still spread out on my bed. About Jarrod Maloof and nine other missing persons. I hoped the crime scene techs were leaving my room alone. “I just think there’s more to this case than meets the eye.”

Brogan looked smug. “Sure is.”

“What?”

“Did Troy Hansen tell you about his big win?”

I almost said What big win? but stopped myself, not wanting Brogan to know my client wasn’t being wholly forthcoming with me. But it was too late. My face gave me away. Brogan smiled and drained his coffee.

“You know what, Ms. Bird? You’ve been so helpful with all this so far, and after a night like tonight” — he nodded at the ambulance — “you seem like you could use a break. So I’m just going to cut out the middleman.”

He took a folded sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me. Then he saluted me with his empty coffee cup and wandered off. I unfolded the paper, saw it was part of a bank statement from Troy and Daisy Hansen’s joint account.

There had been a direct deposit from an unidentified account about two months before Daisy went missing.

A deposit of $250,000.