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“No gun?” I ask stupidly.

Slowly, she shakes her head.

“So...” I say, and I feel like I’m trying to speak from underwater, “he didn’t shoot himself?”

Another slow shake of her head. “Not unless someone removed the gun from the scene afterward.”

“You’re sure ?”

“Very sure,” she says firmly. “But why is that more shocking? You said yourself that you didn’t think he was suicidal.”

“Because he wasn’t...” Parked there for very long . Even in my half-addled state, I quickly back away from this mistake. I’m not supposed to have any idea how recently he’d arrived there. “Because there was nobody else around. And it seemed like it had just happened. When I touched him.”

“He was still warm?” she says softly.

“Yes,” I quickly agree.

“Okay.” She reaches across the table and gives my forearm a squeeze. “I need to ask if you can think of anyone who was angry at him. Did he have enemies?”

“If he did, I never heard about it.”

“Did you meet any of his friends?”

My stomach drops. “No, I didn’t. I got the impression that most of them are in New York.”

And if that’s wrong, he clearly wasn’t interested in introducing me.

“All right. His LinkedIn profile says he was an investigative journalist. Did he talk about work with you?”

“Sometimes.” I rub my eyes, as if it might help to remove the memory of his dead body. “But what he described sounded routine. He had a lot of phone calls with CEOs. Interviewing them about earnings reports. Or something. There were a lot of spreadsheets involved.”

“Anyone specific?” she prodded.

“He talked about trying to pry quotes out of people. But he’d tell me in a comical way. And he never named names.”

“Did he tell you what story he was working on now?”

“No clue. But you could find out. He took a lot of longhand notes. He liked Moleskine notebooks—the hardback kind. He had them in a few different colors. He kept them in a basket on his car’s back seat. He liked working in his car, and I’d started referring to it as his office.”

She frowns. Then she jots something down. “All right. Good tip. Did you notice the notebooks in his car?”

“Last night? Not a chance.”

“How about his laptop or phone. Did you see those? Neither one was found in his car.”

Another shake of my head. “All I saw was his dead body. And I wish I’d never seen that.” Although the only person I have to blame is myself.

“I’m so sorry,” she says patiently. “I have just a few more questions. Do you and your daughter live here alone? How old is she?”

“Natalie is sixteen. It’s just the two of us, plus Lickie.”

The dog raises her head when she hears her name, and her tail swishes a couple of times.

“What a good baby,” the cop says in a soft voice, offering Lickie her hand. “Do you look out for your humans?”

Lickie gets up to give her a sniff, just in case she’s holding a piece of bacon.

“My father gave her to us as a guard dog, but she only looks menacing. She’s the most docile dog ever born.”

Riley grins. “Well, sometimes a deterrent is all you need. Right, girl?”

Lickie accepts some head rubs.

“I need to ask you about other men in your life,” Riley says. “Are you dating anyone else?”

“What? Why?”

She looks back at me with a tired expression. “We need to figure out who’d want Mr. Kovak dead. If someone in your life saw him as the competition, that person might have a motive to harm him.”

Jesus . “You can cross that idea off your list. There aren’t any other men in my life. There haven’t been for years.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Your daughter’s father is... ?”

“Harrison Jones. We were never married, and I haven’t seen him since Natalie was a toddler. That’s when he went to prison.”

She looks up from her notes. “For what?”

“Assault. It was a bar fight. He was abusing drugs at the time.”

I fight the urge to squirm in my chair. I recognize the irony of telling her that no man from my past could have murdered Tim—and then saying in my next breath that my ex went to prison for assault.

“Okay,” she says slowly. “And where did this take place?”

“Here in Portland.”

“What was the fight about?” she asks. “Were you there?”

My stomach drops, like it does every time I think of that night. “There was a guy giving him a hard time, and Harrison basically lost his mind. He’d never been violent before, and it was the most terrifying night of my life.”

“Where was he incarcerated?”

“Maine State Prison, originally. I lost track of his whereabouts more than a decade ago.”

“Is he currently incarcerated?” she asks. I can almost see how badly she wants to whip out her phone and check.

“No. He got out a few years back.” My neck heats again.

“And when did you last speak?” she asks.

“Um...” I try to think. “After he went away, he relinquished his parental rights and stopped speaking to me.”

I don’t tell her that my mother offered him a bribe—a couple of thousand dollars in his commissary account if he’d sign over his parental rights.

He sold us off really cheaply. I’ll never forgive him.

“So, no contact?” she asks. “None at all?”

“None over the past decade, but he emailed once recently.”

“Really, when?”

I pick up my phone again and type Harrison into my email app’s search bar. “Um, May twenty-fifth.” The subject line is I’d like to talk to you about Natalie . I pass her my phone.

She scans the message, her brown eyes serious. “It’s friendly. He’s asking about your daughter and asking for a phone call with you. Did you speak to him?”

I shake my head. “I have full parental rights. I don’t have to give him visitation. He’s an ex-con and a druggie, so I can blow off his emails.”

“Understood.” She taps her chin, thinking for a moment. “Do you own a gun?”

The change of topic surprises me. “Me? No. I’ve never even held a gun.”

“Does anyone else keep a gun in this house?”

“ No ,” I say sharply. “Why are you asking me this?”

She glances up, her pen pausing on her pad. “I have to. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be doing my job. Don’t you want the police to be thorough and find his killer?”

“Of course I do.”

She looks down at her notes again. “You said you’ve been inside Tim’s car?”

“Absolutely. Many times.”

“Which seats?” she asks. “The crime-scene techs will be collecting physical evidence. Looking for DNA.”

“Um, the passenger seat. And once in the, uh, back seat.” My face is the color of a tomato now, and a drop of sweat rolls down my back.

“For sex?” she asks.

“Well, no. Not, um, quite.” That night, I’d felt like a hot young thing as Tim slipped a hand under my skirt. Now I regret everything.

“Did you leave anything in his car?” she asks.

“Besides my dignity?”

She doesn’t laugh.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I need to ask a favor. I’d like to take a set of elimination fingerprints. I brought a scanner.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a device the size of a cordless phone. “Is that okay? By excluding your fingerprints, it will help us figure out if the killer’s fingerprints are in Tim’s car.”

“Okay, sure.”

She pulls out a release form. After quickly skimming the legalese, I scribble my name at the bottom, because I feel I have no choice.

She taps some buttons on the scanner, and it beeps. “Okay, we’ll do it one finger at a time. Please roll each finger from one side to the other. Like this.” She demonstrates on my kitchen table.

I roll my index finger on the screen, and it beeps again.

“Great. Next one.”

Inside, my good-girl complex is shrieking. I don’t want my prints in some database forever. But I don’t want to look guilty, either. So I keep rolling one finger at a time across the little screen.

“After the two of you broke up,” Detective Riley says, “what did you tell your friends about it?”

“Um...” I roll my thumb. “I told my coworker that I was upset. And surprised.”

“Did you tell her you were angry?”

Another drop of sweat rolls down my spine. “Well, yes. And embarrassed.”

“How angry were you?” she asks.

My pulse kicks up another notch, and if I wasn’t agitated before, I’m getting there now. “Look—I was angry enough to finish the Ben and Jerry’s and sulk on the couch. But if you’re implying I might murder a man who dumped me, that’s outrageous.”

The machine beeps after the final print, and I yank my hand back and cross my arms.

Detective Riley squints at the readout, then looks up at me again. “Rowan, I have to ask these questions. If something terrible happened to someone you love, you’d want the police to poke all the sore spots, wouldn’t you?”

I let out a hot breath of air. “Of course I would. And I want you to find the guy who did this.”

“We’re going to,” she says, pushing back in her chair. “I promise. You’ve been very helpful. But you can’t go into work today, because the mansion property is a crime scene, and we’ll probably need at least the weekend.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. “So we can’t go into the mansion?”

“Not yet. We need to take a good look around, in case the perp dropped anything on the grounds. And when you do go back inside, please let us know if anything is missing. Off the top of your head, is there much worth stealing on the property?”

“Um...” I have to think it over. “That just depends what kind of thief you’re dealing with. The stained glass is all valuable. There are several Tiffany pieces, but they’re hard to fence and it would take special skill to remove them. There’s some old furniture locked into rooms upstairs. But again—you’d have to know the market for a nineteenth-century dining chair.”

She scribbles a note. “Anything else? Electronics?”

I shake my head. “I never leave my computer there. Beatrice—the project manager—does, I think?”

Another scribble.

“Take a look at the contractor’s trailer. It should be locked, although tools are sometimes stolen from a job site.”

“Will do,” she says, rising to her feet. “More soon, okay?”

“Thank you,” I say, elated that the interview is over. “Let me know if I can be of any more help.”

“Oh, I will,” she says. “And if you think of anything else that we should know about Tim, I want to hear from you right away.”

She gives me another one of her cards, then opens my kitchen door to go. I’m already mentally collapsing onto the sofa. Before she departs, she turns to look at me one more time. “After we get Tim’s phone data from the cell phone carrier, we might ask for access to your phone records to help us track his last weeks.”

My heart seizes, and I feel my expression harden.

She just stands there. Watching me.

“Okay,” I manage.

She gives me a smile and finally departs. At the sound of the door closing, I let my eyes fall shut, but my heart won’t stop hammering.

That damn app. If I give her my data, she’ll know I was following him.

If I don’t give her my data, I’ll look guilty.

And I wish I’d never met Tim Kovak.