Page 141 of State of the Union (First Family 3)

“That’s a problem,” Freddie said.

“Sure is.”

They pulled up to Wes’s place a few minutes later, and Sam’s stomach immediately clenched at what they had to do there. “We’ll be back shortly,” she told Vernon.

“Take your time. Jimmy, stay with the car.”

“Yes, sir.”

Vernon helped Sam out of the car.

“I said I didn’t need a detail, but I’m thankful for you every day. I hope you know that.”

“It’s an honor to work with you, ma’am.”

“Sam. My name is Sam.”

Smiling, Vernon said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Ugh.” Sam walked with Freddie and Vernon up the stairs to the home Audrey had shared with Wes. “I hate how slow I am.”

“You’re moving better than you were.”

“It’s still too slow.”

“Slow and steady wins the race.”

“Whatever you say.”

It took eight minutes to climb the flight of stairs that led to Wes’s apartment.

Sam raised a finger, telling Freddie to give her a minute to catch her breath before he knocked. She ended up needing two minutes, all the while swearing silently over how much it sucked to be injured. “Go ahead.”

Freddie knocked.

The person who came to the door barely resembled the guy they’d met weeks ago. His hair was long and scraggly, he had almost a full beard, and his eyes were dead looking. When he saw it was them, he brightened ever so slightly. “Did you get the guy who killed Audrey?”

“Not yet,” Sam said, aching as his eyes went dull with disappointment. “We wondered if we could talk to you again.”

“Um, sure. My place is a mess. I, ah, haven’t been doing much.”

“That’s okay.”

They followed him into a pigsty. That was the only word for the condition of the apartment. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the home he’d shared with Audrey. Sam hurt for him, for her, for what had been so senselessly lost.

He cleared a place for them to sit on a love seat across from the sofa where he was clearly spending most of his time.

“When we find ourselves in situations like this, without leads to follow, we start over,” Sam said. “We take it from the top as if we haven’t done anything, and we go through it all again. I’m sorry to put you through it, but we need to reinterview you to make sure we didn’t miss something the first time around.”

“You don’t have any leads?”

“No, we don’t. We have his DNA, but it’s not in the system. We’ve received special permission from the mayor to run a familial DNA search on the samples we have, hoping to find a relative who’s been arrested in the past and has DNA on record. But that’s a long shot that can take months, and we don’t have months if we want to find this guy before he kills again. So, we start over.”

“Whatever you need to do,” he said.

They went over every detail again, drilling down into every random tidbit, but they didn’t learn anything new.

“All I do is think about her, about her routine and her friends and the people she interacted with every day, and I can’t come up with a single thing that would’ve led to something like this. Everyone liked her. She was sweet and kind and… I just don’t know how to go on without her.”