Page 50 of The Couple's Secret

Josie shrugged. “Let’s go with combined.”

The shade of Dalton’s face was so red it was nearly burgundy. If he was a crayon, he’d be Apoplectic Red.

“You forgot PFA violations,” Meredith informed her.

“Better add them in then,” Josie said without taking her eyes from Dalton.

Meredith, too, pretended to count with her fingers.

Dalton lurched forward in his chair, slamming his palms on the table. There was no reaction from Josie or her colleagues. Like a beast baring its teeth, his head swung from side to side, as if seeking to rattle them. Gretchen took out her phone and answered a text message. Meredith kept counting, mumbling numbers under her breath.

“Just a minute, Mr. Stevens,” Josie said. “Detective Dorton’s almost there.”

He let out a low growl but as the moments stretched on, the anger emanating from his body dissipated. “I didn’t kill no one.”

“How about Tobias?” Josie asked. “Did you kill him?”

“No! I told you?—”

“Did you kill Cora?”

“I didn’t kill no one!” Another slap against the surface of the table.

Meredith sighed loudly. “It’s over thirty.”

“Wow,” said Gretchen. “That’s a lot of wife-beating and stalking.”

Dalton made a noise of exasperation in his throat. “So I knocked Cora around sometimes. She had it coming.”

“Detective Palmer,” Josie said.

Gretchen looked up from her phone. “Yes, Detective Quinn?”

“Remember that case we had a few years back? The one where the guy killed his ex-girlfriend?”

“You mean the guy who’s serving life without parole right now?”

“That’s the one. What did he say when we asked him why he killed his ex-girlfriend?”

“He said, ‘She had it coming.’ I remember because that seemed like a perfectly reasonable explanation for killing the mother of his child.”

Josie hummed in agreement. “Pity the jury didn’t agree.”

Dalton gripped the edge of the table. The muscles of his forearms flexed, and Josie got her first real look at some of his tattoos. On his right forearm was the face of a leopard, inked in black and snarling. Red blood dripped from its teeth. “I told you I didn’t kill no one,” he said through gritted teeth. “What. Do. You. Want?”

Josie made him wait, sipping at her coffee like she had all day, watching him gnash his teeth. “When was the last time you saw Cora alive?”

With his left hand, he reached up and squeezed the bridge of his nose. His outer forearm was swathed in an elaborate tattoo that depicted an angel battling a demon. “Hell, I don’t know. It’s been seven years. We were divorced.”

From the other side of the room, Gretchen said, “That’s weird ’cause at the funeral today, you said she was your wife. Not ex-wife. Wife.”

“I just meant that we had something together. We weren’t nothing, you know. I deserved to be up there with Riley and Tobias’s little bastards. Way more than Hollis, that’s for sure.”

“Over fifteen healed fractures makes me wonder if you’re wrong about that,” Josie said. “Why were you really there?”

Twenty-Seven

She and Gretchen had discussed Dalton’s motive for disrupting the funeral on the way over. Cora had been his punching bag, literally and figuratively, for almost two decades before she disappeared. He never bothered to have a relationship with Riley, and he didn’t express any interest in being a father to her even after she was alone and living with Tobias’s sons. Dalton Stevens had a lot of pent-up anger and he was addicted to the high of making his ex-wife miserable. Josie didn’t know how he’d survived the past seven years without an outlet, but he hadn’t made any attempts to harass his daughter until today.