Bab—Bab—”
“Babayan,” the dark-haired young woman supplied.
“She says Mommy is dead.”
Grief clogged Linnea’s throat. She had to swallow twice before she could say, “That’s what they told me, too.”
“That means … she won’t ever come home again?”
Linnea hated having to be the one to make her beloved niece understand how final death was. “No. You remember when Confetti died.”
Hanna bit her lip and nodded. The family’s tortoise-shell cat had been twenty-one when she’d failed to wake up one morning.
“You saw her.”
Another nod.
“Whatever made her Confetti wasn’t there anymore. She’d left her body behind and …” Linnea hesitated only very briefly. She had doubts about what happened after death, but she wouldn’t share them with Hannah. “She’d gone to heaven. Well, your mom has gone now, too. It wouldn’t surprise me if Confetti was waiting there to get on her lap.”
“I want Mommy here!” Hanna wailed. “I don’t want her to be in heaven!”
Linnea pulled her into another embrace. “I know,” she whispered. “I know. Oh, honey, I love you.”
Eventually Hanna recovered enough to ask where her daddy was. Linnea explained that he was having to talk to the police about what happened. Hanna only nodded. Linnea had noticed before that she didn’t go to her father with the uncomplicated trust she ought to feel for a parent. Finn loved his daughter, Linnea didn’t doubt that, but he lacked the patience to be unfailingly gentle even for her sake.
“You’re going to spend the night with me,” she told Hanna. “Let’s pack your suitcase right now. Just in case, why don’t we take enough for you to stay for a couple of days?”
The police officer gave her a small nod of approval.
Hanna’s small suitcase, thank goodness, was on the top shelf in her closet. Linnea packed enough clothes for three or four days, while her niece gathered favorite toys and games. Then while Linnea collected her toothbrush from the bathroom, Hanna put on her shoes.
“I’m ready,” she said stoutly, looking very slight and terribly young. Her twin ponytails sagged, one lower than the other, strands of blond hair escaping to cling to her damp cheeks.
Ignoring the wrench at her heart, Linnea smiled at her. “Good. We’ll have fun.”
Officer Babayan followed them downstairs. Linnea steered Hanna straight for the front door, pausing only long enough to collect her pink coat from the closet in the entry. She noticed that the female police officer had very casually moved to block any view that Hanna might have of the great room where the Sorensens mainly lived.
Where Tess must have died.
Hanna almost gulped. Maybe she had hit her head on that sharp-edged hearth.
On the front porch, Hanna stopped in her tracks. “Why are there so many police cars here?”
“When they get a call saying someone is hurt, any officers who are near come rushing to find out if there’s anything they can do. I guess there must have been a bunch of them this time.”
Holding Hanna’s hand, carrying a duffel bag of toys while Hanna pulled the pink wheeled suitcase, Linnea hurried her down the rainy walk and past several of those squad cars to her small compact. She put everything in the trunk, helped her niece buckle in and started the engine. She didn’t like the fixed way Hanna stared toward those flashing lights and the open front door of her house with people going in and out.
As she backed out and drove up the block, Hanna’s head swiveled so she could keep looking back. Linnea hated that she saw the neighbors clustered, staring.
Then the same officer pulled a sawhorse away to let Linnea’s car through, and she was able to accelerate up the street until the flashing lights vanished from her rearview mirror.
MATTHEW LAUGHLIN HAD barely risen from bed and was padding barefoot and shirtless to the small kitchen in his rented Kuwait City house when his phone rang.
Damn it, there had to be a problem on the job site; the offices weren’t open yet, and it was currently late evening in the U.S.
He picked up the phone. “Laughlin.”
The hollow quality of the long silence told him this call was originating in the United States after all. He relaxed; Tess did sometimes call at this god-awful hour. She was a night owl, and knew when to catch him at home.
But it was a man’s voice he heard. “Mr. Laughlin? My name is Neal Delaney. I’m a detective with the Seattle Police Department.”
Matt groped behind him for a stool and sank onto it. His hand tightened on the phone until the plastic creaked. “Tess? Tell me my sister is all right. And Hanna.” God, Hanna. Had they been in a car accident?
Waiting out the silence stripped his nerves raw.
“I’m afraid I have bad news. Your sister is dead.”
“How?” he asked in a hard voice. “What about Hanna?”
“Hanna is fine. She’s with her aunt, uh, Linnea Sorensen.” This time the pause seemed not to be a consequence of international telecommunications, but rather a hesitation. Perhaps reluctance to tell him the bad news.
“Your sister died of a blow to her head. We have arrested your brother-in-law for her murder.”
Son of a bitch. Rage pummeled him, as dangerous as the Kuwaiti cloudbursts.
He had disliked Finn Sorensen from the first time Tess introduced them. Tried to talk his sister out of marrying Finn, hidden his unhappiness when he failed. God knew she’d always stood up for herself, or so Matt had tried to believe. Later he’d worried most about Hanna, a quiet, sensitive child who regularly saw her father throw things when he lost his temper. But murder … That was something else again. It ran deeper, hotter, than Finn Sorensen’s childish inability to withstand frustration.
Matt heard the detective talking, caught only the end.
“.other family?”
“No,” Matt said. “Our parents are dead. I’m Tess’s only family.” His decision was already made. “I’ll catch the first flight I can get on. Today, I hope. I’ll be in Seattle …” Hell. The complexity of time changes defeated him for the moment. “Give me your number. I’ll phone when I get into Sea-Tac.”
He wrote down Detective Delaney’s number, gave his blessing—if you could call it that—for the autopsy, then ended the call. Even as he left a message for George Hanson, the project supervisor for the port facility they were building at Shuwaikh, Matt was already going online to check for flights.
If he could pack and be out of here in half an hour or less, he could catch a direct flight to Washington, D.C., then, after a two-hour layover, another leg to Seattle. With a flick of his finger, he confirmed that he wanted to buy the ticket.
