gave no clue as to what he was thinking.
“Are you about ready?” His cool tone hit her like a whip. She straightened her spine and moved toward him, pausing until he stepped aside to allow her to precede him. Chief Garraway was on her cell phone pacing in front of the kitchen door while she listened to the person on the other end. She held up her finger as she spotted them. Maggie walked to the love seat and dropped down. She pulled her legs up onto the seat and hugged her knees to her chest, resting her chin against them.
“I want to know as soon as his lawyer arrives. We need to get this situation under control...Sounds good.” Covering the mouthpiece of the phone, she whispered to Lieutenant Willis, “The perp is waiting for his lawyer. Hopefully he will turn on whoever hired him.”
The love seat shifted slightly as Lieutenant Willis lowered himself down beside her. She shifted closer to her side as inconspicuously as she could. Considering the way he smirked at her, she wasn’t very successful. She forgot about her discomfort with his nearness as he rubbed his side, grimacing.
“Are you okay, Lieutenant?” she whispered, casting a glance at the chief, who wasn’t paying any attention to them. “I could get you some ice or a heating pad. I’m not really sure which would be better.”
He sighed. “I’m fine. I’ve had worse.”
Which of course meant he didn’t want her to fuss over him. She rolled her eyes. “Men.”
“What do you mean, men?”
“Get a knife wound, and it’s nothing. Get a cold, and the world ends.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yeah, it is. My husband was all macho, but when he got a cold, he wanted to be babied. He was a horrible patient.”
“Speaking of your husband, it’s time we talked about what happened to him.”
Maggie jumped. She didn’t feel bad as she noticed the lieutenant did, too. Obviously, he wasn’t in top form. He apparently hadn’t noticed his commanding officer approaching them, either.
She shook her head. She just needed to get through this. Drawing a deep lungful of air to steel herself, Maggie turned to face the chief. Surprisingly, though, it was the lieutenant who spoke.
“The last information we have on you is that you started working at the LaMar Pond Journal as a fact-checker three years ago. About two years ago, you made an appointment to come talk with the police. You never kept that appointment. You sent an email stating you needed to reschedule. But you never did.”
Maggie blinked. Nodded. “Yes. I remember. I had forgotten about that.”
The man beside her sat forward, his expression intent. “I didn’t. I was the cop you made the appointment with. Until someone spotted you and called the missing persons hotline, I was looking for a body.”
* * *
It was petty, but there was some satisfaction in watching the shock widen her eyes. He hadn’t been joking. He had been sure she was dead.
“Why would you assume I was dead?” He hadn’t noticed the soft lilt in her voice before, just the softest touch of an Irish accent.
“Remember that case, the trial for Melanie Swanson?” He waited for her nod before continuing. “It turned out several of the jurors had been threatened to give a guilty verdict. Melanie was framed, and the real killers wanted to cover their tracks. A few of the blackmailed jurors eventually tried to come forward to tell the truth, and they were murdered. I thought you had been, too.”
He had a hollow feeling inside as he remembered thinking he had allowed one more life to slip through his hands.
“Wait...she was innocent? That girl accused of murder? Oh, I feel awful! I thought she did it.” Her hands covered her face. Her entire posture suggested she was blaming herself for not seeing the truth. Dan could empathize; he knew only too well how it felt to have your insides torn out by guilt. By the feeling that you hadn’t done enough, hadn’t tried hard enough.
“Don’t. Feel guilty, I mean. You did your duty. If you really thought she committed the crime, then you had to vote that way.”
“If you didn’t make an appointment with the police because of the trial, then why had you made the appointment?” Chief Garraway had stationed herself directly in front of Maggie, a position that said she was in control. Normally, Dan would have remained standing, too. At the moment, though, he couldn’t seem to find the energy to rise. Between spending the past week on the late shift, hunting down Maggie and now getting stabbed, he was whupped good.
Some hair was hanging in his face, annoying him. Shaking it back out of his eyes, he focused on Maggie as she answered.
“I had thought that I was being followed. But almost as soon as I made the appointment, it stopped. I canceled the appointment. I’m sorry. I should have called you in person to tell you why, but I was embarrassed. Then I got married, and I forgot about it...until Phillip was killed.”
“Back to Phillip. Tell me about him.”
The chief’s tone made it clear this wasn’t a request.
Shrugging her shoulders, Maggie’s eyes grew distant. Dan could practically see the thoughts whirling in her head as she searched for where to begin. He could see her pain weighing her down as she remembered.
Dan watched the woman with a clinical sort of interest. She was beautiful, he acknowledged—but that wasn’t what interested him right now. What he found interesting was the tenseness in her posture. Everything about her suggested the willingness to run at a moment’s notice. He had the feeling that the only things that were keeping her in that house at that moment were the two children sleeping in the next room. Somehow he felt that they were the only things that anchored her to anything. He had seen that same sort of wariness in soldiers’ eyes in the battlefield in Afghanistan. Was it just the trauma of seeing her husband killed before her eyes? If indeed there had been a husband. He still felt the need to see some proof of that. Growing up in the foster care system had taught him that there were many people willing to play on others’ sympathy to get what they wanted.
But deep inside, he believed her, although he couldn’t say why.
Just as he was beginning to think that the silence had gone on for too long, Maggie appeared to come to some sort of decision. She nodded her head, lifted her chin and faced them with defiance beaming out of her eyes. The most incredible blue eyes he could ever remember seeing. Where on earth had that thought come from?
“His full name was Phillip Michael Nelson,” she began. Although she appeared calm, he detected a slight tremor in her voice. “We met about three years ago, right after I started working at the Journal. We got engaged a year later. We never really got around to planning a wedding or setting a date. Then one day, Phillip said he had it all figured out, and that we should rush off to Las Vegas to get married.”
“And you just went along with that?” Dan blurted out. He didn’t mean to sound so incredulous, but man, he just couldn’t picture it. How could an intelligent woman not ask the important questions? Questions such as “Hey, honey, why the hurry?” They’d already waited a year.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Maggie snapped. “I trusted him. If it meant that much to him, I was
