frowned. “If so, she wouldn’t admit to it. I had my suspicions. A couple of bruises she laughed off. A broken wrist she claimed she got by slipping on an icy sidewalk. Broken collarbone that was supposed to be a ski injury.”
Delaney scribbled in his notebook. “We’ll follow up. I haven’t had a chance to talk to her doctor yet.”
Matt braced himself and asked, “What does Hanna say?”
“A female patrol officer spoke to her while they waited for Ms. Sorensen to come get her. The little girl says Mommy and Daddy yelled a lot and sometimes things crashed. She apparently scuttled for her bedroom whenever they started to fight. She was pretty scared, and Officer Babayan didn’t push it. I’ll need to talk to Hanna myself, maybe with her aunt present so she feels comfortable.”
“Or heads off any honest answers.”
Delaney sat back in his chair, contemplating him. “That your impression of her?”
Matt was ashamed of how little impression he actually did have of Linnea Sorensen. “No,” he said finally. “But it stands to reason she’d want to defend her brother.”
“Maybe.” His eyebrows pulled together. “I saw her when she arrived at the house as Mr. Sorensen was being taken out in handcuffs. She didn’t exactly rush over to hug him, and he talked to her like she was the family maid. Not real warm and fuzzy.”
Matt thought back to those Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners when they’d all been in that ugly, ostentatious house that was Tess and Finn’s pride and joy. Offhand he couldn’t remember brother and sister ever talking; in fact, he’d seen her quietly slide from a room when Finn entered it.
Okay, maybe she didn’t like him, either. That would be a point in her favor.
“I don’t know how they feel about each other. His parents think he walks on water, I can tell you that.”
Another note.
“When did you last see your sister?”
“Thanksgiving a year ago. I was here for a week. Finn was midtrial and hardly home. Tess took the week off and she and Hanna and I did tourist things. Rode the ferry, went up the Space Needle. We’d intended to ski, but there wasn’t enough snow for even Crystal to open.”
Delaney nodded. The previous winter had been wet but warm, a disaster for winter sports businesses.
“Finn was cordial enough when I saw him. We both … tried. For Tess’s sake.” Finn, Matt sometimes thought, disliked him in part because he felt obligated to be on his best behavior when his brother-in-law was in residence. Tess told him he was imagining things.
“I’d like a few answers, too,” he said, voice implacable. “You say Tess hit her head on the coffee table. What makes you think she didn’t stumble and wham into it wrong?”
“The medical examiner says there was too much force applied. Her skull was shattered.”
God, Matt thought. I didn’t want to know that.
He frowned. Yeah, he did. He owed it to his sister to find out the worst. He hadn’t been able to protect her, but he could be sure justice was served.
“He’s going to bring in an expert to testify that if she was hurrying when she stumbled she could have flown forward and hit hard enough.”
“Uh-huh, but here’s the compelling part. If you fell, you’d hit the top edge.” Delaney ran his hand along the rim of the conference table. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Matt agreed.
“Your sister didn’t. Tissue and hair embedded in the wood shows that the force of the blow was along the side and the sharp edge at the bottom of the tabletop rim. The only way that could happen is if she rose up from beneath the table and hit her head—”
“In which case there isn’t enough force.”
“Right. The alternative …”
“Is if somebody lifted the whole coffee table and swung it at her,” Matt finished softly.
Tissue and hair. Goddamn it.
“You got it.” The two men looked at each other, and Matt saw pure determination in Delaney’s eyes. He wasn’t going to let Finn walk.
Reassured, Matt held out his hand. “Thank you.”
One shoulder jerked. “Just doing my job.” But they shook, and Delaney walked him out. “Where can I reach you?”
“The Silver Cloud on Union Bay. I’m going to look at rentals today, though. I figure I’ll be staying in Seattle, at least through the trial. I intend to have Hanna with me.”
Those eyebrows rose again, but Delaney didn’t comment. “I’m going to ask you to stay away from Mr. Sorensen.”
“I have every intention of doing so.” Matt’s tone hardened. He’d been furious to find that Finn had walked out on bail within twenty-four hours of killing Tess. “Unless he tries to take Hanna home with him.”
Matt had been relieved by Linnea’s phone message, which made it clear that she still had the six-year-old. He was annoyed at himself for apparently sleeping through the ringing phone last night, but God knew he’d been exhausted. He’d see Hanna tonight. With a little luck, he’d have a house to move into within the week.
Normally if he’d planned to be in the area for a few months, he’d have gone for a condo. Why take on mowing and weeding? But a child should have a yard. A swing set, a playhouse, someplace to kick a ball. His ideas were vague. He didn’t actually remember seeing Hanna play outside in the yard in Laurelhurst. When he and she kicked around a soccer ball, they’d walked down to a nearby park.
His guess was that Hanna hadn’t had many opportunities to hang out during the day at home. Both her parents tended to work six days a week minimum and, except during the summer, probably picked her up from after-school care and got home after dark. She’d told him once that she was practically always the last kid picked up. She had sounded wistful, but when he tried to talk to Tess about it, she rolled her eyes and said, “Have you seen her day care? It’s an amazing facility with great teachers. Saturdays they go on field trips, and the rest of the time they do art and put on plays. She’s learning to speak Spanish and about architecture from walking tours and …”
She’d gone on and on, extolling the virtues of Rolls Royce of day-care centers. His guess was that a kid who’d been in school all day probably didn’t want to then go straight to language lessons or be organized to put on a play or do anything else supervised. That was not how he and Tess had grown up. They’d had a stay-at-home mom. Sometimes they’d been in organized activities—Little League for him and dance lessons for her. But mostly they’d been able to get off the school bus, have a snack then go to a friend’s house or read or watch TV. Their entire lives hadn’t been organized the way Hanna’s was.
But he also knew that Tess’s interior-design business had been her dream. It was important to her. What was she supposed to do? Close it down until Hanna was a teenager? She’d actually gone to part-time Hanna’s first year and had sounded
