Fatal Connections

Chapter 10

Well, that was a crap way to spend the last hour or so. Nice to know I had served my country in order to get treated like this. I wanted to say, "I fought for you people and now my body is wreckage, even though I'm barely in my thirties. Good to know you only see me as a madwoman who would kill her own clients." I cracked the car windows. Chilly air blew in and stung my face. It felt good and reminded me that I was alive.

It also snapped me out of my funk and got me thinking more rationally. Maybe I had overreacted with the cops. Perhaps I should have thought twice before rejecting Sully's offer of Nick's background information. Unfortunately, the post-traumatic stress I suffer is very real and has diminished what little patience and what few social skills I had to start with. Being in court-ordered therapy after an unfortunate incident made it even more important that I try to be cooperative. Especially since I had done nothing wrong. But never mind my awesome tendency to fuck things up. Why did they ask me about Nick?

It was still early enough in the afternoon for there to be plenty of good parking spots in my building's garage. I drive an old Fiesta. Old, as in, made before I was born.

I backed the car in, grabbed my stuff, and tromped up to my second-floor efficiency—a word that applies equally to my furnishings. I tossed my things onto the small workstation positioned behind the sofa, walked over to the tiny kitchen, and dumped the cold coffee so I could make a fresh pot. As it dripped, I turned on my laptop.

After checking email and doing a quick browse for updated headlines, I decided to call Nick. The coffee had sputtered its last few drops into the carafe. I found a mug and filled it up as I explained my morning's semi-grilling.

"At the risk of invading your privacy, should I be concerned that they asked about you?" I said.

"What possible motive would I have?" Nick said.

"That didn't seem to stop them from wondering about me, the one who found the bodies and reported it to the police." I paused. "Not that I don't understand. There are weirdos who commit crimes, then tell the police. Whatever their mental state is, it doesn't apply to me."

But Nick hadn't answered my question. Forging ahead, I put the question to him again, with different words. "Have you ever been arrested?"

The brief pause before he answered made my heart skip a beat. "Well, technically, yes. I took part in a protest against the government's failure to pass adequate gun control laws. I was part of a group of concerned journalists who organized the event after the shooting in Annapolis."

"And they arrested you for that?" I couldn't suppress my disbelief. Not only because I joined the Marines to defend our right to do that very thing, but I couldn't see any way it would suggest a motive to commit murder.

"They told us we didn't have a valid permit," he said. "It's really not a big deal," he added. "They ended up dropping the charges."

"Yeah, well, the detectives were having great fun using your quote-unquote arrest to mess with my head while they questioned me," I said. "Is there anything else from your past that would put you on their radar in terms of motive? Anything at all?"

"Absolutely not." He spoke it without hesitation and with such conviction, I wanted to believe him.