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  “I don’t know,” I say, looking at the clock on the wall, “about an hour ago maybe? I could check my cell phone. I called James after I got off of the elevator.”

  “Maybe later,” the detective says. “Did Mr. McDaniel seem agitated when you left?”

  “Well...” I start, but I don’t want James to find out that I’ve been protecting him from what I’ve had to live with at work, so the sentence trails off.

  “It’s my understanding,” the detective says, “that minutes before you left his floor, he had been publicly reprimanding you. From what I hear, he was screaming at you about something.”

  James looks at me with nothing but pure confusion, and the remaining pain in his side. “He was screaming at you?” he asks. “You always told me that Rory was a great boss.”

  “I didn’t want you to worry about me,” I say, finally permitting myself to turn and look at James straight on. “He wasn’t always the most... pleasant man to work for.”

  “So, you would say that he was agitated when you left,” the detective says, and I can’t help but feeling that my hiding the way that my boss treated me—I can hardly believe that I’m using the past tense—from my husband has gone a long way toward damaging my credibility.

  “He had yelled at me,” I say quietly, “but he apologized and told me to take the rest of the day off.”

  The detective makes another note. “Was that a normal thing for him to do? You know, scream at you and then let you go home?”

  “Not really,” I say, but quickly add, “I mean, it’s happened before, but he usually doesn’t send me home.”

  “But he does chastise you on a common basis—I’m assuming publicly?” the detective asks.

  “Rose, if he was doing this to you, why didn’t you just quit?”

  “I didn’t want to feel like I wasn’t contributing,” I say, and my fiancé-for-now must be losing a great deal of trust in me.

  “Rose,” James says, “you know that my parents left me enough that you never have to work if you don’t want to. You told me that you worked there because you loved what you were doing.”

  I look to the detective, but it seems that he’s satisfied enough with James’s questions at the moment that he doesn’t need to interject. “That’s your money,” I say. “I didn’t want you to think that I was a burden, or that I was just after your bank account.” The way I’m saying all of this is implying some sort of ego that I never thought I had.

  “Rose,” the detective finally speaks, “did you kill Rory McDaniel?”

  The tears are back, and I answer, “No.” I look at James. “You have to know that I would never hurt anyone.” I look back to the detective, and I feel like I’m already bound to the stake, just waiting for the villagers to spread the fire around me. “He was that way to everyone,” I say. “I never liked being yelled at, but I would never kill him.”

  “You know what?” the detective asks, tapping his notepad with the end of his pen, “I don’t think that you killed anyone.”

  “Oh thank god,” I breathe, and I’m sobbing openly now. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  The detective holds up his hand. “Before you start a new religion in my name,” he says with half a smile on his face, “there are a few things that we need to go over. Did you see anyone else enter the office, or approach his office as you were leaving?”

  “No,” I say, “nobody.”

  “I really need you to think hard here, Rose,” the detective continues. “Is there anyone you know of who might want to hurt the deceased? Anyone with a grudge? Personal or professional?”

  I chuckle through my tears, and answer, “Like I told you, Mr. McDaniel treated everyone the way he treated me. I don’t know of anyone who would go as far as to actually try to hurt him, but he did rub a lot of people the wrong way.”

  The pain seems to have left James’s side and moved into his eyes. I don’t know if that pain is there because I lied to him, or because of the way that I was treated, but I do know that I’m responsible for it being where it is.

  “Did anyone make any threats against Mr. McDaniel, even in passing or jokingly?” the detective asks.

  “There was the usual office stuff, I guess,” I say, wiping my nose with my sleeve. “I don’t think anyone said anything about actually stabbing him, though.”

  “Who said anything about stabbing?” the detective says, his ears perking up.

  “Oh my god,” I breathe, “I forgot about Melissa.” I go to stand up, but the detective holds up his hand.

  “Who’s Melissa?”

  “She called me,” I say. “Right before the police came. I never hung up. She might still be on the phone.”

  “It’s true,” James says, trying to offer something to help me out of this. Even though I doubt this is going to be the thing that removes all suspicion, it’s just good to know that he still loves me enough to try. “She got a phone call less than a minute before I heard the cars pulling up.”

  “Where is the phone?” the detective asks.

  I point toward the bookcase, now a broken shell of the masterpiece it had been only a short time ago. The detective walks in the direction that I’m indicating and finds the phone on the ground.

  He puts the phone to his ear and says, “Hello?”

  Apparently the line is still open because he has a quiet, brief conversation. A minute passes, then two. Three minutes, and I’m starting to wonder what they could possibly be talking about when the detective looks at me, his eyes inscrutable, but focused.

  “Thank you,” he says finally and sets the phone on the now ruined bookcase. I can hear the other officers somewhere in the house, tossing the place as the detective walks straight to me and tells me to stand up and turn around.

  “What are you doing?” James asks.

  “Rose Pearson, you are under arrest for the murder of Rory McDaniel. You have the right to remain silent...” the rest is a blur of confusion and disbelief, and I can only assume that he finished the Miranda when he asks if I understand my rights.

  Right now, I don’t understand anything.

  Chapter Four

  Handcuffs

  I’m taken away from James and stuffed into the back of a cop car. I don’t know why this is happening, but it’s a mistake. I know that I had nothing to do with Mr. McDaniel’s death. He may not have been in the top twenty of my “favorite people” list, but it would never even occur to me to kill him. I don’t want to kill anyone and I never have.

  The detective is trying to hide his pride in having “apprehended his suspect” so quickly, and with so much ease, but it’s not working. He informed me of my rights, and I said that I understood them, but right now I’m too afraid to say anything else. I don’t know why this is happening, and I don’t know what’s going to make things worse.

  “So,” the detective says, still trying to hide his smile. “You seem like a nice person. I can’t help but wonder what would cause someone like you to just snap and kill her boss.”

  He’s baiting me. After I was read my rights, and I acknowledged my understanding of them, he asked if I wanted to make any statements. I said, “No.” What he’s doing now is a bit of a gray area: he’s trying to get me to respond to him, but he’s not actually questioning me. What he’s doing is trying to get me to waive my Miranda rights and talk to him.

  I have nothing to hide, but that didn’t stop him from arresting me. It didn’t stop those officers from breaking into our house without identifying themselves and it sure as hell didn’t stop that jerk Robertson from assaulting James, so I’m not about to say anything to this snake.

  “I wonder,” he says to himself. “Could it have been that you were just frustrated from years of abuse? Maybe you found out that he was going to fire you. Or maybe,” he looks in the mirror, still technically talking to himself, “it was a jealous rage. From what I understand, your boss had called some woman to take over for you when he told you to go home early. I know this sort o
f thing happens all the time, but it still doesn’t make things right, you know. Bosses will have an affair with someone that works for them, and then just drop them without so much as an explanation. Next thing you know, he’s off doing the same thing to somebody else.”

  Yes, I’m offended at the suggestion, but I’m not about to play this guy’s game. When I’m able to contact my lawyer, things will get worked out; I’ll be released and the police can start looking for the real killer.

  “I wonder,” the detective says again.

  We finally pull up to the police department. I had assumed that they’d be taking me straight to jail, but apparently that’s not the first item on the agenda.

  “Well,” the detective says, “we’re here. I’ll be around to let you out of the back in a moment, and we’ll get you all processed in so you can start enjoying your new life. You’ll have a blast. There are people to meet, activities to keep you busy... If you play your cards right, you can even pick up a degree or two if you decide to stick to the slanted and thin.”

  I’m assuming that “slanted and thin” is a reference to how things in prison are never quite straight and narrow, but I’m not about to ask for clarification.

  The detective finally gets out of the car and waits for a pair of officers before opening my door. As they pull me out, I can’t help wondering how James is doing. I’m concerned about what the officer did to him but, to be honest, right now I’m a little more concerned about what he must be thinking of me. I keep trying to tell myself that he loves me and that he believes me, but there’s that same awkward teenage girl in there, telling me that he thinks I’m a murderer. It’s making me physically ill.

  “All right, Miss Pearson,” one of the officers says, “we’re going to book you in. Remember, you can waive your right to remain silent at any time. It might just help to make this whole process go a lot—”

  “You’re wasting your breath,” the detective says. “This one’s real cold. One of the worst I’ve seen, probably.”

  I know he’s baiting me, but somehow that last statement really digs into me, lodging itself directly under my skin. “I am not a murderer,” I hiss in a voice that I hardly recognize, “and I sure as hell am not a psychopath.”

  “She speaks,” the detective says. “Am I to understand that you’re waiving your rights?”

  “Lawyer,” is the only other word that I say.

  “Oh well,” the detective says. “Put her through. Let me know when you’re all done. Right now, I’ve got to get back to that floater. Third body we’ve found like that this month. It looks like someone’s out there that might almost be as bad as this one,” he says as he walks back to his car.

  * * *

  I still don’t know what it was that Melissa said that made the detective so sure that I’m the one who killed Mr. McDaniel, but it must have been pretty convincing. I’ve been sitting in this filthy interrogation room for what seems like a week, and nobody’s so much as poked their head in since I was cuffed to the table.

  For the first hour or so, I tried not to look too closely at the walls, but I’ve been in here so long that there’s not much else for me to do. There’s a spot of dark splattered something which I can only assume is blood on one of the walls. When I bother to look closely enough, I can see the side-to-side streaking which indicates that someone at least went over the spot with a paper towel, but hadn’t bothered to go much further with their cleanup.

  The desk to which I’m bound has a little ring on the top through which my shackles go. It’s otherwise unremarkable except for a black divot on one of the corners opposite of me which looks almost like it’s been melted into the laminated surface. Apart from a few other spots of what seems to be a variety of bodily fluids only partially cleaned, the room is devoid of anything else but the door and the obligatory one-way mirror.

  I’ve read enough books to know that they’re trying to make me more pliable for their interrogation, but I did ask for my lawyer a few hours ago. So much of this seems off to me. For one, I don’t know why I was immediately to blame for my boss’s death. People in the office know me well enough to know that I would never hurt anyone. At least that’s what I thought. Melissa said something to the detective, and that’s the reason I’m here, but what could she have possibly said?

  The other thing that doesn’t make much sense to me isn’t so much that the police violated what used to be Constitutional law before the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act made the aforementioned document null and void. What doesn’t make sense is that they had a warrant. Well, I guess it’s more complicated with that. What I mean is that it doesn’t make sense that they were able to get a warrant so quickly. Warrants require judges, and judges are busy people. For them to have had the warrant in hand when they broke down James’s—our door, they would have had to get the warrant signed before I even got home. I get that CEOs are important to the structure of our society, but someone had to be psychic to get a warrant pushed through so quickly. That does not make sense to me.

  There’s the sound of someone on the other side of the door, talking in a hushed but hurried tone. I can’t quite hear what’s being said, but it’s obviously about me. I don’t have much time to speculate though. The door opens, and I finally see a friendly face. “Jillian!” I call out as my lawyer stands in the open doorway.

  Jillian Barnes-Pearson is, in my opinion, the finest legal defense that nepotism can buy. Along with having a stellar record, she also happens to be my sister-in-law. You may think it’s lucky that one of my brothers married a lawyer, but I have so many siblings that it’s really not that impressive from a statistical point of view. “Rose,” Jillian says, her lips moving up and to the left in her trademark haughty smile.

  She shuts the door behind her and says, “I haven’t seen you since the last time we all went to the lake. How have you been?”

  “Present moment excluded?” I chuckle, shaking my hands against the shackles.

  “That was the general idea, yes,” she responds, finally showing off her real smile: an almost insecure curl at the edges of her mouth which makes her seem so approachable. “So, it seems that you’ve gotten yourself into quite the predicament,” she says.

  “I don’t know that I got myself anywhere, but this is a hell of a situation, I’ll give you that.”

  “Okay,” she says, leaning in. “So far, what I know is that the only thing they’ve got you on is the testimony of one witness who says that she saw you enter the office of the deceased just before you walked out to the elevator.”

  “That’s it?” I ask. “First off, that’s not even true. Second, how is that enough for them to arrest a person for murder?”

  “It’s pretty high-profile,” Jillian says. “Whether you had anything to do with it or not, it needs to look like the police are moving quickly on this, or they could lose all sorts of donations.”

  “This is about donations?” I ask incredulously.

  “No, it’s about the death of a CEO,” Jillian says, reaching down the front of her shirt and pulling a pack of cigarettes from between her jealousy-inspiring breasts. “Therefore, it’s about bluebloods everywhere. Therefore, I guess, it is about donations.”

  “I thought you quit,” I say.

  “It’s a process,” she says, pulling a lighter from inside of the pack. “What do you know about Melissa Stokes?”

  “I don’t think you can smoke that in here,” I say, trying to wave the slowly spreading cloud of smoke away from my face.

  “Focus,” Jillian says. “Melissa Stokes. Is there any reason that you know of why she might want to see you in prison?”

  “Melissa?” I ask, no doubt trying my sister-in-law’s patience. “Not much,” I answer, finally. Jillian takes another drag and I continue, “I know that she’s married and has a few kids, but we don’t really speak that much. I don’t know why she would lie about something like this.”

  “Would you say that there’s friction between the two of you?”
/>   I cough a bit, the smoke from the cancer stick attacking my lungs. “Seriously, could you put that out?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, snuffing out her cigarette in the center of the blackened divot on the desk. There’s one mystery solved. “So, Melissa Stokes. Friction. Is there anything you can think of that I might be able to work with? I mean, her story’s pretty flimsy, but right now you’re the only suspect, so it’ll be a lot better if we can discredit her now.”

  “No,” I say. “We don’t really talk all that much, but we’ve always smiled at each other. She was the one who called to warn me that the police were on their way, so I don’t know why she would say something like that.”

  “Hmm,” Jillian says. “From what I was told, that call was still live when the detective picked up the phone. Is that right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I don’t understand though. Why would she make that up?”

  “Sometimes people try to help, but end up doing idiotic things,” Jillian says, already reaching for another cigarette.

  “Could you—” I interrupt her action.

  “Right,” she says. “Sorry, I just get a little stressed sometimes.” With that, she pulls a pill bottle from her purse and pops a small blue tablet into her mouth. “Let’s just say that my sister-in-law being arrested for murder qualifies.”

  “Sorry?” I say, and she waves me off.

  “Look, I don’t know if I’ll be able to get you out of here today or not. Like I said, the evidence against you is beyond weak, but this is such a high-profile deal that these people aren’t going to just let you walk out of here. At least not without something to cast some serious doubt on your involvement,” she says, eyeing the half-cigarette sticking out of the molten crater on the desk.

  “Oh, for god’s sake, just smoke,” I say, rolling my eyes. I hate the smell of cigarettes, but I think our conversation will go a lot more smoothly if I just let her indulge her addiction. “So, what happens now?” I ask.

  “Now,” she says, lighting the re-burn, “the detective is going to want to come in here and ask you some questions. Before that happens though, I’m going to need you to tell me absolutely everything that happened today, no matter how insignificant it may seem.” She takes a long drag and sits back in her chair as if the smoke exiting her lungs was an orgasmic emission.