Lisa Unger - Die For You

He asked a lot of questions: What led me to believe the people who stormed the office were there in an official capacity initially? The vests with FBI emblazoned in their centers. No, I didn’t ask for identification. Could I describe any of them? Yes, and I did so to the best of my memory. Would I be able to identify any of them from photographs? I think so, yes. Did my husband have enemies? Any illegal dealings that I knew of? Anyone who would want to cause harm to him, me, or the business? No, no, no, no, and no.

“What do you think she meant by that?” the detective asked finally, when we reached a lull. He’d stopped writing at some point, stood now with his legs spread a bit, his arms crossed in front of him, like a beat cop on a corner.

“How should I know?” I said, annoyed. “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

“But she knew your husband?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer; it was a loaded question. “Her statement seemed to imply that, yes,” I said finally.

The detective appeared to want to pace, kept turning a bit at the shoulder, but there wasn’t much room. He could only walk a step or two in each direction. I could hear his phone buzzing again.

“How was your marriage in general?” he said gently. “Sorry. I know it’s personal.”

“I don’t understand.” But I did.

“Were there problems?”

I saw a ring on his finger, a thick gold band. “Are there problems in your marriage?” I asked nastily.

“Yes, there are,” he said, perching on the stool that my sister had been using. “Mainly, I’m the problem. Or so I’m told. Separated more than a year, legally divorced three months ago, can’t bring myself to take off the ring. Stupid, right? She’s already engaged to someone else. Getting married in a week.”

I heard the hard edge of Brooklyn in his accent, Brooklyn in a prep-school cage. The gentleman cop with his nice clothes and fancy pen, but underneath he was a kid from the neighborhood, no doubt about it.

“Point is, I never saw it coming. I thought we were going to the Bahamas for our anniversary,” he said. “She’s going to the Bahamas on her honeymoon with another cop she met at the precinct Christmas party. How about that?”

I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve so much unwanted candor. Maybe it was just his shtick.

“Our marriage was fine. Not perfect,” I said with a shrug. “He had a brief affair a couple of years ago. It was long over. This is not about that.”

He gave a careful nod, rubbed at his chin but didn’t hold my gaze, seemed to look at some point above me. His eyes were so black that I couldn’t discern the pupil from the iris. I wanted to lie back down, I was feeling so light-headed-but I couldn’t stand the vulnerability of it. I stayed upright.

“And all that stolen computer equipment. Brand-new, right?” he said.

“Yes, that’s right. Over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth.”

“There was another break-in, right? Last month?”

“Yes,” I said slowly.

“Was there an insurance payout?”

I saw how things were adding up for Detective Crowe. “Where are you going with this?”

“Was there?”

“Yes,” I said. “A check for about a hundred and fifty thousand arrived-” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.

“This week sometime?”

“It came Monday.”

“And where’s that money now?”

“Probably in the business bank account. I don’t have much to do with Marcus’s company. I don’t know.”

“Software, right? Razor Technologies.”

“That’s right.” An angry headache was starting, radiating out from the gash on my temple. The pain traveled down my neck and into my shoulders. The drugs they’d given me must have been wearing off.

“What kind of software?”

“Gaming software. They’re freelance designers, creating games for a variety of systems, as well as for cell phones and personal computers.”

“They do well?”

“It has been very lucrative. They sold a PC game to Sony last year called The Spear of Destiny and it was wildly popular, in fact. They have other clients, too. Smaller.”

“Like who?”

I searched my memory for names of other companies Marcus might have mentioned but I couldn’t remember. “I don’t know,” I said finally.

“You don’t know?” He looked at me with a skeptical frown and a quick cock of the head.

“You know, I honestly don’t have that much to do with Razor Tech. And Marcus is really the brains of the company, conceptualizing games, writing the code, and running the business. Rick Marino, his partner, does most of the client interface.” Distantly, I remembered Rick Marino in handcuffs. But I hadn’t asked myself what happened to him if the people who stormed the office were not FBI agents. The possibilities lurked in the periphery of my awareness, nagging but not acknowledged.

The detective scribbled something in his book.

“Look,” I said, starting to feel a terrible constricting in my chest. “Something awful has happened to my husband. Are you going to help us?”

“Mrs. Raine,” he said softly. “I am here to help you. But I need to know everything about this situation before I can determine what happened to your husband.”

I nodded and finally decided it was time to lie back. He reached to help me but I held up a hand. I didn’t want him to touch me.

“Is there family we can call, somewhere or someone he might have gone to without telling you?”

I shook my head. “Marcus doesn’t have any family. His parents died when he was a boy. He was raised by his mother’s sister in the Czech Republic. He came to the U.S. as soon as he was able to after communism fell in 1989, earned a scholarship to Columbia and worked various jobs as he went to school, got his master’s in computer science.” I found myself smiling a little. I had always been so proud of Marcus, of his intelligence, of his strength and fearlessness, of his machinelike drive toward getting what he wanted. Even when all these things had worked against us as a couple, I was still proud of him.

“Was he having any problems with anyone? Colleagues? Clients?”

“Not that he mentioned,” I said. Then: “Well… the earlier break-in? Whoever it was had a key and knew the alarm code. That was strange.”

“A disgruntled employee?”

I nodded. “There was an investigation. Still ongoing, I think. The police were looking at a programmer Marcus had fired a few weeks earlier. He’d made some threats. I don’t remember his name.”

“I’ll look into it.”

I was staring at the ceiling, willing myself to be strong, to be solid. But I kept seeing dark spots in front of my eyes, feeling that fuzzy, light feeling that comes right before you pass out. I tried to measure my breathing.

“You okay?” I heard the detective ask.

I opened my eyes and glanced toward the two of him-the solid one and the blurry, shadowy figure behind him. “Do I look okay to you?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not really. I’m sorry.” He put the cap on his pen, let his hand drop to his lap.

“If those people weren’t FBI agents,” I said when he didn’t say anything else, “then what happened to Rick Marino? He was there with me; they took him away. I thought he was being arrested.”

“Rick Marino is dead,” he said simply. His delivery could have used a little work. I could tell he thought it was better not to soften the blow, that it was a policy he’d decided on long ago. He continued speaking into the stunned silence, where I was having trouble processing the information and forming an appropriate response.

“We found his body in the office along with the bodies of two other employees-Eileen Charlton and Ronald Falco.”