Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

“That was the last time I saw him.” She almost smiled. “And what an image it was-his beet-red, sweaty face… his snarled mouth… his shaking hands. He looked like a… gargoyle.” A sad laugh. “I’ve carried that image with me. Every time I think about the upcoming divorce and I get scared, I just picture that face. It calms me down.” She bit her lower lip. “And he was alive when I left him, Detective. Alive.”

That might have been true, but Nunn had already caught her in a lie. Although the guard had gone in to investigate, he never said anything about her leaving. As a matter of fact, the guard distinctly remembered Rosemary smiling, telling him that they just had a little marital tiff. But Nunn didn’t want to confront her-not yet.

Nunn looked at the woman sitting across from him. “I need a favor from you.” Rosemary looked up but didn’t speak. “I need you to come down to the station house and give a statement. It’ll clear up everything and then I won’t have to bother you again.”

“Why should I do that?”

“But why wouldn’t you want to do that?” Nunn asked. “Clear up this business and your name.”

“I never realized that my name was sullied.”

“It’s just a simple statement.”

“Once you put things in writing, it’s never simple.”

Nunn could see that she wasn’t going to fold that easily. “Hey, you walked out of your office, so technically the guard was the last man to see Christopher alive.”

“Exactly,” Rosemary told him. “So talk to him.”

Her hamburger came. Rosemary picked up a french fry but then let it fall on her plate. “I don’t know why I ordered this.” She pushed her plate aside. Her eyes darkened and she stood up. “I’m leaving.”

Nunn dropped a twenty on the table and followed her outside. “Mrs. Thomas-wait!”

But she didn’t stop. When she got to her car, she couldn’t unlock the door. Her hands were shaking too hard. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She dropped her keys and buried her face in her hands. “Please… just go away.”

Nunn tried to make his voice as soothing as he could. “I can go away, Mrs. Thomas. But what happened… is not going to go away. It’s never going to go away until we find your husband.”

“So go look for him and stop bothering me!”

She was sobbing by this point. Nunn picked up her car keys and placed them in his pocket. “You’re way too upset to drive.”

Her hands slowly peeled from her face. “Please, please leave me alone.”

Nunn placed his hand on her shoulder. “Make it easy on yourself. Let me take you down to the station house so you can get all of this off your chest.”

“I told you everything.”

“I know you did,” Nunn said calmly. “You were very forthright. And that’s good. All I need from you is a written statement of what you told me. That’s it. Simple.”

“Nothing in life is simple,” she said, her face suddenly older.

“Look, once I get a statement from you, I get Tony off my back, I get my superiors off my back, and that’s that.”

“I may be the jilted wife but I’m not a moron, Detective.”

“I can see that. But it doesn’t have to be complicated.” Nunn’s brain was obsessing on a single thought: how to get her voluntarily into the interview room. “Look, forget about the statement, don’t write anything down. You come down to the station house and we’ll talk . That’s all. Just you and me. We’ll talk. What do you say?”

Rosemary dried her tears on her shirtsleeve and took a deep breath.

Nunn waited for a response, but when she said nothing he gently took her elbow and guided her to his waiting car.

Once she stepped into the interview room, that look in her eyes seemed to tell me how it was going to go.

Rosemary gave her statement. Unlike our talk in the coffee shop, her voice now shook. She second-guessed and contradicted herself even more than she had earlier. But any cop will tell you the innocent are never consistent; it’s the ones who look you in the eye without blinking, say their piece as if they’re reading from a script, they’re the ones you have to watch out for.

I couldn’t help liking her. She was nothing like the suspects I’d dealt with before. At times I wanted to help her along, help clarify things, but it was useless. The wheels were turning in one direction and I had to be an unwilling participant. God-yeah, God should bless those suckers who go against the tide and get crushed-I never did back then and look where I’m at now.

After she finished giving her statement, she got up from the gray institutional chair and smoothed out her skirt. She didn’t belong in that dingy office. I drove her back to the coffee shop so that she could get her car and gave her the line about calling me if anything came up.

She called three days later asking if there were any leads. I used that as an excuse to see her. I told myself I was just doing police work… and I was.

But as I got deeper into the case, in the days and weeks that followed, I realized that I liked being around her even if her story didn’t add up.

I’ll never forgetthat day-bright and sunny-the kind of day when even as a cop you felt nothing bad could happen.

Sarah and I woke up at the same time. “Something bothering you?” she asked. After ten years of marriage, she could tell by how I stirred when I was sleeping if I was struggling with something.

“No, just this museum case.” I stretched out my arms. “No body or blood yet, but when he does turn up… he won’t look pretty.”

Sarah was surprised. I hardly ever talked about my cases and rarely expressed my opinions. I’d always prided myself on keeping my cool-cop distance. But something about the Thomas case had gotten to me. Sarah could see it had become personal even though I denied it.

“You sure you’re not going to find this guy on the Riviera with a case of convenient amnesia?” she asked, getting out of bed.

“I don’t think he’s coming back alive.”

“His wife must have done it.” Sarah was never the judgmental type, so I was surprised. I watched her as she walked over to the window and pulled open the curtains.

“What makes you think that?” I sat up in bed.

She turned around to face me “The plain wife, married to the dashing, philandering husband who married her for her money and status, decides she’s had enough one day and kills him.”

“How do you know all that about him?”

She smiled. “You’ve only told me all that a million times.” She walked back to the bed, got in, and snuggled up next to me. “This is your chance to shine, Jon. Our dreams may come true if a high-profile case you’re working on goes to court. You can retire, write a book-the whole world will be yours.”

I wished she had said something else.

On my wayback home from work that day, I stopped at Rosemary’s house. I wanted to see her, though I couldn’t tell you why, or what I was planning to say. Part of me wanted her to crumble completely, admit everything, and that would be it. But I knew that if and when she did, I’d feel dirtied up by the whole thing. Even if she did kill him, I’d hate the part I’d played in bringing about her demise.

The maid showed me in, and as I was walking into that palatial living room of hers, I heard a man’s voice: “It was only a matter of time before the big boys got him…”

It was some guy with long hair, a scraggly beard, and dark, intense eyes. He was sitting on the sofa, scotch in hand, very much at home. Rosemary turned, studying my face, looking for a sign that might betray why I was there. I didn’t have much to say, so she smiled and said, “I’d like you to meet Hank Zacharius.”