Tony leaned back in his chair. It groaned under him. “You said you have reason to believe she was poisoned. What reason?”
This was the part I hadn’t rehearsed well enough. I couldn’t exactly say “her ghost told me.” I’d googled “how to report a crime based on psychic information” and the results had not been encouraging.
“I know things,” I said.
Tony stared at me.
“About the circumstances of her death,” I added quickly. “Things that suggest it wasn’t natural.”
“You know things.” His voice was perfectly flat. Not sarcastic, not dismissive—just flat in the way that a lake is flat right before a storm.
“Yes.”
“What kind of things?”
I shifted in the creaky chair. “I’d rather not say how I came by the information.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“Can you just—look into it? Check the details, see if they hold up?”
Tony put the pen down and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. When he looked at me again, something in his expression had recalibrated. Not sympathy. More like a very tired man trying to figure out which box to put me in.
“Ms. Ferraro. You said the divorce was finalized—when?”
“Three months ago.”
“And you moved here?”
“Three months ago.”
“Where were you the night of the dinner?”
“At the dinner.” I paused. “I sat through the entire thing. My ex-husband made the announcement over dessert.”
“And your relationship with the deceased?”
I almost laughed. “She hated me. Thirty years of making that very clear.”
“So you had a contentious relationship with the victim, you were in the area at the time of her death, the family blames you, and now—several months later—you walk in here saying she was murdered, but you won’t tell me how you know.” He tapped the pen against his notepad. “You see why I might have some follow-up questions.”
“I’m not the one who benefits from her death, Detective. The divorce settlement was already done. I got nothing from Rosaria’s estate. Nothing.” I met his eyes. “I’m the only person in that family who doesn’t have a financial motive.”
Something shifted behind his eyes. Not belief—nothing close to belief—but a flicker of the thing that makes a cop a cop. Curiosity, maybe. The itch of a question that doesn’t have a neat answer.
“Why now?” he asked. “If you’ve suspected this for months?—“
“I haven’t suspected it for months. I came to know recently.”
“How recently?”
“Very.”
“And you can’t tell me how.”
I shrugged, going for casual and probably landing somewhere around desperate. “Sometimes it takes a while. Things come to you.”
Tony looked at me for a long time. Then he picked up his coffee, drained what was left, and set the empty mug on top of a stack of files with the precision of a man who builds coffee cup towers out of habit.
