“I’ll make some calls,” he said.
“You will?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. It’s my job.” He pulled a fresh notepad from his desk drawer. “Tell me everything you ‘know.’ I’ll decide what’s worth checking.”
I was about to start when the air behind Tony’s desk went cold.
No. Not here. Not now. I’d thought this exact thing at Tammy’s, and it had worked about as well then as it did now.
Rosaria materialized in the reflection of the framed commendation on the wall behind Tony’s head. She took one look around the station and her lip curled.
“This is the police? This is who you are trusting with my case?” She peered at Tony through the glass. “He has four coffee cups on his desk. That is not a dedicated officer, that is a man with a drinking problem.”
I kept my eyes on Tony. “Rosaria had a very specific routine. She drank tea every night at eight o’clock. Every single night, for as long as I knew her. Chamomile with honey. She was religious about it.”
Tony wrote it down. “Okay.”
“Tell him about the cup,” Rosaria instructed. “My good china cup. The one from the set my mother gave me. I only used those cups.”
“She had a set of specific cups she used,” I said. “Fine china. Her mother’s set of six different patterns. She never let anyone else touch it.”
Tony’s pen paused. “How’s that relevant?”
“If someone wanted to poison her, they’d know about the tea. Eight o’clock, every night. She’d choose the cup in the morning and have it on the counter until it was time to make the tea. It’s a window.”
“The cup.” Rosaria’s voice had gone tight. “When the family came back to the house after I was found, the cup was gone.Washed, dried, put away. Someone had been in that kitchen, Gina. After everyone left dinner. But I don’t know who, everything after the divorce announcement is a blur until now.”
I relayed this, minus the source. “The morning, after she was found dead, the family went back to her house. Everything had been cleaned. Dishes washed, counters wiped down. But nobody was supposed to be there. Everyone had gone home after dinner.”
Tony stopped writing. He looked up at me, and this time the expression on his face was harder to read. Still skeptical—that was baked in, part of the architecture of the man—but there was something else underneath it. The pen tapped twice against the notepad.
“Someone came back.”
“Someone came back and scrubbed that kitchen before anyone thought to look at it. The tea cup, the counter, everything.”
“Who had a key?”
“Half the family. Sal, George, Paula.” I gripped my purse strap. “But I don’t know who went back. Nobody’s ever mentioned it. That’s the point—nobody’s mentioned cleaning the kitchen because nobody wants to explain why they were there.”
“Have him find out—“ Rosaria started.
“I’ll find out,” I said, too sharply, and Tony’s eyebrow went up again.
“Talking to me or someone else?”
“You. Sorry. Just—thinking out loud.”
He held my gaze for a beat too long. I had the uncomfortable feeling that Detective Tony Caruso didn’t miss much, even if he looked like he’d been assembled from coffee grounds and overdue paperwork.
“Ms. Ferraro.” He closed the notepad. “I’m going to be straight with you. I don’t know what’s going on here. Your story has some holes, your source is a mystery, and you’re asking me to investigate a months old death that was ruled natural causes in another jurisdiction.”
“But?”
He almost smiled. Almost. It was more like a shift in the geography of his face, a slight relaxation around the eyes that disappeared before it fully arrived.
“But the tea thing is specific. The dish-washing is specific. And in my experience, people who make things up go big—conspiracies, cover-ups, drama. They don’t come in with teacups and dishwashing schedules.”
He stood, and I realized exactly how tall he was. He hadn’t seemed that tall sitting down, but standing, he had a good six inches on me and shoulders that suggested he’d played something physical in another life.
