Monty releases my hand so I can follow Winston out onto the porch. The red and blue lights have attracted an audience, including Tim, who watches from his own porch in his pajamas. He probably irons them, too.
“Assault and murder in one day. Your girlfriend is a handful,” Winston says as we walk down the porch steps.
“She isn’t my girlfriend.”
“Don’t let the guys at the station hear you say that. More than one of them was pretty taken with her. She’s certainly charming.”
That isn’t the word I’d use, but sure.
“So, what did you want to talk about?” I ask, folding my arms across my chest, ignoring the chill of the December air.
His hesitation has the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. “We might be closing Erin’s case.”
Anger races through my blood, and I shake my head, as if that will erase his words. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“It’s been ten years, Guy. We had all three bodies, a note?—”
“It’s bullshit, and you know it is. Erin didn’t kill herself, and she definitely didn’t kill her fucking kids,”I hiss. “That fucker needs to go down for this. I’ll take another look into it.”
Winston exhales. “If you insist, but how long are you gonna keep doing this? You’ve already been in hot water over harassing Richard. You go after him again, he’ll get lawyers involved.”
“Let him,” I say. “It’s a small price to pay for Richard Mason to go down.”
We both turn to the door as it opens. Monty stands on the threshold, eating a slice of her leftover pizza. “Where’s the bleach? The house is starting to smell.”
Winston frowns, glancing between the pizza and Monty, likely wondering how a seemingly innocent woman can kill two people and still be hungry.
“I’ll get it,” I say quickly. “Thanks Winston.”
He gives me a nod and leaves.
Inside, pizza dangles from Monty’s mouth as she gets on her hands and knees with a bucket and sponge and cleans up the blood. She hums, chews, totally unbothered by the activity. As I work on the second puddle of blood, I cast glances at her and wonder how many times she’s done this to be so unaffected.
“So, how come you’re on leave?” she asks, dunking her sponge into the bucket and wringing it out.
“None of your business.”
“Did you do something bad?”
“No.”
“You can tell me if you did.”
“I didn’t do anything bad.”
She shrugs and keeps cleaning. “Who’s Richard Mason?”
I pause my scrubbing and lift my eyes to her. “You were eavesdropping?”
“My dad used to say that the best secrets are other people’s. I always listen out to get the gossip. Who is he?”
I tuck away that tidbit about her dad—not that it’ll teach me much about her other than the fact the tense tells me he’s likely dead.
I continue cleaning. “He’s a real estate mogul. Rich prick. His wife and two daughters were found dead in his home a decade ago and no one has been arrested for it.”
The case is like a shadow. Any time I’d solve a crime, close a case, put someone away, I could never fully enjoy it because I’d remember Erin and her little girls.
Nothing was amiss. Not a damn thing. It looked like a straightforward murder suicide; a mother dealing with severe depression. We looked at Richard first, because more often than not, it’s the husband. He was clean. No affairs, no financial troubles, no neighbors reported hearing arguing between the two. By all accounts, they were the perfect couple.
