“I always am.”
Sam went to the door of her office and asked Detective Green for a word.
“What’s up, LT?”
“I need you to find out everything you can about the Russian opposition leader Sergei Ivanov. No detail is too small.”
“I’m on it.”
“Thank you, Cam.”
After he went back to his desk, Sam gave herself a few more minutes to get her head together and shift back into work mode before she went to see what Freddie had found out about Bingham.
“Anything?” she asked
“Nothing helpful.”
“Why did I know you were going to say that. I want to tell Amara her mother corroborated her story.”
Between that difficult case, the dead Russian and what was going on with Nick, Sam felt overwhelmed as they walked to the morgue. Amara was right where Sam had left her, scrolling on her phone while Lindsey assisted Byron with Sergei’s autopsy in the next room.
Sam sat next to Amara while Freddie remained standing.
Amara’s gaze darted between them. “Is everything okay?”
“We spoke to your mother, and she corroborated your story.”
Amara’s eyes went wide with surprise. “She actually admitted it?”
“She did. She understands the situation she’s in.”
“Did you tell her I was the one who reported what they did?”
“Yes.”
“Was she… Did she say anything?”
“She was surprised to hear you’d witnessed it.”
Amara seemed to be processing the information.
“Do you know anything about Louis’s past from before he met your mother?”
“Not much. He has two older kids who were in college when they got married. They never came around, so I just figured he treated them like he did us. He has a couple of brothers and a sister I met a couple of times. They’re not local, so they weren’t around that often.”
“Was there anything else from his past that came up? Like what he did for work?”
“At one time, he was a teacher, but he hated that. He said the kids were brats, and the parents were monsters.”
“You said he was often unkind to you and King, but did he ever physically abuse either of you before his attack on King?”
She shook her head. “Like I said, he preferred to wound with his words. He mostly left us alone when he wasn’t railing about something one of us had done.”
“Before his death, did King undergo any unexplained changes in his personality? Did he become inexplicably sullen or angry, for instance?”
“He was angry all the time because of Louis’s bullshit, but there was nothing different about him in the last few weeks or months that I noticed.”
“This is very helpful,” Sam said. “Thank you.”
