“I assume you told her you have no regrets?”
“I did. That went over as expected.”
“Welp… What can you do? Not everyone will agree with our methodology, but they can’t argue with our results.”
“That’s exactly what I said, and thank you for including yourself in our methodology.”
“We’re a team, you and me.”
Smiling, she said, “Yes, we are, and I never take your support for granted.”
“I know that.”
“Let’s talk to Thelma again.”
When they arrived outside the room, Sam nodded to the Patrol officer who was standing watch. “Thanks for your help.”
“No problem, ma’am.”
As Sam and Freddie entered the room, Thelma looked up at them with an expression of pure dread, as if to ask, What now?
“What did you know about Louis before you married him?” Sam asked.
“He… um… He was from upstate New York and had two older kids he wasn’t close to, as well as three brothers and a sister he was close to, for the most part, anyway. He’d been a teacher in the past, but he left that job because he couldn’t stand the kids or their parents. He said he wasn’t sure which was worse.”
“What did he do for work when you met him?”
“He was running a handyman business and was doing quite well. He later went to work for a construction company, managing their projects.”
“This is a question I ordinarily would never ask a woman who’s been stuck in a violent relationship, but could you have left?”
“Every time he got even so much as the slightest hint that I might be considering leaving, he’d remind me again that he’d hunt me down and kill me—and my daughter—if I dared to leave him. Because I’d seen what he was capable of, I stayed, but I’ve kept my distance as best I could while living in the same house.”
Sam’s cell phone rang, and she glanced at the caller ID to see that it was Vernon. “I need to take this. I’ll be right back.”
She stepped out of the interview room. “What’s up?”
“Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got people from the Russian Embassy out here, demanding access to the body of their countryman.”
“For fuck’s sake with this day.” She massaged the spot between her brows where a headache was forming. “Let me talk to one of them.”
“It’s on speaker,” Vernon said. “Go ahead.”
“We can’t release the body until our medical examiner has completed her work.”
“You don’t touch the body,” he said with a heavy Russian accent. “We take him.”
“That’s not how this works. If you give me a phone number, we’ll notify you when you can pick him up.”
“We pick him up now.”
“Sam,” Vernon said in a lowered voice, “this is not a good situation. We need them out of here or you out of there.”
She walked toward Malone’s office. “I’ll get someone to deal with them. Stand by.” After closing the phone, she ducked her head into the captain’s office. “We’ve got Russians storming the morgue entrance. My detail is freaking out. Can we send some people out there to get rid of them?”
“Yeah, I’m already on it. I was just headed that way to make sure Patrol has it under control.” Sam walked with him toward the morgue. “We just talked to Thelma Bingham again. The more I talk to her, the more I’m seeing her as a victim of this guy and not a perpetrator. He threatened her life and that of her daughter if she tried to leave, and after seeing him kill her son with his bare hands, she believed him.”
“I tend to agree. You’ll have to sell it to McDermott, of course.”
