“Excuse me,” Fuller said. “This should just take a second.”
Fuller left, pulling the door closed behind him. In the fraction of a second before he did, I heard him growl at the interrupter: “This better b—” he started to say, and then the latch clicked and silence descended. I was alone with Murray, who was now looking at me with equal parts nervousness and contempt, like I was a pile of vomit on a carpet that he was afraid he’d be tapped to clean up. He glanced up at the camera, then back at me. The hallway outside the window was empty, both Fuller and the interrupting cop no longer in view. Long seconds passed without anyone speaking. I hugged my arms tighter across my chest.
“Are you cold?” Murray asked.
“A little.”
“Mmm,” he said. He flicked his eyes toward the door and then the hallway behind the window—still empty—and shifted in his chair. His Adam’s apple kept bobbing like he was getting ready to say something, then deciding better of it. I wondered if he’d been instructed not to talk to me, and if so, I wondered why.
“You know,” he said finally, “I was outside your house earlier. Sat there for a while, actually.”
I tried to keep my face neutral.
“Oh? I didn’t see you.”
“Well, I saw you,” he said. He smirked at me. “How was your dinner? What’d you get, Japanese?”
I was starting to sweat. How long had he been there, watching?
“Yeah. It was fine.” A lie: I thought Japanese food would be something like Chinese food, greasy and salty, but of course Adrienne didn’t eat that stuff. Her dinner order turned out to be one little tray full of raw fish and a second one full of something slimy, probably seaweed. I’d choked it down out of desperation. Murray was still smirking.
“Not your first time talking to a police officer today, is it?”
My stomach lurched; the seaweed was threatening to come back up.
“What?” I said.
“The trooper. What, you thought we didn’t know about that? He thought this guy Cleaves might be coming around your place to visit. Guess he was right.”
“I wouldn’t call someone breaking into my house in the middle of the night a visit,” I snapped, and Murray’s eyebrows went up.
“The report said he had a key.”
“He must have stolen it.”
“You didn’t give him one? I heard you were involved.”
“What are you”—I began to say, realizing even as I did that I was taking the bait, that I should shut up, and then the handle on the door turned and both our heads swiveled to see Fuller reentering the room. He had a strange expression on his face and a notepad in his hand. He closed the door and then leaned back against it instead of sitting down.
“Mrs. Richards,” he said. “That was the Maine State Police on the phone.”
I blinked. “Okay,” I said slowly.
“I had hoped to discuss this with you.” He sounded tired. “It’s my understanding that before you shot Dwayne Cleaves, a police officer came to your house looking for him, and that you and Cleaves had been having an affair. Were you planning to share that with us?”
“I thought . . .” I trailed off. Shook my head. Now would have been a good time to start crying again, but my eyes were suddenly, infuriatingly dry. “I don’t remember what I said or didn’t say,” I whimpered. “I’ve been through a lot tonight.”
“Of course,” Fuller said. But as he looked at me, his lips pursed, I thought, Yeah, there it is. I’d seen that expression before. Only a few hours ago, in fact, on the face of Ian Bird. It was the smug irritation of a man who thinks he knows exactly who you are, who’s absolutely sure that he’s the smartest guy in the room. Well, good. I hoped Fuller thought Adrienne was an idiot. The less he thought of her—of me—the less he’d waste his time wondering what I was capable of.
Fuller sighed. “All right, Mrs. Richards. I’m sorry, there’s no easy way to say this. The police in, uh”—he glanced at the pad in his hand—“in Copper Falls have found Dwayne Cleaves’s truck, and some, ah, human remains.”
I allowed my mouth to drop open and thought, Dammit. I’d allowed for this possibility, the slim chance that an insurance adjuster might stumble across the body, but I thought it would take weeks. Plenty of time for Dwayne and I to disappear. I thought I was being so smart: knowing how things worked in Copper Falls, it would never occur to anyone that it might not be Dwayne in the truck. His mother would push to have the body released, so she could bury him in their family plot behind the hilltop church before the first freeze—and the local cops would push along with her, anxious to get the whole sordid mess behind them. There would be a bunch of blather about not dragging things out, so the community could begin to heal. There would certainly be no reason to connect a murder-suicide in rural small-town Maine with the disappearance of a shady billionaire and his wife in a city hundreds of miles away. And with any luck, I thought, that’s where it would end: with Adrienne and Ethan buried in graves with our names on them, and Dwayne and I sitting on a pile of cash in some swamp, eating feral pig jerky and figuring out what came next.