That plan was shot to hell, for a million reasons. But it was lucky for me that it was: this had to be why Ian Bird had left in such a hurry, and why he wasn’t lurking around the house when Dwayne came back in the middle of the night.
Fuller and Murray were both staring at me, and I clutched my hands to my heart, trying to look stricken.
“Human remains?” I said. “Oh God. You mean . . . Ethan? Is it Ethan?”
“We can’t know for sure, ma’am. There was a fire, and the remains . . . well, they may take some time to identify. But under the circumstances, and given what you say Cleaves told you . . .” He paused, nodding, pressing his lips together. “We think it may be your husband, yes.”
I buried my face in my hands. Still no tears. Everything was moving much too fast. I should have left the moment they told me I could; the next-best thing was to go now. Right now.
I dropped my hands and glared at Fuller.
“Did you say I was free to go?”
He looked startled. “Yes, ma’am, but—”
“I can’t do this. It’s too much. I need to sleep, and I need to speak to my attorney before I give you a statement, and I need to go home.”
“Ma’am, if I could just ask you,” Fuller started to say, and finally, finally, my eyes started to leak again. It was because the last thing I’d said was the truth: I did need to go home. Desperately. Only when I said the word “home,” the image that flashed through my mind wasn’t the row house across town where Adrienne Richards lived, or even the dingy little cape where I’d made a life with Dwayne. It was the junkyard, our little trailer standing guard with the heaps rising behind, Pops inside and kicked back in front of the TV. Napping in the ridiculous way he always did in the evenings, with a can of beer in hand and a bowl of peanuts balanced on top of his stomach. A home that didn’t even exist anymore, because I’d burned it to ash.
“Please,” I said, and as if on cue, like something out of a goddamn movie, both my eyes hit overload at the same time and spilled two perfect tears down my cheeks. Both men winced, and I knew I’d won.
Adrienne had an app on her phone that could summon a car for you. I thought it might be complicated, but by the time the elevator dinged at the ground floor, Adrienne’s phone had flashed a message, Where do you want to go? and I simply tapped the topmost option. An honest answer, even if it meant something different to the phone than it did to me. The little gray car on-screen tracked my path across the city, retracing my earlier route. Where did I want to go?
Home.
Whatever that meant.
I was afraid that the street would be blocked off, but it was quiet and nearly deserted. The coroner’s van and all the cop cars were gone. Only a single SUV remained, and a man and a woman in blue CSI jackets were leaning against it. She was smoking; he was laughing. They both looked at me curiously as I got out of the car. I brandished my keys.
“It’s my house.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “Yeah, okay. We’re done. You can go on in.”
“Okay,” I said. In my hand, the phone vibrated, inviting me to review my ride. Pushy. It made me think of the cops, needling me to talk before Dwayne’s corpse was even cold. It’ll be best for everyone if we can get your side of the story right away, while it’s still fresh. I started up the front steps, fitting the key into the lock.
“Hey,” the man in the CSI jacket said. “You know how it’s gonna be in there, right?”
I turned, just in time to see the woman throw an elbow into his ribs and hiss at him to shush. The man winced.
“What?” I said warily.
“I mean,” the man said, stepping away to avoid a repeat elbow, “we just bag stuff. You know. We don’t clean.”
“Oh.” I nodded like I understood, and twisted the key. The door swung open, then shut behind me. I watched through the glass as the woman stubbed her cigarette out and the two climbed into the SUV, started the motor, pulled away. I climbed the stairs in the dark.
It wasn’t until a few minutes later, pausing in the doorway to Ethan Richards’s office, that I realized what the CSI tech meant. The body was gone, of course—I’d watched them wheeling it out—but there were still bits of Dwayne here in the room. A smear on the corner of the mahogany desk, a small, almost perfectly circular spot of red on the carpeted floor. The cat padded out of the dark and began twining around my legs as I stood there, looking at all that was left of my husband. Blood drying to a rust-colored stain on the carpet. The last mess he ever made.