Marcy couldn’t remember taking her purse when she exited the car, but it was over her shoulder and she got the house key out of the side pocket with no trouble. The trouble came when she tried to get it into the lock. Her hand was trembling too badly. Riggins didn’t take the key, but closed her hand over Marcy’s to steady it, and it finally slid home.
From behind her: “Is it true that your husband has been arrested for the murder of Frank Peterson, Mrs. Maitland?”
“Keep back,” one of the troopers said. “Not one step off the sidewalk.”
“Mrs. Maitland!”
Then they were inside. That was good, even with the pregnant detective beside her, but the house looked different, and Marcy knew it would never look quite the same. She thought of the woman who had left here with her daughters, all of them laughing and excited, and it was like thinking of a woman you had loved, but who had died.
Her legs gave out and she plopped onto the bench in the hall where the girls sat to put on their boots in winter. Where Terry sometimes sat （as he had tonight） to go over his lineup one final time before leaving for the field. Betsy Riggins sat down beside her with a grunt of relief, her meaty right hip thwacking against Marcy’s less padded left one. The cop with the shit on his sleeve, Sablo, and two others passed them without a look, drawing on thick blue plastic gloves. They were already wearing booties of a matching blue. Marcy assumed the fourth one was doing crowd control. Crowd control in front of their house on sleepy Barnum Court.
“I have to pee,” she said to Riggins.
“As do I,” Riggins said. “Lieutenant Sablo! A word?”
The one with the shit on his sleeve returned to the bench. The other two continued on into the kitchen, where the most evil thing they’d find was half a devil’s food cake in the fridge.
To Marcy, Riggins asked, “Do you folks have a downstairs bathroom?”
“Yes, through the pantry. Terry added it himself last year.”
“Uh-huh. Lieutenant, the ladies need to pee, so that’s where you start, and make it as fast as you can.” And, to Marcy: “Does your husband have an office?”
“Not as such. He uses the far end of the dining room.”
“Thank you. That’s your next stop, Lieutenant.” She turned back to Marcy. “Mind one little question while we wait?”
“Yes.”
Riggins paid this no mind. “Have you noticed anything odd about your husband’s behavior over the last few weeks?”
Marcy gave a humorless laugh. “You mean was he building up to committing murder? Walking around, rubbing his hands together, maybe drooling and muttering to himself? Has your pregnancy affected your mind, Detective?”
“I take it that’s a no.”
“It is. Now please stop nagging me!”
Riggins sat back and folded her hands on her belly. Leaving Marcy with her throbbing bladder and a memory of something Gavin Frick had said only last week, after practice: Where’s Terry’s mind lately? Half the time he seems somewhere else. It’s like he’s fighting the flu, or something.
“Mrs. Maitland?”
“What?”
“You look like you had a thought there.”
“I did, actually. I was thinking that sitting next to you on this bench is very uncomfortable. It’s like sitting next to an oven that knows how to breathe.”
Fresh color rose in Betsy Riggins’s already flushed cheeks. On one hand, Marcy was horrified at what she had just said—the cruelty of it. On the other, she was delighted that she had gotten in a thrust that seemed to have gone home.
In any case, Riggins asked no more questions.
What seemed like an endless time later, Sablo came back, holding a clear plastic bag that contained all the pills from the downstairs medicine cabinet （OTC stuff, their few prescriptions were in the two bathrooms upstairs）， and Terry’s tube of hemorrhoid cream. “All clear,” he said.
“You first,” Riggins said.
Under other circumstances, Marcy surely would have deferred to the pregnant lady and held her water a bit longer, but not under these. She went in, closed the door, and saw the cover of the toilet tank was on crooked. They had been probing in there for God knew what—drugs, seemed most likely. She urinated with her head lowered and her face in her hands, so she didn’t have to look at the rest of the disarray. Was she going to bring Sarah and Grace back here tonight? Was she going to escort them through the glare of the TV lights, which would undoubtedly be set up by then? And if not here, where? A hotel? Wouldn’t they （the vultures, the trooper had called them） still find them? Of course they would.