'Tell me about Barry,' April said softly, starting at square one again.
Wendy swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. 'It was an accident. How many times do I have to say it?'
'No, no. I mean what was he like?'
'What was he like?' She shifted position and gazed up at the cracks in the ceiling.
'Yeah, what happened? What went wrong?'
'It won't help you. It has nothing to do with this.' She glanced down at April, then clicked her tongue as if she thought April was stupid.
'It's part of your history. It's part of what makes you dck.'
'Why do you want to know what makes me dck?'
'You're in a lot of trouble. I want to help you.'
'Sure you do.'
'What went wrong with Barry?' April could push right back.
'Oh, please. The usual, what else? It happens all the time. A girl thinks she has someone; the guy has a different idea.' She rolled her eyes, drawing the pain upward like smoke up a chimney.
'I know what it feels like. Yeah, men suck, don't they?' April murmured.
For the first time Wendy's eyes flashed interest. 'Yes, that's about it.'
'You got engaged, he cheated on you,' April guessed.
Wendy shrugged wide, bony shoulders. 'It's no big thing. They all do it. They'll do it the day before their wedding. They'll do it the night of their wedding. Shit, some of them will go out for a shave the morning after and fuck someone else before lunch.'
'And you're in a position to know about that,' April murmured.
'Oh, I know a lot about that,' Wendy agreed, checked her nails this time.
April did not doubt it. She nodded. 'Barry was a big disappointment.'
'Barry is an asshole.' Wendy's burst of laughter was contemptuous. 'The jerk's been married twice since then. Doesn't that say it all?' She drank up the rest of the Coke.
'You were, what, twenty at the time?'
'Twenty-three. Old enough to know better,' she said bitterly.
'Not really. Twenty-three is a very hopeful age. How did you meet him?'
Wendy chewed the inside of her lip, bobbed her head. 'You really want the story of my life?'
'Absolutely, we have all time in the world.'
'We have the time until I call my lawyer.' Wendy laughed again.
April froze. She and her camera became still as stone. Wendy knew exactly what she was doing. The minute she demanded a lawyer it would be over. It would be either arrest her on the spot or let her go home. A partial print was weak, nothing more than a muscle to flex. April had lied about one thing: Even fingerprints could be contested. A paid expert could easily contest a partial. How much minutiae could they have, how many matching swirls?
Even if there was enough minutiae to suggest a match alone, the print was only a suggestion of guilt, a possibility. Aware of watchers behind the mirror, April pressed on.
'You met him ... ?'
'Barry is my stepfather's son. He's my stepbrother.'
'No kidding.' A flag. Something new.
'Well, not at first. My mother didn't marry him until years later,' Wendy amended. She glanced at her watch, at the ceiling, everywhere but at April.
'After you started going out, you mean?' April ignored an itch in an intimate place.
'Yes, I guess that's what I mean. They didn't get divorced right away.' Wendy sucked in her lips and sighed as if bored.
'Right away when?'
'Oh, they knew each other a long time.' Now she broke into a smile. Some little secret smile. The woman had swift mood changes.
Oh, this was a long game. April kept waiting.
'I knew Barry. My brothers liked his sister, Miff. It was all pretty friendly when we were growing up.' Wendy paused; then her expression soured again. 'They had a couple more kids. They're still together.'
So Wendy shot a stepbrother and was now out in the cold, probably not so welcome at family reunions, at the very least. April wasn't a shrink, but psychologically speaking, it sounded as if alienation from her own family might be a component of Wendy's problem. April flashed to Jason again. Ha, she could do this.
'Where did the shooting incident occur?' she asked, feeling the excitement of a puzzle piece fitting.
'On Martha's Vineyard. We had a home there.'
Click, Martha's Vineyard was also where Lori Wilson, Wendy's assistant, was on vacation. And she'd seen something else about Martha's Vineyard. What was it?
'Had?' she prompted.
'Oh, we lived in it when I was little. My mother got the house in the divorce,' Wendy said, offhand.
'Does she live there now?'
Wendy shook her head. 'No. They moved to Newport.'
Rhode Island. Another resort area April knew nothing about. 'Who owns the place now?'
'I don't know.' Wendy gazed at the ceiling.
'What kind of shooting did you do?'
'Sport shooting.' Hat.
'Oh, yeah, what exactly is that?'
Wendy gave her a look. 'Sportsmen shoot bull's-eyes, either slow fire or rapid fire, but it's the opposite of what you do.'
'Really. What do we do?'
'You just empty a magazine into the silhouette of a human as fast as you can. With a rifle or revolver. Combat shooting is pretty trashy. It's for the beer-drinking crowd. In sport shooting, the idea is to aim. You do any knockdowns?'
April shook her head. That was for the military.
'In sport shooting you go for silhouettes of game animals about twenty, thirty yards out. If you hit them, they fall over. Or we shoot clay, skeet. No humans.' She said it with a nervous laugh. 'Unlike you.'
'What kind of rifles do you use?'
'It depends. A sporting clay, a skeet rifle. A trap gun. For competition you use a 308; that's a .30-caliber rifle.'
'Shotguns.' Now they were getting somewhere.
'Mm-hm. They have different chokes in them, seven-and-a-half-, eight-, or nine-size pellets, depending. You could cut somebody up pretty bad from twenty yards away but not kill them with that size shot, but as I said, we don't go out for humans like you do.'
'How many guns do you have, Wendy?' April asked, unperturbed.
'I don't know.'
'What do you mean, you don't know?'
'The house was burgled during the winter years ago. I don't even remember when. I had a few guns up there then; I don't remember how many.' Wendy bobbed her foot.
April guessed that was where the murder weapon came from. She switched off the tape recorder and left the room without a word. She glanced at her watch. Jesus, nearly seven. She had to pee. And she had to go to Martha's Vineyard to find Lori Wilson and more about Wendy's missing guns.
Forty
'Hey, what's your hurry,
?' Mike caught her as soon as she stepped into the squad room.
'Gotta pee. Be right back.'
