The world darkened. A rushing sound filled the inside of her head. Her voice caught, and then she said, “My… my name? I don’t know what on earth you mean.” But there was no real conviction in it. She’d waited just that critical heartbeat too long.
She heard a soft hissing sound-an exhalation. The sheriff’s eyes narrowed and his features hardened… darkened…became the face of a man nobody in his right mind would care to cross. “Oh, sure you do,” he said in his soft, growly voice, and Mary marveled that a voice she’d thought so pleasing, even sexy, could sound so dangerous now. “We both know you’re not Mary Owen. For one thing, she’s dead-been dead for thirty-some years. So that brings me back to my question:
Mary did the only thing she could think to do. She drew her hands from the pockets of the smock, nudged her glasses more firmly onto her nose as if girding herself for battle, then folded her arms tightly across her waist and slowly shook her head. She made a small, throat-clearing sound and said, “Don’t I have a right to remain silent?”
The sheriff’s chin jerked up a notch. For a moment or two he didn’t answer, and the space between them pulsed with the shimmering, vibrating silence. A muscle twitched in the side of his jaw-the only sign of any annoyance he might have felt. “If I place you under arrest,” he said finally.
Then once more the silence waited, growing denser…harder to break. Mary’s throat and mouth were too dry to form words and swallowing didn’t help. In the end she had to whisper them. “Then I guess you’ll have to do that. Because I have nothing more to say to you.”
The sheriff made that hissing sound again, and slowly shook his head. “Miss Mary,” he said as he settled his hat on his head, “you have no idea how sorry I am to hear you say that.”
Roan closed the door to the interrogation room carefully behind him, resisting an unprofessional urge to slam it. Frustration tension gripped his neck and shoulders as he nodded brusquely at the man standing with folded arms in front of the observation window, then continued on down the hallway to his office without saying a word.
After a moment, Senator Holbrook pivoted and followed, his steps hurried and heavy with anger. He fired point-blank as he pushed through the door behind Roan, almost on his heels. “You didn’t arrest her?”
“No,” Roan snapped back without turning as he rounded his desk and jerked back his chair, “I did not.”
Gripping the back of the chair closest to the desk, Holbrook leaned on his white-knuckled hands, hardened his already iron jaws and demanded tightly, “Why the hell not?”
Instead of answering immediately, Roan stared down at his own hands and pictured his daughter’s face-for him the equivalent of counting to ten. The fact that the man standing before him huffing and snorting like an angry bull was a United States Senator didn’t have much bearing on Roan’s efforts to cut him some slack, but the fact that he was the murder victim’s father sure did. All Roan needed to keep his own temper under control was to remember what it had felt like to be in this man’s shoes.
“The fact that she’s not willing to talk to us, aggravating as that may be, does not mean she’s guilty,” he said patiently, bringing his eyes up to meet Holbrook’s narrow and glittering glare. “I’d really like to have some evidence she is before I arrest her, and right now we don’t have any hard evidence connecting her with Jason’s murder. We know the gun she gave us isn’t the murder weapon, and we didn’t find any others when we searched her place. Her blood on Jason’s sleeve only proves he assaulted her, it doesn’t-”
“It proves she had motive to kill him, dammit! I said it before: she had motive and opportunity. She was the last person to see my son alive-”
“That we know of,” said Roan.
“-and she knows how to shoot a gun,” the senator forged on as if Roan hadn’t spoken, stabbing the air like a stump speaker at a political rally. “You said she told you she’s a good shot, and if she has one gun she could just as well have had two. You didn’t find it because she got rid of it, obviously-hell, she’d have to be a dang fool to hang on to it after she’d shot somebody with it! She’s not who she claims to be, so that already makes her a liar. And she’s for damn sure a flight risk, given what little history you have for her. You let her walk out of here now, and what makes you think she’s gonna still be around when that evidence you’re looking for does turn up? Dammit, Roan, if you won’t arrest that woman, I’ll find somebody who will. Hell, I’ll get those state guys to do it. If I have to.”
Roan closed his eyes and rubbed the lids with the fingers and thumb of one hand, and it occurred to him to wonder if Cliff Holbrook’s red-rimmed eyes felt as tired and sore as his did; he imagined neither one of them had gotten much sleep last night. And exhausted though they both might have been, he had to admit the senator was right about one thing: The woman calling herself Mary Owen was one hell of a flight risk.
Projected against the backs of his eyelids he saw an image of her as he’d seen her last, sitting unnaturally still and upright in a straight-backed chair in the center of his interrogation room. And neither the ugly dark-rimmed glasses veiling her dull gray eyes nor the strings of dirt-brown hair drooping into the collar of her pink nylon smock could disguise the elegance of bone structure, the symmetry of features, the translucence of skin she tried so hard to hide. Now that he knew it was there he wondered how he ever could have missed it.
Another image took the place of that one: a man he knew well, lying on his back with his arms flung wide, sightless eyes staring up at the sky and an ugly dark hole squarely in the center of his forehead. And try as he would, Roan could not make those two images come together in his mind.
It just didn’t jell. Not that he had a whole lot of experience to judge by, but it didn’t feel right.
On the other hand, there was no getting around the fact that the woman had been living under a false identity for the past ten years. And she was definitely a flight risk. And if there was one thing Roan was certain of right now, it was that he didn’t want Mary Owen-or whoever she was-to slip away from him before he got some answers to his questions.
He let out a breath and the words he didn’t want to say came with it. “All right, dammit, I’ll arrest her.” But he still didn’t think it was going to solve his case. It just seemed like the only course open to him right then. His belly knotted and burned as he snatched his phone from its cradle, and it occurred to him that the way things were going, this case, the senator, that woman, were going to give him ulcers.
“What are you doing now?” Holbrook demanded as Roan stabbed at the numbers on the phone.
Roan shot him a look, wishing he had the gumption to say the words that had popped into his mind.
“Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?”
Mary focused her eyes on the pair of hands that were loosely clasped together on the wooden tabletop just across from her. She nodded.
“Would you mind answering out loud for the recorder, please?”
That voice. Why had she ever thought it warm-sounding and pleasant? It reminded her now of the purr of a tiger.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat lightly. “Yes. Of course I understand.”
“All right, that’s it then, until your attorney gets here.” The sheriff turned off the recorder.
Mary’s eyes followed him as he picked it up and rose from his chair. “May I-” She paused to take a breath; the rapid tapping of her heartbeat against her breastbone made it hard to speak, harder to keep her voice steady. “May I make a phone call?” The sheriff looked down at her, frowning in a rather remote, distracted way, and she felt her temper kindle. “I do get one phone call, don’t I?”
He snorted softly. “You can have more than one, far as I’m concerned. But like I told you, your lawyer’s already on his way. You might even know him-he’s a neighbor of yours. Harry Klein-Andrews & Klein? They’re right next door to your shop.”
She waved that aside with a gesture. “That’s not-I’d like to call someone else. If I’m allowed.”
There was a long pause while the keen blue eyes studied her, their gaze no longer remote. Then, “Sure. Fine. I’ll have Lori bring you a phone. Do you need a phone book?”
She shook her head, then added self-consciously, “No. Thank you.”
He nodded and went out. Mary sat still, refusing to look toward the mirror she knew wasn’t really a mirror, listening to the relentless thumping of her heart, trying to summon enough moisture in her mouth to relieve her papery throat.
