“Every word,” I told her.
She folded her hands behind her head and grinned, as if she knew something I didn’t.
“Why do you hyphenate your last name?” she asked.
“What?”
“Roberts-Walsh. You hyphenate your last name. Why?”
Changing topic midstream was Heidi’s way of keeping a suspect off-balance. It worked. You could never tell what was coming next.
“Sorry,” I said, “but how is that relevant?”
“Would you say that you have marital issues, Ms. Roberts-Walsh?”
“Issues is a bit vague.”
“Problems, then.”
“No more so than any other couple.”
“So everything’s fine at home?”
“Have you ever been married, Detective Haagen?”
She let the question pass.
“What’s interesting is that you’re very similar to your husband.”
“How’s that?”
“You’re both guarded. You both give the impression that you’re holding back. You both pretend to be cooperating when really you’re running your own game.”
“Maybe you’re projecting because you know my husband. I’ve told you everything I can remember.”
She shrugged, seemed almost amused. I took a long look at the mirror I’d been avoiding.
“Maybe,” she said. “It’s true I know him very well. We were partners for a decade. You know what they say about partners? They’re closer than man and wife.”
A new way to rattle me: jealousy. I wasn’t going to bite.
“Is he on the other side?” I asked. “Is he watching us?”
“Your husband, you mean?” She shifted forward in her seat. “Let me ask you something, Ms. Roberts-hyphen-Walsh. Suppose he is there, monitoring, listening, standing idle as you dig yourself deeper and deeper. Why wouldn’t he intervene? Barge in here, slam his fist on the table, and order me to stop tormenting his beloved wife? Wouldn’t he at least bang on the glass? This isn’t going very well for you, you know.”
She’d confirmed it: my husband was there, watching. She was talking to him now, not me.
“Could it be because he knows you’re guilty?” she asked. “Did the two of you have a heart-to-heart on the drive back from Texas?”
She tapped the manila folder on the table in front of her.
“Or maybe it’s the other way around,” she said. “Maybe you’re protecting him. I mean, however you look at it, it was Sean who set this whole thing in motion.”
“You’ve lost it,” I said. “You’re off your rocker.”
I didn’t care anymore about winning her over. If I’d been someone else—someone like Anna, or even Serena—I would have lunged.
“Am I?” she asked. “Tell me, how does a cop’s wife end up working for Florida’s top crime family? Are you really going to tell me that Sean didn’t get you the job? Maybe he wanted you in Costello’s house for a reason. Maybe that reason expired. Or maybe you just couldn’t take it anymore.”
I cocked my head and furrowed my brow like a puppy confused by her master’s command.
“Don’t you know?” I asked.
“Know what?”
“I was working for you.”
“For me?”
“For Tampa PD. I filled out the informant paperwork and everything. I gave weekly reports.”
“And you were paid for this?”
“Once a month like clockwork.”
“How were you paid?”
“In cash. Sean said that was standard procedure. He said banks left a paper trail that someone like Anthony could easily check on.”
“And Sean made these payments himself?”
I nodded.
“And you reported directly to him?”
I nodded again.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to—her smirk said it all.
Haagen came back after a long coffee break during which I’d been left alone to stew.
“Time to switch gears,” she said.
She opened the folder, flipped through the top pages.
“Your medical records,” she said. “Type 2 diabetes is no joke. That’s what bothers me most about your story.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You say you woke up thinking you’d passed out due to either a missed dose of insulin or dehydration, but we both know you weren’t dehydrated: the morning wasn’t particularly hot, and you’d only wandered off for a few hours. If you blacked out, it had to be something like insulin shock. Yet you slid down off that rock and were suddenly fine. Nowhere in your testimony do you mention searching for your insulin bag once you got back to the house. Shouldn’t that have been your first priority? You know, the way you’re supposed to secure your own oxygen mask before you start helping your kids?”
“I was disoriented. And then there was the shock of seeing Anthony like that. I couldn’t think straight.”
“Shock—there’s that word again. You know, I did some research.”
She held up a sheet of paper and waved it around.
“Diabetics don’t usually black out because they missed a dose. In fact, blackouts are very, very rare. No, I think you invented your little bout of amnesia because the one detail you can’t explain to us is the knife wound in your calf.”
“It wasn’t a knife wound,” I said. “It must have been a rock. Maybe a beer bottle. Anthony liked to host cookouts.”
“I asked CSI to look into that. They had an entire class of cadets from the academy search the area. No rocks sharp or jagged enough to have made such a clean incision. No discarded bottles. Not even a pointy stick.”
“I told you: I don’t remember how it happened.”
“That’s okay,” Haagen said. “I have a pretty good idea.”
She let me chew that over for a long, hostile beat.
“One more thing,” she said. “You were alone when you left the house?”
“Yes.”
“Which means you were alone when you got into your car?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t take anything with you? Anything that didn’t belong to you?”
I hung my head.
“You know what I took,” I said.
Chapter 4Detective Sean Walsh
WHILE HEIDI was busy grilling my wife, I decided to conduct a little business of my own.
Destroying police evidence is never easy, especially when you’re dealing with computer files. Evidence logged through our municipal network is cloned onto two servers downtown. The trick isn’t to remove it. The trick is to drown it.
I sat at my desk, picked up the phone, dialed, and waited.
“Hi, this is Detective Sean Walsh with Homicide,” I said. “I’m calling to see if you’ve processed the files for the Danza case, reference number 00527 dash 57. I was looking for them this
