Rivers asked, “Where is Ms. Wallace now?”
“Down in the car. With Taggert.”
“Did Knowlton show up?” Mendoza asked the question as she checked out the small apartment.
“Yeah, he’s down in the parking lot. Or was. His story checked out. He only came because he was called.”
Mendoza asked, “The ME on her way?”
Brown gave a quick nod. “Should be here within the half hour.”
“And the crime-scene guys?” Mendoza pressed.
Brown rubbed his chin. “S’posed to arrive any minute.”
“Good.” Rivers had seen enough. He and Mendoza walked carefully down the exterior stairs, where the night was cold, new snow falling softly, the darkness abated by the single security lamp casting a gray-blue pool of light over the parking area of what had once been a bakery and the blue-and-red flashers from the light bars of the deputies’ vehicles.
Mendoza tapped on the driver’s-side window of the occupied, idling cruiser. “We’d like to talk to Ms. Wallace,” she said as the window was rolled down, Deputy Taggert behind the wheel.
Taggert nodded. “Here?” she asked, short brown hair visible beneath her hat.
“Unless she’d rather go into the station,” Rivers said.
“No. Oh, God, no!” the woman in the passenger seat said around sobs. “I can’t. I just can’t. I . . . I’m pregnant.”
Looking up at them, Taggert rolled a world-weary eye. Even though she was barely fifty, Taggert was jaded, thought she, personally, had seen and heard it all.
From the passenger seat, Zena said, “I have to get home. My boyfriend. He’ll be missing me.”
“Fine, we can talk here.” Mendoza leaned down to look past Taggert to the passenger seat, where the woman was shredding a much-used tissue.
They climbed into the back seat, which was warmer than outside, and conducted a quick interview in which Zena explained her concerns about her friend.
“She . . . Willow would call in sick, y’know, all the time, and it’s not like she was pregnant like me or had a good excuse and Donna—uh, Donna Bunn, she’s our supervisor—had said before that she was on her last nerve with Willow or something like that.”
Rivers adjusted himself so that he could face Zena as Taggert adjusted the heater and defroster. “Was Willow depressed?”
“What?” Zena Wallace seemed shocked at the idea. “No—I mean, maybe. It would be hard to tell.” She blew her nose. “She was so quiet. Could have always been depressed, for all I know.”
“Any change in her attitude lately?” Mendoza asked.
“No. She didn’t seem any different than usual.”
“Had she ever talked about suicide?”
“Geez, no!” Zena reacted by dropping a hand and covering her abdomen protectively as if she didn’t want her unborn child to hear.
“It wasn’t suicide,” Rivers reminded Mendoza.
“Just covering all the bases,” Mendoza said, but kept her gaze on Zena Wallace. “She have a boyfriend?” Mendoza asked.
“No. Well. Uh. Not that I know of.”
Rivers suggested, “Enemies?”
“Oh, Geez, no! Willow? Uh-uh. There isn’t—wasn’t—anything to not like about Willow. She just kind of blends into the woodwork, if you know what I mean. Kind of always around, but not loud or pushy or . . .” Zena started crying again and fanned herself with her hand. “Sorry, it’s my pregnancy hormones, you know, I’m like, I mean, my emotions are all over the place.”
“She has something she wants to show you,” Taggert said, interrupting another of Zena Wallace’s crying jags.
“What’s that?”
“Oh.” Zena sniffed loudly as the windows in the cruiser started to fog. “It’s just so weird. I finally got a text from Willow, right before I came over here and . . .” She shuddered, scrolled, then handed her phone, through the open partition, to Rivers in the back seat. On the small screen was a photograph of the dead woman, but in these images she looked very much alive, still nude, but posing suggestively with what appeared to be the same gun that took her life.
Rivers’s eyes narrowed. “When did you receive this?”
“Like an hour ago . . . maybe. Hour and a half? I don’t know.” Her voice cracked.
Only ninety minutes ago, but the woman in the bed appeared to have been dead for much longer. “Did we find Willow Valente’s phone?” he asked Deputy Taggert.
“Not that I know of.”
“I’ll call upstairs to Brown,” Mendoza said and punched in a phone number. Rivers knew she didn’t want to take the steps up to the apartment again, was trying to minimize any alteration to the snow pattern on the stairs in case the killer had left a footprint or some trace evidence.
Rivers asked Zena Wallace, “Did she ever send you something like this before? Any other suggestive pictures or—?”
“No!” Zena squeaked. “Are you kidding? It’s not like I’m a perv—or she is, for that matter. I mean, I never thought Willow would do anything like that. She’s kind of weird, like I said, a little quiet and shy. So . . . I don’t get this. I don’t get it at all. It’s just not like her.”
“. . . okay, thanks,” Mendoza said and disconnected. “No phone found yet,” and her gaze collided with Rivers’s as they both understood that the pictures of Willow with the gun were sent to Zena Wallace’s phone after Willow Valente was dead. So, no, she hadn’t offed herself, not without an accomplice. She had been murdered.
Mendoza glanced at Zena’s phone, where the picture of the nude girl gazing seductively into the camera was still in the frame. “That’s not Willow’s bed,” Mendoza pointed out. “Not the twin bed upstairs. Willow’s has different sheets too and a white headboard. This bed”—she pointed to the screen—“doesn’t have one at all. And is much larger. Check out how she’s sprawled across it.”
But the bed in the small image on Zena’s phone looked familiar. And then Rivers got it, and he felt a frisson of excitement surge through his blood.
Mendoza was asking, “You’re certain Willow doesn’t have a boyfriend?”
“I already told you: no!” Zena was shaking her head violently.
“One she might have recently broken up with?”
“I never heard
