The Marriage Lie(64)

“He doesn’t seem very nice,” I whisper behind the paper as Evan and I are sinking into a row of empty chairs by the far wall.

“That’s because he hates my guts.” Evan doesn’t bother lowering his voice. He leans back in the chair, crossing an ankle over his knee, and bounces a so what shoulder. “I’m a defense attorney. I make my living defending the same person his buddies just went to a great deal of trouble to arrest. From where he’s sitting, I’m batting for the wrong team.”

The sergeant purses his lips and nods, but he doesn’t look over.

“How am I the wrong team?” I say, stung. “I didn’t do anything.”

“It’ll be fine. Just fill that thing in so we can go make our statement.”

I return to the form, and ten minutes later, we’re stepping back up to the front desk.

“Detective Dreesch in?” Evan says.

The sergeant doesn’t look up from his papers. “Nope.”

“What about Detective Willoughby?”

His pen stills against the paper, and after a great sigh, he leans back in his chair, cranes his neck around the corner. “Detective Johnson’s available.”

Evan frowns. “Is he new?”

“He’s a she, and yup. Fresh from patrol.”

“Excellent,” Evan says, but in a tone that makes it obvious it’s not.

“Wait over there.” The desk sergeant aims his pen over our heads, at the row of chairs we just came from, and Evan and I return to our seats.

It’s a full forty minutes later by the time he shows us to Detective Johnson, a petite officer with a freshly scrubbed face and pretty features pulled high and tight in a ponytail. Her posture is rigid, and her expression overly serious, a young woman with something to prove and a glass ceiling to bust through. She gestures for us to sit at the edge of her immaculate desk, an anomaly in this cluttered, crowded room, where most horizontal surfaces seem to be hidden under piles of paper files and dirty coffee mugs. She studies my form, looking up with a knitted brow. “Who’s the perpetrator?”

“We’re hoping you could tell us that from the cell phone number,” Evan says before I can draw a breath to answer. Not for the first time, I think how glad I am he didn’t send me here alone. I’ve never done this before, never even had a reason to walk into a police building until Seattle, and now here I am for the second time in a week. I feel completely unequipped for this task.

“Assuming it’s not a dump phone,” Detective Johnson says. She flips through the copies of the screenshots Evan’s assistant printed out, the ones detailing my text conversation with the 678 number. When she gets to the one with the first threat, Tell me where Will hid the money or you’ll be joining him, she looks up. “What money?”

“Four and a half million in missing funds, allegedly stolen by Mrs. Griffith’s husband from his place of employment.”

She glances at me but directs her question at Evan. “Where is the husband now?”

“He was a passenger on Liberty Airlines Flight 23. Mrs. Griffith is a widow.”

The detective’s eyes widen, but as far as I can tell, not in sympathy. “So then, where’s the money?”

“My client only learned of the alleged embezzlement yesterday. She’s not apprised of where her husband might have stored the funds before his death. It’s certainly not in any of their shared accounts. We can confirm all of this with bank statements, of course.”

Detective Johnson leans back in her seat, suddenly a lot more interested. “So let me get this straight. Mr. Griffith embezzles millions—”

“Allegedly,” Evan interrupts. “As far as I know, no formal charges have been brought.”

She gives him an unamused look. “Mr. Griffith allegedly takes off with more than four million dollars, then disappears in a plane crash.”

“He didn’t disappear,” Evan says, both his words and tone careful. “He died, and in about the worst possible way you can imagine.”

“Meanwhile, the money’s disappeared, too.”

Beside me, Evan grows an inch in his chair. “I don’t like what you’re insinuating, Detective. Mrs. Griffith lost her husband last week, along with 178 other families who lost husbands, wives, parents and children. Surely you can’t be accusing him of what I think you are.”

But of course, Evan knows exactly what she’s accusing Will of.

And so do I. My heart takes off, fluttering like a bird trapped behind my ribs, because I know, too. It’s the same thing I’ve spent the better part of the past nine days obsessing over. I’ve come at it from every possible angle, come up with every possibility, and every time, one answer keeps rising to the top like cream.

Evan reads it on my face. He doesn’t say a word, but the look he gives me does. It orders me to shut the hell up, to keep whatever I’m thinking to myself.

“I’m not accusing anyone of anything, sir. I’m only trying to get a thorough understanding of the situation so I know what steps we need to take in order to ensure Mrs. Griffith’s safety.” She turns back to me. “I’d like to hear it from Mrs. Griffith.”

“I don’t really have anything to add, other than that I found the 678 number on a receipt. Will listed it as his own.”