Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(55)

“Thank you.” She looked up at her mother. “Mommy?”

Sherri’s gaze settled on me. “Why are you here?”

“To help, if I can.”

“Yes, you were such a help when Elise died.” She wielded sarcasm like a knife. Sherri had been livid during the Hensley case when I’d dragged Kane into it. “Mother, would you take the girls upstairs to watch TV?”

Krystal looked like she would protest. But then she nodded and shifted the baby to her other hip. “Of course. Haley, honey, let’s go upstairs. We can play dress up if you want.”

“Can I take my muffin?”

“Food stays in the kitchen.”

“Mother. It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Haley, you can take your muffin.”

Haley slid off her mother’s lap, balancing the plate in her small hands. The stairs creaked as she and her grandmother and the baby disappeared from view.

Sherri turned to me, narrowing her own eyes down to slits in perfect imitation of her mother. “Why are you really here?”

“Jeremy tried to call me five times the day he died. I’d like to know why.”

“You didn’t pick up?”

“I was in Mexico. I didn’t see the calls.”

Sherri’s mouth went slack, and her hands fluttered up as if to ward off my words. Her hands were pale and slender, fragile in a way the rest of her was not. They settled on her chest, fingers spread like a cage over her heart.

“Why would he call you?”

“I don’t know,” I said gently. “I thought you might.”

“No. I don’t.”

I walked out onto the ice. “Something to do with the war, maybe?”

“Damn the war.”

She lowered her hands to the table, flattened her palms, and pushed herself up. She poured herself a mug of coffee.

Every time I’d seen Sherri in the past, she’d been flawlessly put together in a way I couldn’t fathom how to achieve. Money was part of it—the perfectly tailored clothes, the expensive hair. Attitude was the other half. Sherri had been raised to believe the world was her oyster and, if you were patient, life gave you pearls.

Now she looked as if she’d been shattered from the inside and pieced back together with bailing wire and Xanax.

She groped for her chair and sank into it.

She said, “For a long time, Jeremy was doing all right. He loved his job with the RTD. Standing watch was what he knew best, and because of that, he also thought it was what he did best.”

I understood. Why not monetize your anxiety? A lot of us did.

“But a week ago,” she went on, “he started acting the way he did when he first came home from Iraq. Those horrible nightmares. He’d wake up screaming, and his screaming would wake the girls, and then they’d start crying. On the nights he didn’t have nightmares, it was because he never went to sleep. I’d find him walking the house or standing at the living room window. I thought he was having a . . . a breakdown. I begged him to go back to his therapist.”

“You have any idea what triggered this?”

“I know when it started. I’d gone out with my girls group. Dinner and a movie. Jeremy was fine when I left. But when I got home, everything had changed.”

“What did he say when you asked?”

She flushed. “I didn’t. Not at first. I just thought he was mad that I’d left him alone with the girls.” She gave me a plaintive look. “I keep telling him I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t understand. I’m sorry I got mad. Do you think he can hear me?”

“I’m sure he knew that, Sherri.”

“I need him to know now. I need to know he can hear me.”

She tilted her head back as if she couldn’t get enough air. I gave her a moment. Then I said, “So when you got home that night, he was angry.”

“Not angry. Not exactly. Agitated.”

“Later, did you ask him what had made him agitated?”

Her flush deepened. “I asked Haley. She said someone called, and Daddy was on the phone for a long time. After that, he put the baby down with a wet diaper and sent Haley to bed without reading her a story. Megan was soaked when I got home.”

“He was distracted.”

Her gaze roamed the room as if she wasn’t sure where she was. “He was terrified.”

“Of what, Sherri?”

But she’d jumped tracks. “Detective Gorman told me Jeremy was killed by a lunatic. A bum. A . . . a random stranger. How can this happen? My husband defended his country in Iraq. He survived a bomb blast. And then he comes home to be killed by a madman.” Her fingers curled into fists. “Tell me where there’s any justice in that.”

There wasn’t, of course. I remained mute before her rage and grief.

“If they find him,” she said, “I hope they fry him. That would be justice.”

Part of the Xanax had given way, exposing the cracks, and tears poured unheeded down her face. I spotted a box of tissues on the counter and passed it to her. She pressed a tissue to her eyes and sat silently for a moment.

My chest aching, I waited her out. In the backyard, the pit bull loosed a broadside of barks that tapered off to a cranky growl. He whined at the door, then gave up on that, too.