Finlay Donovan Is Killing It(Finlay Donovan #1)(54)

“This is Vero, my nanny—”

“Accountant,” Vero interjected, shaking his hand.

“Vero lives with us. And she was just going upstairs.” I threw her a pointed look. “We can talk in here,” I said, steering Detective Anthony into the kitchen. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, soda, or anything?”

“Soda would be great.” He slid off his windbreaker as I opened the fridge. I watched him over the refrigerator door. A brown leather holster crisscrossed his back, and the black grip of his gun seemed to point at me as he took a seat at my table.

My throat bobbed with my hard swallow. “So … Detective Anthony—”

“Please, call me Nick.”

“Nick.” If he was here to arrest me, he wouldn’t be so informal, right? And he probably wouldn’t be smiling. Or maybe he would. My sister said some cops were assholes that way. “You know Georgia?” Ice rattled in the glass as I set his Coke on the table in front of him.

“Yeah, we were in the Academy together years ago.” He didn’t look much older than my sister. The thick stubble coating his jaw was free of gray, and dark hair peppered the corded muscles of his forearms below the rolled sleeves of his Henley. “We go out for beers once in a while. So you’re the writer. She’s told me a lot about you. You and the kids.”

I casually pulled my chair a few inches farther away before I sat down, keeping some distance between us. “Really?”

“Don’t worry. It’s all good.”

I choked on a nervous laugh. He laughed, too. But I felt his keen eyes taking in every detail of me, and it made me squirm a little. “So … you’re working a case?”

Color rushed into his cheeks, that single deep dimple making another unexpected appearance. “Yeah, right. The case. I feel a little odd about this,” he said almost shyly, “but Georgia insisted you wouldn’t mind. She thought maybe we could help each other.”

My suspicion shifted direction. Maybe this had nothing to do with Harris or Patricia. It wouldn’t be the first time Georgia had tried to set me up with one of her friends from work. I glanced at his left hand as he reached for his soda. No wedding ring. No suspicious tan line where one should have been. I narrowed my eyes at him. “Help each other how?”

“It’s a missing persons case. You might have seen it on the news. The couple who went missing from Arlington—Harris and Patricia Mickler?”

My mouth went dry. The floor creaked at the top of the stairs in the hall where Vero must have been listening. “I think I may have seen something about it.”

“I don’t have any leads on the wife yet, but we know the husband disappeared from a bar in McLean twelve days ago. We found his car in the parking lot, along with his wallet and phone. Apparently, he met a woman for drinks, but she had some kind of an emergency and ended up in the bathroom for a while. A waiter remembered seeing him leave with someone else. We believe we’ve been able to identify her.”

Ice trailed down my spine. “You have?”

He nodded. “She was a member of a social media group that Harris was part of. He was at the bar for some kind of networking event. The woman never RSVP’d or confirmed her attendance online, but the name of the woman at the bar matches the one on the social media group profile, and she fits the description given to us by the waitstaff.”

A shaky sigh of relief slipped out of me. They had a suspect. And it wasn’t me. “So what does any of this have to do with me?”

“That’s where things get a little weird.” He set down his drink, trailing a line of condensation with his thumb. “I’m not saying she’s a suspect. But she’s definitely a person of interest in the case.” His dark eyes lifted to mine. “We think Harris Mickler may have left the bar with your ex-husband’s fiancée, Theresa Hall.”

I knocked over my glass, soda spreading over the surface of the table. The detective and I jumped up at the same time, both of us reaching for the napkins in the holder. I grabbed a wad of them, muttering apologies, my hands shaking as I mopped up the mess.

What had I done?

I braced myself against the table. Nick reached to steady me as I sank into my chair.

I’d told Julian my name was Theresa. I’d told him I was in real estate. I’d been wearing a blond wig and Theresa’s black dress. I hadn’t even looked to see if I recognized anyone else on the networking event page when I’d vetted Harris. There had been seven hundred members in that group. Even this week, I’d only been searching the roster for names that matched the ones I’d seen on Harris’s phone.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I mean, that isn’t much to go on.”

“If that was all I had to go on, no. But Harris’s cell phone pinged a tower later that night, within a three-mile radius of her house.”

No. Not from Theresa’s house. From here. Harris’s phone pinged from my garage. Right down the street from Steven and Theresa’s town house.

“Have you talked to her?” I heard myself ask.

“I caught up to her at her office this morning. She vehemently denied that she was at the bar that night. A bartender there remembered serving a woman meeting her description. He gave us her first name and said she was a real estate agent, but he never asked for her ID, so we can’t confirm it’s actually her. All the evidence we have is circumstantial at this point, but it’s piling pretty high, and Theresa has no verifiable alibi for the night Harris disappeared.”