Loyalty in Death (In Death #9)(82)

“Clarissa, what did Zeke do then, after your husband fell? After the blood?”

“He… I’m not sure.”

“Think. Pull it back into your head and think.”

“He…” The tears began to plop, in single drops, onto the table. “He made me sit down, then he went to B. D. He told me to call an ambulance. He told me to hurry, but I couldn’t move. I just couldn’t. I knew he was dead. I could see — the blood, his eyes. He was dead. Call the police. Zeke said we had to call the police. I was so afraid. I told him we should run. We should just run away, but he wouldn’t. We had to call the police.”

She stopped, shivering, then looked into Eve’s eyes. “B. D. knows the police,” she said in a whisper. “He said if I ever told anyone, if I ever went to them because he hurt me, they’d lock me up. They’d rape me and lock me up. He knows the police.”

“You’re with the police now,” Eve said coolly. “Have you been raped and locked up?”

Clarissa’s eyes flickered. “No, but — “

“What happened after Zeke told you he was calling the police?”

“I sent him away, into the other room. I thought if I could just… make it go away. I asked him to get me some water, and when he was gone, I got the droid. I programmed it to take the — the body, to drive it to the river and throw it in. Then I tried to clean up the blood. There was so much blood.”

“That was fast work. Fast and smart.”

“I had to be fast. And smart. Zeke would come back — he’d try to stop me. He did stop me.” She lowered her head. “And now we’re here.”

“Why are you here?”

“He called the police. He called them and they’ll put him in prison. It was my fault, but he’ll go to prison.”

No, Eve thought, he wouldn’t.

“How long were you married to B. Donald Branson, Clarissa?”

“Almost ten years.”

“And you claim he abused you during this period?” Eve remembered the way Clarissa had stiffened when Branson had put his arm around her at the will reading. “He hurt you physically?”

“Not the whole time.” She wiped a hand over her face. “At first. It was all right at first. But I couldn’t do anything right. I’m so stupid, and I never got anything right. He’d get so angry. He hit me — he said he hit me to knock some sense into my head. To show me who was in charge.”

“Just remember who’s in charge around here, little girl. Just you remember.”

Eve’s gut clenched as the words played back in her head, and the sticky fear from childhood that went with it. “You’re a grown woman. Why didn’t you leave?”

“And go where?” Clarissa’s eyes were ripe with despair. “Where would I go that he wouldn’t find me?”

“Friends, family.” She’d had none, Eve thought. She had no one.

Clarissa shook her head. “I didn’t have any friends, and my family’s gone. What people I knew — the ones he let me know — think B. D. is a great man. He beat me whenever he wanted, raped me whenever he chose. You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t know what it’s like to live with that, with the not knowing what he’ll do, what he’ll be like when he walks through the door.”

Eve rose, walked away to the two-way mirror and stared at her own face. She knew exactly what it was like, too much what it was like. And the remembering, the feeling, would only cloud her objectivity. “And now, now that he won’t walk through the door again?”

“He can’t hurt me anymore.” She said it simply, causing Eve to turn. “And I’ll have to live with knowing I caused a good man, a gentle man to be responsible for his death. Any chance Zeke and I had to be together, to be happy, died tonight, too.”

She laid her head on the rough table. Her weeping, Eve thought, was the sound of a heart breaking.

Eve ended the recording and stepping out, instructed the uniform to arrange to have Clarissa taken to her health center until morning.

She found McNab by the vending machine, scowling at his choices. “The droid?”

“She did a good job with him. He followed orders. I ran his program back and forward and sideways. She inputted orders — retrieve the body by the hearth, transport it to the car, drive to the river, and dispose. There’s nothing else in there. She wiped previous memory.”

“Accident or design?”

“Can’t tell. She’d have been rushed, nervous. It’s easy to wipe out old with new programming if you’re in a hurry.”

“Yeah. How many other servants in that place?”

McNab took out his notes. “Four.”

“And nobody hears anything, sees anything?”

“Two in the kitchen at the time in question. Personal maid upstairs, groundskeeper tucked in his shed.”

“Tucked in his shed, in this weather?”

“They’re all droids. The Bransons had full droid staff. Top quality.”

“Figures.” She rubbed her tired eyes. She’d think about that later, go through those steps and stages later. First priority was to clear Zeke of any chance of formal charges.

“Okay, I’m going to hit Zeke again. Peabody in there with him?”