Every Last Secret(57)

Brown eyes flipped open, his lips tightening on the cool barrel of the gun before gaping back open. The intruder carefully flipped off the safety with his thumb. As the prone man’s eyes pleaded with him for mercy, he let out a slow breath and pulled the trigger.





CHAPTER 39

NEENA

The police came in silently, their sirens off, three cars in total. From my perch at the window, I watched them pull up to our house, the knot of unease growing in my stomach. This was bad. I didn’t even know what had gone wrong, but this was bad. I followed Matt as he opened the front door, meeting them as they came up the wide brick steps.

“Mr. Ryder?” A female detective flashed her shield, then introduced the other uniforms, all in the standard black garb of the town police department. “I’m Detective Cullen. You said on the phone that the intruder has left?” She had a thick New York accent and the aggressive posture to match it.

“Yes.” Matt straightened to his full and unimpressive height of five feet nine inches. “I heard him leave through the front, and I searched the house. He’s not here.”

She looked down at the stoop. “He left through here?”

My husband nodded, not realizing the issue of three officers trampling through the exit. “Yeah.”

“Dammit,” she swore. “Donnie, get back. All of you, get back and watch where you’re stepping. We just screwed ourselves in terms of footprints.”

I hung back in the warmth of the house, the night chill trickling through the open doorway, and watched as the cops attempted to maneuver inside without damaging evidence. “I’ll open the side door. You can come in through there.”

“Thank you.” The woman lifted her flashlight, shining it in my face. “You Mrs. Ryder?”

“Dr. Ryder,” I clipped back, holding up my hand to block the flashlight’s glare. “Do you mind?”

“No problem.” She clicked off the lamp and gave me a hard smile. “We’ll meet you around the side.”



I leaned against the left side of the house, my hands tucked into the pockets of my robe, and felt like a criminal. The scene was eerily familiar. Suspicious looks. Probing questions. Before, they’d only done a brief glance through the house, then ushered me into the back of a police car. Before, I’d been given a series of gentle questions paired with sympathetic looks. Now, I was being drilled. An army of uniforms was moving into my house. Matt and I were being kept outside and questioned as if we were suspects.

The detective pointed down the dark stretch of our driveway. “Your front gate out there—does that fence go all the way around the property?”

I shook my head. “Just the front. The neighbors have fences that make up the sides. Well, most of the sides. And we leave the front gate open. The motor is broken on it.”

“And the back of the property?”

“The back doesn’t have a fence due to the steep hill. Past the tree line, there are other homes.”

“So, someone could have gotten in that way?”

“Sure, but those homes are in the neighborhood, also. They’d still have had to get past the main entrance gate.”

She turned to the garage’s interior door, examining the lock, then nodded to the security keypad mounted on the wall. “Your security system go off?”

“It doesn’t work. It’s from the last owners.”

“You have any security system at all? Cameras? Motion sensors? A Ring video doorbell?” Her voice rose with each item, and I bristled at her incredulous tone. She probably lived in a townhome. Something low rent, in a neighborhood that might require a security system. This was Atherton. We were paying the highest property taxes and homeowners’ dues in the state for a reason.

“No.” Seeing her raised eyebrows, I pushed back. “You know, most people in the neighborhood don’t even lock their doors. The Winthorpes leave theirs wide open most of the time. We had planned to get some sort of system in place, but we’re renovating. Did you see the new landscaping?”

Maybe we should have pushed an alarm further up the to-do list. The security company had given a thorough presentation of the different safeguards available. Window sensors, motion-activated cameras, a schedule of interior lights that would give the appearance of constant activity. I’d seen the estimate and taken a few giant steps back at the cost, deciding to invest in an outdoor seating set instead. And the weather-friendly sectional had been a valuable and impressive investment—until Cat had splattered limoncello all over it.

She pointed at our side door. “Was this locked when you just came out of it?”

“Yeah. It’s a dead bolt. I flipped it to come out.”

“Let’s step in there for a moment.” She opened the door with a gloved hand and moved into the secondary foyer. She let out a low whistle, and I stiffened at the critical way her eyes moved over the space.

Excessive grandeur, that’s what Matt’s mother had called it, her afternoon pop-in perfectly timed when I was exhausted from unpacking and too emotionally fried for verbal assault. Way too fancy for the likes of you two, she’d said, running her hand over the velvet chair with an unimpressed sniff. That chandelier come with the place, or did you guys buy it? She liked to remind him that I grew up in a shack and had been perfectly happy in my Kmart sundresses before I started wearing designer lines. She was wrong, of course. I may have smiled the night I met her in my cheap sundress, but I had never been happy. Not while my father was home, and not until I was out of that horrible town and had my first taste of financial stability. She thought I changed Matt, but his lifestyle had been what changed me. He’d given me a taste of the good life, and I’d binged on each middle-class bite until I’d developed more expensive tastes.