Half Empty (First Wives, #2)(76)

“But—”

“No, ma’am. There are no buts in this situation.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Jeb told Wade.

“How soon can you leave?” Mauro asked Trina.

“Five days. So long as nothing new happens.”

Avery snorted from the couch. “With our luck, something new is bound to happen by lunch.”



Something new came in the form of an increase in body count.

Armstrong and Gray arrived at the house at two o’clock. Right after Jeb left for the airport with Vicki and Mauro. Their conversation was directed toward Avery.

“We found our suspect,” Gray stated once everyone was seated.

“He’s dead. OD in Central Park. He was found two days ago. Came in as a John Doe until he was identified through his tattoos.”

Avery blinked. “What kind of tattoos?”

“Do you remember something?” Trina asked softly.

“I don’t know.”

“He liked his ink, but kept most of it off his face and forearms.”

“Most?” Lori asked.

Avery stared off at the wall across the room, her fingers on her good hand scratching the inside of her wrist.

“Avery?” Shannon’s calm voice seemed to focus her. “Do you remember something?”

She looked down at her arm before shaking her head. “No.”

“If you do . . .”

“Yeah, I know. Call you.”

The conversation moved to Trina. “Our investigation into Cindy Geist has taken a turn.”

“Oh?”

“We found fifty thousand euros in a coffee can in her backyard. Her husband said she’d buried it a year ago as a time capsule. She didn’t tell him what was in it. When he dug it up and found the money, he called us.”

“Euros?”

“Strange currency for a woman who’d never been out of the country.”

Trina felt her skin crawl. “Blood money. She knew something.”

“That’s our thoughts. She and her husband had applied for passports and were planning a second honeymoon.”

“Or she was running,” Reed said.

“She didn’t run fast enough.” Avery’s stone-cold delivery of the facts chilled the room.



Just after dark, Trina, Wade, and Reed were in Fedor’s office, putting the place back together. There wasn’t a chance in hell she’d see if anything was missing without seeing it as it had been when Fedor was alive.

Reed held a photograph he’d received from the crime scene pictures. How he obtained them, Trina didn’t ask. She was thankful that she didn’t need to see the ones that actually showed Fedor’s lifeless body.

Although she knew exactly when Reed was looking at those particular pictures. He flipped them quickly when she walked around him to peer at his phone.

She pushed a plush chair to the far corner of the room, beside a bookcase, a lamp, and a side table.

Wade and Reed scooted the desk around until it was perfectly centered to the room and just past the three-quarter mark of the second set of windows. The curtains had been replaced . . . after. There was a fireplace on the north side of the room, the hearth clean of ashes and soot. She remembered how Fedor liked to have a fire going on cool nights. He didn’t like the gas-fed options like they had inside the house. “Crackling wood and the smell of smoke is primal,” he’d told her, laughing.

“You okay?” Wade asked as he came up behind her.

She blinked her gaze away from the fireplace. “Yup.”

Reed picked up shards of broken glass and looked at the picture on his phone. “I’m assuming that this used to be this vase.” He turned the phone around and pointed to it.

Trina shrugged. “Looks right. I couldn’t really tell you.”

Reed looked from his phone to the desk, and then tweaked the objects on the desk until he got them just right.

It took a couple of hours, but they finally had the room looking somewhat normal, minus the dark smudges left behind from the investigators searching for prints.

“Okay.” Reed dropped his arm holding his phone. “We’re done.” He turned a full circle, looked at his phone, and repeated his action several times.

“It’s all here.” Trina didn’t see one thing missing.

Reed flipped through a few pictures, tilted his head, and stared at where Fedor’s body would have landed.

“Let’s talk about what you would see when you normally walked in.”

Trina pushed the last time out of her head and moved to the door.

“It was almost always late. Or around dinnertime, if he was home. Most nights he was at the hospital until late. At least toward the end.”

Wade watched her from the corner of the room, something Trina was acutely aware of.

She offered him a reassuring smile, flipped her hair over her shoulder, and walked toward the desk.

The memory of Fedor sitting behind his desk, his eyes fixed on the fire in the hearth, filled her thoughts. Many times he didn’t even realize she was standing there until after she called his name. Not that the office was so big that he could miss her walking in. It’s just that he was so focused on his problems, it was easy to sneak up on him.

“. . . so he would jump sometimes, when I stood next to the desk.” She stood there now, looking down and trying hard not to see him there dead.