All the Dark Places(22)

“Seems odd,” Lauren says. “Like she’s hiding from the world maybe.”

*

Mrs. Bradley answers the door, looking thin and peaked, washed out. She’s wearing an oversized pair of gray sweatpants and a man’s flannel shirt that looks like it’s been pulled from the bottom of a laundry basket.

She leads Chase and me down the hall and into the kitchen. The party mess has all been cleared away, I notice as we sit at the table. The house smells of lemon and bleach and seems to echo in its stillness.

“We want to bring you up to date on the investigation, Mrs. Bradley.”

“Do you have any leads?”

“Not yet.”

She nods. “When can I have my phone back?”

“Soon. We’ve got a lot to process, but it’s a priority.” How times have changed. Cell phones are the number one thing people want back after a crime.

I open a file folder. “The autopsy is complete, so we’ll be releasing your husband’s body later today.” She stares at me with round, blue eyes that look like they’ve been bruised in a prize fight, but that look is typical too.

“I’ll need to arrange a service,” she says almost to herself.

“It would be appropriate to go ahead with those plans.” I wonder if she’s up to it. Hopefully, she’s got family who can make the arrangements because this woman doesn’t look like she could handle planning a trip to the grocery store.

“How are you holding up, Mrs. Bradley?” Chase asks, his eyes searching her face. “Are you staying here alone?”

“Yes,” she says quietly.

“Do you want one of our officers to drive by while on patrol tonight?”

“Yes. Please. Someone told me they could do that.”

“I’ll make sure.” Chase squeezes her hand, then inputs notes on his phone. He seems a little taken with our widow. He spent ten years as a patrol cop, and while they see lots of carnage, deal with dangerous situations, they don’t tend to spend the time with the victims that detectives do. They don’t have an opportunity to develop a relationship with the people they serve, and that can sometimes get tricky for a detective. Professional distance is a must, even if that means being a little distant.

That thought takes me back to when I was a young cop in Boston. One hot summer night, my partner and I were called to a nice neighborhood where someone had reported shots fired. We entered an upscale home to find a man sobbing and cradling his dying wife in his arms. Blood covered his shirt, and he mumbled about a man with a gun who had broken in the back door. I was so caught up in the husband’s apparent grief that I missed obvious signs that he was, in fact, his wife’s killer. Later a veteran cop sat me down for a talk, set me on the right road. People are great at projecting the emotions they want you to see. Lesson learned.

“Mrs. Bradley,” I say, “the autopsy revealed that your husband was killed by a single neck wound. Otherwise, he appeared to be a healthy man. Nothing else of note was found.”

Her gaze is on the table, and she makes a noise in her throat, and I’m afraid she’s going to cry, but she holds it together. “Who would do that to Jay, Detective? Everybody loved him.”

Not everybody, apparently, but I don’t say so. I shuffle through my notes. “Was your husband talking to anyone about what he was writing? You think he might have interviewed anybody for his book?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe Elise would know about that. If he talked to anybody about his work, it would be her.”

I pull a planner from my satchel.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“Your husband’s social calendar. Last year.”

Her eyes narrow. “Where did you get it?”

“His office in town.” I open the notebook to December, and she leans over to look. “He, Josh, and Cal go to the pub often?”

“Once in a while.”

“What about him meeting Laken Ferris at the spa on the ninth?”

She shrugs. “He might have gone in for a massage. I seem to remember that. He’d tweaked his back doing yard work about then. Why is this important?”

“May not be. Just trying to get a sense of what was going on in your husband’s life leading up to his murder.” I push the calendar closer to her. “What’s this about?” I point to Saturday, December 28, which bears the notation “window.”

“Oh. Jay drove up to our mountain house in Mountclair, New Hampshire. A little ways past Manchester. He got a call that a couple of kids were throwing snowballs and had broken one of the windows. He went up to fix it.”

“Okay. What about this on December 30?” The appointment at the prison.

She leans forward again, purses her lips. “I have no idea what that’s about.”

“He never mentioned it to you?”

She shakes her head. “I’m sure it was work-related or had something to do with his book maybe, Detective. I have no idea.”

“Okay. One more.” I close the book, slide it back in the bag, and retrieve the other planner. I open it to the first page. “What about this?” I tap my finger on the square in question. “Lunch with Hayes. Who’s he?”

She blinks her eyes. “My boss at the bookstore.”