by Debra Webb
Investigation. Murder. Someone had murdered William.
Her lips trembled. This was a homicide investigation, and she was a person of interest. Her hand went to her mouth, and the urge to vomit was nearly overwhelming. Dear God.
“Dr. Frasier, can you start from the beginning and tell me what happened?”
Her mind still steeped in disbelief, she recounted all that had happened since she woke up. Twice he stopped her and urged her to take her time. The clearer the details, the better. She tried her very best to speak slowly and not leave anything out.
More people came into her home. The latest two were fully clad in disposable garb—gloves, white coveralls, matching hair covers, masks and booties. Forensic techs, she realized. They were here to collect evidence of the crime that had taken place in her home.
The shooting. The murder.
How in the world had William been shot right next to her without her hearing it? Wouldn’t there have been a struggle?
No sooner had she finished her story to the officer than another pair of official-looking men walked in. These two wore business suits.
“Dr. Frasier,” Tolliver said as he stood, “this is Detective Nader and his partner, Detective Watts. They’ll be taking over from here.”
The man named Nader took the chair that Tolliver vacated. Watts followed the officer up the stairs.
Marissa’s throat felt dry. She wished for water or coffee. Anything.
“Let’s start at the top, Dr. Frasier. I want to know everything you remember from the time you got home last night.”
Marissa started at the beginning once more and told the detective the same story she’d told the officer. Nader asked her about her relationship with William. She flinched. Of course he would want to know those details. Most likely the officer simply hadn’t gotten that far in his interrogation.
Because this was an interrogation. Not merely an interview. A man was dead.
As briefly as possible, Marissa explained her relationship with William, culminating with the recent volatile history—his words to her last night outside the ER.
Nader did a lot of scribbling.
Marissa wrung her hands together, wished again that she had a jacket or sweater and a bottle of water or a cup of coffee.
A female officer approached Nader and whispered something in his ear. The two of them glanced at Marissa.
“Give me a minute,” Nader said.
The officer stepped back to the front door and waited there.
“You know a fellow named Lacon Traynor? Says he’s part of your legal and security team from the Colby Agency.”
Relief rushed through Marissa. “Yes.” Though she didn’t know the name Lacon Traynor, she absolutely knew the Colby Agency. Eva likely knew the man.
“Does the Colby Agency represent you?”
Marissa wasn’t sure how to answer that question. They did, in a manner of speaking, she supposed. Though she hadn’t technically met with Victoria yet and hadn’t signed any documents.
But William was dead—in her bed.
She needed help.
“Yes.” She hated that her voice quivered. “Yes, the Colby Agency and I are working together. Because...” She moistened her lips. “Because William’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic and threatening.”
Nader sent a nod toward the waiting officer, who disappeared out the door.
“Nader!”
The shout came from the landing at the top of the stairs. Marissa’s gaze moved to the man who had called out. It was the other detective, Watts.
“Yeah?” Nader glanced over his shoulder.
“Bring the doc up here for a minute, will you?”
Nader stood. “Let’s have a look at your bedroom.”
Marissa followed the detective to the staircase. They waited at the bottom until the two paramedics had descended.
“Coroner’s on his way,” one of the paramedics said to Nader.
The detective nodded and the paramedics left. Marissa watched as they, too, disappeared out her front door. Suddenly she wanted to do exactly that. She didn’t want to be here any longer. She didn’t want to go back upstairs. There was blood in her bed.
Bile churned in her belly.
William was dead.
Nader gestured for her to go ahead of him. Her entire body had started to shake by the time they reached her bedroom door. She hugged herself tight. It wasn’t until she walked into the room this time that she smelled the stench of death. That unmistakable odor of rapidly decomposing cells, mixed with the metallic fetor of blood. The shades had been raised, filling the room with morning light. William remained on the bed. He would be there, she reminded herself, until the coroner arrived to take possession of the body.
The body. Dear God, why? Why would he do this? Yet the gunshot had been to the back of his head. He had not done this. She had to keep her thoughts straight. Her mind whirled madly. He had been murdered. She had to remember that. Someone had come into her home...
Her stomach clenched, and she suffered through another round of nausea. She had assumed that William had somehow gotten her key. But William couldn’t have done this...not alone anyway.
His killer had stood over her bed...had done these awful things while she slept.
“At any time after you awakened and found your husband—”
“Ex-husband,” she corrected Nader, her voice weak, practically a whisper.
He nodded. “After you discovered your dead ex-husband lying next to you, did you at any time walk to that side of the bed?”
Marissa had to think about the question for a moment, then she shook her head. “No. I scooted across the bed and pushed him onto his back.” She shrugged. “All I could think was that he needed CPR, but then I realized it was too late. I suppose I was in shock.” Her hand went to her throat. “I don’t see how this could have happened.” She looked around the room. “Here. With me asleep right next to him.”
Watts held up a clear bag with a handgun inside it. “Is this .22 caliber automatic yours, Dr. Frasier?”
Marissa peered at the bag. “It looks like mine.” She gestured to her night table. “May I?”
Watts and Nader nodded. One of them muttered, “Sure.”
She moved to the table and pulled open the top drawer. A fingernail file, a brush, the book she’d started reading months ago and never gotten back to. The nail polish she never seemed to have time to use, and the lockbox. She removed it from the drawer and opened it. No weapon.
Where was her gun?
“It’s not here.” She turned back to the detective holding the weapon. “Is there a way to determine if that one is actually mine?”
She instinctively understood that the weapon in the bag, the one that was probably hers, had been used to kill William.
“Our forensic experts will make that determination,” Watts assured her.
“We’d like to swab your hands,” Nader said.
She nodded. “Of course.” She had nothing to hide. Apparently she had slept through William’s murder. How was that possible? Wouldn’t she have heard the weapon fire? It might be small, but it was loud nonetheless. She’d fired it numerous times when she took that gun safety course. The sound would certainly have awakened her. The entire scene was sheer madness. None of this made sense.
Horror churned inside her.
Watts motioned for one of the techs to come do the honors. Marissa held her hands in front of her—they shook. The forensic tech carefully collected the samples from the skin on her hands then stepped away from her without ever making eye contact.
This was a nightmare. She squeezed her eyes shut, wondered again how this could be happening.
“We’d also like the clothes you’re wearing, Dr. Frasier.”
Marissa opened her eyes and met Nader’s
steady gaze. The female officer was there now, as well.
“Officer Holcombe will accompany you to your closet. You might want to pack a few things. I’m afraid you won’t be able to come back into the house for a few days. We need time to properly process the scene.”
The scene.
“Of course.”
With Holcombe right behind her, Marissa went through the en suite to the large walk-in closet that had been a key selling point for the home. Moving mechanically, she packed jeans and T-shirts and her favorite sneakers into her overnight bag. She wasn’t due back to work until Tuesday. Surely they would be finished here by then. Just in case, she grabbed a set of scrubs as well as a pair of black dress slacks and a matching blouse, along with her favorite flats for meeting with Victoria Colby-Camp. She went back into the bathroom and gathered her toiletries.
Once she’d zipped the bag, Holcombe said, “I’ll just need you to remove your pajamas, ma’am.”
It wasn’t until then that Marissa remembered she was still wearing her pj’s. Rather than answer Holcombe, she returned to the closet and found another pair of jeans and a University of Illinois T-shirt. While the officer stood by, she stripped off her pj’s and dropped them into the waiting bag.
“I’ll need your underwear too, ma’am.”
Naked save for her underwear, Marissa went back to the closet, Holcombe on her heels, and snatched another pair of panties from the drawer. She slipped off the pair she was wearing and quickly shimmied into the clean ones. While Holcombe readied the bags for turning over to one of the forensic techs, Marissa quickly dragged on the jeans and a T-shirt. She’d already packed her sneakers, so she pulled on a pair of thong sandals. With the officer waiting for her, evidence bags in hand, she abruptly remembered she would need pj’s, too. She grabbed a pair and stuffed them into her bag with the rest.
With her bag hanging over her shoulder, she exited the bathroom and walked straight up to Nader. The coroner had arrived and was examining the body.
The body. It sounded so clinical. This was the man with whom she had thought she would spend the rest of her life...
“May I leave now?” She kept her gaze carefully averted from the activities across the room.
“You can.” He reached into his jacket pocket and removed a business card. “Call me if you think of anything else.” When she’d taken the card, he added, “I will have more questions, and there’s the official statement you’ll need to come downtown and make, so keep me informed of your location.”
Marissa nodded and hurried from the room. She felt sick and disgusted and aggrieved. How the hell had this happened? When she went to sleep last night, her biggest concern had been how to extract William from her life. Now she had to worry about whether she was a murder suspect.
Her heart hurt for William. She would never have wished him dead.
Downstairs, yet another new arrival stood near the stone fireplace perusing the framed photographs there. This one was male and tall, with sandy blond hair. He wasn’t like the others. He wore well-loved jeans, a sky blue shirt and a tan summer-weight suit jacket, but it was the cowboy boots that really set him apart from the others. He turned as she descended the last step and thrust out his hand, looking for all the world like a character from a modern-day Western movie who’d just stepped off the screen and into her living room.
“Lacon Traynor,” he said, “from the Colby Agency.”
Marissa took the final steps between them and accepted his hand for a quick shake. She wasn’t sure what she had expected when Eva mentioned calling the Colby Agency, but this towering, cowboy-boot-wearing guy was not it. He looked vaguely familiar, but for the life of her she couldn’t place him.
She finally found her voice. “Have we met?”
He gestured for her to follow him toward the kitchen. Her graystone was three stories and quite deep, but very narrow. When you walked in the front door you could see all the way out the back, with nothing but the staircase with the powder room tucked beneath it to hamper the flow. Beyond her kitchen was a set of French doors that led onto a rear deck. Beyond the deck was the small driveway. No garage, just a driveway. She was immensely grateful for something beyond street parking. A garage was on her wish list.
“We may have run into each other at the Edge when I was working with Bella and Dr. Pierce.”
Now she remembered. She’d seen him once with Dr. Pierce during that awful business about his deceased wife. She remembered thinking then that this guy looked like a sheriff from a modern-day Western. Ruggedly handsome and utterly capable. She hoped he could help her the way Bella Lytle had helped Dr. Pierce, and Todd Christian had rescued Eva.
“Let’s get out of here,” he suggested.
She was more than ready to do that. In the kitchen, she grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. Traynor took her bag and led the way out onto the deck and down to where her car was parked. He walked right past her vehicle and to the alley.
She followed, too overwhelmed to put up a fuss. “Where do we go from here?”
“My car. They’ll want to go over yours at the lab.”
Marissa hissed a disgusted sigh. They were taking over her entire life. Not that she actually minded, as long as it would help find William’s killer.
A killer who had been in her home. Fear tightened around her throat.
She waited until they were seated in Traynor’s car and he’d driven away before she said as much.
“Until they’ve collected all the evidence they believe they can find and have ruled you out as the shooter, they’re going to be all over you and your property. You might as well get used to that now.” He sent her a sidelong glance. “The good news is that while ruling you out, they’ll also be looking for the actual perpetrator. It’s no fun, but it’s the way it works.”
Marissa closed her eyes and leaned back against the headrest. She was so tired.
“Why don’t you tell me why someone would want to make it look as if you killed your ex-husband?”
Marissa’s eyes snapped open. Good God, he was right. The entire setup was about making her look responsible for William’s death. But who would do that? Other than her friends at work, she had none. Her social life had fizzled out during her final years of marriage to William. He’d chased away every friend they’d ever had.
“I have no idea.” Why did this have to happen now? Her life was finally headed in the direction she wanted, and this insanity had to descend upon her? What had William gotten himself into that someone would want to murder him?
“Eva filled me in on your past with Bauer. Officer Tolliver brought me up to speed on your statement, so I’m not going to make you repeat any of that for now.”
Thank goodness. She’d already repeated it twice.
“Since his release from prison, have you kept up with Bauer’s activities?”
“No. I tried to evict him from my life, but he still showed up every so often to antagonize me.”
“So you don’t know how he made money or who his associates were?”
“No.” God, she’d thought she was doing the right thing distancing herself, and suddenly it felt as if all the things she didn’t know were coming back to haunt her. “He sold the condo when he went to prison. Honestly, I don’t even know where he lives.”
Saying the words out loud made her feel all the guiltier. How could she have been married to the man for five years and not know where he was living the day he was murdered?
What kind of person did that make her?
“No worries,” Traynor assured her. “We can track down all that information. But first, I’m taking you to breakfast. You need to eat.”
“I’m really not hungry.”
He flashed her a smile. “Maybe not, but I’m starving.”
At that moment, the reality of her predicament settled fully upon her.
&nb
sp; How in the world would she ever prove that she hadn’t killed her ex-husband?
He had been murdered in her bed. The murder weapon was her gun. The security guard from the Edge could confirm that she and William had had a heated exchanged less than twenty-four hours ago.
She swung her gaze back to the man behind the wheel.
Her only hope was this cowboy who wanted to eat before they got down to business.
She was in serious trouble.
Chapter Three
Lincoln Avenue, 10:00 a.m.
Lacon had practically shoveled in the stack of pancakes he’d ordered while Dr. Frasier picked at her egg-white omelet. When she’d descended the stairs in those tight-fitting jeans and the navy university T-shirt, she’d looked like a college freshman, not the thirty-four-year-old doctor he’d been sent to protect. He’d learned a lot about her last night from Eva Bowman, fellow Colby investigator Todd Christian’s soon-to-be wife. Eva and Frasier were close friends. Frasier spent an hour in the gym most every day running on the treadmill—which was different from the way she used to run through the neighborhood she loved. Her ex-husband had followed her by car several times so she’d changed her routine.
She worked hard and lived frugally to cover the mortgage for the restored graystone she’d bought when she left Bauer. She’d allowed him to keep the equity in their condo as well as the furnishings to facilitate a speedy divorce.
Between Eva and his online research, he’d learned a great deal about Dr. William Bauer, as well. Like his ex-wife, he’d graduated medical school with lower than average student loan debt because of scholarships and hard work, but the practice he’d been invited to join had not offered much in the way of fringe benefits to cover any of those loans. Frasier, on the other hand, had landed a great offer with complete coverage of any loans still outstanding. Dr. Devon Pierce, the administrator at the Edge, had given her a hefty bonus to join him when he opened the prototype advance emergency medicine facility. That bonus had served as a down payment on her new home.
While Frasier’s career blossomed, Bauer’s had flopped. After ferreting out all he could online about the guy, Lacon had called a friend of his who had made a career writing about life in Chicago and who kept his finger on the pulse of Chicago’s streets. Since Bauer’s prison stint, he sold his services as a physician to anyone who had the money to pay the exorbitant prices, and he asked no questions. He lived in a hotel and used his cell phone like an answering service.