Dead Certain - Mariah Stewart [26]
“You knew though that he’d been shot with a .38?”
“Of course I did. It was on the news. But he wasn’t shot with my .38.”
“Let’s prove it.”
They stared at each other. She was the first to blink.
“All right. Evan will scream bloody murder when I tell him I did this, but you’re right. You can prove that Derek wasn’t killed by my gun.” She started toward the front steps.
She was almost to the front door when she saw it.
She stopped abruptly and uttered a quiet little, “Oh.”
Mercer followed her gaze to the porch. On the decking, just outside the door, lay a long-stemmed red rose.
“Looks like someone left a token of their sympathy,” he said.
Amanda’s face had drained of color and her eyes had grown wary.
“Ms. Crosby? Are you all right?” He touched her arm, and she recoiled as if she’d been burned.
He went up to the door and picked up the rose. “There’s no card.”
“There never is.” She remained on the step.
“There have been others?”
She nodded.
“Any idea who they’re from?”
She shook her head.
He held the rose out to her, but knew she’d decline to take it.
She shook her head a second time, then walked past him and unlocked the front door with a key she’d withdrawn from her back pocket.
“Nice house,” he said as she closed the door behind them.
“You’ve seen it before. You were here before.”
“Yes, but things were a little hectic then. We’d just found your partner that morning, we were trying to get statements—”
“So what you’re saying is that in all the confusion, you failed to notice how nice my house is.” Before he could respond, she added, “So maybe you can understand how, in the midst of that same confusion—and considering that it was my partner and best friend who had been murdered—I forgot to mention that I do own a gun, and that I’d fired it the day before. It just never occurred to me, since it wasn’t used to kill Derek.”
“Ruling out your gun as the murder weapon will certainly go a long way to prove that, since there is that matter of gunshot residue on the sweatshirt you were—by your own admission—wearing on the night Mr. England was killed.”
“Because I’d worn it to the firing range.” Her jaw was clenched. “And I can prove that. There’s a video camera set up on the range. Check it out and you’ll see exactly what I was wearing.”
“Thanks. I’ll do just that.”
Muttering under her breath, she turned and marched up the stairs to the second floor. She stopped midway up and looked down at him over one shoulder.
“You tested my hands and arms as well. What were the results of those tests?”
“They were clean. No residue.”
“I could have told you that.” She made no effort to hide the touch of smugness as she continued up the steps.
She held the gun out to him handle first, as she came back down a moment later.
“Here. It’s not loaded. But you were taking quite a chance, weren’t you? I mean, how did you know I wouldn’t come back down, gun blazing?”
“My very obvious error.” She would have expected him to look a bit embarrassed by this oversight, but he did not.
“I’ll get you a plastic bag from the kitchen so that you don’t even have to get your prints on it”—she waved for him to follow her toward the back of the house—“since you obviously didn’t expect to gather any evidence this afternoon.”
He walked behind her down the short hall and into the kitchen.
She opened a drawer and pulled out a plastic bag into which she unceremoniously deposited the gun. Handing the bag to him, she said, “There you go. In a few days, you’ll know for certain that I am absolutely, positively telling you the truth. I did not kill Derek.”
He accepted the bag and folded over the top. “Thanks,” he told her. “I hope it proves you didn’t.”
“Why, Chief Mercer, I believe you—”
The air between them was split unexpectedly by the harsh ringing of the phone.
She glanced at the wall unit.
“You going to answer that?” he asked.
Amanda hesitated.
The answering machine in the front hall picked up. Even from the kitchen, the sound of heavy breathing was clear and distinct.