Glory in Death - J. D. Robb [87]
“Thank you.” He stepped inside. He gave her one last look before shutting the door and turning to the man slumped at the table. “Marco,” Whitney said on a long sigh. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Jack.” Marco offered a thin smile. “I wondered if you’d be along. We never did make that golf date.”
“Talk to me.” Whitney sat down heavily.
“Hasn’t your efficient and dogged lieutenant filled you in?”
“The recorder’s off,” Whitney said sharply. “We’re alone. Talk to me, Marco. We both know you didn’t kill Cicely or anyone else.”
For a moment, Marco stared up at the ceiling, as if pondering. “People never know each other as well as they believe. Not even the people they care for. I loved her, Jack. I never stopped loving her. But she stopped loving me. Part of me was always waiting for her to start loving me again. But she never would have.”
“Damn it, Marco, do you expect me to believe that you slit her throat because she divorced you twelve years ago?”
“Maybe I thought she might have married Hammett. He wanted that,” Marco said quietly. “I could see that he wanted that. Cicely was reluctant.” His voice remained calm, quiet, faintly nostalgic. “She enjoyed her independence, but she was sorry to disappoint Hammett. Sorry enough that she might have given in eventually. Married him. It would have really been over then, wouldn’t it?”
“You killed Cicely because she might have married another man?”
“She was my wife, Jack. Whatever the courts and the Church said.”
Whitney sat a moment, silent. “I’ve played poker with you too many times over the years, Marco. You’ve got tells.” Folding his arms on the table, he leaned forward. “When you bluff, you tap your finger on your knee.”
The finger stopped tapping. “This is a long way from poker, Jack.”
“You can’t help David this way. You’ve got to let the system work.”
“David and I . . . there’s been a lot of friction between us in the last several months. Business disagreements and personal ones.” For the first time he sighed, deep and long and wearily. “There shouldn’t be distance between father and son over such foolishness.”
“This is hardly the way to mend fences, Marco.”
The steel came back into Angelini’s eyes. There would be no more sighs. “Let me ask you something, Jack, just between us. If it was one of yours, and there was the slightest chance—just the slightest—that they’d be convicted of murder, would anything stop you from protecting them?”
“You can’t protect David by stepping in with some bullshit confession.”
“Who said it was bullshit?” The word sounded like cream in Angelini’s cultured voice. “I did it, and I’m confessing because I can’t live with myself if my own child pays for my crime. Now tell me, Jack, would you stand behind your son, or in front of him?”
“Ah, hell, Marco,” was all Whitney could say.
He stayed for twenty minutes, but got nothing more. For a time he guided the conversation into casual lines, golf scores, the standings of the baseball team Marco had a piece of. Then, quick and sleek as a snake, he’d toss out a hard, leading question on the murders.
But Marco Angelini was an expert negotiator, and had already given his bottom line. He wouldn’t budge.
Guilt, grief, and the beginnings of real fear made an unsettling stew in Whitney’s stomach as he stepped into Eve’s office. She was hunched over her computer, scanning data, calling up more.
For the first time in days, his eyes cleared of their own fatigue and saw hers. She was pale, her eyes shadowed, her mouth grim. Her hair stood up in spikes as if she’d dragged her hands through it countless times. Even as he watched, she did so again, then pressed her fingers to her eyes as if they burned.
He remembered the morning in his office, the morning after Cicely had been murdered. And the responsibility he’d hung around Eve’s neck.
“Lieutenant.”
Her shoulders straightened as if she’d slammed steel poles into them. Her head came up, her eyes carefully blank.
“Commander.” She got to her feet. Got to attention, Whitney thought, annoyed by