25

H ow unbelievable that someone like Jane, someone who appeared as merely a pretty talking head, was, once you saw behind the exterior, one of the most-okay, the most-intensely sexual person anyone could imagine. To be with someone like that was intoxicating. No, intoxicating wasn’t a strong enough word. Being with Jane-being in her bed with that body, being in her head-was all-consuming, all-captivating, something you could never, ever get enough of.

And when she asked you to wind that red scarf around her neck, God that was something incredible. First, she would tell you how. Then, when you were doing it, she would sigh and murmur, telling you to keep going. She would tell you to do it harder then, do it faster. Shoot me out of this world, she would say. You did it. Happily. Because you wanted to please her, you wanted to blow her mind, because if you did it the right way, if you did it enough, maybe, maybe, maybe she would let you stay in her world forever.

The problem was there was always the sense with Jane that it would end. No, it was more than a sense. Jane had always been clear about her limits. She insisted on saying, this has to end, this is the last time, over and over and over. She would never shut up about it.

And despite how badly you wanted it to go on forever, even if you were only let into her world every so often, Jane had been right. It had ended. What Jane would not have foreseen was that it was you who ended it, not her. It was you who decided to pull that scarf tighter and tighter around her neck. It was you who, one last time, shot Jane out of this world. In fact, it was you who shot her right to heaven.

26

I can hardly remember the next few hours. When I think of it, I see only bursts of memories-the police lights flashing like blue strobes, the shrieking sirens as the ambulance raced away with Jane’s body, the yellow slashes of crime scene tape, the neighbors standing stiffly, arms crossed in front of them as they watched the police swarm the area.

I was questioned by one cop, then another. I know my mouth moved. I know I answered everything, recalling each detail about the night. I know I told them about the break-in Jane had a few days ago, the flowers, the scarf shaped into a noose.

I was driven in the back of a police car to the Belmont station, where a detective asked all the same questions as the others. I gave the same answers. The detective left.

I was in a square windowless room about eight feet around, painted all in white. One wall had a metal bench pushed against it, and above that, a steel ring bolted into the wall. I sat at a fake wood table in the center of the room, one chair on the other side.

Another detective came in. He was a lean guy wearing brown casual pants, a light blue button-down shirt and an empty holster and expensive-looking running shoes. Something about him snapped me out of my fog.

“We’ve met,” I said.

“I’m Detective Vaughn.” He sat down across the table.

“You and another detective interviewed me last fall when Forester Pickett passed away.” And you were an asshole, I wanted to add. Then due to my stop-swearing campaign I amended it. I mean, a total jerk.

“Yep,” he said. “If I remember right, your fiancé hit the road, right?” This memory seemed to cause him some pleasure. A little smile played over his mouth and his green eyes crinkled a little. He looked as though he was trying not to laugh, and it made me remember precisely how much I disliked Detective Vaughn.

“Yes,” I said. “Sam had to leave town.”

“You rope him back in yet?”

“He’s back.”

“Getting married anytime soon?” His delight in this topic hadn’t seemed to wane.

“Not right now. If we could get back to what happened tonight.” Suddenly a thought occurred to me. “Has anyone called Zac?”

“The husband? We’re trying to find him.”

“I think he’s in Long Beach.”

“California?” His brows, thick and brown, moved closer together. His tone was conversational, as if we weren’t here because someone had bludgeoned Jane to death.

Blunt trauma to head and neck, the other detective had said at some point, making it sound clinical, distant. Strangulation. We’re not sure which came first, but from what you said about the body positioning and the scene, it seems she had her back turned. Probably meant she knew the person who did this.

“Long Beach, Indiana,” I said. “They have a house over there.” I remembered Jane’s words from Saturday after the break-in. “Long Beach is an hour and a half away.”

“You have the number for the house there?”

“No.”

Detective Vaughn fell quiet, watching my face, then his eyes dropped.

I followed his gaze. “Oh!” I said. My hands were in my lap. There was blood on them. Jane’s blood. I turned my hands over. Red-black smears stained the fingers of my left hand, the palm of my right and under the nails.

I stood, really taking in the windowless room for the first time, feeling trapped suddenly, feeling the reality of everything whoosh back in. “I have to wash my hands.” I realized that I hadn’t been to the bathroom since earlier that night when I got ready for the party.

“Sure.” The detective stood with me. “Let’s print you while you’re out there.”

“Print me?”

“Fingerprint you.” Again, that casual tone.

“Why do you have to fingerprint me?”

“Gotta figure out whose prints are in that house. Yours are probably all over, huh?” We both looked at my hands.

I felt cold. “I guess.”

The woman who fingerprinted me was bored. She yanked at my fingers, pressed them into ink, then a pad. “You’re done,” she said.

But why did it feel like everything was just starting?

27

“W ho hated her?” Detective Vaughn said when I was back in the room. He was sitting, hands clasped on his abdomen, as if he were settling in for a nice, long chat.

“Jane? No one.”

He raised one of those thick eyebrows. “What happened to her was a crime of passion.”

It was fitting in a way, because Jane was a passionate person. I debated whether to tell Vaughn about her affairs. The last thing I wanted was bad posthumous PR for Jane. She would have been mortified if the final information attached to her name was the fact that she cheated on her husband. She was so much more than that. Plus, I’d promised as a lawyer and a friend that I wouldn’t tell anyone about the games she liked to play with the scarf.

I thought of Maggie, too. She was always telling her clients, Don’t speak to the cops. Never talk to them unless they arrest you.

But I hadn’t been given a Miranda warning. I was just a witness to a crime, not a suspect. And yet I had been fingerprinted.

“Is there any reason I need an attorney with me right now?” I asked Vaughn.

“No, we’re just talking. I need to hear every possible thing you saw, so we can find out who did this to your friend. Most homicides have to be solved within the first few hours or they won’t be solved at all.”

Won’t be solved… Flashes of Jane’s blood-spattered body filled my head again; I could hear my cries bouncing off the hardwood floors as I knelt by her.

I nodded and swallowed down bile from my lurching stomach.

He scratched one finger over his jaw. “So who would do this to her?”

I made my face placid, but in my mind, I struggled. I wanted to say that she thought she was being followed by Mick, the writer. But if I said that, I’d have to explain why-because Jane was, as she had put it, red-blooded.

Red-blooded. It had been almost funny when Jane said it over the weekend. Now, all I could think about was the blood that had covered Jane’s head and pooled around her body.