Page 16 of The Secrets We Hide
“Bill, I need to talk to you.”
He tensed, but he didn’t reach for a weapon or try to run. “I don’t know if you noticed, sugar, but I’m kind of busy here.”
She nodded him away from the dugout. Bill hesitated before following Emmy up the foul line. She led him past the first base coach and didn’t stop until they were through the side gate and standing in the parking lot. The fence was on Bill’s left. Gregg positioned himself on the right.
Bill made a point of noticing they had boxed him in. His eyes narrowed. Hands pulled into loose fists. He looked at Emmy with something like disgust. They had stood like this before, each squaring off against the other in a parking lot. Emmy had been threatening to arrest him for choking his wife until she’d lost consciousness, and Bill had been threatening to have Allison arrested because she had fought back.
Bill asked, “Is this about last night?”
“What happened last night?”
His mouth twisted into a sneer under his mustache. He knew how to navigate a domestic violence interrogation.
Emmy made a point of looking at his hands, arms, and legs to check for scratches or bite marks. “Could you lift up your shirt for me, please?”
He snorted. “We were both hammered. She gave as good as she got.”
“Poor Bill.” Emmy kept her voice low. “Were you terrified she would hurt you? Break the bones in your face? Rupture your spleen? Strangle you until you passed out? Were you in fear for your life?”
Emmy tensed when Bill’s hands moved, but he was only lifting his shirt to show underneath. He did a slow turn, making a show of it. Emmy ignored his hairy belly hanging over the tensed waistband of his shorts. No weapons. No dried blood spatter. No defensive injuries.
“You happy?” Bill let his shirt drop. “I could sue you for abuse of power. See if you win the election with that hanging over your head.”
“I need you to account for your movements today.”
“Are you kidding me?” He glanced back at Gregg like he needed a man to weigh in. “Are you really asking me for an alibi? What happened? Allison stub her toe and blame me?”
Emmy waited him out.
“I was at the Lazy Eight, okay? I’ve been living out of a goddam motel for two weeks because my lawyer says I can’t go back inside my own goddam house that I’m still paying for.”
Emmy was very familiar with the circumstances that might compel a lawyer to tell a man he couldn’t go home. “Allison filed a restraining order against you?”
“She filedeverythingagainst me. I got served papers at the store. My family’s place of business. That’s the kind of psychopath she is. My mother was there, for chrissakes. She nearly had a heart attack. God knows how much this is gonna cost me. Damn lawyer made me pay five grand up front just to talk to him.”
Emmy needed a second to process the information. She had begged Allison for years to leave Bill. “Allison filed for a divorce two weeks ago?”
“Are you stupid?” Bill asked. “Yes, she filed for divorce two weeks ago. No, I’m not gonna roll over for her no matter how many cops she sends to harass me.”
“What other cops did she send?”
“Take a guess, Scrappy Doo.”
“Reggie?”
Bill opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked back at Gregg. Took notice that the kids were no longer on the field. Emmy could tell from the sudden change in his demeanor that he’d finally taken in the fact that the sheriff and a deputy had stopped an afternoon baseball game to talk to him.
“What’s going on here?”
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just gonna be straight with you. Allison is dead.”
He laughed. Then he saw that Emmy wasn’t joking. Still, he shook his head in disbelief. “What?”
“An intruder shot and killed Allison at the house.”
“No …” His head kept shaking. “That can’t … no …”
Emmy gave him time to come around to the truth. “You got any idea who would want to hurt her?”
