Micklind considered it. "Three years ago?" he asked, then shook his head. "Doesn't ring a bell. Says something about this job that I can't remember a copper I taped my badge for, doesn't it?"
"If he was anything like Cindy, he probably wasn't that great a cop," Timmie said.
Mattie harrumphed. "Probably shot hisself by accident."
"Mattie Lou Washington Wilson," Walter chastised in his soft voice. "Cindy is your friend."
Timmie felt properly chastised. Mattie flashed her husband a grin the size of a dinner plate. "Which is why nobody but me can talk 'bout her that way."
Walter's chagrined smile said it all.
"Would you mind answering some questions about what happened last night?" Micklind asked Timmie, his voice almost as quiet as Walter's.
Timmie leaned against the counter next to Mattie as if settling in. "I can't say I'd be happy to, but I will."
"Have you had a chance to think about it?"
"Hard to do anything else."
"Y'all want us to leave you alone?" Walter asked.
"She does not," Mattie said, wrapping a protective arm around Timmie's shoulder.
Timmie smiled and rubbed at her chest. "Doesn't matter. This is all gonna have to be said sooner or later."
Micklind didn't bother with tact. "Do you think your husband was just at the wrong place at the wrong time?" he asked.
Timmie sipped her coffee. She looked tired, Murphy thought. Wrung out and hung to dry. But at least the life in her eyes didn't look like it was going to blink out. This was going to be tough, but it wasn't going to break her like that call about her father almost had.
"They doing Jason's autopsy this morning?" she asked.
Micklind nodded. "The St. Charles ME's doing it."
She nodded, contemplated her coffee. "Good. Conrad's already been helping me." Then she just stopped. "God, Jason would be so furious at the mess. He was such a tidy man."
"Do you know why he was at the house?"
"Last night? No. He was in town to see Meghan. To harass me. He'd already served me with one court order."
"Two," Mattie offered. "Remember?"
Timmie's smile was sad. "No, hon. I lied to you guys about that. It was an easy reason to give you for why I was so nuts."
Mattie frowned. "But we all thought—"
"We'll talk about it later, Mattie. Okay?"
Mattie just patted and hushed, probably like she had to Timmie's little girl.
"If he wasn't supposed to be at your house," Micklind said, "could you have been the target and he just got in the way?"
Murphy saw Timmie suck in a breath and Mattie squeeze more tightly.
"Or maybe they set Jason up, knowing you'd be at work," Mattie offered. "Then maybe they'd try and pin it on you."
For a few seconds, there was dead silence in the kitchen. Then, unbelievably, Timmie shook her head. "See, that's where I'm having trouble with all this."
"What do you mean?"
She just sat there for a second, focused on her coffee as if divining answers in it. "Well, if I'd kept my mouth shut about Jason's left hand, everybody else would have closed it as a suicide. Am I right?"
Micklind nodded. Murphy just waited her out.
"Then, why do it that way? Everybody in town knows I hated the guy. Heck, I publicly expressed my desire to kill him... to a cop, no less. Why not make it look like murder and pin it on me?"
"Because nine out of ten women in that situation probably would have just kept their mouths shut," Micklind said. "If you'd followed suit, whoever did this would have had you in the ten ring on the blackmail target."
"But everybody knows about the deaths at the hospital now."
"They don't know who's doing it."
Timmie leaned against Mattie as if her friend could shield her. "What if I said I didn't want to know, either?" she asked miserably.
Micklind offered no comfort. "I think it's too late. Whoever's doing this is feeling cornered, and you're the one they're coming after."
Chapter 24
Timmie had definitely had enough of funerals.
Especially when it was her turn to ride in the limo with the in-laws she hadn't seen in almost five years. It probably could have been a lot worse. Jason's parents were so shaken by the death of their only child that they couldn't find it in their hearts to lay blame anywhere near Timmie's feet. They also clung to their granddaughter with a sort of fragile desperation that actually helped Meghan get through it.
The SSS had all caravaned up to be there. Murphy was there along with Micklind as the line of mourners who owed or loved Jason's parents trudged through the slush to the stone building Catholic Cemeteries used for their grave-site services in St. Louis. No more standing out in the biting wind, staring at your loved one's mortal remains perched over a rectangle of empty air. No long wait while the casket creaked its way into the ground. No chance for the bereaved to fling themselves into the grave, alongside the loved one. Evidently the archdiocese had decided that the pile of fresh dirt next to the flapping tents was just a little too real for a grieving family.
Timmie wanted the dirt. She wanted the hole and the wind and the specter of gravediggers waiting in the shadows to make what they were doing real. To give that awful scene in her living room proper closure. This way it all ended with a few careful words echoing from cold stone and finished with a brisk request to return to cars so the next grieving line could pull up. She hated it.
But then, she hated the whole ritual. The stiff discomfort of survivors, the sloppy disbelief of parents who'd survived the son unto whom they'd entrusted all their earthly dreams. The hollow confusion of the little girl who couldn't quite believe her father wouldn't come through the door smiling just one more time.
They should have been burying Timmie's father, not Meghan's. They could have at least done that with gusto, sharing wild stories and wilder songs over aged whiskey and sandwiches. But there hadn't been enough of Jason to toast. So they'd all filed quietly out and reassembled at the Parkers' tasteful colonial in the heart of Ladue, where everyone but Timmie studiously avoided the fact that Jason had been murdered for no apparent reason.
"You didn't tell me he was a child of privilege," Murphy said to her as they stood near the living room door.
Ladue was the Bel Air of St. Louis, where the obscenely wealthy rubbed elbows with the simply respectably wealthy over dinner parties on manicured lawns and old brick patios, and a former mayor had once gone all the way to the Supreme Court to try and keep political signs from marring pristine front yards.
"He was a spoiled child of privilege," Timmie amended, watching her in-laws cruise the rooms. "This isn't exactly the Wilsons' house, is it?"
"You grow up in a place like this?"
"Nah. Jason and I met in college, where it was romantic to ignore financial disparity. It might have worked if Jason hadn't inherited his father's acquisition gene and his mother's knack for habit-forming behavior. I was a caregiver, first, last, and always."
And Betty and Jason Senior, whom Timmie had so wanted to love her, had settled for her instead. She hoped they'd end up offering more to Meghan, because Meghan needed it much, much more.
"Is Micklind still here?" she asked Murphy, sipping her mineral water.