Page 20 of Dying to Meet You
“You mean like a gunshot? No.”
“Anything,” she says.
I shake my head. “It was as quiet as ever.”
Her face is impassive, but her fingers worry the edge of the table. “When you saw his car, what did you notice about it?”
“At first nothing seemed weird. I approached from the passenger side”—I indicate my path with a tap on the paper—“and I did wonder if there was another person in the car with him...”
“Like a date?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I take a breath. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. But I didn’t see anyone in that seat. Then, as I passed the car, I looked over my shoulder. I saw the driver’s door was open, so I doubled back.”
“It was open?” She sits up just a little bit straighter. “Like, how far?”
I use my hands to indicate a couple of inches. “It looked like maybe someone had forgotten to close it all the way. So I walked Lickie over,thinking I’d close it for him. Unless he was there in the car. And then I would have said hi.”
“Tell me exactly what you saw.”
I try, but it’s rough going. I explain how the light was bad, and I didn’t understand that I was looking at blood on the asphalt. “I got a bad feeling, but it just didn’t seem real, until he rolled out of the car. His...face. I only saw it for a second.” The coffee in my stomach turns into paint thinner. “I’d just never seen anything like that before.”
“It’s upsetting,” she says quietly.
“Upsetting doesn’t even cover it.”
“Did you see the gun?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“It didn’t roll out of the car with him?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“Then you touched him,” she prompts.
“Yes. I grabbed his shoulder. He felt solid, I thought. Like normal. And I had this weird idea that maybe he was okay. So I said his name and I rolled him toward me a little. And...”
Bile rises up in my throat. I gag and have to swallow it down.
Detective Riley gets up and finds a glass in my cupboard. She fills it with water and brings it to me.
I accept it wordlessly and drink some. It helps a little.
“Okay, what about the jogger?” she asks. “How much time passed between Tim rolling out onto the ground, and the jogger reaching you?”
“Um...” I try to think. “Not long at all. Less than a minute? I couldn’t scream right away. But when I did, the jogger came pretty fast.”
She asks me some more befuddling questions. Which direction did the jogger come from? Did the jogger say anything? Had I ever seen him before?
I don’t remember much, and I feel like I’m failing a test. “Why are you so interested in the jogger?”
She folds her hands and goes quiet. As if she’s trying to decide how much to share. “There was no gun found at the scene, Rowan. And we need to know where it went.”
8
“No gun?” I ask stupidly.
Slowly, she shakes her head.
