Page 23 of Dying to Meet You
“No,” I say sharply. “Why are you asking me this?”
She glances up, her pen pausing on her pad. “I have to. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be doing my job. Don’t you want the police to be thorough and find his killer?”
“Of course I do.”
She looks down at her notes again. “You said you’ve been inside Tim’s car?”
“Absolutely. Many times.”
“Which seats?” she asks. “The crime-scene techs will be collecting physical evidence. Looking for DNA.”
“Um, the passenger seat. And once in the, uh, back seat.” My face is the color of a tomato now, and a drop of sweat rolls down my back.
“For sex?” she asks.
“Well, no. Not, um, quite.” That night, I’d felt like a hot young thing as Tim slipped a hand under my skirt. Now I regret everything.
“Did you leave anything in his car?” she asks.
“Besides my dignity?”
She doesn’t laugh.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I need to ask a favor. I’d like to take a set of elimination fingerprints. I brought a scanner.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a device the size of a cordless phone. “Is that okay? By excluding your fingerprints, it will help us figure out if the killer’s fingerprints are in Tim’s car.”
“Okay, sure.”
She pulls out a release form. After quickly skimming the legalese, I scribble my name at the bottom, because I feel I have no choice.
She taps some buttons on the scanner, and it beeps. “Okay, we’ll do it one finger at a time. Please roll each finger from one side to the other. Like this.” She demonstrates on my kitchen table.
I roll my index finger on the screen, and it beeps again.
“Great. Next one.”
Inside, my good-girl complex is shrieking. I don’t want my prints in some database forever. But I don’t want to look guilty, either. So I keep rolling one finger at a time across the little screen.
“After the two of you broke up,” Detective Riley says, “what did you tell your friends about it?”
“Um...” I roll my thumb. “I told my coworker that I was upset. And surprised.”
“Did you tell her you were angry?”
Another drop of sweat rolls down my spine. “Well, yes. And embarrassed.”
“How angry were you?” she asks.
My pulse kicks up another notch, and if I wasn’t agitated before, I’m getting there now. “Look—I was angry enough to finish the Ben and Jerry’s and sulk on the couch. But if you’re implying I mightmurdera man who dumped me, that’s outrageous.”
The machine beeps after the final print, and I yank my hand back and cross my arms.
Detective Riley squints at the readout, then looks up at me again. “Rowan, Ihaveto ask these questions. If something terrible happened to someone you love, you’d want the police to poke all the sore spots, wouldn’t you?”
I let out a hot breath of air. “Of course I would. And I want you to find the guy who did this.”
“We’re going to,” she says, pushing back in her chair. “I promise. You’ve been very helpful. But you can’t go into work today, because the mansion property is a crime scene, and we’ll probably need at least the weekend.”
