Half Empty (First Wives #2)

The officer stepped aside.

Wade and Reed were in the kitchen, along with two plainclothes police officers. Both of them wore badges attached to their belts.

Wade noticed her about the same time that Reed noticed Lori. They both stood and met them halfway.

“How is she?” Wade asked once Trina was in his arms.

“Tiny improvement. They said they were going to do another scan of her head this morning to make sure there weren’t any changes overnight.”

“Did you get any rest?” Reed asked Lori.

“In the car, you?”

He shook his head.

Trina turned to Jeb. “Jeb, there are plenty of guest rooms upstairs. Please make yourself comfortable. Get some sleep.”

Jeb looked at Wade.

“We’re good.”

“I’ll only need a couple hours.”

“Mrs. Petrov?” One of the officers interrupted them.

She winced, no longer wanting to use the name. “Yes.”

“I’m Detective Armstrong and this is Detective Gray.”

“Good morning,” she said on autopilot. She glanced around the kitchen. “I should make coffee. Anyone need coffee?”

Lori led Trina to a chair. “I’ll get the coffee, you talk to these men.”

Then the questions started.

When was the last time she was in the house? Who had keys and who knew the security code to turn off the alarm system? Because the alarm was monitored by the company Reed worked for, he’d already told the police that it appeared that Avery did set the alarm when she left the day before, and sometime around two, the alarm was disengaged. The cameras on the front gate and front door didn’t show anyone coming or going.

Lori pushed a cup of coffee in front of Trina.

“Thank you.”

Wade rubbed the back of her neck as she answered questions. The touch did two things, it soothed the ache, but more than that, it filled her soul. The poor man picked the wrong woman up in a bar, and now he was sitting in her Hamptons dungeon instead of sleeping off what should have been a decent buzz from the night before. She apologized to him with her eyes and hoped he understood.

“As you may already know, we don’t think anything was taken from the office, but you’ll have to confirm that.”

She closed her eyes, saw Fedor’s lifeless body in her head. Trina took a drink of the coffee. “I doubt I can tell if anything is missing. I didn’t go in there a lot, and it’s been a year.”

“Can you try? It will help quite a bit.”

“Of course.”

Wade rubbed her shoulders.

She held the cup with both hands, surprised at how cold they felt. “Is this related to what happened to Avery?”

There was silence in the room.

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “How? Why?”

Reed filled in the blanks.

“Your text from Avery came in at one thirty-five. The alarm here was deactivated at two, almost on the nose.”

“You can’t get from the city to here in twenty-five minutes.”

“Right. Avery was on her way back here.”

“How could anyone know that other than me? She sent the text to me, and I didn’t even see it until after all this had happened.”

“It could be any number of things. She told someone she was on her way home, maybe her phone was bugged. We might never know, since it was destroyed after a car ran over it in the garage. The working theory is someone wanted to keep her from coming home too early.”

“They could have killed her . . . and for what?” Trina almost yelled her question.

“Has anyone ever threatened you, Mrs. Petrov? Anyone that comes to mind that is capable of this?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“That’s not true,” Lori said in a quiet voice.

Everyone in the room turned at the same time.

“Ruslan,” Lori said, looking directly at Armstrong. “Fedor’s father stood in the front door of this house and threatened to get back at Trina for the death of his son. There were half a dozen witnesses.”

“Not to mention him threatening you,” Reed reminded them.

“What?” Wade asked.

“Ruslan blamed the women in Fedor’s life for ‘ruining him.’” Lori made air quotes when she spoke. “He’s a big, scary man, but he hires people to do his dirty work. I’d be shocked if you found anything you can pin on him, including a traffic violation.”

“This is your father-in-law?” Wade asked Trina.

“There was no love between Fedor and his dad. The two never spoke,” Trina told him.

“That gives us something to go on,” Armstrong said.

“Let’s find out if anything is missing from the office. Forensics will be here in a couple of hours to start dusting for prints.”

Trina pulled herself out of the chair and turned toward the door.

God, she was tired.

The backyard buzzed with officers, most of whom stopped and moved aside when they walked by.

Her legs started to shake.

Wade stopped her. “You okay?”

She closed her eyes, opened them. “The last time I was in that office was when we found him.”

“You don’t have to do this.” He looked at the police officers. “She doesn’t have to do this.”

Trina placed a hand on his arm. “I’m okay.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Yeah, I am. But I’ll survive.”

Wade kept an arm around her waist when she continued walking.

She took the final steps through the door and cringed. It would have been harder to see the office in its normal state and imagine exactly how she’d seen Fedor. This way, with the desk sitting in the wrong place and the chairs in places they never were . . . it was easier, somehow.

Wade squeezed her shoulder.

“I’m okay.” Yet as she said those words, she saw the wall behind the desk and remembered the blood splatter.

She swallowed hard.

“Can you tell if anything is missing?” Detective Gray asked.

“I wasn’t in here very often. Uhm. His desk. A chair, only I think the original chair was removed with him. The wall was painted . . . after.” It had been a lighter color, the whole room. But that wasn’t what they were asking. “He liked pens, there was an old inkwell set on his desk.” Not that they could see it under all the clutter. “I don’t know if it was here after they cleaned up the room.”

“Do you have a cleaning lady?”

“Yeah, Cindy . . .” Trina looked at Lori. “You remember her?”

“I do.”

“She comes twice a month. She’d probably know if anything was missing more than I would.”

Detective Armstrong wrote something down. “We’ll need her number.”

“It’s in the house. I’ve been trying to get ahold of her the past few days, but she hasn’t returned my calls.”

The detectives exchanged glances. Armstrong wrote a note in his small pad of paper.

Detective Gray pointed to the safe behind the tilted painting on the wall. “Do you have the key?”

“No. I didn’t have any of the safe combinations or keys.”

“Really? That’s odd.”

She shook her head. “Not necessarily. We’d only been married for a year. I didn’t see the need for that kind of thing.”

The detectives were silent. “Your husband was a wealthy man.”

“He was. He had everything to live for, it made no sense for him to kill himself.”

“So why do you think he did it?” Armstrong asked.

Lori interrupted Trina before she could answer.

“The investigation that followed Fedor’s death determined that he was distraught over his mother’s impending death. They were very close. She passed shortly after Fedor’s funeral.”

While all that was true, Trina felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end when Lori delivered the information in her lawyer voice.

Armstrong scribbled in his notebook.

“Gentlemen. If that’s all, I think it would be good for all of us to get some rest. We’ve been up for over twenty-four hours.” Lori cut everything off.

The officers exchanged looks.

Trina was too tired to figure out what had gotten up Lori’s butt.

“You’re Wade Thomas,” Detective Gray said as if he was just figuring it out.

“Yeah, we talked about this a few hours ago,” Wade said.

Trina looked up at Wade, then back to the officer talking.

“So you two are . . . dating?” he asked.

Wade opened his mouth and Lori stepped in front of him.