For a crazy second I thought he might be the blackmailer. I pulled open the door and the man turned—tall, a crew cut. He looked vaguely familiar.
“Alison? Alison Riordan?”
“Yes? Listen, I was just leaving to—” I’m not sure how much I would have revealed if he hadn’t interrupted me.
“I’m Detective Jeff Kasper.” He flashed a badge. “I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”
“Actually, I’m on my way out,” I said. If the detective noticed that my voice sounded squeaky and scared, he didn’t react. The minute he said his name I remembered him from the funeral home. He and his partner had been there the entire time, watching and waiting.
“This’ll just take a couple of minutes,” he said with a smile, but he didn’t budge from the doorway.
“Of course, sure. I saw you at the funeral home. Is this something to do with Viktor Lysenko’s death?”
He took a step forward, giving me an inquiring look, and I realized that he wanted to come inside. I didn’t know how to refuse. “Come on in; I can talk for a minute.” I stepped to the side and he brushed past me, the corner of his jacket moving so that I spotted his holstered gun. Without asking he walked into the living room, looking around with an interest I found nerve-racking. Maybe it was supposed to be. “Have a seat,” I said, picking a newspaper off a chair and straightening the couch cushions to hide my nervousness. “Would you like something to drink?” I asked, the manners my mother had drilled into me kicking in automatically.
“Sure, got any bottled water?”
Was this some sort of cop trick? Ask for bottled water so he could take the bottle with him and lift my fingerprints from it? “No, but I can get you tap.”
“Tap would be fine.”
Out of sight in the kitchen, I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and hurriedly filled it at the sink. The kitchen clock ticked away; my window of time evaporating. “Here you go,” I said as I came back into the living room, unnerved when I found him standing and looking at the photos hanging in my hall.
“Is this your family?” he asked, pointing at a photo of the four of us from a few years earlier.
“Yes. So what can I help you with, Detective?”
He took the glass from my hand and took a big sip, watching me over the rim, before answering. “You’re a close friend of Heather Lysenko, right?”
“We’re friends—I don’t know how close.”
“Been friends for a long time?”
“Several years.”
He nodded as if that confirmed something he already knew. “Yeah, well, we’re trying to figure out what happened the night Dr. Lysenko was killed, just putting together a timeline—routine police stuff—and we noticed something.” He paused to put the glass down, searching around for a coaster before I handed one to him and he set it down on the coffee table. At any other time, I might have appreciated this consideration, but not at that moment, not when I was desperate to leave.
Hands free, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small notebook, flipping through it. “We pulled the phone records for that night, and the thing is we found out that a call was placed from a cell phone registered to Heather Lysenko to your cell phone sometime after one A.M.” He looked up at me, that benign smile still on his face. “Do you remember that call, Mrs. Riordan?”
“Please, call me Alison.” I stared straight back at him, trying to look impassive. “Of course I remember. Heather has trouble sleeping sometimes and she knows I’m a night owl, so she called to chat.” This was a preposterous lie; I’m a morning person in fact, in bed and fast asleep by ten most nights. I’d hated this when I was young because I could never stay awake at sleepovers and always missed the best gossip, plaintively asking what everyone was giggling about the next morning over Pop-Tarts.
“Did she talk about her husband?”
I tried to look as if I were pondering. “I don’t think so—she might have mentioned that he wasn’t home yet. We only talked for five minutes.”
“Less than five. It was only three minutes and forty-seven seconds.” Detective Kasper glanced down at his notebook for confirmation. “That’s a pretty quick chat. Why so short?”
A moment’s pause that felt longer as I scrambled to think of an answer. “I’d actually already gone to sleep that night; Heather woke me up. She felt so bad for waking me, that I stayed on for a few minutes to make her feel better and try and help her get to sleep.”
He scribbled this down in his notebook, before nodding and standing up. “Great, well that’s all the questions I’ve got at this point.”
I stood up, too, feeling more than a little flustered, which was probably the point, so I did my best to hide it. “Have you found the guy who shot Dr. Lysenko?” I asked as we headed toward the door.
“We’ve got some leads,” he said, “the investigation’s ongoing.” Was it my imagination or had he stared right at me on those last words?
“It’s a terrible thing—I never thought something like this would happen in Sewickley.”
Why had I said that? I could have bitten my tongue immediately after. I expected him to make a general comment about crime happening anywhere, but instead Kasper said, “Yes, it is pretty unusual.”
I waited to leave until he’d pulled away from the curb in an unmarked Ford Taurus. It was five until ten; I had two missed calls from Julie and one from Sarah and I had at least a ten-minute drive to the drop-off point. I shot them a quick text before pulling out of the garage. Even if I raced the whole way, I was going to be late, and I didn’t dare speed; I was terrified that the detective or his partner was secretly watching me. Had they been watching all of us all along? What if the blackmail letter was a setup and the cops were waiting to trap us at the drop-off?
Sarah shot down that idea when I called. “There’s no way. Think about it—if they sent the blackmail letter, then they have photos of us from that night. If they have photos of that night, then they wouldn’t need to set us up—we’d already be under arrest.”
“You’re right, that’s right,” I said, but I couldn’t shake the paranoia that had me checking all the mirrors in my car every five seconds. “What if we’re too late—what if this person goes to the cops because I’m not there on time?”
“They’re not going to do that. He—or she—is not a Good Samaritan—they’re an extortionist. That greedy asshole will make another attempt to get their hands on the cash before they even think about calling the cops.”
It made sense, but I couldn’t shake a growing feeling that things were hurtling out of control. What had seemed like a good decision in the middle of the night looked like a horrible decision in the light of day, and I wished there were some magic morning-after do-over pill that could reverse everything. If only I’d insisted that Heather call the cops that night, then we wouldn’t have been out on Fern Hollow Road to be seen by the blackmailer, and we wouldn’t be risking our futures trying to drop off $20,000 to a total stranger.
At least I thought it was a stranger. What if it was someone we knew? What if that’s why he or she had stopped on the road that night, because they’d recognized Julie’s car, or Viktor’s, and had been planning to offer help? That could explain how they knew our identities, because I was sure, so very sure, that no one had followed us back to Heather’s after we’d dropped off the body.
“Where are you now?” Sarah interrupted my mental spiral.
“At the clock tower. Where are you?”
“In position, where we’ve been for over an hour,” Sarah said in a withering voice that made me think how much I would have hated appearing against her in court. Of course they were there; I knew that.
“They’ve pulled Heather’s phone records—why would they do that if they think it’s a carjacking?”