“Understandable. If you just wait there I can come get you. Then, if you want, you can make some calls from the station. Maybe there’s a friend’s house you’d like to stay at, or a hotel . . .”
The detective arrived ten minutes later in a white Mercury Grand Marquis, and drove me to the station. The interior of his car smelled of hand-rolled cigarettes and peppermint. He was wearing jeans and a corduroy jacket. His tie looked vintage, and was frayed a little along one side.
“Thank you so much for coming back to Boston,” he said as he weaved through traffic, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on his knee, index finger tapping to nonexistent music. “We’re feeling very good about this lead. We think we have a detailed description of the man who killed your husband.”
“How?” I asked.
“There was a woman visiting one of your neighbors who was sitting in her car texting. She watched a man exit from the house that was burglarized—the Bennetts at 317, you know them?—and then walk to your house. She said she kept watching him because he seemed shifty and nervous. He passed right under a streetlamp and she got a good look at his facial features. She worked with our sketch artist and we have a pretty good likeness, I think.” The detective glanced toward me. He was smiling a little shyly, as though he wasn’t sure how he should act. I watched his eyes scan my face.
“Why do you want me to take a look at the sketch? Do you think I might know him?”
“We think it’s a possibility. Our witness said that the suspect rang the doorbell at your house. Your husband came to the door, and talked to the man for a while. In fact, the witness says she stopped watching because it seemed like they might have known each other. Next time she looked up he wasn’t there, and she assumed that he’d entered the house.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “It was someone Ted knew?”
“It’s just a possibility, Mrs. Severson. It’s possible he was a random burglar who talked his way into your house. That’s why we want you to look at the sketch.”
“Are you sure that this man who came to the door was the same man who shot . . . who shot my husband?”
The detective casually spun the wheel of the car and looped his way into a parking space in front of the precinct.
“We think so,” he said, killing the engine. “The witness said she was sitting in the car sometime around six at night, and that’s approximately the time of death that the coroner came up with. She didn’t hear a gunshot, but her car was running and your house has thick walls, or so they tell me.”
I lowered my head and took a deep breath through my nostrils.
“You okay?” the detective asked.
“I’ve been better. Sorry. I just need a moment . . . let’s go in and look at the sketch.”
We were quiet as Detective Kimball escorted me into the station, and had us buzzed past the heavily fortified reception area into a hallway with scuffed linoleum floors and brick walls. I followed the detective to an open-space area that had been carved into cubicles. I moved slowly. It was clear from what I’d heard that Brad had definitely been spotted. I controlled my rage, and thought about what I needed to say to the detective. If the sketch looked remotely like him I would need to say so, otherwise I would look suspicious when they did finally catch up with Brad. What I was desperately hoping for was a sketch that didn’t look like him at all, so that I could honestly say that I had no idea who I was looking at.
We reached the detective’s desk, in a cubicle framed by temporary partitions. He offered me a molded plastic chair to sit in and he settled onto a swivel chair with a padded seat. His desk was cluttered, but the piles of folders and loose paper seemed organized into distinct towers, each topped by a Post-it note in a different color. He pulled a folder off the top of one of the smaller towers and unfolded it. “Can you see okay here?” he asked. We were under a bright fluorescent light built into the low ceiling of polystyrene tiles, and I told him I could see fine. He slid out a piece of paper from the manila folder and twisted it so that I could see the sketch. It was a pretty good likeness of Brad—the thick neck, the black goatee, the dark eyes a little too close together under thick brows. His most distinctive feature—the thick hair and low hairline—was covered up by the baseball cap he wore. I could feel Detective Kimball’s eyes on me. I could sense his giddy anticipation.
“I don’t know,” I said, and jutted out my lower lip, studying the sketch to give myself another few seconds. But it was too close a likeness for me not to mention it. “You know who he looks like,” I said. “He looks like our contractor up in Maine. Brad Daggett. But Brad barely knew Ted, and he doesn’t even live in Boston, so . . .” I sat up and looked at the detective. “I don’t know if that’s helpful.”