You’ll be glad to hear, Mrs. Severson, that we caught Brad Daggett this morning. He didn’t get far, actually. They got him at the Canadian border. He’s confessed to murdering your husband, and he has quite the story to go with it. Would you mind coming into the station for questioning?
No, Brad running was not an option. He needed to hold his nerve, long enough for the investigation to become cold. I had plans for Brad eventually, but those plans needed to wait.
I stood in front of the wide window in the second-floor living room. It was dark outside, the rain steady, almost comforting. Across the street were the lighted rooms of my neighbors’ brownstones. I saw a figure move across one of them, a curtain being pulled.
I stood at the window for a while. I had yet to turn on any lights in my home, and I felt invisible, looking out at my corner of the city. A car moved slowly down the street, hitting a pothole and sending a cresting spray of rain onto the sidewalk. Would the police be watching me yet? Was I a suspect? It was Monday. The murder had happened on Friday and no one had been arrested yet. They must be getting nervous, and I knew that, on one level, I would have to be a suspect. I was the wife of a rich man who had died a suspicious death. But was it more than that? I pulled the curtains across the window, making sure that they met in the middle, then snapped on a lamp. It sent a circle of pale light into the room. I blinked rapidly, then shut the lamp off. I lay down on the couch in the dark, wondering if it had been a mistake to return to my house. Maybe I’d have been better off in a hotel room, like that baby-faced detective had suggested.
I kept imagining Brad at the moment when a detective approached him with questions about where he had been on Friday night. I pictured him sweaty and stammering, the detective instantly suspicious. I knew that the wheels would come off fast. I’d misjudged Brad. When we’d first met, all I saw was a cocky, slightly stupid contractor. Seducing him had been way too easy. I’d waited until we were alone in the house. I bummed a cigarette, telling Brad not to tell my husband. “Hey,” he’d said. “I won’t tell your husband anything you don’t want me to tell him.” It was early August and I was wearing a short dress that buttoned up the front. I pulled it over the top of my head, shucked my underpants, and slid on top of the finished kitchen counter. The height had been all wrong, and Brad had to slide a box of tiles over and stand on them. It was awkward and unsatisfying, but afterward I lied and told Brad, tears in my eyes, that it was the first time I’d had sex since the week after my wedding, that my husband had no interest in me that way. We got dressed, and I cried for a while, and then we got undressed again, and had sex with Brad sitting on one of the folding chairs the crew had brought in for their lunch breaks. I straddled him, facing forward, my leg muscles shaking. The look on Brad’s face, his eyes raking over me, told me all I needed to know. “Never anywhere else,” I said that afternoon. “Only here, and only when we absolutely know that no one will be showing up. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
“You tell anyone about this . . .”
“I won’t.”
A week later I told him that sometimes I dreamed about killing my husband. Two weeks later Brad told me he’d do it for me if I wanted. It was that easy. I told him if we did it right, and made no mistakes, that no one would ever suspect either of us, and we’d be able to marry, buy a yacht, take a yearlong honeymoon. When I’d mentioned the yacht, Brad’s eyes had lit up in a way I’d never seen, even when we were having sex. Sex had hooked him, but greed would keep him, and I had thought all along that he would hold his nerve, but now I wasn’t so sure.