Love You More: A Novel

Bobby looked at her. “I thought you were convinced she’d killed her own daughter?”


D.D.’s hand was resting unconsciously across her stomach. “What can I tell you? I’m getting soft in my old age. Besides, a jury will buy a wife killing her gambling-addicted husband. A mother killing her child, however, is a tougher sell.”

She glanced at Phil. “We need to follow the money. Nail down that Tessa definitely took it out. See what else you can find in the financials. And tomorrow, we’ll give Tessa’s lawyer a call, see if we can arrange for a fresh chat. Twenty-four hours in jail has a tendency to make most people more talkative.

“Any other news from the hotline?” she asked.

Nothing, her taskforce agreed.

“Final drive of the white Denali?” she tried hopefully.

“Based on fuel mileage, it remained within a hundred miles of Boston,” the lead detective reported.

“Excellent. So we’ve narrowed it to, what, a quarter of the state?”

“Pretty much.”

D.D. rolled her eyes, set down the marker. “Anything else we should know?”

“Gun,” spoke up a voice from the back of the room. Detective John Little.

“What about it?” D.D. asked. “Last I knew, the firearms discharge investigation team had turned it over for processing.”

“Not Tessa’s gun,” Little said. “Brian’s gun.”

“Brian had a gun?” D.D. asked in surprise.

“Took out a permit two weeks ago. Glock forty. I couldn’t find it on the evidence logs as seized from either the house or his car.”

The detective gazed at her expectantly. D.D. returned his stare.

“You’re telling me Brian Darby had a gun,” she said.

“Yes. Applied for the permit two weeks ago.”

“Maybe bulking up wasn’t getting the job done anymore,” Bobby murmured.

D.D. waved her hand at him. “Hello. Bigger picture here. Brian Darby had a Glock forty, and we have no idea where it is. Detective, that’s not a small thing.”

“Gun permit just went through,” Detective Little countered defensively. “We’re a little backed up these days. Haven’t you been reading the papers? Armageddon is coming and, apparently, half the city intends to be armed for it.”

“We need that gun,” D.D. said in a clipped voice. “For starters, what if that’s the weapon that killed Sophie Leoni?”

The room went silent.

“Yeah,” she said. “No more talk. No more theories. We have a dead husband of a state police officer, and a missing six-year-old. I want Sophie Leoni. I want Brian Darby’s gun. And if that evidence leads us where we think it’s probably going to lead us, then I want us to build a case so fucking airtight, Tessa Leoni goes away for the rest of her miserable life. Get out. Get it done.”

Eleven o’clock Monday night, the detectives scrambled.





26


Every woman has a moment in her life when she realizes she genuinely loves a guy, and he’s just not worth it. It took me nearly three years to reach that point with Brian. Maybe there were signs along the way. Maybe, in the beginning, I was just so happy to have a man love me and my daughter as much as Brian seemed to love me and Sophie, I ignored them. Yes, he could be moody. After the initial six-month honeymoon, the house became his anal-retentive domain, Sophie and I receiving daily lectures if we left a dish on the counter, a toothbrush out of its holder, a crayon on the table.

Brian liked precision, needed it.

“I’m an engineer,” he’d remind me. “Trust me, you don’t want a dam built by a sloppy engineer.”

Sophie and I did our best. Compromise, I told myself. The price of family; you gave up some of your individual preferences for the greater good. Plus, Brian would leave again and Sophie and I would spend a giddy eight weeks dumping our junk all over the place. Coats draped over the back of kitchen chairs. Art projects piled on the corner of the counter. Yes, we were regular Girls Gone Wild when Brian shipped out.

Then, one day I went to pay the plumber and discovered our life savings was gone.

It’s a tough moment when you have to confront the level of your own complacency. I knew Brian had been going to Foxwoods. More to the point, I knew the evenings he came home reeking of booze and cigarettes, but claimed he’d been hiking. He’d lied to me, on several occasions, and I’d let it go. To pry would involve being told an answer I didn’t want to hear. So I didn’t pry.

While my husband, apparently, gave in to his inner demons and gambled away our savings account.