“What shooting?” Emily groaned, clutching the ultralight combat rifle. Annie was testing it as a replacement for shotguns in patrol cars. “I’m hopping around like a bullfrog.”
She’d been plowing through task force paperwork since the funeral. Devlin Bloch still wasn’t talking, and no new leads had surfaced. Then came the Luerchens. Then Marty, who’d barely said a word since leaving the funeral. “What’s wrong?” she’d asked. “Nothing,” he’d replied. “Just tired.” Angering her because she knew it so untrue. It was one thing to keep something from her. Now he was lying directly.
Annie stopped by to update Branch on Friday’s security plan. Noted Emily’s hunched-over grumpiness. Conferred with him, then told her, “Follow me.”
Next stop, gun range.
“This isn’t frog-jumping, girl,” Annie snorted. “It’s high-speed low-drag tactical ninja operator training. How you gonna be Robocop if you refuse to learn the lingo?”
“Don’t wanna be Robocop,” Emily said. She handed over the Kel-Tec SU-16CA, then sat against the wall to flap the Guns n’ Roses T-shirt. “I just wanna shoot Ray for haunting me from the grave.”
Annie looked at her strangely.
“Sorry,” Emily said. “Bad taste.”
“No such thing when it comes to Ray,” Annie said. “But I hear more than our un-dearly departed in that statement. What’s wrong?”
Emily waved it off. “Nothing. Let’s just get back to-”
“Tell me, Detective. That’s an order.”
Emily sighed, flopped back to the floor. “All right. I’m worried.”
“About?”
“Marty.”
A pair of traffic cops walked in. “Come back later, all right?” Annie said. They sensed it wasn’t a request, and left. Annie locked the door, sat cross-legged against the wall.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I think he’s seeing someone,” Emily said. “A woman named Alice.”
“Oy,” Annie said. “All right, tell me everything. From the beginning.”
Emily shifted around. “He’s been moody lately,” she said. “Quiet.”
“He’s the strong silent type,” Annie said. “About personal stuff, anyway.”
“Not when we’re alone,” Emily said. “Not once in our two years together. We’ve talked about our marriages. Our spouses’ deaths. Rebuilding the house. Living together, living separately, all of it.” She wiped hair off her face. “But all of a sudden he’s shutting himself off.”
“Completely?”
“Oh, no,” Emily said. “You wouldn’t even notice if I hadn’t told you. Ninety-nine percent of the time he’s his normal happy self.” She blew the drop of sweat off the tip of her nose. “But the other percent, his face gets that foggy look. Like he’s lost in thought. His attention drifts. I ask him about it, and he changes the subject.”
“Maybe it’s the execution,” Annie ventured. “He’s lived with that rotten case for seventeen years, Em. Now that the end is near, maybe he’s depressed.”
“That’s what I assumed,” Emily said, shaking her head. “So I asked. He insists nothing’s wrong. But I know better. He’s hiding something.” Her eyes brimmed, and she told Annie about the secret phone call to “Alice,” the lame “snitch” excuse he’d used to cover the others, and the several unexplained disappearances he’d made in the middle of the night. “I think he’s fallen in love with this Alice woman, and he doesn’t know how to tell me.”
She wiped her face with her shirttail.
“I fell in love with him practically overnight, you know,” she said. “A year went by and it just got better. I finally started believing we were that million-to-one shot that was meant to be. Marty believed it, too.”
“He still does,” Annie said.
Emily fiddled with her wedding ring, then realized it wasn’t there. She’d removed it a year ago, when Marty finally replaced her dead husband Jack as her heart-mate.
“But maybe we were just safe shelter for each other,” she continued. “You know, an escape from all that tragedy. And now that it’s over he’s met someone and wants to dump me . . .”
The tears spilled.
“No way, hon,” Annie said, shaking her head so hard the blond ringlets danced. “Marty’s nuts about you. No way he’d take a hike, and he’s too damn noble to sneak around. Besides, Branch would let me know in his special guy way if there was trouble in paradise.”