“How would I know? I was with you,” I said.
“No, you were alone, remember? Walking home, alone, after our last little conversation.”
“I—What?” I said.
“You tell me, Milan,” he said, and I noticed that he’d dropped the Ms. Meadows thing completely.
“You’re the detective.”
“And what does that make you?”
“What are you implying?” I asked, my voice on the razor edge, my emotions somewhere between rage and breakdown.
“I’m not implying anything. All I know for sure is that instead of coming to the police after a shooting, you went on a little mind vacation and drove around. Or something,” he said, his voice overflowing with his disgust.
“What does that have to do with Tif-Tiffany?” I said.
He shrugged, giving off an air of nonchalance that would have been convincing were it not for the malice and scorn in his eyes. “Why don’t you tell me?”
I pressed my lips into a line, felt my face twisting into a frown I was powerless to control.
“You got nothing,” he said, leaning back as he ran his hand down his tie. “Well, I guess I can take a stab at it. You ‘work’ the wedding of one this state’s most notorious mob bosses, get caught up in a shooting, disappear for hours, and then your roommate is murdered the next day. Did I leave anything out?”
I could do nothing but glare at him, rage, grief—guilt—making words impossible.
“So the way I see it,” he said, again leaning back—I hoped his fucking chair toppled over—“is that you’re either an innocent victim with the world’s worst luck. Wait, I think poor Tiffany has—had—the world’s worst luck.” He paused, no doubt giving me time to react. I’d rather swallow my own tongue than give that bastard anything, so finally he continued. “Or you’re involved.”
He let those words hang, having finally made the subtext that I’d been too stupid to see earlier plain.
“So you’re saying you think I killed my best friend?” I said, my voice coming out strained.
“I don’t think anything, Milan. I’m simply laying out the facts and sharing the only reasonable conclusion. You can correct my error if you’d like to tell me the truth.”
The tone of his voice set me even further on edge. He wasn’t yelling, but he’d taken on that authoritative tone I hated, trying to use guilt to bully me into telling him something I didn’t know instead of figuring out what had happened to Tiffany.
You could tell them about Priest, stupid.
That would be the right thing to do. Maybe a necessary thing, especially if he had had something to do with her death. I wasn’t moving, but still, I froze.
Priest involved with Tiffany’s death…
The thought hadn’t crossed my mind before, hadn’t even seemed a possibility. But how could I dismiss the thought out of hand? Maybe it was my own lack of thought that had led to Tiffany’s demise.
Horror rocked through me, but the thought didn’t fit, didn’t feel right to me. I tried to remember every second I had spent with him, searching for some clue that I could have been mistaken, that he could have done something so horrible.
I shook my head.
No. He couldn’t have done it. He didn’t do it.
I didn’t know anything for sure, not anymore, but I knew with all my heart Priest hadn’t harmed Tiffany.
That certainty gave me comfort, a touchstone in this sea of insanity. But that didn’t mean the smartest thing to do wouldn’t be to tell everything I knew, including everything that had happened with Priest. And I was so close to doing so, so close to spilling everything.
“Did you even care about her at all?” he asked.
Sudden anger made me lock my eyes on his with seething contempt.
“Guess not,” he said.
Then he stood, grabbed that stupid goddamned folder, and left.
Fuck it.
I couldn’t sit here, wouldn’t sit here and be accused by that asshole, do nothing while Tiff’s murderer was free. Besides, I wasn’t under arrest. I could leave, and I would.
When I turned the doorknob, it occurred to me that it might be locked, so I breathed a sigh of relief when it opened without pause.
Left was the same path I’d used three times before that day. To the right was a glowing red-and-white exit sign. I went right, again worried that someone might try to stop me. I made it to the exit without trouble, and when I pushed it open and stepped outside, I was again hit with the most overpowering sense of relief.
Soon, I was headed to my car. I’d called 9-1-1 but insisted I drive myself back to the police station, out of my mind with grief. And now that car would take me away from this place. To where, I hadn’t decided, but away from here was all that mattered.