AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“The one who beats his wife. You told me to keep an eye out, right? Just in case, you said. So I have. Haven’t seen anything, but maybe you need to keep an eye out. It was you who fucked with him. Not that he didn’t deserve it. How would he know where you live?”
I stared at the ceiling, a litany of swear words running through my head, though I only uttered one. “Fuck. Watch your back, Theo.” I ended the call.
That was fast, but Theo was right. Peter Carillo was a cop. I’d been careful, didn’t drive by the front of his house, but what if he talked to neighbors? What if someone else caught my Jeep on camera?
Any cop could run my license plate and get my name, address, driver’s license, social, driving restrictions. There would be a log, but that log was only accessible to certain people in the department. I couldn’t just call a beat cop like my cousin Josie to find out who’d run my plates, I’d need someone higher up.
Like my sometimes-boyfriend, Phoenix PD Sergeant Rick Devlin.
I hadn’t talked to Rick in months. While Jack knew more cops than I did, I didn’t want to bring my family into this. Annie Carillo was my case, and I needed to take care of my own.
If State Trooper Peter Carillo had run my plates, then he had most likely broken in to find out where his wife was. Maybe he thought she was here.
And I had to figure out what to do about it, because proving he broke in would be next to impossible.
Tuesday
Twenty-Three
Peter Carillo
Two Phoenix PD officers responded to Peter’s missing persons call Tuesday morning. They stood in his kitchen while he sat at his table, hands around a mug of cold coffee. His head pounded from lack of sleep, and his heart hurt from missing his family. He kept going over why, why, why and alternating between angry and sad.
His friend Brian had come over for support. And, Peter thought, to corroborate everything Peter said. He was right to tell Brian immediately about Annie walking out. But he didn’t tell his friend about Margo Angelhart. He wouldn’t understand why Peter had gone to her house or why Peter decided to withhold that information from the investigating officers. Angelhart was Peter’s angle to pursue. If they found out about her on their own, fine, but for now, she was Peter’s best bet to get Annie back under his roof where he could control her.
Officer Ritchie looked twelve and his badge number suggested he’d only recently graduated from the academy. Officer Archie Nunez was in his thirties, a training officer with a good reputation. Their paths had crossed in the field a few times over the years, but Peter didn’t know him well.
Peter explained everything—that he’d tried Annie during the day, but she hadn’t answered. That he knew she was going to a fair to see Natalie, Brian’s wife, so he didn’t think much about it until he came home and she and the kids were gone, but her car was here. He gave them the note—he had debated that for hours. But if he hid the note from them, then the police might think that he had done something to his family.
He would never hurt his family. He loved them.
He claimed he thought she took Uber, maybe went to a hotel because she was mad about something, but he checked their joint credit card and she hadn’t charged anything. He gave all the statements and bank records to the police, so they could see he wasn’t lying.
“What does this mean?” Nunez asked, pointing to the first line of the short note. “You hurt me one time too many.” He looked at Peter as if he was a suspect. As if he had done something wrong.
“I don’t know,” he said. Less is more, he told himself. Don’t over talk. Don’t say anything that can get you in trouble.
“Did you have a fight recently? Maybe Saturday night? Sunday morning, before you went to work?”
“No. We don’t fight. I mean, we argue like everyone about stupid things, but we don’t fight.”
Brian said, “Tell them, Peter.”
“Tell us what?” Nunez asked.
“I—I have been asking Annie to see a doctor.”
“Is she sick?”
He shook his head. “Ever since Marie was born, Annie has been...different. I didn’t think much of anything about it, just the stress of having an infant and a toddler. PJ is almost four, he’s a handful. My mom comes over to help around the house and with the kids a few days a week when I’m working, and she told me that Annie has signs of postpartum depression. My mom is a retired nurse. I mentioned it to Annie, and she got so mad at me. She broke a vase my mom had given us, stormed upstairs. I let her calm down, but she refused to see a doctor.”
“When was this?” Nunez asked.
“She broke the vase six, seven weeks ago? But I’d noticed her behavior change shortly after I went back to work after paternity leave—I took two weeks off to help with PJ and the baby, and then my mom stayed here for a couple weeks.”
“Is Annie on any medications?”
“Not currently. She’d been on anxiety medication years ago, but not since she was pregnant with PJ.”
