AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I want my lawyer.”
“I’m sure you do.”
Eliza frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
The taller cop stepped forward, removed a pair of handcuffs from his waist. “All I’m saying, Mrs. Tate, is that things aren’t looking good for you.”
The other cop shook his head, a false sadness sliding over his features. “They never do when the wife’s fingerprints turn up on the murder weapon.”
Eliza felt her face go numb first. Then her arms, her hands, the tips of her fingers and toes. The world seemed to halt on its axis, suspended in space and time, while the cops surrounded her.
The panic in her chest grew in its intensity as she was hauled from her office. How was this possible? She hadn’t killed anyone. As Eliza climbed into the back of a cop car, her brain whirred at a million miles an hour. There had to be an explanation. How had the cops found the murder weapon? Where? And most importantly, how had her prints gotten onto it?
THIRTY-SIX
One Month After
March 2019
Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?” asked a detective dressed in slacks and a sky-blue button-down shirt. “Something to drink, maybe? Coffee?”
“Just so long as the bathroom is close by, I should be fine.” Penny dropped herself into a chair, groaning with the effort of it. “I hope we can make this quick.”
“We’ll do our best.” The detective sat opposite Penny at the interview table. “Ms. Sands, we’ve invited you here to discuss the murder of Roman Tate.”
“Eliza wouldn’t have killed her husband. I don’t know why you’ve arrested her.”
“Isn’t that a little ironic? A defense coming from her husband’s mistress?”
Penny winced, then shook her head. She rested a hand on her stomach as she met the detective’s gaze. “You don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“You’re right, I don’t. That’s why you’re here. When did your affair with Mr. Tate begin?”
Penny’s breath hitched. “I didn’t realize it was an affair. He said he was separating from his wife.”
“At the time of his death, Mr. Tate was still wearing his wedding ring.”
“Yes.”
“Was he wearing it when you started seeing him?”
Penny thought back to the day when everything had changed. The day in Roman’s office when he’d promised her great things. Wild success. Then he’d turned her very dreams into the trap that broke her.
“Yes, he was wearing it when our relationship began.”
“You didn’t think to ask him about it?”
“I did ask him about it, and he told me he was separating from his wife.”
The detective jotted down a note on a tiny piece of paper. “Did he explain the cause of the separation?”
“He only said that it was a long time in coming. There was a mention of how he was still on good terms with Eliza. That it was a mutual and amicable separation—no kids, no messy dividing of assets. They were going to split things down the middle and carry on with their lives.”
“Would it surprise you to learn that Roman Tate had no real assets to split?”
Penny blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I thought you said that you and Mrs. Tate were friends.”
