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“Yep. Of course, he has no explanation for why his squeaky clean wife would fire point-blank shots at us. Or why she would have been carrying two semiautomatics in her purse.”
“Love is blind,” Presley remarked. “Mia knows about that. Love has caused her to overlook your faults.” He grinned.
Angel scowled and would have tossed back a required insulting comeback, but he mentally tripped over what Presley had just said. Not the faults part. But the other.
Love has caused her…
He was still trying to wrap his mind around the possibility that was true when his own phone dinged. “It’s Detective Walker,” he relayed. “Birdie wants to talk to Mia and me.”
“Well, that oughta be an interesting conversation,” Presley concluded. “Fill me on what she says first chance you get.”
“I will,” Angel assured him, and he put his hand on the small of Mia’s back to get them moving.
Since Birdie was just up the hall, it didn’t take them long to get there. Not enough time for Angel to speculate about what the woman would say.
There was a uniformed officer standing guard outside her room, but he had apparently been given a heads-up about their arrival because he let them right in after he checked their IDs.
Like Presley, Birdie was in a hospital bed and hooked up to a variety of machines to monitor her vitals, but she had the addition of being cuffed to one of the metal bed rails. A good precaution because despite her injuries, Angel thought Birdie might run if she got the chance.
Walker, an imposing man with his six-foot-six height and muscular build, was at the back of the room, and he nodded a greeting to them. Angel spared Birdie a long once over, and a scowl, before Mia and he went over to have a word with the detective.
“She’s confessed to killing Kenton Barker, but that’s about it,” Walker informed them. “I’ve reminded her that anything she says to you can be used to bring additional charges against her,” he added in a raised voice that Birdie no doubt had trouble hearing.
Good. Angel was glad that Walker had made that clear.
“Oh, and we just got IDs on the two dead guys you shot,” Walker said, taking out his phone. “Lou Trainor and Quinn Stephens. They were friends with the other two men who tried to kill you.”
So, connected. The question was—who had hired them?
“What about Birdie’s financials?” Angel asked.
Walker shook his head. “All tied up with her husband’s, and they have lots of money going in and out. Our forensic accounts will need some time to see if there was a payment to hitmen.”
That tightened his chest. Angel just wanted this over and done. Hoping to accomplish that, he turned, and Mia and he went closer to Birdie. However, Birdie spoke before he could say anything.
“Kenton deserved to die,” Birdie spat out. “You know it. Mia knows it. And I know it.”
Since it appeared Birdie was in a chatty mood and not hampered by the gunshot to her side, Angel just stood by and let her continue.
“That night when I went to confront him about Mia, he spit in my face, told me I was just a good fuck, that was all. That the girl he really wanted was Mia.”
Birdie sobbed out Mia’s name as if the insult was fresh and not something from two decades ago. The tears came, spilling down her cheeks, but Angel couldn’t help but wonder who she was crying for. Certainly not Kenton.
“So, you went to Kenton’s room, and he spit in your face,” Angel said, making a circling motion for her to continue.
Birdie did, eventually, after several snail-crawling moments. Her fit of temper seemed to have been spent, and she sighed. “I slapped him and shoved him hard, and he fell. He got up to come after me, and I knew he was going to punch me so I grabbed his lamp and bashed him on the head. Over and over again, until he quit moving.”
Birdie paused again, shuttered, and was no doubt battling the motherlode of flashbacks.
“And?” Angel pressed. “What did you do then?”
She cleared her throat and continued. “I dragged him to the window. God, he felt so heavy, like he weighed a ton, but I rolled him out. Ruby was right about that. I grabbed his keys that he kept on his nightstand and the lamp so I could get rid of it. After that, I hurried downstairs, managed to get him into his car and drove him to the woods. Since it’d rained the night before, the ground was soft. I used a rock to scoop out a shallow grave and put him in it.”
Angel figured it wouldn’t have been easy for her to do all of that. Kenton and she had been about the same size. But adrenaline would have given Birdie the boost she needed.
“What did you do with Kenton’s car and the lamp?” Angel asked.
“I threw the lamp in a trash bin in the parking lot of the strip mall, and I left his car there with the keys in the ignition.” Birdie gathered her breath. “I figured someone would steal it.”
