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“I said not yet,” he growled.
She stood and backed off.
“I love you,” I repeated several times.
“I love you too, Sugarbear. It’ll be okay,” he said each time.
Rylie returned. “Adam.”
“I’ll be okay,” I assured him, and he finally released me.
In the next hour, they took Heiden’s body away, and Rylie and another agent asked me over and over what happened.
They’d taken Adam into another room.
I recounted how Mr. Heiden had only just gotten back to town, and how he’d been strange at the office and then brought flowers to my door before turning a gun on me. I explained as best I could how the loss of his mother had driven him to blame me, and what he’d said about the theft, and Evelyn and Len. Then, I detailed how he’d threatened to kill me and how Adam had saved me by clueing me to step on Heiden’s foot.
When the agents were finally done with me, the others were still questioning Adam.
All I could think of were Rylie’s words after the first shooting. Adam would need me, and his father could shove it. There was no way I wouldn’t be there for my man now.
* * *
Adam
Neil and Dougtook me into a different room for the debrief.
“Who the hell called MPD?” I asked. “If they’d gotten here two minutes earlier, this would have gone sideways.”
Neil shrugged. “Dempsey made the call.”
“It was a bad one,” I shot back.
For over an hour, they kept after me about the timeline and the details of my arrival at the house, breaking into the back, and shooting the suspect. And I confirmed that I’d never met Paul Heiden before today.
When they finally released me, it was another half hour before the EMTs and forensics guys finished checking out me and Kelly.
“You have a broken door again, so you’re coming with me,” I told her as she changed into fresh clothes to replace the ones now in the evidence bags.
A half hour after that, we’d driven to my place, and I turned on the shower.
I ushered her in and joined her. “Here we are again.” I pulled the strawberry shampoo she’d left here from the ledge. “Turn around. I need to wash your hair.”
She ran her hair under the water and faced away without asking why, which was good. She might not have reacted well if I’d told her she had blood spatter in her hair from the bullet that took down Heiden.
“Why’d he do it?”
“It’s too soon to know.”
“But why me?”
I didn’t have any witty response to lighten the mood. “The man clearly wasn’t rational.”
She went quiet for a while. “Please keep that up,” she murmured as I massaged her scalp.
I kept at it.
“Adam, I was so scared.”
