Sasha McCandless 03 - Irretrievably Broken by Melissa F. Miller

Detective Gilbert twisted his mouth into a smile.
    “No,” he said, “there’s a blood-covered claw hammer on the floor of the passenger side, so I have deduced as much.”
    Cinco watched as Marco reddened.
    Then he turned back to the homicide detective and said, “The firm will cooperate with your investigation, of course, limited only by our obligations to our clients to preserve their confidentiality. Let Ms. Davis know if you need anything.”
    “I’ll be in touch,” Detective Gilbert promised.
    Cinco nodded his goodbyes and turned to head back toward the elevators, stepping over the yellow crime scene tape. The others trailed behind him, whispering. He stifled a sigh. He saw more meetings in his future.
     

 
     
    CHAPTER 20
     
    Sasha, Naya, Larry, and Greg squeezed around the small round conference table in Sasha’s office. A takeout container of coffee and pastries from the coffee shop below sat, untouched, in the center of the table.
    Greg squirmed under the weight of the unimpressed stares he faced. He’d been there for twenty minutes and, so far, he’d done a lot of tap dancing instead of answering Sasha’s questions. Naya rapped her pen against the table and bit her lip.
    Sasha wondered if Naya would continue to hold her peace in the face of Greg’s apparent refusal to help himself. She hadn’t asked Naya to join her practice because of Naya’s diplomacy: she was outspoken, and her instincts about people were sound. If Greg continued to feed them a line, Naya would eventually lose her patience.
    “Let’s try this again,” Sasha said to Greg, holding up the picture of him with the earliest date. It showed him at a poker table at 10:30 a.m. on the third Tuesday in June. “Do you remember how you came to be at the casino instead of at work this day?”
    Greg exhaled through his nose. “I told you, I don’t know. I guess I just got the idea to stop by on my way to work. I drive right by the North Shore, you know.”
    “Okay, sure, but why that day?” Sasha probed.
    “I. Don’t. Know.”  Greg cut off each word, making his irritation clear.
    Finally, Naya made hers clear, too.
    “Listen, Mr. Lang,” she began, pushing back from the table, “we’re trying to help you. Do you think someone who knew your gambling would set off your wife just happened to be at the casino, with a camera, on the same Tuesday morning that you got an urge to pull off the exit from 279 instead of taking your sorry ass to work?”
    Greg stared at her, slack-jawed, then said, “I guess I never thought about it.”
    “You never thought about it,” Sasha repeated.
    She arched a brow and looked at Larry, who shrugged, like he’d heard it all and didn’t consider this to be outside the realm of possibility.
    Greg went on, haltingly, “I mean, I guess, if I had thought about it, I might have wondered if she was having me followed, maybe?”
    “Was she?” Sasha asked.
    “She said no. I thought we were on pretty solid ground, until she found out about the gambling. We did a bike trip through the French countryside last spring. We were getting along fine—no, better than fine. So, I don’t think she had any reason to be suspicious.”  He spread his hands wide and said, “But, I don’t know.”
    Naya shook her head but said nothing.
    “It’s true. We had been in love once, you know,” Greg insisted. “And, it’s not like we’d ever had a big falling out. It’s just that life, work—her work—got in the way, buried us. But, in the Loire Valley we spent our days riding through rolling hills dotted with heather and sunflowers turning their faces to the sun and our nights drinking wine under the stars in the courtyards of ancient chateaus. There was nothing in the way. Just us. It gave us a chance to uncover what had been there all along. I don’t care if you believe me or not, things were the best they’d been in years,” Greg finished, choking back tears and staring down at the table.
    “Let’s get