Page 137 of State of Alert

“I didn’t kill my wife. How can you pin that on me?”

“You’ve obstructed the investigation into her murder by withholding relevant information. That’s a slam-dunk conviction that comes with years in prison.”

Nothing was ever a slam dunk, but he didn’t need to know that.

“Call your daughter and put it on speaker.”

He placed the call and set the phone on the table.

Zoe’s voice mail picked up with the same message that was on her other phone.

“Try Jada.”

Same thing. Straight to voice mail.

“So they’ve shut off all their phones and gone off the grid. Why would they do that if they have nothing to hide?”

“Maybe they got scared because you seem to be looking only at them for this.”

“Or maybe you told them to shut off their phones, get in the car, go as far away as they could get and don’t come back.”

“I did not!”

“Did you know they wanted Elaine dead?”

“Elaineknew they wanted her dead, but that doesn’t mean they did it.”

“No one else in her life wanted her dead. According to you and the girls, no one else had access to your house. There was no sign of forced entry. Elaine was killed coming out of the shower, which means she most likely didn’t admit the person who killed her.” Sam leaned in closer to him. “Who else could it be?”

“I don’t know! Someone could’ve gotten in somehow and killed her.”

“For what reason? You said nothing was missing, right?”

“At first glance. Who knows if they took things that belonged to her? I don’t know every piece of her jewelry. She inherited some valuable things from her mother. Maybe they were after those.”

“How would they know she had them?”

“Isn’t it your job to answer these questions?”

“Yes, it is, and usually the family members of murder victims are helpful because they want answers, too. For instance, they don’t wait days to tell me their daughters have second cell phones that their mother didn’t know about. They come clean with details like that the first time we ask so we won’t waste valuable time chasing our tails.”

“I should’ve told you that. I’m sorry that I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He took a second, seeming to collect his thoughts. “My first thought was protecting Elaine.”

“From what?”

“From the whole world finding out that the three peopleclosest to her lied to her about everything. I hope you can try to understand… She was intractable when it came to guarding the safety of her loved ones. Her brother wouldn’t tell you that he put distance between them because he couldn’t handle having to report in to her every day and flatly refused to let her track his phone. She wasobsessed, Lieutenant.”

“You said before that you understood why she was obsessed, after the way her sister was murdered.”

“I did, but understanding doesn’t make it easy to live under that kind of regime. If I was ten minutes later than planned getting home, she’d grill me about where I’d been. If an open house ran late, she’d start texting, fearing that some rando had killed me in the house. It was all day, every day. I used to wonder sometimes how she held on to her job with all the time she spent spying on us.”

“Were you faithful to your wife, Mr. Myerson?”

His expression hardened. “Yes, I was.”

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