Page 30 of The Better Sister

I told them both I’d help however I could, still wishing that Nicky were somewhere else. She always had a way of saying something to make a situation even more awkward.

Guidry launched the first question with no introduction. “Why wouldn’t Adam go for the gun?”

I felt my eyes blink, but couldn’t get any words to come out of my mouth.

“Your gun. Or Adam’s gun, at least. He has a Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter registered to the sheriff’s office in Riverhead.”

I remembered the weapon, that was for sure. “We don’t have it anymore.”

“Well, where did it go?” Guidry asked. “It wasn’t on your list of items missing from the house. And yet if it had been in the house, I would have thought that Adam might have retrieved it when he heard an intruder. It’s a very popular gun, precisely because it’s useful for self-defense purposes.”

“Adam bought it”—I paused, pretending to search my memory—“maybe a year ago. I told him I wasn’t comfortable having a gun in the house and insisted that he get rid of it. My house rules are more Use Your Words than Stand Your Ground. I even went to the march after the last school shooting—well, the last one big enough for people to even notice anymore. Sorry, you can tell I feel strongly about it.”

“So where is the gun now?”

I shrugged. “I have no idea. I didn’t want it under our roof. I made that quite clear, and he said he understood. I assumed he took it to work or sold it or something.”

The silence that followed told me nothing, but I hoped that I had checked one item off her internal list.

“That’s helpful. We also want to make sure we know for certain what your habits were with respect to the security alarm at your house.”

“I told you, we never set it except when we were gone or if I were out there alone.”

“And when it was set, who knew the code?” Bowen asked.

I gave him what was a short list: us, the housekeeper, and her husband, who did handyman work when we needed it. “But the password is our son’s birthday. In theory, it was guessable, I suppose. Speaking of which, are you able to get into Adam’s emails? I’m still trying to figure out where he was on Thursday and Friday.”

“His client meeting near the airport,” Guidry said. “You mentioned it yesterday. We’re looking into it.”

I could tell from Bowen’s blank expression that this was the first he had heard of the subject.

“I looked at our Uber account, and he didn’t go to the airport. Or even to a hotel, from what I can tell.” I handed her the ride trip receipts that I had printed out. “I asked Adam why his well-heeled client wouldn’t stay at a Manhattan hotel instead of an airport crash pad. I even offered to get them dinner reservations and theater tickets, because I knew how important client development was to him as a relatively new partner. He said something about how they might need to take an emergency flight to a country that wouldn’t extradite them back to the United States if things went bad. In retrospect, I think something was wrong, but I don’t know why he’d get dropped off at a train station.”

I could tell Guidry was unconvinced. “I appreciate that you’re trying to recall anything unusual, Chloe, but that sounds like your husband was making a joke?”

I realized how random my comments sounded, and tried to offer more specific grounds for my concerns. “He was never comfortable with this client,” I said. “Adam used to be a federal prosecutor—a really good one, in fact, in the Southern District. And of course he knew that when he crossed over from one side of the aisle to the other by joining Rives & Braddock, he wouldn’t always be wearing a superhero’s cape or the white hat, so to speak. But I could tell that the Gentry Group made him feel... dirty. I don’t know the details, but something weird was going on. I think he was meeting with them but didn’t want the law firm to know about it for some reason. Apparently he didn’t even bill his time to the client, according to his time sheets. And he used Uber, which gets billed to our personal card, instead of the law firm’s car service.”

Guidry was nodding along as I spoke, but she chose her words carefully in response. “If he were meeting a client, wouldn’t he have simply entered the name of the hotel as the destination instead of a train station? And I don’t know much about lawyers, but I’ve never heard of one who spent two days with a client without charging them for it. Isn’t it more likely that he went somewhere else and didn’t want either you or the law firm to know about it?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you to follow up on it.”

Bowen caught Guidry’s eye and then asked the next question. “Do you think your husband was cheating on you, Ms. Taylor?”

“No!” I was surprised by the certainty in my own voice. “I’m telling you: there’s a reason he didn’t want anyone to know where he was for two full days, and it has to be connected to his murder.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, scribbling notes in a spiral pad, even though there was nothing to write down. “We’re going to look into this, but please understand that certain questions are routine in every homicide case. We don’t enjoy asking them.”

“My husband wasn’t cheating.”

“Got it, and to be clear, there’s no third party in your life, either? We have to ask, if only to exclude that person or persons as a suspect.”

“Persons?Plural?No, no third party. Or parties. Just a boring married monogamous couple. It does happen, detectives.”

Bowen smirked as he glanced at Nicky. I wanted to take one of her earring hooks and jab it through his hand.

“And had your son and his father been getting along okay lately?” Bowen asked.

“Of course,” I said. “They’re very close.”

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