Page 68 of No One Can Know

34EMMA

Now

Emma walked into the police station with Christopher Best beside her and tried to calm the galloping pace of her heart.

Detective Mehta was a round-faced woman with a stocky frame and a button on her shirt that was on the verge of falling off, hanging loosely in its hole with a stray thread sticking out.

“I want to state for the record that my client is here of her own accord, and is free to go at any time, but has chosen to cooperate with this investigation,” Chris said.

“And we appreciate that,” Mehta said, without looking at Chris at all. “Emma—can I call you Emma?—we have the statement you and Mr. Best have provided, of course, but I’d like to go over things one more time to make sure that we have all the details.”

Emma nodded. They weren’t looking for additional details, they were looking for inconsistencies. She went over things again, from the time she got home the night before to when the police arrived. Mehta had a good poker face, but Emma didn’t think that anything she said had made the detective relax or trust her more by the time she was done.

“You came home around nine o’clock,” Mehta said. “Is that correct?”

“Around then. I don’t know exactly,” Emma said. “I didn’t come straight back from the bar. I sat in the park for a while. There were a few other people around.”

“Any particular reason you went to that bar?” Mehta asked.

Emma hesitated. She didn’t want to lie, but going too far down this road wouldn’t be good for anyone. Not her, not Logan, not JJ. “I knew Logan worked there. I wanted to talk to him. You know what happened to my parents the last time I was in town, obviously. And you know…” Mehta, mercifully, nodded without making her spell it out. Emma shifted in her seat. “I wanted to talk to Logan a bit, about being back and what happened all those years ago.”

“You and Logan Ellis were friends?” Mehta asked.

“Our parents were friends, I suppose. We knew each other, that’s all,” Emma said. “I thought he’d probably talk to me. We chatted briefly, and then I left.”

“And you saw your husband in the carriage house,” Mehta said, and then they were going back and forth over the timeline again. Emma stumbled only once, stating the wrong time and then quickly correcting herself, and Mehta looked up but didn’t seem bothered. Best looked unhappy, but not enough to put a stop to things.

“Ms. Palmer, there were a number of firearms found in your house. Are they yours?”

“They belonged to my father,” Emma said. “They’d been in storage, but Nathan went and got them. I didn’t want them in the house. I told him as much.”

“Any particular reason he wanted them?”

“Protection,” Emma said, all too aware of the irony.

“He felt he was in danger?”

“We’d been having some trouble with vandalism,” Emma said, keeping her voice measured.

“Bad enough that he thought you needed a firearm.”

“Like I said. I disagreed,” Emma replied.

“You said that you asked him to get rid of them. Did you handle any of the guns at all?” Mehta asked.

“Once. The Glock, just to clean it. Nathan didn’t know how.”

“Why would you clean a gun you didn’t want around?” Mehta asked, eyebrow raised.

“Keeping busy, I guess,” Emma said. It sounded glib, and Mehta frowned. “Was it… do you know if it was one of those guns that killed him?”

“We’re still conducting tests,” Mehta said. She laced her fingers, hands resting on the tabletop, and Emma’s mouth went dry. This was it, then. The part she’d been dreading.

“How was your relationship with your husband?” Mehta asked.

“Not great, recently,” Emma said. Mehta looked interested at last, straightening up. “Things have been stressful. It’s the reason we moved out here.” She explained about the house. The baby.

“It sounds like he screwed up pretty bad,” Mehta said. Emma thought she was trying to sound sympathetic. Like they were venting on a girls’ night out. But Mehta wasn’t built for it.

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