Page 33 of The Writer

Her face remains expressionless.

Back at her apartment, next to her husband’s dead body, she’d shown no real emotion. There was no fear, anxiety, sorrow, nothing. Declan blamed that on shock, but now he isn’t so sure. During his career, he’d come across his share of psychopaths—people who lacked empathy and remorse. People who had no trouble manipulating others for personal gain with little or no guilt. Always men, though.Never women. Not once. He’d found that those people had trouble maintaining eye contact, something Denise Morrow has no problem doing. When she looks at him now, it’s with laser focus, like she can see through him. Like she’s learned all that’s worth learning about him, has cataloged the data, and has determined the most efficient way to manage him. He has no idea if she’s a psychopath, but she sure as shit is cold.

Although he’s traveled less than fifty feet, the maître d’ is out of breath when he reaches the table, flustered. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrow. He got by me.”

“It’s fine, Bobby. I know him.” She sets her pen aside and glances at Declan. “What would you like to drink, Detective?”

“I’m on the clock.”

“No, you’re not.”

When Declan doesn’t respond to her question, she narrows her eyes and studies his face for a moment. “Get him a grasshopper, Bobby. He’ll like that.” She taps the rim of her own glass. “I’ll take another cosmo.”

Reading upside down, Declan realizes she’s working on the Maggie Marshall book. The weird part is that half her handwritten notes in the margins are puns about cops:

Honorable police officers are hard to find. Hope they don’t go extinct, like the tricera-cops!

The cops found a dead cartoonist in his apartment, but the details are still sketchy.

The police investigated the murder of the crows and came up with the most probable caws.

He doesn’t hide the fact that he’s reading. “Is this all some kind of joke to you?”

“If you know where to look, there’s humor in everything. Life’s too short to get caught up in the ugly parts, Detective. That’s how you find yourself staring down the center of an empty Jameson bottle.”

Declan’s father drank Jameson. For more than a year after he’d died, Declan found half-empty fifths hidden around their apartment—bathroom, sofa cushions, cabinets. She can’t possibly know that. She knows he’s Irish and she’s just assuming he fits the stereotype. That has to be it, right?

Their drinks arrive. Declan stares at his, a fluorescent-green concoction in a martini glass.

“Trust me,” Denise says, “you’ll like it.” She raises her cosmo. “To New York’s Finest.”

Declan doesn’t touch the drink. He says, “Why are you writing a book about Maggie Marshall?”

“It’s an intriguing case.”

“Her killer is locked up. Do you really want to stir that up? She has a family.”

“So did the man you put away.”

Declan nearly laughs at that. Lucero’s parents were dead. His only family is a half sister who’s spent most of her life in institutions and the rest on the street. When the police interviewed her, she all but said her half brother molested her when she was younger. He’d taken lewd photos of her and sold them to his friends. She hated him. Declan never saw the woman smile until the judge read the verdict and put her brother away for good. When that happened, she beamed.

Denise can tell what he’s thinking. “Nobody asked you to like him, Detective, only to treat him objectively.”

“Objectively, I found him to be a piece of shit.” He taps her stack of pages. “What’s your goal here? To get me fired? Put him back on the street?”

“My goal is to put the facts out on the street where everyone can see them, then let the chips fall where they may.”

“You get Lucero out, and we pull another dead girl out of the park a month later, then what?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “Then I’d expect you to do your job. Properly. If you still have your job, that is.”

“There was plenty of evidence against Lucero.”

“I agree. It was damning.”

“Then why do this?”

“Because it wasn’t conclusive.”

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