He shook his head. “I don’t know the truth about that. I don’t know anything about it at all.”
“Are you sure about that?” She paused. “Are you sure that your wife didn’t also abuse you?”
He shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But she watched as his hand gently rubbed his ribs. “So, maybe I should get a subpoena and photograph the damage to your body,” she suggested.
He stared at her, his gaze hardening up.
She nodded. “Obviously you don’t want anybody to know. If that is the case, I get it. Nobody wants something that you consider an embarrassment to be known publicly, particularly now that the women are both gone. I can see that, from your perspective, it won’t help anything.”
“Of course not,” he spat. “It’s despicable to just ruin their memories.”
“That’s not what I’m doing. That’s just a statement of fact.”
“So, what difference would it make?” he asked. “Why would I even want to talk to you about something like that?”
“Because, if we don’t get a clear picture, we don’t know exactly what’s really going on, and currently everybody is pinning the blame on the ex-husband.”
“Well, if he was being abused, wouldn’t that give him more motivation?”
“If it had been an abused-woman-turned-killer, yes, at least potentially,” she stated. “With men who are abused, there are additional issues, I believe. I’m sure the shrinks would have a heyday with this one as it is, though they would anyway because this guy killed two women. However, there’s also another part of the story. If Barry were the killer, and he is prosecuted, then his whole motivation in all this would be made public knowledge. The whole sordid story would come out, and everybody would know that he was an abused husband.”
She caught just the barest wince cross Agnew’s face. She nodded. “Just like you felt just now. Obviously you don’t want anybody to know, and it would be something that we would try very hard to keep under wraps,” she noted. “Your self-esteem is very important, as is the children’s memory of their mother. But hiding that abuse will never be a good thing in the end.”
“Sure, it is,” Agnew argued. “So what if she did hit me every once in a while? She used to lose her temper on a regular basis.” Kate just continued to stare at him, and finally he flushed. “It wasn’t very often. It wasn’t that bad.”
“How bad does it have to be?” she asked. “I’m struggling with that whole concept. When is something like that enough to raise an alarm?” she asked. “It always seems to be a ‘bad enough’ issue. It wasn’t bad enough?”
He shrugged. “You’re making too much out of it.”
“No, I’m not. Yet I understand that you don’t want it to be made public.”
He stiffened and glared at her.
“So can you please help me—and you too—and confirm whether or not you heard that the same thing was a problem in the marriage of the other couple?”
He nodded slowly. “Robin did mention it every once in a while.”
“In what context?”
“That Jenna should have beaten up Barry more often. Tuned him up, made him more amiable. And that it was sad that it had come to this.”
“So Robin advocated for the abuse?”
Agnew didn’t say anything.
Kate nodded. “Of course she would because she was abusing you.” Kate sighed heavily. “You know that there are professionals you can talk to if you need help, right?”
He just curled his lip, as if that were the worst thing that she could have suggested.
“Did Robin think that you needed a tune up, when she realized that the other couple was getting a divorce?”
“I think she finally realized that the divorce was a good thing,” Agnew shared quietly. “I gathered the ex-husband was getting more and more difficult to control, and this was deemed a better option.”
“Interesting, and so you never ever went against Robin, did you?”
He stared at her for a long moment, before responding. “What difference does it make now?”