“It’s not funny,” she stated, “but I do mean it. This could have gone a completely different way.”
He nodded, acknowledging her point.
“But this doesn’t have anything to do with your wife’s death, I presume?”
“You mean, did I kill her and decide to kill myself?” He snorted. “I figured that’d be the first thing you’d think of, when I saw you pop in here.”
“Since we haven’t had any luck finding a good suspect for this case,” she noted, “it makes it difficult.”
“Of course it does,” he agreed, “and that’s just frustrating too. Because the questions of who and why and what’s really going on, they just drive into my brain and stay there.”
“It’s always thewhyfor me,” she murmured.
He nodded and started to look really tired. Just on cue, a nurse walked in. Kate hopped to her feet. “I’ll see you again soon, Agnew. Remember to stay strong and to get better.”
He gave her a half wave, and she took that as a request to leave, and she turned and walked out of the room. She walked down the hallway, her hands in her pockets, pondering the scenario. By the time, she got back to the office, she was evenmore confused than ever, but a kernel of a suspicion brewed in the back of her mind.
Owen looked up. “Hey, did you get a chance to talk to him?”
“I did—and his parents. Sad deal all around.”
“What did he have to say?”
“That he got drunk, and booze is always an unhappy friend for him.”
“Well, you’d think, in that case, you wouldn’t drink.”
“I think in his case,” she replied, with the wry look, “notdrinking was a much harder option than giving a shit about what might happen if he did.”
“Well, considering his wife was just murdered, I would think so.”
“I’m not necessarily getting the vibe that he’s in much grief over Robin at all. More like he feels like he should be grieving but is almost maybe feeling guilty because he isn’t.”
“That can be pretty twisted up too,” Lilliana stated calmly from the back corner of the squad room. “Relationships tie us up in knots. We have this expectation from everybody else about how we’re supposed to feel, but they aren’t part of the core relationship. So, was he really happy in his marriage or was he just expected to be happy? And, if he wasn’t really happy, is he now really expected to actually grieve? Was she a good friend, or was she becoming a pain in the ass? Was she somebody who bossed him, bullied him, and possibly even abused him, or was she somebody who was his partner and tried to meet his every need out of love?”
Kate looked at her team member in surprise and nodded.
Lilliana continued. “So much of this is just part of the private relationships that publicly nobody knows or understands, until we get in there and start tugging away at the curtains. Everybody is happy with the status quo, until that status quo gets changed, and then people get pretty pissy about everything.”
Kate nodded slowly. “I hadn’t really looked at it that way, but there is a weird vibe about Agnew. Maybe I’ll go talk to him again this afternoon,” she suggested. “And maybe he’ll have had a chance to think about it a little bit more.”
“Maybe,” Lilliana replied. “Of course the other issue is, he might have firmed up how he’ll handle this publicly and be even less helpful.”
“That’s something we need to know too,” Kate said, “because, if they won’t be helpful, the next question is, will they actively hinder us instead?”
“I’ve not seen so much hindering but definitely plenty of not helping,” Lilliana noted, as she sat down. “It’s all something to think about.”
“Exactly, and nothing quite like a death to shake people up and to make you wonder just how much they’re actually even playing a part.”
“And how much they were always playing a part but didn’t even really know it.”
“Sounds like you’ve had some experience with that,” Kate suggested.
“We’ve had some cases that were pretty interesting,” Lilliana replied. “The bottom line is that, with something like this, you just don’t know what you’re dealing with. Sometimes the individual people don’t know what they’re dealing with, until actual horror hits. Some people rise above it really well, prepared to honor and love and cherish. Other people realize just how much they hated the person, and, now that they’re gone, they’ll start to really live again.”
“Ouch,” Kate noted. “That sounds pretty rough.”
“Maybe, but it’s also not necessarily a bad thing in this case,” Rodney added. “We know perfectly well what’s being revealed about these two women.”